Pandemic Read online

  Gamal’s information fit with what Eleish discovered earlier in the morning. When he checked with Kabaal’s newspapers (under the pretense of buying substantial advertising space) no one had seen or heard from the publishing magnate in over a week. “On vacation,” he was told. Eleish realized that it still wasn’t a crime in Egypt to take a vacation, but he didn’t believe for a moment that Kabaal was lounging on a beach. Though he’d only met the man twice, after years of studying him Eleish knew Kabaal inside and out. He was a creature of habit. And vacations—at least ones where he left his mosque during Ramadan and dropped out of contact with the newspapers that he oversaw with a mother’s devotion—were not Kabaal’s style.

  Achmed Eleish stamped out the butt in the ashtray and reached for another cigarette through the smoke wafting in front of him. He had no proof of any wrongdoing. When it came to Kabaal, proof was something he always lacked. And Eleish believed this recurring issue damaged his coronary arteries as much as the cigarettes.

  Compounding his frustration, Eleish had so little time to dedicate to his pursuit of Kabaal, Rarely had Eleish ever fallen so far behind in his caseload of unsolved murders and other crimes. And like the rest of the police force, he was under constant pressure from above to intensify the crackdown on Egypt’s homosexuals. He found it an insulting and laughable waste of time to harass Cairo’s underground, but thriving gay community.

  Eleish closed the file on Kabaal. He tapped his nicotine-stained fingertips on the back of the manila folder as he weighed his options. True, he had more pressing official matters than locating a missing mogul who was not known to have broken any laws, but Eleish felt a sense of criticalness that he could not readily explain. A voracious reader of detective novels, Eleish had long believed in the “hunch”. His hunches had solved many cases over his twenty-five-year career. One of those same hunches told him that finding Kabaal, and soon, was an issue of great urgency.

  Whatever Kabaal was up to, Eleish suspected it would only serve to further shame his beloved Islamic faith. And he intended to prevent that from happening at any cost.

  PARK TOWER PLAZA HOTEL, LONDON, ENGLAND

  Malcolm Ezra Fletcher III-Fletch to any of the boys back in Arkansas—couldn’t shake his nagging cough. The hulking, fifty-five-year-old oil company executive was damned if a little head cold was going to ruin his first trip to London. Just my luck, Fletch thought, my first day clear of interminable meetings and I wake up with a fever and cough.

  The cough reminded him of the young woman he’d seen getting out of his taxi in front of the hotel. He remembered that the pretty little thing had been hacking up a lung, too. Maybe that was where he picked up his cold? Wherever it came from, it was a doozy!

  Still, lying around feeling sorry for himself was never Fletch’s style. He hadn’t missed a day of work in thirty-two years due to illness, and he wasn’t about to miss his only chance to sightsee because of it either. He pushed himself out of bed and headed for the landmarks.

  At the Tower of London he signed up for a tour. Climbing the winding staircase inside one of the Tower’s turrets, he empathized with the medieval prisoners the tour guide mattered on about. Even though Fletch was a history buff, especially of the dungeons and dragons variety, he was too winded to concentrate on the guide’s words. And with each step, Fletch felt as if his legs and arms were in the same shackles the prisoners once wore.

  Exhausted and short of breath, Fletch had to drop out of the tour halfway through. He stumbled his way to the exit. Fulfilling a promise, he stopped at the gift shop to load up on keepsakes—toy swords and replica crown jewels—for his two little grandsons. Though made of plastic they felt like lead as Fletch dragged the bag toward the exit.

  After staggering out of the taxi, he had to stop five or six times on the short walk to the elevator and then again on the way to his room. He felt so short of breath that he wondered if he was having a heart attack, but he knew that wouldn’t explain his spiking fever.

  Ten minutes passed and Fletch still sat huffing and puffing on the queen-sized bed. He reached for the bedside phone, thinking of calling 9-1-1, not even certain if that was the right number in England. But in spite of how horrible he felt, he opted to stick with his mother’s tried-and-true remedy: brandy and sleep.

