The Stolen Chalicel (48 page)

That aerosol was clearly a death sentence. He knew that from Oakley’s lecture. And if there was any doubt, it really struck home when the door to the safe room opened. Six medics walked in wearing biocontainment suits with their own air supply. They clomped over to him with the slow gait of astronauts. And when they talked their voices sounded robotic, transmitted through the microphones in their headgear.

“Hey, buddy,” one of the spacemen said to him. “Hang on. We’ll get you fixed up.”

The condescending cheerfulness of the medical worker told Sinclair the whole story. They were speaking to him the way people spoke to terminally ill patients in the hospital.

“Let’s get you into this.” The medic indicated the gurney with a biocontainment tent. Clear plastic and stiff, it lay in jumbled folds, ready to be assembled. They pulled the tent off and Sinclair climbed onto the rolling stretcher. He lay there feeling foolish. After all, he still felt fine.

They began setting up the struts to support the plastic tent. He watched them struggle awkwardly with gloved fingers, then closed his eyes, trying to make it all go away.

How had this happened? In his mind he was transported back to the room at the Mark Hotel, the night of the gala in New York. He had been lying there just like this, a little lethargic from jet lag, anticipating a lovely evening. Cordelia had been moving about the room, and he was vaguely conscious of her fiddling with things as he dozed on the bed.

She had looked gorgeous that day, glowing with excitement about
being in Manhattan. Sinclair remembered that he had entertained the thought of a seduction before the party, just to get the evening off to a jolly start. Cordelia was not in the mood at first—she was all fluttery about getting ready and concerned about the creases in her dress. As he dozed on the bed that evening, she had tried to quietly unzip the suitcase, but it had made a tearing sound and he had woken up.

The same sound occurred now. Sinclair opened his eyes and they were zipping him into the tent and closing the Velcro flaps over the teeth of the closure. A hiss of air was pumped in near his head and puffed up the tent. Cold air blew over his face.

He was fully sealed in, and he fought his claustrophobia for a moment, taking deeper breaths. Through the clear plastic, the figures were moving around the room.

“All set?” they asked him, and without waiting for an answer started to push him to the door.

Here we go, Sinclair thought. This is not the way he had pictured his end. But there really wasn’t any choice. It was time to go.

Paul Oakley looked across the tarmac at Sharm el-Sheikh Airport and saw the waiting military helicopter. The rotors were already churning, and evacuation medics were standing, waiting for Sinclair. The airport was often used by the Egyptian military, and this operation had all the appearance of any other government flight, except the medics were pushing along what looked like a plastic coffin.

Sinclair was zippered into a negative-air-pressure biocontainment module, complete with oxygen and a microphone for speaking to the outside world. He was completely sealed in, rolling on a collapsible ambulance gurney, being pushed along by medics dressed in bulky suits and bubble helmets. As they got closer, Paul could see Sinclair’s face through the plastic.

“Paul, how much time do I have?” Sinclair asked. His voice sounded tinny on the microphone. Oakley looked at Sinclair’s eyes. They were calm, resigned.

“Don’t think like that, John. We are going to do all we can.”

Sinclair blinked slowly and sighed.

“I know you will. But promise me one thing. Don’t let Delia anywhere near me. If I’m going to die like this, I want to die alone.”

Moustaffa was sitting in a private plane, heading back to the United States. He looked at his watch and laughed.

“It’s done. Everyone is dead,” Moustaffa declared.

“Think again, asshole,” the military guard said to him. “They didn’t fall for it.”

Moustaffa’s head jerked up, surprised.

“Your buddy John Sinclair tipped them off. They evacuated the building. Everyone got out safely. The press never knew.”

“I demand a lawyer. I’m a British citizen,” Moustaffa said. “You can’t charge me with anything. I had nothing to do with any of this.”

“Save it for the guys at Guantánamo. It’s an act of terrorism,” the guard replied. “Haven’t you heard? We have a special place for people like you.”

NAMRU-3, Cairo

T
HE MEDICAL UNIT
officer at the front desk had been stonewalling Cordelia for several hours, saying that there was no record of any patient. When she mentioned the word “plague,” his eyes had widened, but he denied any knowledge of a case being admitted.

She became more and more infuriated, demanding to be let into the isolation unit to verify it herself. With each exchange he was icily polite, calling her “ma’am.”

The desk officer was young, but he had the firm demeanor that comes with military training. Besides she wasn’t the first person to be denied admittance. This hospital—NAMRU-3—had been studying infectious diseases in the Middle East since the end of World War Two. They dealt with contagion every day.

