THE SECOND GROUP often criminals was little different from the first, except that in this one there was not a condemned apostate. It was easy to dislike them, Moudi thought, looking at the group with their sallow faces and slinking mannerisms. It was their expressions most of all. They looked like criminals, never quite meeting his eyes,
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glancing this way and that, always, it seemed, searching for a way out, a trick, an angle, something underhanded. The combination of fear and lingering brutality on their faces. They were not just men, and while that seemed to the doctor a puerile observation, it did mark them as different from himself and the people he knew, and therefore as the bearers of lives which were unimportant.
“We have some sick people here,” he told them. “You have been assigned to look after them. If you do this job well, you will be trained as hospital aides for work at your prisons. If not, you will be returned to your cells and your sentences. If any of you misbehaves, your punishment will be immediate and severe.” They all nodded. They knew about severe treatment. Iranian prisons were not noted for their amenities. Nor, it would seem, for good food. They all had pale skin and rheumy eyes. Well, what solicitude did such people merit? the physician asked himself. Each of them was guilty of known crimes, all of them serious, and what unknown crimes lay in their pasts only the criminals and Allah knew. What pity Moudi felt for them was residual, a result of his medical training, which compelled him to view them as human beings no matter what. That he could overcome. Robbers, thieves, pederasts all, they’d violated the law in a country where law was a thing of God, and if it was stern, it was also fair. If their treatment was harsh by Western standards–Europeans and Americans had the strangest ideas about human rights; what of the rights of the victims of such people?–that was just too bad, Moudi told himself, distancing himself from the people before him. Amnesty International had long since stopped complaining about his country’s prisons. Perhaps they could devote their attention to other things, like the treatment of the Faithful in other lands. There was not a Sister Jean Baptiste among them, and she was dead, and that was written, and what remained was to see if their fates had been penned by the same hand in the book of life and death. He nodded to the head guard, who shouted at the new “aides.” They even stood insolently, Moudi saw. Well, they’d all see about that.
They’d all been pre-processed, stripped, showered, shaved, disinfected, and dressed in surgical greens with
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single-digit numbers on the back. They wore cloth slippers. The armed guards led them off to the air-lock doors, inside of which were the army medics, supplemented by a single armed guard, who kept his distance, a pistol in his gloved hands. Moudi returned to the security room to watch on the TV system. On the black-and-white monitors he watched them pad down the corridor, eyes shifting left and right in curiosity– and doubtless looking for a way out. All the eyes lingered on the guard, who was never less than four meters distant. Along the way, each of the new arrivals was handed a plastic bucket with various simple tools inside–the buckets also were numbered.
They’d all started somewhat at seeing the medics in their protective suits, but shuffled along anyway. It was at the entrance of the treatment room that they stopped. It must have been the smell, or perhaps the sight. Slow to pick up on the situation, one of their number had finally realized that whatever this was–
On the monitor, a medic gestured at the one who froze in the doorway. The man hesitated, then started speaking back. A moment later, he hurled his bucket down at the floor and started shaking his fist, while the others watched to see what would result. Then the security guard appeared out of the corner of the picture, his arm coming up and his pistol extended. At a range of two meters, he fired–so strange to see the shot but not hear it–straight into the criminal’s face. The body fell to the tile floor, leaving a pattern of black spots on the gray wall. The nearest medic pointed to one of the prisoners, who immediately retrieved the fallen bucket and went into the room. There would be no more disciplinary trouble with this group. Moudi shifted his gaze to the next monitor.
This one was a color camera. It had to be. It could also be panned and zoomed. Moudi indicated the corner bed, Patient 1. The new arrival with 7 on his back and bucket just stood there at the foot of the bed at first, bucket in his hand, not knowing what he beheld. There was a sound pickup for this room, but it didn’t work terribly well because it was a single nondirectional mike, and the security staff had long since turned it down to zero, because the sound was so piteous as to be debilitating to those who lis-
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tened–moans, whimpers, cries from dying men who in their current state did not appear so sinister. The apostate, predictably, was the worst. He prayed and even tried to comfort those he could reach from his bed. He’d even attempted to lead a few in prayer, but they’d been the wrong prayers, and his roommates were not of the sort to speak to God under the best of circumstances.
Aide 1 continued to stand for a minute or so, looking down at Patient 1, a convicted murderer, his ankle chained to the bed. Moudi took control of the camera and zoomed it in further to see that the shackles had worn away the skin. There was a red stain on the mattress from it. The man–the condemned patient, Moudi corrected himself– was writhing slowly, and then Aide 1 remembered what he’d been told. He donned his plastic gloves, wet his sponge, and rubbed it across the patient’s forehead. Moudi backed the camera off. One by one, the others did the same, and the army medics withdrew.
The treatment regime for the patients was not going to be a serious one. There was no point in it, since they’d already fulfilled their purpose in the project. That made life much easier on everyone. No IV lines to run, no needles to stick –and no “sharps” to worry about. In contracting Ebola, they’d confirmed that the Mayinga strain was indeed airborne, and now all that was left was to prove that the virus had not attenuated itself in the reproductive process . . . and that it could be passed on by the same aerosol process which had infected the first grouping of criminals. Most of the new arrivals, he saw, did what they’d been told to do–but badly, crassly, wiping off their charges with quick, ungentle strokes of the sponges. A few seemed genuinely compassionate. Perhaps Allah would notice their charity and show them mercy when the time came, less than ten days from now.
“REPORT CARDS,” CATHY said when Jack came into the bedroom.
“Good or bad?” her husband asked.
“See for yourself,” his wife suggested.
Uh-oh, the President thought, taking them from her
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hand. For all that, it wasn’t so bad. The attached commentary sheets–every teacher did a short paragraph to supplement the letter grade–noted that the quality of the homework turned in had improved in the past few weeks … so, the Secret Service agents were helping with that, Jack realized. At one level, it was amusing. At another– strangers were doing the father’s job, and that thought made his stomach contract a little. The loyalty of the agents merely illustrated something that he was failing to do for his own kids.
“If Sally wants to get into Hopkins, she’s going to have to pay more attention to her science courses,” Cathy observed.
“She’s just a kid.” To her father she’d always be the little girl who–
“She’s growing up, and guess what? She’s interested in a young soccer player. Name of Kenny, and he’s way cool,” SURGEON reported. “Also needs a haircut. His is longer than mine.”
“Oh, shit,” SWORDSMAN replied.
“Surprised it took this long. I started dating when I was–”
“I don’t want to hear about it–”
“I married you, didn’t I?” Pause. “Mr. President. . .”
Jack turned. “It has been a while.”
“Any way we can get to the Lincoln Bedroom?” Cathy asked. Jack looked over and saw a glass on her night-stand. She’d had a drink or two. Tomorrow wouldn’t be a surgery day.
“He never slept there, babe. They call it that because–”
“The picture. I know. I asked. I like the bed,” she explained with a smile. Cathy set her patient notes down and took off her reading glasses. Then she held her arms up, almost like a toddler soliciting a pickup and a hug. “You know, I’ve never made love to the most powerful man in the world before–at least not this week.”