  After swallowing a little bottle of Courvoisier from the minibar, he crawled under the covers, convinced that a good nap would set him right.

  CHAPTER 14

  GREAT WALL HOTEL, JIAYUGUAN CITY, CHINA

  They had played phone tag for the last four days. Sitting back on the double bed and listening to the phone ring a fourth time, he resigned himself to another day without hearing his daughter’s voice. Then he heard a click. “Hello?” Anna said.

  “Hi,” Haldane said. There was a pause, which Noah didn’t know whether to attribute to phone delay or to Anna.

  “How are you?” she asked stiffly.

  “Fine,” Haldane said. “How about Chloe and you?”

  “Chloe’s much better. The fever is gone. She’s back to her old self.” Anna paused. “She misses her daddy, though.”

  Haldane waited, but Anna didn’t mention whether or not she missed him, too. “Looks like things are stabilizing here in China,” he said. “I hope to be coming home in the next couple of days.”

  There was another brief silence. Long enough for Haldane to realize that it had nothing to do with the phone connection. “That’s great, Noah,” she said, but her words rang obligatory.

  “Yeah,” Haldane said distantly. “Can I speak to Chloe?”

  “Sure.”

  He tapped the receiver against his ear while he waited for his daughter. Finally, he heard breathing on the line.

  “Chloe?” He felt butterflies. “Is that you?”

  “Hi, Daddy.”

  “Chlo, it’s so good to hear your voice.”

  “Where are you, Daddy?”

  “I’m in China, honey.”

  “At a tea party?” she asked excitedly.

  It took Haldane a moment to make the connection. Then he laughed, remembering Chloe’s miniature china tea set at home. “No, Chlo. Not that china. I’m in the country China. Remember? The place where we tried to dig to last summer.”

  “Daddy, did you dig a big hole?” she asked him sternly.

  “No, I flew in a plane, honey.”

  “Daddy?”

  Haldane pictured his daughter cradling the relatively oversized phone against her ear. His heart ached. “Yes, Chloe?”

  “It’s my birthday party tomorrow.”

  Her birthday was ten days away, but in Chloe’s vocabulary “tomorrow” meant anytime in the future. “Very soon, sweetie,” Haldane said.

  “Will you bring balloons?”

  The previous year, Haldane bought a huge bouquet of balloons for her party, and Chloe had forsaken all her other gifts to play with the balloons until the helium drained and they lay as deflated sacks on her bedroom floor. “I promise you’ll have balloons,” he said. “More balloons than clouds in the sky.”

  She giggled with glee. “And cake?”

  “And cake,” he said.

  “Bye, Daddy.” Then Haldane heard Chloe yell to her mom, “Daddy says I am going to get balloons and cake for my birthday!”

  “I love you, Chlo,” Haldane said, but from the sound of the phone hitting the table, he knew Chloe was already gone.

  After a moment, Anna picked up the phone. “Noah?”

  “Where did Chloe go?” Haldane asked.

  “The playroom,” she said. “Looks like she’s gone to bake you another cake.”

  “Hope not.” Haldane forced a laugh. “Those imaginary cakes are murder on my hips and thighs.”

  Anna cleared her throat. “Noah, listen, we should talk.”

  “Not now, Anna,” Haldane cut her off. “I have to get to an evening meeting. Like I said earlier, I am going to be home soon. We can talk then.”

  “Okay ... good,” Anna said.

&nb
sp; “Bye, Anna,” he said, hanging up the phone without waiting for her reply.

  After dropping the receiver into the cradle, he sat on the bed and massaged his temples. He had lied to Anna about the meeting—there were no more that evening—but he was not prepared to discuss separation or whatever else she had in mind over the phone.

  How did we screw it up? he wondered. He increased the pressure of his thumbs against his scalp even after it began to hurt, because he knew where most of the blame lay.

