“This way. Let’s get you suited up.” The floor had a doctors’ lounge, and one for nurses. Both were being used. The one at the far end was “hot,” used for disrobing and decontamination. The near one was supposed to be safe, used for suiting up. There wasn’t time or space for all the niceties. The Secret Service agents went in first and saw a woman in bra and panties, picking a plastic suit that was her size. She didn’t blush. It was her fourth shift on the unit, and she was beyond that.
“Hang your clothes over there.” She pointed. “Oh!” she added, recognizing the President.
“Thank you,” Ryan said, taking his shoes off and taking a clothes hanger from Andrea. Price examined the woman briefly. Clearly she wasn’t carrying a weapon. “How is it?” Jack asked.
She was the charge nurse for the floor. She didn’t turn to answer. “Pretty bad.” She paused for a second and then decided she had to turn. “We appreciate the fact that your wife is up here with us.”
1111
“I tried to talk her out of it,” he admitted to her. He didn’t feel the least bit guilty about it, either, and wondered if he should or not.
“So’d my husband.” She came over. “Here, the helmet goes on like this.” Ryan experienced a brief moment of panic. It was a most unnatural act to put a plastic bag over one’s head. The nurse read his face. “Me, too. You get used to it.”
Across the room, Dean James was already in his. He also came over to check the President’s protective gear.
“Can you hear me?”
“Yeah.” Jack was sweating now, despite the portable air-conditioning pack that hooked on his belt.
The dean turned to the Secret Service personnel. “From here on, I’m the boss,” he told them. “I won’t let him get into any danger, but we don’t have enough suits for you people. If you stay in the corridors, you’ll be safe. Don’t touch anything. Not the walls, not the floors, nothing. Somebody goes past you with a cart, get out of the way. If you can’t get out of the way, walk to the end of the corridor. If you see any kind of plastic container, stay clear of it. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir.” For once, Andrea Price was cowed, POTUS saw. As was he. The psychological impact of this was horrific. Dr. James tapped the President on the shoulder.
“Follow me. I know it’s scary, but you are safe in this thing. We all had to get used to it, too, didn’t we. Tisha?”
The nurse turned, now fully in hers. “Yes, Doctor.”
You could hear your breathing. There was the whir of the A/C pack, but everything else was muted. Ryan felt a frightening sense of confinement as he walked behind the dean.
“Cathy’s in here.” He opened the door. Ryan entered.
It was a child, a boy, aged eight or so, Jack saw. Two blue-clad figures were ministering to him. From behind he couldn’t tell which one was his wife. Dr. James held his hand up, forbidding Ryan from taking another step. One of the two was trying to restart an IV, and there couldn’t be any distractions. The child was moaning, writhing on the bed. Ryan couldn’t see much of him, but he saw enough for his stomach to turn.
1112
“Hold still now. This will make you feel better.” It was Cathy’s voice; evidently she was doing the stick. The other two hands were holding the arm in place. “… there. Tape,” she added, lifting her hands.
“Good stick, Doctor.”
“Thank you.” Cathy went to the electronic box that controlled the morphine and pushed in the right numbers, checking to be sure that the machine started functioning properly. With that done, she turned. “Oh.”
“Hi, honey.”
“Jack, you don’t belong here,” SURGEON told him firmly.
“Who does?”
“OKAY, 1 HAVE a line on this Dr. MacGregor,” the station chief told them, driving his red Chevy. His name was Frank Clayton, a graduate of Grambling, whom Clark had seen through the Farm some years earlier.
“Then let’s go see him, Frank.” Clark checked his watch, did the calculations, and decided that it was two hours after midnight. He grunted. Yeah, that was about right. First stop was the embassy, where they changed clothes. American military uniforms weren’t all that welcome here. In fact, the station chief warned, few things American were. Chavez noted that a car followed them in from the airport.
“Don’t sweat it. We’ll lose him at the embassy. You know, sometimes I wonder if it wasn’t a good deal when my folks got kidnapped out of Africa. Don’t tell anybody I said that, okay? South Alabama is like heaven on earth compared to this shithole.”
He parked the car in the embassy’s back lot and took them inside. A minute later one of his people walked out, started the Chevy, and headed right back out. The tail car went with him.
“Shirts,” the CIA resident officer said, handing them over. “I suppose you can leave the pants on.”
“Have you talked to MacGregor?” Clark asked.
“On the phone a few hours ago. We’re going to drive over to where he lives, and he’s going to get into the car.
1113
I have a nice quiet parking spot picked out for our chat,” Clayton told them.
“Any danger to him?”
“I doubt it. The locals are pretty sloppy. If we have anybody tailing us, I know what to do about it.”
“Then let’s move, buddy,” John said. “We’re burning moonlight.”
MacGregor’s quarters weren’t all that bad, located in a district favored by Europeans, and, the station chief related, fairly secure. He lifted his cellular phone and dialed the doctor’s beeper number–there was a local paging service. Less than a minute later his door opened, and a figure walked to the car, got in the back, and closed the door a second before it moved off.
“This is rather unusual for me.” He was younger than Chavez, John was surprised to note, and eager in rather a shy way. “Who exactly are you chaps?”
“CIA,” Clark told him.
“Indeed!”
“Indeed, Doctor,” Clayton said from the front seat. His eyes checked the mirrors. They were clear. Just to make sure, he took the next left, then a right, and then another left. Good.
“Are you allowed to tell people that?” MacGregor asked as the car pulled back onto what passed locally as the main drag. “Do you have to kill me now?”
“Doc, save that for the movies, okay?” Chavez suggested. “Real life ain’t like that, and if we told you we were from the State Department, you wouldn’t believe us anyway, right?”
“You don’t look like diplomats,” MacGregor decided.
Clark turned in the front seat. “Sir, thank you for agreeing to meet with us.”
“The only reason I did so–well, the local government forced me to disregard normal procedures for my two cases. There’s a reason for those procedures, you know.”
“Okay, first of all, could you please tell me all you can about them?” John asked, switching on the tape recorder.
1114
“YOU LOOK TIRED, Cathy.” Not that it was all that easy to tell through the plastic mask. Even her body language was disguised.
SURGEON looked over to the wall clock behind the nursing station. She was technically off duty now. She would never learn that Arnie van Damm had called the hospital to make sure the timing went right for this. It would have enraged her, and she was mad enough at the whole world already.
“The kids started arriving this afternoon. Second-generation cases. That one in there must have got it from his father. His name is Timothy. He’s in the third grade. His dad’s on the next floor up.”
“Rest of the family?”
“His mom tested positive. They’re admitting her now. He has a big sister. She’s clean so far. We have her sitting over in the outpatient building. They set up a holding area there for people who’ve been exposed but don’t test out. Come on. I’ll show you around the floor.” A minute later they were in Room 1, temporary home of the Index Case.
Ryan thought he must be imagining the smell. There was a dark stain on the bedclothes which two people– nurses, doctors, he couldn’t tell–were struggling to change. The man was semiconscious, and fighting the restraints that held his arms to the bed bars. That had the two medics concerned, but they had to change the sheets first. Those went into a plastic bag.
“They’ll get burned,” Cathy said, pressing her helmet against her husband’s. “We’ve really dialed up the safety precautions.”
“How bad?”
She pointed back to the door and followed Jack into the corridor. Once there, with the door closed behind them, she poked an angry finger into his chest. “Jack, you never, ever discuss a patient’s prognosis in front of them, unless you know it’s good. Never!” She paused, and went on without an apology for the outburst: “He’s three days into frank symptoms.”