Ebola K: A Terrorism Thriller: Book 2 (5 page)

Still well before regular work hours, Olivia left the building with a smile to the guard who’d seen her come in earlier. Her smile wasn’t real—more of an apology for troubling him to watch her come and go. Olivia was worrying over her morning’s research, specifically about the speculative Ebola K virus. She knew only one person who could tell her for sure whether the author was simply fear mongering or whether it could be something real.

Olivia crossed the near-empty parking lot, unlocked her car with the remote, and settled into the driver’s seat. She took her cell phone out of the console where she kept it during work hours and dialed the number.

After a couple of rings, the voice on the other end said, “Wheeler.”

“Dr. Wheeler,” Olivia started.

“Dr. Wheeler?” he asked. “I thought we’d switched to Mathew already. Or Matt. You know, something social.”

Olivia sighed. “I know you’ve got a pathological need to flirt,
Mathew
, but I need to ask you some questions if you’ve got time.”

Dr. Wheeler heaved a sigh. “That’s okay. I’m only flirting out of habit. I’m not in the mood for it this morning. Um...not because of you, mind you. I’ll always be happy to flirt with you...it’s just something with work.”

“I know,” said Olivia. “Why are you at work early?”

Dr. Wheeler laughed feebly. “You recall my employer is the CDC, right?”

“Sorry. Too many other things on my mind lately.”

“Like your brother?” Wheeler asked.

“Yes.”

“Last time we talked, you were worried about him. Please tell me he made it out of Uganda before the quarantine.”

“No,” Olivia said, letting too much of her anxiety color her answer.

“Are you in contact with him?”

“He’s missing but—” Olivia cut herself off, not sure what she should say to finish the thought.

After a moment, Dr. Wheeler said, “I’m sorry. Is there anything I can do?”

She let out a sad, short laugh. “You wouldn’t happen to have a medical team in Kapchorwa, would you?”

“No,” said Dr. Wheeler. “I do know the people who know the people who are trying to get into that area. I can get back to you on it.”

“Thank you.” Not at all expecting that, Olivia found herself choked up again with gratitude and a smidgen of hope. “I...uh...thank you.”

“Don’t mention it. I’d say you can thank me by having a drink with me, but even I’m not that much of a heel.” Wheeler laughed a little to let her know he was trying to cheer her up.

“I know.” Olivia took a deep breath to get back to an emotionally level spot. “I’ll take you up on that drink, but I’ll buy. I’ve got other questions to ask.”

“Shoot.”

“I’ve been reading reports all morning—”

“All morning?” Dr. Wheeler laughed. “Most people haven’t had their morning coffee yet.”

Olivia smiled. “I read something that mentioned a new strain of Ebola more contagious than previous strains. The report seemed pretty speculative to me. Do you know anything about that?”

“You’re talking about the strain affecting Eastern Uganda and Western Kenya?”

“And Nairobi,” Olivia added.

“Yes,” confirmed Dr. Wheeler. “We’ve been waiting all night on samples to come in. We’ve got them flying in from both Uganda and Kenya. Samples arrived in the European labs last night. Our plane hit some weather and got delayed. It should be landing in Atlanta any moment.”

“Do you think it is a new strain?” Olivia asked. “What are the chances, I mean, that two different strains of Ebola could hit Africa at the same time?”

Dr. Wheeler drew a long, patient breath. “Actually, pretty good. Viruses mutate all the time.”

“All the time?”

“Viruses are simple, elegant life forms, Olivia. They combine with RNA or DNA in a cell and hijack it for their own purposes. That’s how viruses work. Just the nature of how they replicate opens them up to mutation. Take influenza, for instance. You wouldn’t know it as a layperson, but most of the virions produced when influenza takes over a cell are mutations. Only a small fraction of them are accurate reproductions. Most are useless in terms of how effective they’ll be at attacking and reproducing, but sometimes the mutants are more effective. Sometimes they affect the host in a new way, with new symptoms. Sometimes they transfer from host to host more easily, sometimes they kill the host more efficiently, and sometimes they kill too efficiently.”

“Okay,” Olivia said as an acknowledgement while she waited for Dr. Wheeler to get through the introductory matter.

“The point is, the more people who catch a virus, the more chances the virus has to mutate into a more effective strain. Africa is suffering from the largest Ebola outbreak ever. In a manner of speaking, it’s never been a better time to be an Ebola virus.”

“So the samples you’re waiting for could be from a new strain,” Olivia concluded. “What’s your gut tell you on this one?”

“Just between you and me?” he asked.