  Noah would never forget the day they met two days before his thirtieth birthday at a house party, to which both of them had been reluctantly dragged by friends. They ended up spending his entire birthday and as many subsequent days as their schedules allowed together in bed. Haldane had just completed his infectious diseases’ residency while, at twenty-five, Anna had just begun her master’s in languages, in Italian. They wed a year later. For the next six years, they stayed the best of friends, sharing mutual ambitions and an insatiable passion for one another. After Chloe’s birth, their home life grew more idyllic. As with most couples, the sex life diminished in those sleep-deprived breast-feeding days, but their intimacy heightened. In Chloe, they shared something even more important than their deep romance.

  When Chloe was only two, Haldane woke up one morning in a black cloud. At first, he didn’t know what had hit him. He attributed his burnout to the constant fatigue and pressures of juggling his clinical and academic commitments, his WHO obligations, and his devotion to his daughter. Thinking it would soon pass, he took a few weeks off work, but the rest didn’t help.

  Determined not to let his funk affect his relationship with his daughter, he dedicated even more time to Chloe. He attended as many classes with her as possible. He took her to almost every playground in the city. But Noah found it impossible to try to fill the role of perfect father, doctor, and husband. Something had to give. And Anna wound up bearing the brunt. Not that he wasn’t around as much or more than before, but their time together lacked the previous closeness. He had grown uncharacteristically irritable. He shared less of his work life. He stopped taking her out on regular dates. And he made so little effort in the bedroom that their once active and imaginative sex life dried up almost completely.

  For eight months, Anna stomached his detachment in silence. One day, she sat Haldane down in their living room. With arms folded across her chest and tears welling in her large brown eyes, she pointed out that he had stopped being a husband and had become merely a co-parent. She told him that she could not and would not continue to live like that.

  It was the wakeup call Haldane needed. Though aware that he had withdrawn from their marriage, he never realized the extent it had reached or how badly he had hurt his wife. The threat to his family hit him like a bucket of ice water. He resolved to right things. And while there were no easy fixes, he put energy into improving their relationship. Over the ensuing months, slowly but surely Anna and Noah reclaimed some lost ground. Then SARS hit, and Haldane was summoned to China to help deal with the crisis.

  He had only been home for a few months when Avian Influenza, or Bird Flu, surfaced in the Far East, and he was sent back to help investigate.

  At some point during his long absences, Anna fell in love with Julie.

  Papers spread out over the bed and his notebook computer still on his lap, Haldane drifted off without intending to. The ringing phone woke him with a start. Sitting up, he knocked his laptop onto the mattress beside him.

  He grabbed for the phone, hoping to hear from a more conciliatory Anna. “Hi,” he breathed.

  “Dr. Haldane?” the female voice said.

  “Yes ...” He cleared his throat and tasted the staleness in his mouth. “Who is this?”

  “Gwen Savard, Department of Homeland Security.”

  Haldane positioned the computer on the nightstand. “Sure. I remember. We met at that conference on the end of the world.”

  Savard laughed. “You were the only one claiming the end of the world was near.”

  “Isn’t it?” Haldane wet his dry lips.

  “I’ve been trying to find that out from you, but you’re a hard man to track down.”

  “One of the drawbacks of being in remote China, I guess ... or maybe it’s an advantage.” Then he added, “Nothing personal, Dr. Savard.”

  “Gwen,” she said. “None taken. I need to be unreachable for a month just to begin to catch up. Do you have a few minutes now?”

  He looked at the clock, which read 10:18 P.M. He had the rest of the night. “What’s on your mind, Gwen?”

  “The Gansu Flu,” she said.

  He grimaced at the receiver. “Which genius came up with that name?”

  “Some reporter,” she said. “It’s better than their other choice, the ‘Killer Flu.’ I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but this virus is getting a lot of press coverage in the wake of SARS and the Bird Flu.”

  “Luckily, I’m also sheltered from most of the media, but I’ve seen some stories on the Internet,” he said. “We call it Acute Respiratory Collapse Syndrome, or ARCS, because the syndrome was identified before the virus.”

  “What’s it like, Noah?”

  Haldane sighed, considering the question. “It’s bad, Gwen.”

  “Worse than SARS?”

  “Yes and no.”

