He nodded, smiled, and told her, “I can wait.”
The hospital’s waiting room was an island out of time. In his mind the world was somewhere else. Crazy memories rampaged through his brain. He seemed to be out of control. He would have to call the wedding off. Cancel everything. The caterers, the limousine, the…
My God, what was he doing?
He shook his head violently. Tried to focus his mind. He was in the hospital.
Dawn’s light reflected pink and yellow on the buildings across the street. He would have to put his dress uniform back into mothballs.
Where had she been in recent weeks? He should have been with her. He should never have gotten her the job at USAMRIID.
How many people had they invited to the wedding? He had to write each one. Personally. Tell them she was gone… gone…
He had killed her. Sophia. He had made USAMRIID make an offer so good she had taken the job at Detrick, and he had killed her. He had known he wanted her the moment he saw her at Randi’s. When he had tried to tell Randi how sorry he was her fiancé had died, Randi had been too angry to listen. But Sophia had understood. He had seen it in her eyes— those black eyes, so intense, so lively, so alive…
He had to tell her family. But she had no family. Only Randi. He had to tell Randi.
He lurched to his feet to find a pay telephone, and Somalia came back to him in a rush. He had been posted to a hospital ship in the minor invasion to bring order and protect our citizens in a country torn apart by the war raging between two warlords who had divided Mogadishu and the country. They summoned him into the remote bush to treat a major with fever. Exhausted from a twelve-hour shift, he had diagnosed malaria, but then it had turned out to be the far-less-known and far-more-deadly Lassa fever. The major had died before the diagnosis could be corrected and better treatment begun.
The army exonerated him of wrongdoing. It was a mistake many more experienced doctors— unfamiliar with virology— had made before and would make again, and Lassa usually killed even with the best treatment. There was no cure. But he knew he had been arrogant, so full of himself that he had not called for help until too late. He blamed himself. So much so that he had pressured the army to assign him to Fort Detrick to become an expert in virology and microbiology.
There, after he really understood the rarity of Lassa compared to malaria, he finally accepted his error as a risk of field medicine in distant and unfamiliar places. But the major had been Randi Russell’s fiancé, and Randi had never forgiven Smith, never stopped blaming him for his death. Now he had to tell her he had killed another person she loved.
He slumped back onto the couch.
Sophia. Soph. He had killed her. Darling Sophia. They would marry in the spring, but she was dead. He should never have brought her to Detrick. Never!
__________
“Colonel Smith?”
Smith heard the voice as if from under miles of water at the bottom of a murky lagoon. He saw a shape. Then a face. And burst through the surface to blink in the hard light.
“Smith? Are you all right?” Brigadier General Kielburger stood over him.
Then it struck him and left him chilled to the marrow. Sophia was dead.
He sat up. “I have to be there at the autopsy! If—”
“Relax. They haven’t started yet.”
Smith glared. “Why the hell wasn’t I told about this new virus? You knew damn well where I was.”
“Don’t use that tone with me, Colonel! You weren’t contacted at first because the matter didn’t seem urgent— a single soldier in California. By the time the two other cases were reported, you were due home in a little over a day anyway. If you’d returned when your orders instructed, you would have known. And perhaps—”
Smith’s stomach clenched into an enormous fist, and his hands followed suit. Was Kielburger suggesting he might have saved Sophia had he been here? Then he slumped back. He did not need the general to do what he was already doing himself. Over and over as he sat in the dawn waiting room he blamed himself.
He stood up abruptly. “I have to make a call.”
He walked to the telephone near the elevators and dialed Randi Russell’s home. After two rings the machine picked up, and he heard her precise, get-to-the-point voice: “Randi Russell. Can’t talk now. After the beep, leave a message…. Thanks.”
That “thanks” came grudgingly, as if an inner voice had told her to not be all business all the time. That was Randi.
He dialed her office at the Foreign Affairs Inquiries Institute, an international think tank. This message was even crisper: “Russell. Leave a message.” No thanks this time, not even as an afterthought.
Bitterly, he considered leaving the same kind of message: “Smith here. Bad news. Sophia’s dead. Sorry.”
But he simply hung up. There was no way he could leave a death message. He would have to keep trying to reach her, no matter how much it hurt. If he could not get her by tomorrow, he would tell her boss what had happened and ask him or her to have Randi call him. What else could he do?
Randi had always been a sometime thing, frequently away on long business trips. She saw Sophia rarely. After he and Sophia grew close, Randi seldom called and never came around.
Back in the waiting room, he found Kielburger impatiently swinging a knife-creased uniform leg and polished boot.
Smith dropped into a chair beside the general. “Tell me about this virus. Where did it break out? What kind is it? Another hemorrhagic like Machupo?”
“Yes to all of that, and no to all of that,” Kielburger told him. “Major Keith Anderson died Friday evening out in Fort Irwin of acute respiratory distress syndrome, but it was not like any ARDS we’d ever seen. There was massive hemorrhaging from the lungs, and blood in the chest cavity. The Pentagon alerted us, and we got blood and tissue samples early Saturday morning. By then two other deaths had occurred in Atlanta and Boston. You weren’t here, so I put Dr. Russell in charge, and the team worked around the clock. When we did the DNA restriction map, it turned out to be unlike any known virus. It failed to react to any of the antibody samples we had for any virus. I decided to bring in CDC and the other Level Four facilities worldwide, but everything is still negative. It’s new, and it’s deadly.”
In the corridor, Dr. Lutfallah, the hospital pathologist, passed with two orderlies pushing a sheet-draped gurney. He nodded to Smith.
The general continued talking. “What I want you to do is—”
Smith ignored him. What he had to do was more important than anything Kielburger wanted. He jumped up and followed the procession to the autopsy rooms.
__________
Hospital orderly Emiliano Coronado slipped out into the service alley behind the hospital to have a cigarette. Proud of his distant ancestor’s daring and fame, he stood erect, his shoulders squared, and in his imagination he stared off into the vast distances of Colorado four centuries ago, looking for the Cities of Gold.
A sudden pain sliced across his throat. His cigarette dropped from his mouth, and his vision of glory sank into the refuse littering the dark alley. A knife blade had cut a thin trickle of blood from his neck. The blade pressed against the wound.
“Not a sound,” the voice said from behind.
Terrified, Emiliano could only grunt.
“Tell me about Dr. Russell.” Nadal al-Hassan dug the razor-sharp knife deeper as encouragement. “Is she alive?”
Coronado tried to swallow. “She die.”
“What did she say before she died?”
“Nothin’ …she don’ say nothin’ to no one.”
The knife dug in. “You are sure? Not to Colonel Smith, her fiancé? That does not sound possible.”
Emiliano was desperate. “She unconscious, you know? How she gonna talk?”
“That is good.”
The knife did its work, and Emiliano Coronado lay unconscious and dying as his blood soaked the refuse of the shadowed alley.
Al-Hassan looked carefully around. He left the alley and circled the block to where the van waited.
“Well?” Bill Griffin asked as al-Hassan climbed in.
“According to the orderly, she said nothing.”
“Then maybe Smith knows nothing. Maybe it’s good Maddux missed him in D.C. Two murders at USAMRIID increases the risk of someone figuring it out.”
“I would prefer Maddux had killed him. Then we would not be having this discussion.”
“But Maddux didn’t kill him, and we can rethink the necessity.”
“We cannot be certain she did not speak in her condominium.”‘
“We can if she was unconscious the whole time.”