“Just between us.”

“If all the reports coming out of East Africa are true, hell, if
half
the reports coming out of East Africa are true, I’m afraid of what we’ll find in our tests.”

From the air, Dallas expanded in a gridwork stain across a tan-colored sea of dead, late-summer grass. The pilot, in his pre-landing announcement, told the passengers that the temperature in Dallas was one hundred and four. Salim understood the reason why all the vegetation had withered to desert hues.

The airplane banked into the turn and started the final descent. From his window seat, Salim saw a labyrinth of runways astride six semicircular terminals. He recalled being fascinated the first time he’d seen an airport from above. He’d even been interested in many he’d seen after. Chicago O’Hare—he’d arrived there near midnight—had been particularly beautiful, with its millions of lights twinkling against a black earth.

Mostly, he’d seen too many airports, had too many flights, and awakened too many times to a wrong-colored sky, black when it should have been blue, blue when it should have been dawn. Salim was unstuck in time and place. His circadian clock sent his body messages that contradicted those sent by his eyes. Everything jumbled in his brain. His stomach was roiling. His ability to concentrate was shot. It was hard to focus his eyes when he tried to read his tickets.

Of one thing he was certain: he had an urgency brewing in his bowels.

He looked across the laps of two other passengers and gave a brief thought to climbing over them and running for the restroom at the back of the plane. He couldn’t. The seatbelt light was on. The plane was landing. He had to stay seated or risk arrest by an overzealous sky marshal. He’d never make it to a restroom then.

The plane would be on the ground in two or three minutes; it might still be another fifteen or twenty before it was parked at the terminal. From there, Salim needed to get out of his seat and hustle up the gangway.

Please, let there be a restroom close by.

The diarrhea had been a problem over the past three flights. When it initially hit, Salim had been only an hour into a five-hour flight, and he’d spent a good deal of that flight locked in the restroom. The ordeal had been embarrassing. The other passengers stared at him. Some snickered as he made trip after trip up and down the aisle. He’d disturbed his neighboring passengers with his comings and goings, and he felt sure he’d disturbed the passengers close to the restroom with the unpleasant smells that escaped when the door was open.

Salim’s belly gurgled some more, and cramps followed. He clenched his teeth and closed his eyes as he leaned back in his seat.

“We’ll be down in a second,” the elderly woman said from the seat beside his.

He smiled politely and nodded.

“Do you live in Dallas?” she asked.

Salim had been chatted up by how many passengers now? He didn’t understand why it was getting hard to keep his thoughts straight. “Just visiting,” he said.

“You live in Chicago?”

That’s where the flight originated. But he didn’t know anything about Chicago. To tell the lie that he lived there might put him at risk of being exposed for what he was.

The airplane bounced through some turbulent air, and the seatbelt tugged across Salim’s lap. He winced. “I’m from Denver. I’m visiting my cousin in Dallas.” That was the briefest version of his story. Why was this woman talking to him now? She’d been silent the entire flight.

“Denver to Dallas via Chicago?” The woman smiled. “I hope you saved a lot of money on that flight.”

Without consciously choosing to, Salim rubbed a hand over his aching forehead as he tried to dredge up the best part of his lie, the one he’d picked up from a frequent flier on an early leg of his journey. “I’m on a mileage run.”

The old woman burst into a fit of giggling.

When will this damn flight end?
A little bit rudely, Salim told her, “I’m flying discount flights to maximize my frequent flier miles.”

“Oh, dear.” Oblivious to Salim’s tone of voice, the woman laid her hand on his and said, “I thought maybe you were nervous about landing. I know what a mileage run is. I have a friend who hit a million miles last spring.”

That impressed Salim as he imagined his discomfort in getting through the ten or twenty thousand he’d already racked up. “A million?”

Out the window, the ground rose closely enough to convey a sense of the speed they were traveling.

“Yes,” she said, “both him and his wife.”

The airplane jolted, and the wheels briefly screeched as rubber touched concrete. Wind roared over the wings, and the plane braked hard. The seatbelt tugged at Salim’s lap again as he prayed that he could hold on just a few minutes longer.

The airplane slowed to taxi speed and started bumping across the joints in the runway’s concrete slabs. People started clicking the clasps on their laps in anticipation of the seatbelt sign being turned off. Passengers retrieved bags from beneath the seats in front of them and situated themselves to exit.

Salim removed his phone from his pocket and turned it on. He watched the screen as the phone went through its boot process, hoping mostly to take his mind off the waiting, to think about something besides how badly he needed to sit down on a toilet.

