“Come right over.” .
And with that everything was as it should be.
GOD HAD NOT heard her prayers, Moudi saw. Well, the odds had been against that. Mixing his Islamic faith with scientific knowledge was as much a problem for the doctor as for his Christian and pagan colleagues–the Congo had been exposed to Christianity for over a hundred years, but the old, animistic beliefs still prospered, and that made it easier for Moudi to despise them. It was the old question, if God were a God of mercy, then why did injustice happen? That might have been a good question to discuss with his imam, but for now it was enough that such things did happen, even to the just.
They were called petechiae, a scientific name for blotches of subcutaneous bleeding, which showed up very plainly on her pale north European skin. Just as well that these nuns didn’t use mirrors–thought a vanity in their religious universe, and one more thing for Moudi to admire, though he didn’t quite understand that particular fixation. Better that she should not see the red blotches on her face. They were unsightly all by themselves, but worse than that, they were the harbingers of death.
Her fever was 40.2 now, and would have been higher still but for the ice in her armpits and behind her neck. Her eyes were listless, her body pulled down with induced fatigue. Those were symptoms of many ailments, but the pe-techia told him that she was bleeding internally. Ebola was a hemorrhagic fever, one of a group of diseases that broke
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down tissue at a very basic level, allowing blood to escape everywhere within the body, which could only lead to cardiac arrest from insufficient blood volume. That was the killing mechanism, though how it came about, the medical world had yet to learn. There was no stopping it now. Roughly twenty percent of the victims did survive; somehow their immune systems managed to rally and defeat the viral invader–how that happened was one more unanswered question. That it would not happen in this case was a question asked and answered.
He touched her wrist to take the pulse, and even through his gloves the skin was hot and dry and … slack. It was starting already. The technical term was systemic necrosis. The body had already started to die. The liver first, probably. For some reason–not understood– Ebola had a lethal affinity for that organ. Even the survivors had to deal with lingering liver damage. But one didn’t live long enough to die from that, because all the organs were dying, some more rapidly than others, but soon all at once.
The pain was as ghastly as it was invisible. Moudi wrote an order to increase the morphine drip. At least they could attenuate the pain, which was good for the patient and a safety measure for the staff. A tortured patient would thrash about, and that was a risk for those around a fever victim with a blood-borne disease and widespread bleeding. As it was, her left arm was restrained to protect the IV needle. Even with that precaution, the IV looked iffy at the moment, and starting another would be both dangerous and difficult to achieve, so degraded was her arterial tissue.
Sister Maria Magdalena was attending her friend, her face covered, but her eyes sad. Moudi looked at her and she at him, surprised to see the sympathy on his face. Moudi had a reputation for coldness.
“Pray with her, Sister. There are things I must do now.” And swiftly. He left the room, stripping off his protective garb as he did so and depositing it in the proper containers. All needles used in this building went into special “sharps” containers for certain destruction–the casual
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African attitude toward those precautions had resulted in the first major Ebola outbreak in 1976. That strain was called Ebola Mayinga, after a nurse who had contracted the virus, probably through carelessness. They’d learned better since, but Africa was still Africa.
Back in his office, he made another call. Things would begin to happen now. He wasn’t sure what, exactly, though he’d help determine whatever they were, and he did that by commencing an immediate literature search for something useless.
“I’M GOING TO save you.” The remark made Ryan laugh and Price wince. Arnie just turned his head to look at her. The chief of staff took note of the fact that she still didn’t dress the part. That was actually a plus-point for the Secret Service, who called the sartorially endowed staffers “peacocks,” which was more polite than other things they might have said. Even the secretaries spent more on clothes than Gallic Weston did. Arnie just held his hand out. “Here you go.”
President Ryan was quietly grateful for the large type. He wouldn’t have to wear his glasses, or disgrace himself by telling somebody to increase the size of the printing. Normally a fast reader, he took his time on this document.
“One change?” he said after a moment.
“What’s that?” Weston asked suspiciously.
“We have a new SecTreas. George Winston.”
“The zillionaire?”
Ryan flipped the first page. “Well, I could have picked a bum off a park bench, but I thought somebody with knowledge of the financial markets might be a good idea.”
“We call them ‘homeless people,’ Jack,” Arnie pointed out.
“Or I could have chosen an academic, but Buzz Fiedler would have been the only one I’d trust,” Jack went on soberly, remembering again. A rare academic, Fiedler, a man who knew what he didn’t know. Damn. “This is good, Ms. Weston.”
Van Damm got to page three. “Gallic …”
“Arnie, baby, you don’t write Olivier for George C.
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Scott. You write Olivier for Olivier, and Scott for Scott.” In her heart, Gallic Weston knew that she could hop a flight from Dulles to LAX, rent a car, go to Paramount, and in six months she’d have a house in the Hollywood Hills, a Porsche to drive to her reserved parking place off Melrose Boulevard, and that gold-plated computer. But no. All the world might be a stage, but the part she wrote for was the biggest and the brightest. The public might not know who she was, but she knew that her words changed the world.
“So, what am I, exactly?” the President asked, looking up.
“You’re different. I told you that.”
12
PRESENTATION
THERE WERE FEW ASPECTS
of life more predictable, Ryan thought. He’d had a light dinner so that his stomach flutters would not be too painful, and largely ignored his family as he read and reread the speech. He’d made a few penciled changes, almost all of them minor linguistic things to which Gallic’had not objected, and which she herself modified further. The speech had been transmitted electronically to the secretaries’ room off the Oval Office. Gallic was a writer, not a typist, and the presidential secretaries could type at a speed that made Ryan gasp to watch. When the final draft was complete, it was printed on paper for the President to hold, while another version was electronically uploaded onto the TelePrompTer. Callie Weston was there to be sure that both versions were exactly the same. It was not unknown for someone to change one from the other at the last minute, but Weston knew about that and guarded her work like a lioness over newborn cubs.
But the predictably awful part came from van Damm: Jack, this is the most important speech you will ever give. Just relax and do it.
Gee, thanks, Arnie. The chief of staff was a coach who’d never really played the game, and expert as he was, he just didn’t know what it was like to go out on the mound and face the batters.
The cameras were being set up: a primary and a backup, the latter almost never used, both of them with TelePrompTers. The blazing TV lights were in place, and for the period of the speech the President would be silhouetted in his office windows like a deer on a ridgeline, one more thing for the Secret Service to worry about, though they had confidence in the windows, which were spec’d to stop a .50-caliber machine-gun round. The TV crews were all known to the Detail, who checked them out anyway, along with the equipment. Everyone knew it was
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coming. The evening TV shows had made the necessary announcements, then moved on to other news items. It was all a routine exercise, except to the President, of course, for whom it was all new and vaguely horrifying.
HE’D EXPECTED THE phone to ring, but not at this hour. Only a few had the number of his cellular. It was too dangerous to have a real number for a real, hard-wired phone. The Mossad was still in the business of making people disappear. The newly found peace in the Middle East hadn’t changed that, and truly they had reason to dislike him. They’d been particularly clever in killing a colleague through his cellular phone, first disabling it via electronic signal, and then arranging for him to get a substitute . . . with ten grams of high explosive tucked into the plastic. The man’s last phone message, or so the story went, had come from the head of the Mossad: “Hello, this is Avi ben Jakob. Listen closely, my friend.” At which point the Jew had thumbed the # key. A clever ploy, but good only for a single play.