At least he knew about the proper precautions. The government doctor barely entered the room at all–he had to come an additional, reluctant step so that the door could be closed behind him, but moved no farther than that, standing there, his head tilting and his eyes squinting, the better to observe the patient from two meters away. The lights in the room were turned down so as not to hurt Saleh’s eyes. Despite that the discoloration of his skin was obvious. The two hanging units of type-O blood and the morphine drip told the rest, along with the chart, which the government official held in his gloved, trembling hands.
“The antibody tests?” he asked quietly, summoning his official dignity.
“Positive,” MacGregor told him.
The first documented Ebola outbreak–no one knew how far back the disease went, how many jungle villages it might have exterminated a hundred years earlier, for example–had gone through the nearest hospital’s staff with frightening speed, to the point that the medical personnel had left the facility in panic. And that, perversely, had helped end the outbreak more rapidly than continued treatment might have done–the victims died, and nobody got close enough to them to catch what they had. African medics now knew what precautions to take. Everyone was masked and gloved, and disinfection procedures were ruthlessly enforced. As casual and careless as many African personnel often were, this was one lesson they’d taken to heart, and with that feeling of safety established, they, like medical personnel all over the world, did the best they could.
For this patient, that was very little use. The chart showed that, too.
“From Iraq?” the official asked.
Dr. MacGregor nodded. “That is what he told me.”
“I must check on that with the proper authorities.”
“Doctor, I have a report to make,” MacGregor insisted. “This is a possible outbreak and–”
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“No.” The official shook his head. “Not until we know more. When we make a report, if we do, we must forward all of the necessary information for the alert to be useful.”
“But–”
“But this is my responsibility, and it is my duty to see that the responsibility is properly executed.” He pointed the chart to the patient. His hand wasn’t shaking now that he had established his power over the case. “Does he have a family? Who can tell us more about him?”
“I don’t know.”
“Let me check that out,” the government doctor said. “Have your people make copies of all records and send them to me at once.” With a stern order given, the health department representative felt as though he had done his duty to his profession and his country.
MacGregor nodded his submission. Moments like this made him hate Africa. His country had been here for more than a century. A fellow Scot named Gordon had come to the Sudan, fallen in love with it–was the man mad? MacGregor wondered—and died right in this city 120 years earlier. Then the Sudan had become a British protectorate. A regiment of infantry had been raised from this country, and that regiment had fought bravely and well under British officers. But then Sudan had been returned to the Sudanese–too quickly, without the thne and money spent to create the institutional infrastructure to turn a tribal wasteland into a viable nation. The same story had been told in the same way all over the continent, and the people of Africa were still paying the price for that disservice. It was one more thing neither he nor any other European could speak aloud except with one another–and sometimes not even then–for fear of being called a racist. But if he were a racist, then why had he come here?
“You will have them in two hours.”
“Very well.” The official walked out the door. There the head nurse for the unit would take him to the disinfection area, and for that the official would follow orders like a child under the eye of a stern mother.
612
PAT MARTIN CAME in with a well-stuffed briefcase, from which he took fourteen folders, laddering them across the coffee table in alphabetical order. Actually they were labeled A to M, because President Ryan had specifically asked that he not know the names at first.
“You know, I’d feel a lot better if you hadn’t given me all this power,” Martin said without looking up.
“Why’s that?” Jack asked.
“I’m just a prosecutor, Mr. President. A pretty good one, sure, and now I run the Criminal Division, and that’s nice, too, but I’m only–”
“How do you think I feel?” Ryan demanded, then softened his voice. “Nobody since Washington has been stuck with this job, and what makes you think /know what I’m supposed to be doing? Hell, I’m not even a lawyer to understand all this stuff without a crib sheet.”
Martin looked up with half a smile. “Okay, I deserved that.”
But Ryan had set the criteria. Before him was a roster of the senior federal judiciary. Each of the fourteen folders gave the professional history of a judge in the United States Court of Appeals, ranging from one in Boston to another in Seattle. The President had ordered Martin and his people to select judges of no less than ten years’ experience, with no less than fifty important written decisions (as distinguished from routine matters like which side won in a liability case), none of which had been overturned by the Supreme Court–or if one or two had been overturned, had been vindicated by a later reversal in Washington.
“This is a good bunch,” Martin said.
“Death penalty?”
“The Constitution specifically provides for that, remember. Fifth Amendment,” Martin quoted from memory: ” ‘Nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.’ So with due process, you can take a person’s life, but you can only try him once for it. The Court established the criteria for that in a number of cases in the
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’70s and ’80s–guilt’trial followed by penalty trial, with the penalty phase dependent upon ‘special’ circumstances. All of these judges have upheld that rule–with a few exceptions. D here struck down a Mississippi case on the basis of mental incompetence. That was a good call, even though the crime was pretty gruesome–the Supreme Court affirmed it without comment or hearing. Sir, the problem with the system is one that nobody can really fix. It’s just the nature of law. A lot of legal principles are based on decisions from unusual cases. There’s a dictum that hard cases make for bad law. Like that case in England, remember? Two little kids murder a younger kid. What the hell is a judge supposed to do when the defendants are eight years old, definitely guilty of a brutal murder, but only eight years old? What you do then is, you pray some other judge gets stuck with it. Somehow we all try to make cohesive legal doctrine out of that. It’s not really possible, but we do it anyway.”
“I figure you picked tough ones, Pat. Did you pick fair ones?” the President asked.
“Remember what I said a minute ago? I don’t want this sort of power? I didn’t dare do otherwise. Ehere reversed a conviction one of my best people got on a technicality– an issue of admissibility–and when he did it, we were all pretty mad. The issue was entrapment, where the line is. The defendant was guilty as hell, no doubt of it. But Judge … E looked at the arguments and probably made the right call, and that ruling is part of FBI guidelines now.”
Jack looked at the folders. It would be a full week’s reading. This, as Arnie had told him a few days before, would be his most important act as President. No Chief Executive since Washington had been faced with the necessity of appointing the entire Supreme Court, and even that had been in an age when the national consensus on law had been far firmer and deeper than what existed in America now. Back then “cruel and unusual punishment” had meant the rack and burning at the stake–both of those things that had been used in pre-Revolutionary America–but in more recent rulings had been taken to mean the absence of cable television and denial of sex-change operations, or just overcrowding in the prisons. So
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fine, Ryan thought, the prisons are too crowded, and then why not release dangerous criminals on society for fear of being cruel to convicted felons?
Now he had the power to change that. All he had to do was select judges who took as harsh a view on crime as he did, an outlook he’d learned from listening to his father’s occasional rant about a particularly vile crime, or an especially bat-brained judge who hadn’t ever viewed a crime scene, and therefore never really known what the issues were. And for Ryan there was the personal element. He’d been the subject of attempted murder, as had his wife and children. He knew what it was all about, the outrage at facing the fact that there were people who could take a life as easily as buying candy at a drug store, who preyed on others as though they Were game animals, and whose actions cried out for retribution. He could remember looking into Scan Miller’s eyes more than once and seeing nothing, nothing in there at all. No humanity, no empathy, no feelings–not even hatred, so outside the human community he’d taken himself that there was no returning . . .