Please, let me make it to the restroom in the terminal.

The main screen came to life. The phone searched for a signal. It dinged with the arrival of a text message—a message from a contact in his phone named
Mother
.

It was a narrow bathroom stall in the terminal, and for that, Salim was thankful. As he sat on the commode, he leaned over with one elbow on his knee, the other on the toilet paper dispenser. Past caring about the noise he was making, he grunted as another cramp stabbed him in the belly.

He rubbed a hand across his sweating face. As bad as he was feeling when the airplane landed, he was getting worse. He had no thermometer, but knew he had a fever. Salim ached like never before, and he was starting to wonder if the runs would keep him on the toilet for the rest of his life.

Salim shivered. Not from the fever, but from fear.

For the first time since he started hopping through airports and driving himself into a jet-lagged stupor, he didn’t believe it was the loss of a regular schedule that had sent him reeling. He now feared he’d caught the disease that had killed those villagers in Kapchorwa.

If so, Salim realized, he could be dying.

With that thought came despair so real and so deep he bit his lip while he muffled a pained cry into his shirtsleeve. He gasped a ragged breath and sobbed again. Having seen so many people suffer, bleed, and wither, having smelled the stench of what flowed from their bodies, having felt trembling lips that tried to drink, having touched dying flesh, and hearing the wails of parents over dead children, Salim knew the true horror of death.

“You okay, buddy?” a voice called from the next stall over.

“Yes,” Salim managed a reply. “Just...just...on my phone. Bad news...from home.”

“No good comes from looking at your phone in the john,” came the voice of a man that sounded like he was smiling.

Salim sucked in a few long, silent breaths and rubbed the tears out of his eyes. He’d made a mistake in going to Pakistan. But that was just the finale in a long list of pathetic, ill-advised choices. There was no romance in dying for jihad—not for anybody or anything. He was too young, had too much living to do. Sobs threatened to overwhelm him again.

He made a significant effort to get himself under control while he stared at the floor and contemplated what to do next.

The toilet in the next stall flushed, and then beneath the wall Salim saw feet shuffle. He heard a zipper and a belt buckle rattle.

“You good, buddy?” the man asked.

“Yeah,” said Salim.

“Safe travels.” The guy in the next stall exited.

Salim remembered he had a message from Mother on his phone. He took it out of his pocket, not with a plan of what to do in response to the message, but more as a mental escape from the weight of contemplating his own gruesome death. He looked at the black screen for a long time without activating the device. Mother was the source of the next set of orders from his handlers. The same handlers who’d put his life at risk in Kapchorwa. A thought came to him that he finally dared let himself think: he hated them.

He wanted to turn on the phone and respond to the message from Mother with every curse word, every insult he knew. Instead, he scooted back on the seat of the commode and dropped the phone in.

For an eye blink of a moment, it felt good. He’d taken the first step to free himself from his mistakes.

He told himself the thing he needed next was an attorney. When another series of cramps hit him, he realized the thing he needed more urgently than an attorney was a hospital. That’s where he was going. Salim checked his billfold to see how much cash he had—a few hundred in American bills. Enough for a taxi to the nearest hospital, of that he was sure.

When he felt he’d emptied himself enough to hold it together for the time it might take him to get out of the airport terminal, into a taxi, and to a hospital emergency room, he cleaned himself up, stood, and nearly fell over from dizziness. As quickly as he could, Salim put himself back together, shouldered his bag, exited the bathroom stall, and washed his hands in an unoccupied sink.

Good God, the bathroom was crowded. Two rows of twenty stalls, at least as many urinals, and a long row of maybe thirty sinks. Still, men lined up to wait for empty spots at stalls and urinals.

Salim took his time at a sink and threw several handfuls of water on his face. He washed his mouth out and straightened up. His head pounded hard enough to knock him off balance. He looked down at the watery mess he’d made but didn’t care. He was past caring about many things. All that mattered was getting out of the crowded restroom and getting through the terminal.

On shaky legs and over a floor tilting against him, Salim made his way through the obstacle course of men waiting in lines or rushing through the doorway. He exited the restroom and stepped into a throng of people scurrying at different speeds in both directions. They all seemed to be walking at a pace too fast for Salim to match. Still, he tried.

That was a mistake.

Each of Salim’s hurried steps was more of a struggle than the last. Each breath was harder to draw. As he scanned the ceiling for hanging signs that would direct him to an exit and to a taxi stand, the floor seemed to come unstuck from the earth. He reached his arms out to catch his balance and fell as the world went black.