“What do you mean, I can’t go in!” Cordelia demanded, flailing her arms.

“Take it easy, Delia,” Gardiner calmed her, putting a hand on her shoulder.

“I can’t let anyone onto the sixth floor. Doctor’s orders,” the medical officer explained to Gardiner, as if to reason with someone sane.

“Doctor?
What
doctor?” Cordelia snapped. “
Who
is this so-called
doctor
!”

“Dr. Paul Oakley,” he announced. “He’s the head physician on this case.”

Delia whirled around to face Gardiner.

“Jim! Do something!”

Paul Oakley came out looking weary. His white coat gave him gravitas. Now he looked older, more beaten down.

Gardiner rose from the couch in the waiting room.

“Paul?”

Oakley didn’t speak until he sat down next to Cordelia. All the steam had gone out of her. Now she was just scared.

“Paul, what’s going on?” she asked. Tears were trembling in her eyes.

“Sweetie, I wish I had better news,” Paul Oakley said. “He’s . . .” He stopped and took a breath. “Well, we just have to hope for the best.”

“Do you mean he could . . . ?” Gardiner asked.

“It is a possibility.”

“Ohhhhh God!”
Cordelia howled, bending over, holding her stomach, and rocking back and forth.
“Oh God, no! Please please please . . .”

Gardiner stood in the hall with Paul Oakley.

“What’s happening, Paul?” Gardiner asked.

“I don’t think he’s going to pull through, Jim,” Oakley said. “I’m sorry.”

“Isn’t there anything you can give him?”

“Yes, not to be too technical, but antibiotics can work if the disease hasn’t overwhelmed the body’s defenses. I gave him oral antibiotics on the way here and set up an IV drip as soon as we got him into the isolation unit. So far nothing has had any effect. I’m afraid it’s the strain. It’s bubonic, luckily. If it were pneumonic, he’d be dead by now.”

“You just sequenced the genome for the Black Death. Doesn’t that kind of research help?”

“Not exactly. There were three major plagues, historically. The Black Death in medieval Europe, the Justinian plague in the sixth century, and then another in China in 1894. I have cross-referenced everything we know about those outbreaks.”

“And?”

“This is different. We haven’t seen anything like this. It’s an enhanced pathogen. We ran it through a polymerase-chain-reaction analysis . . .”

“No, wait! Don’t start with the jargon,” Gardiner said, holding up his hand. “You’re going to have to slow down on this or I won’t understand.”

“Come have a look,” Oakley said, walking over to a machine. It looked like a normal laptop with a huge computer attached. On the screen was a graph of multicolored lines fanning out into a wide spectrum.

“This is a PCR machine, one of the fanciest diagnostic tools in the world. It helps us analyze the DNA of the toxin Sinclair was exposed to,” Oakley explained. “Within three hours of Sinclair’s arrival here, we were able to sequence the DNA and confirm he had plague. The good news is it’s bubonic and
not
pneumonic.”

Oakley then reached over to the lab sink and picked up a sealed plastic container.

“This is a Mueller-Hinton agar—in other words, a type of petri dish for growing bacteria. This sample is only common flu. We are keeping the disk with Sinclair’s plague in the negative-pressure lab. It’s too contagious to handle like this. But I can show you how we run antibiotic susceptibility testing on this one. That would determine which drugs would help Sinclair.”

Oakley held the plastic disk up to the light. It was cloudy with yellow film. White dots were scattered across its surface.

“Imagine that this petri dish has been coated with a sample of the disease that Sinclair is fighting. Each of these dots is an antibiotic,” Oakley said, pointing to the dozen pinprick dots scattered across the surface.

“And what are you looking for?” Gardiner asked, squinting at it with interest.

“If a certain drug would be effective in treating the disease, there would be a clear ring around the dot, like a doughnut.”

“I see a few circles that look like doughnuts,” Gardiner observed.

“Which tells us that those antibiotics work on this strain of flu. Sinclair’s plague needs twenty-four hours before we have results.”

“And if there is no change the dish stays the same?” Gardiner asked.

“That would mean that the antibiotics are not effective for treating the strain of plague that Sinclair has,” Oakley said dispiritedly.

“So it could be a lot stronger?”

“It may be a so-called designer disease, created to be antibiotic-resistant or evade immune responses. Even with the normal strains of plague, there is a high mortality rate. About fourteen percent of people who contract the disease die of it.”

“I had no idea!” Gardiner gasped.

“There are about twenty cases a year in the United States. That jumps to about three thousand people globally.”