  “Meaning?” She spoke with such confident authority that Haldane was grateful to share the privileged information with her, as if unloading a secret he didn’t want to bear alone.

  “The clinical syndrome is worse than SARS,” he said. “Infected patients develop a sudden severe pneumonia often leading to multi-organ failure and death in a couple of days. Sometimes faster. And it’s an ugly death, too. Not all that different from the philoviruses like Ebola, except without as much hemorrhaging. The mortality rate of ARCS is at least four or five times that of SARS.”

  She didn’t reply for a moment. Haldane thought he heard the sound of her teeth tapping. “So how is it better than SARS?” she asked, her voice monotone.

  “It’s so damn fast. The incubation period is only a few days, maximum five. And once sick, the patients either die or recover fully in under a week.”

  Another pause, more tapping. “That doesn’t sound so much better.”

  “From an epidemiological point of view, it’s a big advantage,” he said. “It makes for a much shorter quarantine period than with SARS. Five days versus twelve. And we don’t have to worry about latent spread. Unless of course the virus mutates again.”

  “I suppose,” Savard said, sounding unconvinced.

  “But the biggest advantage is this bug’s relatively low contagiousness,” Haldane said. “Unlike SARS we’ve seen minimal spread to health-care workers. And if this were a common influenza strain, it would have escaped Gansu by now. We would never have been able to contain it.”

  “You have contained it?” she asked pointedly.

  He didn’t answer right away. “It seems to be contained in Jiayuguan City,” he said, hedging. “There have not been any new case reports in over forty-eight hours. It’s too early to tell about the more rural regions.”

  “That’s great news, Noah.”

  “Maybe for you,” Haldane said. “You haven’t seen what it’s like here.”

  “So tell me.”

  “The government set up a quarantine that looks more like a ghetto. They fenced in ten thousand people behind guns and barbed wire. So far 276 people have died, most of them young adults or children. It’s like something out of a nightmare. Ambulances rush in, body bags are dragged out. The fear is so thick in the air you can almost touch it. It’s awful.”

  “Sounds awful,” Gwen said with genuine empathy. “But also necessary. Imagine those same ghettos in cities all over the world, if you hadn’t stopped the spread in China.”

  Haldane grunted a laugh. “I didn’t have much to do with it.”

  “Jean Nantal tells me otherwise.” She forced the praise on him. “He says that you c
onvinced the officials to sacrifice the local livestock. And he says that was the key to stopping this virus.”

  “I wish I were as confident as you.” Haldane sighed. “I am not so sure we’ve seen the last of ARCS or the Gansu Flu or the Killer Flu or whatever the hell you want to call it.”

  “Why?” Savard asked.

  “Maybe I’m just being dramatic.” Haldane rubbed the rest of the sleep out of his face. “But we have been incredibly lucky not to see any spread beyond this province. Almost too lucky. You understand?”

  “Not necessarily,” she said. “Maybe the Chinese have learned from the SARS experience.”

  “Clearly.” He stood up with his phone to his ear and stretched. “With the way they run the farms around here they’re going to need to learn a lot more if they don’t want to be responsible for Armageddon.”

  She swallowed. “Noah, my biggest concern lies in the potential for weaponizing this virus.”

  “I wouldn’t recommend it.”

  She ignored the quip. “How easy do you think it would be for someone to get their hands on the virus.”

  “You mean from a lab?” he asked.

  “From anywhere,” she said.

  “I don’t imagine it would be too difficult,” he said. “Who would want it? No. Don’t answer that. I have enough trouble sleeping.” He sighed. “Okay, your question would be better answered by our microbiologist Milly Yuen, but let me take a stab at it. This virus is more fastidious than most influenza, which explains the delay in identifying him. But at his core he is a member of the same family.. Influenza is easily incubated in chicken eggs or for that matter live animals like pigs and certain primates. I imagine you could use. the blood or other body fluid products of an infected patient to propagate the virus. From there ...”

  She didn’t comment, so Haldane added, “If it makes you feel any better, I haven’t bumped into Osama bin Laden on the streets of Jiayuguan City.”