Ebola K: A Terrorism Thriller: Book 2 (7 page)

On the day Austin thought of as his first full day back in the world of the living, he didn’t have much energy. He was able to get off his bed and use the outhouse. He fetched his own water and sat up with Dr. Littlefield and Kristin when they ate. It was at their noontime meal when Austin asked Dr. Littlefield how he’d escaped Najid’s homicidal wrath.

Dr. Littlefield told Austin he’d been taken out behind the hospital by one of Najid’s men. This was shortly after he’d heard the gunshots from down the road west of town. Dr. Littlefield had been made to kneel in front of the waste pit and felt the barrel of a gun pressed to the back of his head. He prayed, knowing that he was in the last moments of his life.

At some point though, the gun barrel abruptly went away. Dr. Littlefield didn’t take that to mean anything at that moment. He continued to kneel, looking into the pit of human waste, hoping only that he’d die instantly when the bullet entered his brain. The idea of drowning in the waste was horrid enough to make him shudder as he told it.

Seconds passed, then minutes. Nothing happened. Dr. Littlefield didn’t know how long he’d stayed there on his knees. When curiosity got the best of him, he looked over his shoulder. The man who’d taken him out for execution was gone. Dr. Littlefield stood up and looked around. He was alone. He wondered if Najid’s man didn’t have it in him to execute a kneeling victim. Dr. Littlefield took the opportunity and ran into the forest.

He worked his way up Mt. Elgon’s slopes and didn’t look back until a red glow illuminated the night. From a place maybe a thousand feet up, he helplessly watched the village burn. He was too far away to hear anything but the faintest of screams from those unlucky enough to be alive when their houses were burned. Those indistinct cries and guilt for his impotence haunted his nightmares.

Najid Almasi sat in what was his father’s office. With his father and younger brother gone, everything now belonged to him. The room was expansive—the size of an average house in many Western countries. The desk was cut from a primordial layer of sedimentary stone that encased the fossil of some aquatic dinosaur and spanned nearly twenty feet long. The floor was layered in a rare Brazilian hardwood, illegal to export. The shelves on the walls displayed glittery items, each of sufficient value to make nearly any of the world’s dirty grovelers feel rich, even the American ones.

None of it impressed Najid.

He looked out his window at an acre of glare off the ripples in the swimming pool’s blue water and thought about all he’d done. He’d told himself as he progressed in his endeavor to bring down the West that he was being decisive, bold. He, Najid Almasi, was walking the path of Salahuddin Ayyubi;
Saladin
to the Western crusaders he drove from Arab lands, in the time when unwashed Christians stank more than the horses they rode, and wore thick metal plate and maille to protect their delicate white skin from Arab blades.

Now, Najid wondered if his ambition had blinded him to the rashness of his choices.

He’d gambled his financial future.

He’d gambled with his own brother’s life.

Najid couldn’t help but wonder what would have happened if, instead of plotting to spread Ebola to the West, he had spirited Rashid out of Kapchorwa and gotten for him the best medical care available. Would Rashid be alive today? Did Najid sacrifice his own brother on the altar of his ambition?

He’d lost contact with all of those zealous young men he’d co-opted from Firas Hakimi’s organization. Najid didn’t know what that meant, but it left him with an unease that grew day after silent day. It was the source of his foul mood, a mood that was fertilized by the near absence of new Ebola cases being reported around the world. He hoped for, and desperately depended on, so many more.

Najid’s few contacts in Western law enforcement agencies told him eighteen of his unwitting martyrs had been apprehended. How that happened, Najid guessed, was that the young men must have been under the scrutiny of some Western intelligence agency before they’d come into his possession. His mistake was that of trusting Hakimi to do the work of securing his own organization.

Hadi, Najid’s computer man and cousin, had been keeping Najid apprised on the progress of his remaining men with a meeting each morning and another in the afternoon. At each meeting, Hadi had reported that fewer and fewer of the jihadists had shown up on flights for which their tickets had already been purchased. Only eleven of the one hundred and eight made it to the end. The last of the tickets had been used the day before by an Indonesian boy who was currently at the Auckland airport in New Zealand. He was the only one responding to messages and awaiting further instructions.

Najid laughed bitterly. Auckland—the hundredth busiest airport in the world. That wasn’t the kind of information Najid would ever have been aware of had it not been for Hadi. Hadi had made the ticket purchases, chosen the routes, and optimized the layovers.

Optimize the layovers? Najid didn’t follow Hadi’s logic on it. Hadi had first taken a list of the hundred busiest airports—from Atlanta, Georgia, which processed on average over ten thousand travelers an hour, down to Auckland, which processed maybe a sixth of that number at fourteen million a year. Not knowing which of the jihadists would turn symptomatic and when made for a statistical game. Hadi had to schedule infected men to fly through the busiest airports spread across the globe’s different regions on laughably circuitous routes.

