Payback (17 page)

Margai
frowned. “It may be that he thinks he’s doing this
for
his country.”

Dawson
nodded as he watched a body being carried out of a nearby tent, a poignant
reminder of the danger they were under just being there. “Whatever his
motivations, his actions are what concern me. We need to find him and rescue
the hostages.”

“May I
ask
you
a question?”

Dawson
tore his eyes away from the body bag and the small procession carrying the
anonymous victim, all clad in protective gear. “Of course.”

“Have
you
discovered why our Vice President was killed?”

Dawson
shook his head. “I was hoping you could tell us.”

Margai’s
eyes narrowed. “I don’t understand.”

“He was
murdered by people from your country, all who grew up within fifty miles of
your Major Koroma.”

Margai’s
eyebrows shot up. “You are certain of this?”

Dawson
nodded. “Yes.”

Margai bit
his bottom lip, appearing slightly concerned. “How—” He paused, as if debating
whether or not to continue.

Dawson
decided to press him. “How?”

Margai looked
at Dawson then away. “How did you find out so quickly?” The words were
delivered slowly, as if he were reluctantly delivering each syllable.

“Our
government can be very efficient when it wants to.”

Margai smiled,
seeming to regain his composure.

“If only
it had been efficient on the important things, then perhaps all of this could
have been avoided.”

Somewhere in Sierra Leone

Sarah frowned. Another positive test. Tanya had worked all evening
getting blood samples from those they suspected might be infected so they’d be
ready for her when she took over. Tanya was now finishing her shift in the
isolation wards before getting as much sleep as she could. They had no idea how
long they’d be here, but they had both discussed it and decided it was best to
try and maximize their usefulness but also to spend as little time alone as
possible.

Sarah
wasn’t sure who had been watching her in the shower, but she thought she
recognized the driver who had groped Tanya. She just couldn’t be certain, it
only being a brief glimpse. She hadn’t told Tanya, her friend’s grip on sanity
hanging on by a thread, but the house they were sleeping in, apparently Koroma’s
family home, had a bedroom door that didn’t lock. She had slept lying in front
of it so no one could enter without having to push her aside.

Fortunately
exhaustion had her to sleep quickly and soundly.

And now
sample after sample was showing the virus, the outbreak worse than initially
thought. Fortunately—or unfortunately—these people were in the early stages,
and with proper care could be saved. She just wasn’t very confident in their
ability to provide that care. They had no IV equipment which meant all they could
do was try to feed them and have them drink plenty of well water.

She
marked the result on the list of patients compiled by Tanya and prepared the
next sample, looking up as Koroma walked into the nearly spotless
administrative office, Mustapha true to his word.

“What
have you found?” he asked.

“See for
yourself.” She pushed the sheet toward him. “Out of the eleven tested so far
I’ve found seven infected.”

Koroma
frowned. “We just received word that the government has announced house to
house searches in the cities.”

Sarah
for a moment felt a surge of hope. If the authorities were searching house to
house for them, her father must be placing a tremendous amount of pressure on
the government here. But Koroma’s apparent lack of concern had her second
guessing that hope. He had said cities, and they were in a small village of
several hundred at best.

They’ll
never find us.

“I guess
they’re hoping to find all of the infected before they can spread the disease
further.” Koroma pushed the list back toward her as she realized he hadn’t been
talking about a search for them at all, but a search for the infected. “They
won’t bother with us until they eradicate it in Freetown. Do you think they
can?”

She was
almost overwhelmed with disappointment, the one shred of hope, dangled out
there purely based on a misunderstanding, yanked out from under her, the delicate
balance she had been able to maintain crumbling around her.

“Doctor?”

She
looked up at Koroma, her eyes unfocused as tears threatened to spill down her
cheeks. “Wh-what?” she finally managed, looking away.

“Do you
think they can stop the spread?”

She
nodded slightly as she blinked the tears out of her eyes. “If they’re thorough,
then yes, but only if they’ve got enough room for the sick. We know how to stop
the disease, we just need the resources to fight it, and the people to stop
hiding the sick.”

“Resources.
I keep hearing that word and it makes me sick. That’s what they told us when I
brought my wife and son to the clinic. Not enough resources. Not enough room.
My wife and son died because there weren’t enough resources.”

Sarah
turned toward Koroma, the villain seeming a bit more human if only for a
moment. “I’m sorry about your family.”

He
nodded, then pointed at a name on the list, a name she hadn’t tested yet. “My
daughter.”

A pit
instantly formed in Sarah’s stomach, words escaping her. She pictured her own
son and how she would feel if he were infected. Then she wondered what she
would do if she lived in a poor country like Sierra Leone.

Would
I kill to save my own son?

She
would like to think that she wouldn’t. She couldn’t imagine justifying killing
another human being to save her own son.

Unless
that person were directly threatening her child.

But if
that were an exception, what constituted a threat? Would someone withholding
medicine that could save her child justify her killing that person to get the
medicine? Her moral side said no, it couldn’t possibly be used as a
justification for murder, but her logical side said it could. If someone were
denying her access to something that could save the life of her own flesh and
blood, then yes, killing them would be justifiable.

And
wasn’t that what Koroma was doing? Trying to save the life of his child, the
lives of his village?

“How old
is she?”

“Five.”

A lump formed
in Sarah’s throat. “I-I’m sorry to hear that. I’ll test her next.”

“No.”

Sarah
looked up from her chair at Koroma’s shaking head. “Why not?”

“She
shouldn’t get preferential treatment just because of who her father is. That’s
what’s happening in Freetown. Those who have the connections, those with money,
they’re the ones getting the treatment and it’s disgusting—they should all be
left to rot like those of us who are poor have been left to.”

