dangerous and costly,' Movie Star warned.
Badrayn nodded. That meant picking especially reliable people. Daryaei had such people. That was obvious from what had taken place in Iraq. He looked over the diagrams in silence for a few minutes while his guest stood to look out the window. The demonstration was still under way. Now they were shouting 'Death to America!' The crowds and the cheerleaders who organized them had long experience with that particular mantra. Then his intelligence man came back.
'What exactly,' Movie Star asked, 'is the mission, All?'
'The strategic mission would be to prevent America from interfering with us.' Badrayn looked up. Us now meant whatever Daryaei wanted it to mean.
ALL NINE OF them, Moudi saw. He ran the antibody tests himself. He actually did each three times, and the tests were all positive. Every one of them was infected. For the sake of security, they were given drugs and fold that they'd be all right—as they would until it was determined that the disease had been transmitted in its full virulence, not attenuated by reproduction in the previous set of hosts. Mainly they were dosed with morphine, the better to keep them quiet and stuporous. So first Benedict Mkusa, then Sister Jean Baptiste, then ten criminals, and now nine more. Twenty-two victims, if one also counted Sister Maria Magdalena. He wondered if Jean Baptiste was still praying for him in Paradise and shook his head.
SOHAILA, DR. MACGREGOR thought, looking over his notes. She was ill, but she had stabilized. Her temperature had abated a whole degree. She was occasionally alert. He'd thought jet lag at first, until there had been blood in her vomit and stool, but that had stopped… Food poisoning? That had seemed the likely diagnosis. She'd probably eaten the same things as the rest of her family, but it could have been one bad piece of meat, or maybe she'd done what every child did, and swallowed the wrong thing. It happened literally every week in every doctor's office in the world, and was particularly common among the Western community in Khartoum. But she was from Iraq, too, just as Patient Saleh was. He'd rerun the antibody tests on the latter, and there was no doubt. The bodyguard fellow was gravely ill, and unless his immune system rallied itself—
Children, MacGregor remembered, somewhat startled by the connection, have powerful immune systems, rather more so than adults had. Though every parent knew that every child could come down with a disease and high fever in a matter of hours, the reason was simply that children, as they grew, were exposed to all manner of ailments for the first time. Each organism attacked the child, and in each child the immune system fought back, generating antibodies which would forever defeat that particular enemy (measles, mumps, and all the rest) whenever it again appeared—and rapidly defeating it the first time in nearly all cases, which was why a child could spike a high fever one day and be out playing the next, another.characteristic of childhood that first terrified and then vexed parents. The so-called childhood diseases were those defeated in childhood. An adult exposed to them for the first time was in far greater distress—mumps could render a healthy man impotent; chicken pox, a childhood annoyance, could kill adults; measles had killed off whole peoples. Why? Because for all its apparent frailty, the human child was one of the toughest organisms known to exist. Vaccines for the childhood diseases had been developed not to save the many, but the few who for whatever reason—probably genetic, but that was still being investigated—were unusually vulnerable; Even polio, a devastating neuro-muscular disease, had done permanent harm to only a fraction of its victims—but they were mostly children, and adults protected children with a ferocity usually associated with the animal kingdom—and properly so, MacGregor thought, because the human psyche was programmed to be solicitous to children—which was why so much scientific effort had been devoted to childhood disease over the years…. Where was this line of thought taking him? the doctor wondered. So often his brain went off on its own, as though wandering in a library of thoughts, searching for the right reference, the right connection…
Saleh had come from Iraq.
Sohaila had also come from Iraq.
Saleh had Ebola.
Sohaila showed symptoms of 'flu, or food poisoning, or— But Ebola initially presented itself as 'flu…
'My God,' MacGregor breathed. He rose from his desk and his notes and walked to her room. Along the way he got a syringe and some vacuum tubes. There was the usual whining from the child about a needle, but MacGregor had a good touch, and it was all over before she was able to start crying, which problem he left to her mother, who'd slept overnight in the room.
Why didn 't I run this test before? the young doctor raged at himself. Damn.
'THEY ARE NOT officially here,' the foreign ministry official told the health department official. 'What exactly is the problem?'
'He seems to have Ebola virus.' That got the other man's attention. His eyes blinked hard, and he leaned forward across his desk.
'Are you certain?'
'Quite,' the Sudanese physician confirmed with a nod. 'I've seen the test data. The doctor on the case is Tan Mac-Gregor, one of our British visitors. He's actually a fine practitioner.'
'Has anyone been told?'
''No.' The doctor shook his head emphatically. 'There is no cause to panic. The patient is fully isolated. The hospital staff know their business. We are supposed to make the proper notifications to the World Health Organization, informing them of the case and—'
'You are certain there is no risk of an epidemic?'
'None. As I said, full isolation procedures are in place. Ebola is a dangerous disease, but we know how to deal with it,' the physician answered confidently.
'Then why must you notify the WHO?'
'In these cases, they dispatch a team to oversee the situation, to advise on procedures, and to look for the focal source of the infection so that—'
'This Saleh chap, he didn't catch the disease here, did he?'
'Certainly not. If we had that problem here, I would know of it straightaway,' he assured his host.
'So, there is no danger of spreading the disease, and he brought it in with him, so there is no question that there is a public-health danger to our country?'
'Correct.'
'I see.' The official turned to look out the window. The presence of the former Iraqi officers in Sudan was still a secret, and it was in his country's interest to make sure it stayed that way. Keeping secrets meant keeping secrets from everyone. He turned back. 'You will not notify the World Health Organization. If the presence of this Iraqi in our country became widely known, it would be a diplomatic embarrassment for us.'
'That might be a problem. Dr. MacGregor is young and idealistic and—'
'You tell him. If he objects, I will have someone else speak to him,' the official said, with a raised eyebrow. Such warnings, properly delivered, rarely failed to get someone's attention.
'As you wish.'
'Will this Saleh fellow survive?'
'Probably not. The mortality rate is roughly eight of ten, and his symptoms are advancing rapidly.'
'Any idea how he contracted the disease?'
'None. He denies ever having been in Africa before, but such people do not always speak the truth. I can speak with him further.'
'That would be useful.'
PRESIDENT EYES CONSERVATIVES FOR THE SUPREME COURT, the headline ran. The White House staff never sleeps, though this privilege is occasionally granted to POTUS. Copies of various papers arrived while the rest of the city slept, and staff workers would take one of the copies and scan it for items of particular interest to the government. Those stories would be clipped, pasted together, and photocopied for the Early Bird, an informal publication which allowed the powerful to find out what was happening—or at least what the press thought was happening, which was sometimes true, sometimes false, and mainly in between.
'We got a major leak,' one of them said, using an X-Acto knife to cut out the story from the Washington Post.
'Look like it. Looks like it gets around, too,' her counterpart on the Times agreed.
An internal Justice Department document lists the judges being reviewed by the Ryan administration for possible nomination to fill the nine vacant seats on the Supreme Court.
