“But, sir, what if he is telling the truth?”
“He isn’t.” Ryan took a breath, as Arnie had told him to do, and then went on, saying what Arnie had told him to say. “Mr. Kealty resigned his position at the request of President Durling. You all know the reason. He was under investigation by the FBI for sexual misconduct while he was a senator. The investigation was in the matter of a sexual assault–not to say”–which Ryan then said–“rape of one of his Senate aides. His resignation was part of a … deal, a plea bargain, I guess, to avoid criminal prosecution.” Ryan paused just then, somewhat surprised to see the assembled faces go a little pale. He’d just hurled down a gauntlet, and it made a loud noise on the floor. The next one was even louder. “You know who the President is. Now, shall we get on with the business of the country?”
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“What are you doing about this?” ABC asked.
“You mean Realty or Iraq?” Ryan asked. His tone indicated what the subject ought to be.
“The Kealty question, sir.”
“I’ve asked the FBI to check into it. I expect them to report back to me later today. Aside from that, we have enough things to be done.”
“Follow-up–what about what you said to the governors in your speech last night, and what Vice President Kealty said this morning? Do you really want inexperienced people to–”
“Yes, I do. First of all, what people do we have who are experienced in the workings of Congress? The answer is, not very many. We have the few survivors, people fortunate enough to have been elsewhere that night. Aside from that–what? People defeated in the last election? Do you want them back? I want, and I think the country needs, people who know how to do things. The plain truth is that government is by nature inefficient. We can’t make it more efficient by selecting people who’ve always worked in government. The idea the Founding Fathers had was for citizen legislators, not for a permanent ruling class. In that I think I am in agreement with the intentions of the framers of our Constitution. Next?”
“But who will decide the question?” the Los Angeles Times asked. It wasn’t necessary to say which question.
“The question is decided,” Ryan told him. “Thanks for coming. If you will excuse me, I have a lot of work to do today.” He picked up his opening statement and walked off to his right.
“Mr. Ryan!” The shout came from a good dozen voices. Ryan walked through the door and around the corner. Arnie was waiting.
“Not bad under the circumstances.”
“Except for one thing. Not one of them said ‘Mr. President.’ ”
MOUDI TOOK THE call, which required only a few seconds. With that he walked over to the isolation ward. Outside, he donned protective gear, carefully checking the
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plastic fabric for leaks. The suit was made by a European company, modeled on the American Racal. The thick plastic was an incongruous powder blue, reinforced with Kevlar fiber. At the back on the web belt hung the ventilation unit. This pumped filtered air into the suit, and did so with a slight overpressure so that a tear would not suck environmental air inside. It wasn’t known if Ebola was airborne or not, and nobody wanted to be the first to prove that it was. He opened the door to go inside. Sister Maria Magdalena was there, attending her friend, dressed the same way. Both knew all too well what it meant for a patient to see her attendants dressed in a way that so clearly denoted their fear of what she carried within her.
“Good afternoon, Sister,” he said, his gloved hands lifting the chart off the foot of the bed. Temperature 41.4, despite the ice. Pulse rapid at 115. Respiration 24 and shallow. Blood pressure was starting to fall from the internal bleeding. The patient had received a further four units of whole blood–and probably lost at least that much, most of it internally. Her blood chemistry was starting to go berserk. The morphine was as high as he could prescribe without risking respiratory failure. Sister Jean Baptiste was semiconscious–she should have been virtually comatose from the drugs, but the pain was too severe for that.
Maria Magdalena just looked over at him through the plastic of her mask, her eyes beyond sadness into a despair that her religion forbade. Moudi and she had seen all manner of deaths, from malaria, from cancer, from AIDS. But there was nothing so brutally cruel as this. It hit so fast that the patient didn’t have the time to prepare, to steel the mind, to fortify the soul with prayer and faith. It was like some sort of traffic accident, shocking but just long enough in duration for the suffering to–if there were a devil in creation, then this was his gift to the world. Physician or not, Moudi put that thought aside. Even the devil had a use.
“The airplane is on the way,” he told her.
“What will happen?”
“Professor Rousseau has suggested a dramatic treatment method. We will do a complete blood-replacement
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procedure. First the blood supply will be removed completely, and the vascular system flushed out with oxygenated saline. Then he proposes to replace the blood supply completely with whole blood in which he has Ebola antibodies. Theoretically, in this way the antibodies will attack the virus systemically and simultaneously.”
The nun thought about that. It wasn’t quite as radical as many would imagine. The total replacement of a body’s blood supply was a procedure dating back to the late 1960s, having been used in the treatment of advanced meningitis. It wasn’t a treatment that could be used routinely. It required a heart-lung-bypass machine. But this was her friend, and she was well past thinking of other patients and practicality.
Just then, Jean Baptiste’s eyes opened wide. They looked at nothing, unfocused, and the very slackness of the face proclaimed her agony. She might not even have been conscious. It was just that the eyes could not remain closed in severe pain. Moudi looked over at the morphine drip. If pain had been the only consideration, he might well have increased it and taken the risk of killing the patient in the name of mercy. But he couldn’t chance it. He had to deliver her alive, and though her fate might be a cruel one, he hadn’t chosen it for her.
“I must travel with her,” Maria Magdalena said quietly.
Moudi shook his head. “I cannot allow that.”
“It is a rule of our order. I cannot allow her to travel unaccompanied by one of us.”
“There is a danger, Sister. Moving her is a risk. In the aircraft we will be breathing recirculated air. There is no need to expose you to the risk as well. Her virtue is not in question here.” And one death was quite enough for his purposes.
“I have no choice.”
Moudi nodded. He hadn’t chosen her destiny either, had he? “As you wish.”
THE AIRCRAFT LANDED at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport ten miles outside Nairobi and taxied to the cargo
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terminal. It was an old 707, once part of the Shah’s personal fleet, the internal furnishings long since ripped out to reveal a metal deck. The trucks were waiting. The first of them backed up to the rear door, located on the right side, which opened a minute after the chocks secured the wheels in place on the ramp.
There were a hundred fifty cages, in each of them an African green monkey. The black workers all wore protective gloves. The monkeys, as if sensing their fate, were in an evil mode, using every opportunity to bite and scratch at the handlers. They screeched, urinated, and defecated as well, but to little avail.
Inside, the flight crew watched, keeping their distance. They wanted no part of the transfer. These noisy, small, nasty little creatures might not have been designated as unclean by the Koran, but they were clearly unpleasant enough, and after this job was over, they’d have the aircraft thoroughly washed and disinfected. The transfer took half an hour. The cages were stacked and tied down in place, and the handlers moved off, paid in cash and pleased to be done with the job, and their truck was replaced by a low-slung fuel bowser.
“Excellent,” the buyer told the dealer.
“We were lucky. A friend had a large supply ready to go, and his buyer was slow getting the money. In view of this …”
“Yes, an extra ten percent?”
“That would be sufficient,” the dealer said.
“Gladly. You will have the additional check tomorrow morning. Or would you prefer cash?”
Both men turned as the 707 lit off its engines. In minutes it would take off, this flight a short hop to Entebbe, Uganda.
“I DON’T LIKE the smell of this,” Bert Vasco said, handing the folder back.