“We
don’t discriminate at our clinic, that I can assure you.”

Koroma
laughed, dropping into a nearby chair. “You are so naïve. You apply your
Western way of thinking to everything you see. You assume because someone
smiles and is polite that they are honest by your standards. And that is the
key—
your
standards. You Americans always express shock and outrage when
you are asked to pay a bribe to get something done, but what you don’t realize
is that the vast majority of the world works that way—it is simply common
practice. You go into a store and pay the price on the tag, but in the markets
of my country it is an insult to not try to negotiate the price down. You apply
your values to us, and that in itself is an insult and one of the reasons so
much of the world hates you.”

“Do
you
hate us?” Sarah nearly peed her pants at the words that had come out of her
mouth on reflex.

She held
her breath.

Koroma
smiled slightly, as if impressed she had the balls to ask the question given
her situation. “Yes. But not in the way you probably think. I hate your
politicians for doing nothing while our people were dying. It wasn’t until your
own might die that you took action. I hate your people collectively for
ignoring our plight and not insisting their government do something to stop the
horror we’ve been living with for months. But I don’t hate the individuals.”

“I don’t
understand. How can you hate the people but not the individuals who
are
the people?”

“I make
the distinction because the
people
act as a collective, the individual
as himself. The people collectively did nothing, but individuals did do
something, like yourself. And I think that individual Americans or Europeans,
when shown the horror, would demand something be done. The problem is that your
culture is so wedded to your television sets and your Internet that unless
someone does a cute viral video with a cat in it, you don’t pay attention. If
one of your Hollywood stars came down with Ebola, maybe then you’d demand
action, but when your own CDC says there could be a million cases of Ebola here
within the next few months, and the only
collective
reaction is ‘what
happens if it comes here?’, then your society has a serious problem. You care
deeply about yourselves, individually you claim to care deeply about the
downtrodden around the world, but collectively you do little.” He sighed. “And
that is why I hate you, the people, but not you, the individual.”

Sarah
didn’t say anything for a moment. There was nothing she could say. He was
right. Doctors like her had been begging their governments to do more but their
pleas had fallen on deaf ears until the first case was reported on US soil.
Then there had been action, but still not enough. Why had it taken only one
sick person on American soil for the government to react, when thousands of
Africans had died already? It was indifference. No one cared unless it affected
them personally and politicians only cared about what their voters cared about.

“I
understand.” She put the next slide under the microscope and looked, shaking
her head, the virus clearly visible yet again. She marked the sheet.

“Another
one?”

She
nodded.

“These
samples. What would happen if you came into contact with them?”

Sarah
pulled away from the microscope and the blood samples, suddenly nervous. “I
could become infected. A single drop of blood can contain over a million copies
of the virus.” Her eyes narrowed and her mouth-brain barrier failed her. “You
know that. Why do you keep asking these questions?”

Koroma
rose from his chair. “Let me know what the test result is for my daughter.”

“And if
she’s positive?”

He
paused, looking over his shoulder but not making eye contact. “Then I will have
a decision to make.” He walked out of the room, leaving Sarah to wonder what
decision he could possibly be talking about.

She
looked back at the list and at his daughter’s name. Biting her cheek, she
debated for a moment on what to do, then decided she had to know. She took his
daughter’s sample and prepared it, her hands almost shaking in anticipation and
fear. If she were positive, how might he react? He could go crazy, but she
thought that unlikely. The man had already lost his wife and son and had
maintained control.

Control?
He beheaded Jacques!

But he
had done that with some end goal in mind. If his daughter were confirmed sick,
it just might give him the reason he needed to keep her and Tanya alive to try
and save her, and if they were lucky, she might survive the ordeal, or at least
survive a couple of weeks, long enough perhaps for her father to find them.

You’re
hoping a little girl suffers for as long as possible to save yourself?

Her
mouth filled with bile at the thought, guilt almost overwhelming her as she
leaned back in her chair, her shoulders slumping.

What’s
happening to me?

She
thought of her own child then this sweet little girl who had never done
anything to harm anyone in her life, who had already lost her mother and
brother, who was now in a strange room with the sounds of the sick and dying on
the other side of a soiled sheet with strange people in suits like nothing she
had seen before tending to her.

Shame
overwhelmed her, her chest heaving with sobs as she prayed to God for
forgiveness, her selfishness so out of character, it shocked her to her core.

Sucking
in a deep, slow breath, she calmed herself, blinking the tears out of her eyes
otherwise she’d need to remove her gloves. It took a few minutes but gave her
the time to think and she came to a decision. If Koroma’s daughter was
infected, she would do everything she could to save the little girl despite
Koroma’s objections. Self-preservation aside, she was an innocent, the youngest
of the victims so far, but her survival could mean their survival, and she
would be a fool not to recognize that.

She
loaded the slide and looked.

“Oh no.”

CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia

“What’s that?”

It was Marc
Therrien that vocalized what Leroux had already spotted—three dots on a road
clearly visible on one of the Operations Center displays. They had been poring
over satellite imagery from the hours during and after the kidnapping, and
beyond spotting the trucks at the Port of Freetown, they had found nothing.
Police reports from their point of contact in Freetown had suggested the trucks
had been spotted heading south but nothing had been found. It was Leroux who had
redirected the search north, toward the geographic region all of their suspects
had come from.

And this
might be their first hit.

“Zoom
in.”

A mouse
pointer dragged across the image, selecting the portion showing the dots and a
segment of road. A pixelated image appeared then quickly resolved into a crisp
new image.