In Europe, they cycled through Frankfurt and London. In the Far East, they visited Tokyo, Beijing, and Hong Kong. In America, Hadi had seven of the top twenty busiest airports in the world to choose from, not to mention all the others that filled out the top one hundred. For geography’s sake, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Moscow, and Mumbai each received extra visits.

He divided individual trips up between coach and business class. In coach, passengers who sat near contagious jihadists were most likely people going to or from an annual vacation; people who could carry the disease on to infect their friends and family where they lived. Those in business class were most likely to fly with great regularity, picking up the virus and perpetuating it through their fellow business travelers even after all of the jihadists had become too ill to continue.

Through careful planning, Hadi had been able to provide Najid with an estimate on the number of people exposed to his infected men through close contact at an airport or on an airplane. Each day Hadi provided a low and a high estimate, all graphed on a pretty curve with a second line for the growth of indirect infections. Unfortunately, the range of uncertainty between the low and high estimate of the number of infected after eight weeks—the range of time over which Hadi projected into the future—wasn’t any better than Najid’s pure guesswork, somewhere between a few thousand and a few billion.

Najid left the disposition of the remaining jihadist in Auckland to Hadi. Najid suspected that if the man wasn’t showing symptoms already, he was probably in the clear.

For Najid, the question of what to do about Firas Hakimi was a more pressing problem. Hakimi had made no attempt to contact him despite the ignorant English boy, Jalal, whom Najid had sent his way.

Had that plan failed?

Had that plan failed, as well?

Najid stared at the water in the pool a little longer and decided he wasn’t going to be victimized by his mood. He chose to move forward pragmatically and accept the pain of his mistakes. He picked up one of his telephones and dialed.

When the ringing stopped, Najid heard faint breathing on the other end. “You have not met my emissary,” he said.

Firas Hakimi spat, “You know not what I have or have not done.”

“My friend—”

“Be careful with your pleasantries, Almasi. They are less true than you know.”

“My friend,” Najid persisted, “if you had spoken with my emissary, we would now be talking face to face, and you would understand and approve my course of action.”

“Do not presume—”

“No,” Najid told Hakimi harshly. “Stop with this pettiness. You have sycophants to grovel at your feet. Do not demand such behavior from me. I’m no pet goat of yours. My father has died. His fortune has passed to me. I will use it to pursue our common goals. Will you meet with me to discuss this as men?”

Hakimi’s flaring temper was obvious through his sharp breaths. That was good. Hakimi needed to be goaded into action, and Najid needed Hakimi’s temper for leverage.

“Search for your emissary’s name this afternoon on the Internet.” Hakimi paused dramatically. “You will find something of interest.”

The line went dead.

Paul’s phone rang. He saw Olivia’s name on the screen and looked at the other four people seated around the conference room table. He told them, “I’ve got to get this.” He rolled his chair away from the table and stood up. “Just go on without me. I’ve got everything I need.” Paul left the conference room and closed the door behind him, glad to be out of another pointless meeting. He answered the phone, “Olivia?”

“Hey, Dad. Am I interrupting anything?”

“Just a meeting. Nothing important.” Paul looked at his watch. It was nine-thirty a.m. where Paul was, so it was eleven-thirty in Atlanta. “Are you on your lunch break?”

“Yeah.”

“You sound worried.”

Olivia said, “I’ve barely said anything.”

“I’ve been your dad for a while now, and I pay attention. What’s up? Did you find something out about Austin?”

“No, nothing, but I’m working on it.”

“How does it feel to be back in the office?”

“Better than not, but I’m kind of in limbo. My project was taken over by—” Olivia, of course, couldn’t say by whom, but she knew her father would guess. He knew what she did and for whom she worked. “Well, I’m between projects at the moment.”

“Hmm.”

“Did you see the news this morning?”

Paul replied, “I’ve been in back-to-back meetings since seven. Give me the summary.”

“A guy collapsed at the airport in Dallas yesterday. He was taken to the hospital. They’re testing for Ebola.”

“I know Heidi probably called you and told you not to talk to me about Ebola stuff anymore, right?”

“Of course she did,” answered Olivia.

“Yet here we are.” Paul hadn’t heard about the case in Dallas, and he was curious why his daughter would call about a single case he was sure to see on the news later in the day. “What’s different about this guy?”

“Maybe nothing. I haven’t found anything specifically on him yet, but—” Olivia took a long slow breath as she decided whether or not to take the final step in an action that could get her fired and might piss off Heidi. She wasn’t sure which was worse.

“If you can’t say,” said Paul, “then don’t.”

“I spoke with Mathew Wheeler yesterday morning.”

“Mathew Wheeler?”

“Dr. Wheeler,” Olivia explained.

“Oh, the CDC doctor you met.”

“Yes.” Olivia gulped down the last of her reservations. “Yesterday when I talked to him, the CDC was waiting on some Ebola samples out of Uganda. They arrived, and the CDC worked on them all night. Dr. Wheeler just called me with the results.”

“And?” Paul asked, into Olivia’s pause.

“It’s a new strain.”

“What does that mean in practical terms?”

