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Not a loose item on the floor. Her clothing for the coming day was neatly laid out on a wooden valet. Even the white socks were folded next to the diminutive sneakers with cartoon animals on them. Was this a way for a child to live? It seemed like a Shirley Temple movie from when his mom and dad were kids–some upper-class thing that he’d always wondered about: Did people really live that way?
Not real people, just royalty, and the family of the man sentenced to the presidency. Jack smiled, shook his head, and left the room. Agent Raman closed the door for him, not even letting POTUS do that. Somewhere else in the building, Ryan was sure, an electronic status board showed that the door had been opened and closed, probably sensors told that someone had entered the room, and probably someone had asked over the radio link the Service people used to be told that SWORDSMAN was tucking SANDBOX in.
He stuck his head in Sally’s room. His elder daughter was similarly asleep, doubtless dreaming of some boy or other in her class–Kenny or something, wasn’t it? Somebody who was way cool. Little Jack’s bedroom floor was actually polluted by the presence of a comic book, but his white shirt was pressed and hanging on another valet, and someone had shined his shoes.
Another day shot to hell, the President thought. He turned to his bodyguard. “Night, Jeff.”
“Good night, sir,” Agent Raman said outside the door to the master bedroom. Ryan nodded his farewell to the man, and Raman waited for the door to shut. Then he looked left and right at the other Detail agents. His right hand brushed against the service pistol under his jacket, and his eyes smiled in a private way, knowing what might so easily have been. Word had not come back. Well, his contact was doubtless being careful, as well he should. Aref Raman had the duty tonight as supervisor for the Detail. He walked up the corridor, nodding to the agents on post, asked one innocuous question, then headed down the elevator to the State Floor, and outside to get some air, stretch, and look at the perimeter guard posts, where, also, everything was quiet. There were some protesters in
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Lafayette Park across the street, this time of night huddled together, many of them smoking–exactly what he didn’t know but had suspicions. Maybe hashish? he wondered with a cryptic smile. Wouldn’t that be funny. Beyond that there were only the traffic sounds, a distant siren to the east, and people standing at their posts, trying to stay alert by talking about basketball, or hockey, or spring training for baseball, eyes sweeping outward, looking for dangers in the shadows of the city. The wrong place to look, Raman thought, turning back to head for the command post.
“IS IT POSSIBLE to kidnap them?”
“The two older ones, no, too inconvenient, too difficult, but the youngest, that is possible. It could be both 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
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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.
SOHAI’LA, 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
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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?”
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“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.