Harold Coyle, Barrett Tillman
Team Yankee
1
The traveler had a secret.
He was a young man with an American passport; one of 155,000 travelers who passed through Heathrow Airport west of the city that day. The British customs official in Terminal Three personally dealt with scores of them at a time, and she had become expert at sizing up people. Patrice Assamba was Jamaican by birth and British by her first marriage. She was also the senior agent on her shift by virtue of thirteen years’ experience.
Assamba accepted the youngster’s dark blue passport and began her initial examination.
The traveler standing before Agent Assamba held the passport of one Youssef Ibrahim, but he certainly had been born with another name. Apparently a convert to Islam, his hometown was listed as Berkeley, California.
Young Mr. Ibrahim’s hand trembled when passing his documents, but Patrice Assamba attributed that to initial nervousness. Gauging by the stamps in the passport, he was new to international travel. Apparently he had gone from California to Saudi Arabia, via Frankfurt, thence to Pakistan for two months. Evidently the boy was on some sort of personal pilgrimage.
Assamba looked closer at the supplicant. She noted his pale, clammy skin and the watery eyes that seldom fixed on her. She read the signs:
Youssef Ibrahim probably was hiding something.
Assamba’s accent bore the carefree lilt of the Caribbean. “Welcome to Heathrow, sir.” She gave him a gleaming smile and perky tilt of the head. “Are you staying in England for long?”
Ibrahim shifted his weight, placing his hands in his jacket pockets. “Uh, no. Ma’am. No, ma’am. I’ll just be here a few days.” He glanced away again.
Agent Assamba decided to play this strange fish before reeling him in. “After Pakistan, you must be glad to be going home.”
A brisk nod. “Yes, ma’am. You bet.” Mentally he excoriated himself.
In fact, Youssef Ibrahim loathed the very existence of Berkeley, California. After all, that’s where his parents lived. He felt an onset of queasiness, uncertain whether it was caused by parental disdain or the effects of his secret. He swallowed hard, keeping the saliva down only by conscious effort. His mouth now was drier than ever before. He damned himself for shivering visibly. The headache that had begun as merely annoying hours before was a growing, insistent pressure behind his eyes.
Now the customs agent was examining him more closely.
“Sir, you don’t look well. Would you like to sit down? Could we get you some water?”
Ibrahim opened his mouth, intending to decline the offer, when he felt the sudden rumbling in his bowels. He contracted his sphincter, desperately needful of a lavatory. He turned away, not sure where to go, realizing it was already too late. He turned back to Agent Assamba, beyond embarrassment at confiding his crisis to a strange woman. An
Dr. Carolyn Padgett-Smith resembled a practitioner of neither medicine nor immunology, though she possessed a master’s degree in the latter. Tall and slender, at forty-one she could have passed for thirty-five, and it took most of her male colleagues a while to get their egos around the fact that a woman with large, violet eyes and high cheekbones knew more about infectious diseases than most Ph.D.s. None would have been surprised to learn that she had paid much of her college tuition by modeling; few realized that beneath her stylish clothes she had the muscular agility of a passionate rock climber.
“CPS” had planned on grading some postgraduate papers but the call from the Home Office changed all that. Because she had been on the short list for notification in the event of a communicable disease crisis, she was summoned to St. Edmund’s, a well-equipped teaching hospital of 1960s vintage.
Padgett-Smith was met by a security officer she knew slightly, Richard Eversole Carruthers. She knew him to be professionally competent but, like too many coppers of her acquaintance, prone to situational ethics. “Hullo, Mr. Carruthers. What’ve we got?”
“Nice to see you, too, Padgers.” Carruthers had long since abandoned hope of getting anywhere with Carolyn Padgett-Smith, burdened as she was with conventional morality and an attentive husband.
“Ebola?”
“Likely that or Marburg, I’m told.”
CPS muttered some fervent Anglo-Saxon monosyllables, none encumbered with a fifth letter. Then she focused her attention. “I shall need to see a blood sample to confirm the virus.”
Carruthers nodded in his curt fashion. “Right. They’re ready for you in the lab.”
Padgett-Smith pulled on a gown, mask, and rubber gloves before stepping to the microscope with the blood in the high-quality plastic tube. She appreciated the caution: Glass could shatter if dropped, possibly spreading a deadly virus.
CPS focused the eyepiece more sharply and looked into the microscopic world. She felt a slight chill run down her spine, as if she had locked eyes with a cobra.
A layman would have seen a riot of cells, hardly recognizable one from another, though the sick ones outnumbered the healthy. But Dr. Padgett-Smith immediately discerned the dying cells: discolored, pale, swollen. Some had already burst apart.
Something had caused them to explode.
Padgett-Smith looked up at the lab director. “Filovirus?”
The man nodded. “I’ll show you the microphotographs. We’re also running tests to see if the patient’s blood reacts positively in other samples. We should know before long.”
Padgett-Smith returned to the lobby, ordering her priorities to coordinate with Carruthers’s.
“Who had contact with the patient?” she asked.
“Well, the customs agents of course. And the ambulance attendants; probably some others.”
“I shall like to see all of them.”
“Of course. You can start with the point of contact, Agent Patrice Assamba.”
“Give me the short version first.”
“She seems a reliable observer. At first she suspected this so-called Ibrahim fellow was merely nervous because he was hiding something. Then with the sweating and chills, she thought he had malaria or a bad fever.”