“I don’t know anything for sure,” said Olivia. “I’ve been reading everything I can find coming out of Uganda and Kenya, for obvious reasons. It might be that the new strain is more contagious than previous strains.”

“I’ve been following the stories and looking at what data I can find,” said Paul, feeling frightened at a confirmation of his belief. “I suspected much the same thing.”

“There’s more.”

“More?” Paul asked.

“The new strain may already be mobile.”

“Mobile?” Paul asked, not sure exactly what she meant.

“A German lab matched cases in Frankfurt with the new strain.”

“In Frankfurt?” he asked. “I haven’t heard anything about those on the news. Well, one or two maybe.”

“Dr. Wheeler is getting his information through the medical community, and it looks to me like the government has been keeping a tight lid on Ebola information. They’ve got more cases than have been reported in the news.”

“I’ve seen news of cases popping up here and there in lots of major cities,” he replied.

“Yeah,” Olivia agreed. “They may all be the new strain.”

Paul didn’t follow up with questions about how she jumped to that last conclusion. He knew his daughter well enough to be sure that if she had taken the risk to make him aware, she was certain the information she was sharing was true.

“Dad, I know you can work from home. Can Heidi?”

“Yes.”

“Indefinitely?”

“Yes.”

“Then I think you should. Hunker down at home, and avoid contact with people. Start today.”

The German Chancellor, in a surprise news conference called to address an Ebola outbreak in Frankfurt, announced that every one of the thirty-eight confirmed cases had been traced back to the airport there. She further announced that the government was considering the drastic decision of shutting down all air traffic in and out of the country.

Lufthansa’s stock price in after-hours trading on European markets plummeted by nearly twenty percent. US airline stocks, still trading in New York and Chicago, took a beating. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, the number most laymen thought reflected the pulse of the US economy, didn’t contain any airline stocks. One of its components was Boeing, which everybody knew manufactured airliners. General Electric was another component, and in its vast catalogue of manufactured goods were jet engines. Both companies plummeted with the airlines, dragging down the Dow. That spooked an already jittery market, and as the market neared the closing bell, it had shed nearly six percent on the heaviest volume day ever.

The Bear was on the trading floor and investors were stampeding for the exits.

Gold prices were on the rise. Oil prices were on the way down because everyone foresaw an Ebola-related economic slowdown. It was disaster for all the people Najid knew in the oil business. For Najid, it was a good day. The markets had finally turned in the direction he’d engineered. His massive bet—while far from profitable—was losing him less money.

He was in a better mood when an email came from Hadi. Najid opened the email and clicked the link. In a trite scene soon to turn graphically brutal, Jalal, the English boy, knelt in the sand, nothing but desert behind him and clear blue sky above. Jalal’s eyes were red-rimmed from crying. A piece of cloth was pulled tightly between his teeth, presumably tied behind his head. His hands were bound.

Jalal’s face was bruised and his clothes were spattered with blood, presumably his. Where other viewers saw needless brutality, Najid saw more chances for Jalal to transmit his gift to Hakimi or someone in his inner circle. Najid didn’t harbor any illusions that Jalal had kept anything secret. Najid felt certain Jalal had told Hakimi every single thing he could remember about his time in Kapchorwa, his time in Pakistan, and even how many times he’d had inappropriate thoughts about the young girls in his high school. To Najid, Jalal didn’t appear to be strong, and that was the primary reason he’d been selected. Najid was sure that Hakimi’s anger would drive him to torture any emissary sent. Jalal, being weak, would make no effort to hide anything, and so would suffer less in being convinced. It was a kind of humanity that made sense in Najid’s mind.

A man clad in black, exposing only his eyes, stood beside Jalal, holding a knife in a fierce grip as though he expected any moment to be attacked by a lion. Everybody in the world had seen videos just like it before. There was no lion to come, only poor kneeling Jalal and a loquacious, ranting man, showing his anger through the way he held his knife.

Najid watched with the sound turned down, not interested in the embarrassing ramblings that only served to make the black-clad brute appear mentally unstable. The babbling finally reached its end. The man in black positioned himself behind a struggling Jalal, and then went to work sawing through Jalal’s throat until his head came off. Blood was everywhere. The brute didn’t know it, but in killing Jalal, he’d infected himself with the Ebola virus and was going to die an even more brutal death. That made Najid smile.

The video didn’t end. In an unexpected surprise, Firas Hakimi himself walked into the camera frame with no mask, as bold as a peacock. He picked up Jalal’s head by the hair, raised it in front of the camera, and went on a rant of his own.

Najid paused the video a few minutes into the tirade. He took a screen capture of the image and pasted it into a graphic program, not sure he was seeing what he thought he was seeing. He zoomed in on Hakimi’s face, angry mouth open in mid sentence. Najid looked closely and nodded as he felt at least one of his troubles start to melt away. Spatters of Jalal’s blood were on Hakimi’s cheek. Any doubt that Hakimi would also be infected with Ebola disappeared.