The director was examining a sample under the electron microscope, comparing it with another. As Moudi approached, he could see the date-stamp labels on each. One was from Jean Baptiste. The other was newly arrived from a “patient” in the second group of nine.
“They’re identical, Moudi,” he said, turning when the younger man approached.
This was not as much to be expected as one might think. One of the problems with viruses was that, since they were scarcely alive at all, they were actually ill suited for proper reproduction. The RNA strand lacked an “editing function” to ensure that each generation would fully follow in
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the footsteps of its predecessor. It was a serious adaptive weakness of Ebola, and many other similar organisms. Sooner or later each Ebola outbreak petered out, and this was one of the reasons. The virus itself, maladapted to the human host, became less virulent. And that was what made it the ideal biological weapon. It would kill. It would spread. Then it would die before doing too much of the latter. How much it did of the former was a function of the initial distribution. It was both horribly lethal and also self-limiting.
“So, we have at least three generations of stability,” Moudi observed.
“And by extrapolation, probably seven to nine.” The project director, whatever his perversion of medical science, was a conservative on technical issues. Moudi would have said nine to eleven. Better that the director was right, he admitted to himself, turning away.
On a table at the far wall were twenty cans. Similar to the ones used to infect the first collection of criminals, but slightly modified, they were labeled as economy-size cans of a popular European shaving cream. (The company was actually American-owned, which amused everyone associated with the project.) They’d been exactly what they said, and been bought singly in twelve different cities in five different countries, as the lot numbers inked on their curving bottoms showed. Here in the Monkey House they’d been emptied and carefully disassembled for modification. Each would contain a half liter of the thinned-out “soup,” plus a neutral-gas propellant (nitrogen, which would not involve any chemical reaction with the “soup” and would not support combustion) and a small quantity of coolant. Another part of the team had already tested the delivery system. There would be no degradation of the Ebola at all for more than nine hours. After that, with the loss of the coolant, the virus particles would start to die in a linear function. At 9 + 8 hours, less than ten percent of the particles would be dead–but those, Moudi told himself, were the weak ones anyway, and probably the particles that would be unlikely to cause illness. At 9 + 16 hours, fifteen percent would be dead. Thereafter, experiments had revealed, every eight hours–for some reason the
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numbers seemed to track with thirds of days–an additional five percent would die. And so …
It was simple enough. The travelers would all fly out of Tehran. Flight time to London, seven hours. Flight time to Paris, thirty minutes less. Flight time to Frankfurt, less still. Much of that factor was the time of day, Moudi had learned. In the three cities there would be easy connecting flights. Baggage would not be checked because the travelers would be moving on to another country, and therefore customs inspection wasn’t necessary, and therefore no one would notice the cans of unusually cold shaving cream. About the time the coolant ran out, the travelers would be in their first-class seats, climbing to cruising altitude to their cities of final destination, and there again international air travel worked out nicely. There were direct flights from Europe to New York, to Washington, to Boston, to Philadelphia, to Chicago, to San Francisco, to Los Angeles, to Atlanta, to Dallas, to Orlando, and regular connecting flights to Las Vegas, and Atlantic City– in fact to all of America’s convention cities. The travelers would all fly first class, the quicker to claim their luggage and get through customs. They would have good hotel reservations, and return tickets that took them out from different airports. From time-zero to delivery no more than twenty-four hours would pass, and therefore eighty percent of the Ebola released would be active. After that, it was all random, in Allah’s hands–no! Moudi shook his head. He was not the director. He would not apply this act to the will of his God. Whatever it might be, however necessary it was to his country–and a new one at that–he would not defile his religious beliefs by saying or even thinking that.
Simple enough? It had been simple once, but then–it was a legacy of sorts. Sister Jean Baptiste, her body long since incinerated … instead of leaving children behind as a woman’s body ought, disease was its only physical legacy, and that was an act of such malignance that surely Allah must be offended. But she’d left something else, too, a real legacy. Moudi had once hated all Westerners as unbelievers. In school he’d learned of the Crusades, and how those supposed soldiers of the prophet Jesus had slaugh-
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tered Muslims, as Hitler had later slaughtered Jews, and from that he’d taken the lesson that all Westerners and all Christians were something less than the people of his own Faith, and it was easy to hate such people, easy to write them off as irrelevancies in a world of virtue and belief. But that one woman. What was the West and what was Christianity? The criminals of the eleventh century, or a virtuous woman of the twentieth who denied every human wish she might have had–and for what? To serve the sick, to teach her faith. Always humble, always respectful. She’d never broken her vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience–Moudi was sure of that–and though those vows and those beliefs might have been false, they hadn’t been that false. He’d learned from her the same thing that the Prophet had learned. There was but one God. There was but one Book. She had served both with a pure heart, however misguided her religious beliefs might have been.
Not just Sister Jean Baptiste, he reminded himself. Sister Maria Magdalena, too. And she had been murdered– and why? Loyalty to her faith, loyalty to her vows, loyalty to her friend, not one of which the Holy Koran found the least bit objectionable.
It would have been so much easier for him had he only worked with black Africans. Their religious beliefs were things the Koran abhorred, since many of them were still pagans in deed if not in word, ignorant of the One God, and he could easily have looked down on them, and not worried at all about Christians–but he had met Jean Baptiste and Maria Magdalena. Why? Why had that happened?
Unfortunately for him it was too late to ask such questions. What was past was past. Moudi walked to the far corner of the room and got himself some coffee. He’d been awake for more than a day, and with fatigue came doubts, and he hoped the drink would chase them away until sleep could come, and with it rest, and with that, perhaps, peace.
“YOU HAVE TO be kidding!” Arnie snarled into the phone. Tom Donner’s voice was as apologetic as it could be.
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“Maybe it was the metal detectors on the way out. The tape–I mean, it’s damaged. You can still see it and hear it just fine, but there’s a little noise on the audio track. Not broadcast quality. The whole hour’s worth is shot. We can’t use it.”
“So?” van Damm demanded.
“So, we have a problem, Arnie. The segment is supposed to run at nine.”
“So, what do you want me to do about it?”
“Is Ryan up to redoing it live? We’ll get better share that way,” the anchorman offered.
The President’s chief of staff almost said something else. If this had been sweeps week–during which the networks did their best to inflate their audiences in order to get additional commercial fees–he might have accused Donner of having done this deliberately. No, that was a line even he couldn’t cross. Dealing with the press on this level was rather like being Clyde Beatty in center ring, armed with a bottomless chair and a blank-loaded revolver, holding great jungle cats at bay for the audience, having the upper hand at all times, but knowing that the cats needed to get lucky only once. Instead he just offered silence, forcing Donner to make the next move.
“Look, Arnie, it’ll be the same agenda. How often do we give the President a chance to rehearse his lines? And he did fine this morning. John thinks so, too.”
“You can’t retape?” van Damm asked.
“Arnie, I go on the air in forty minutes, and I’m wrapped till seven-thirty. That gives me thirty minutes to scoot down to the White House, set up and shoot, and get the tape back here, all before nine? You want to lend me one of his helicopters?” He paused. “This way–tell you what. I will say on the air that we goofed on the tape, and that the Boss graciously agreed to go live with us. If that isn’t a network blow job, I don’t know what is.”