Ebola K: A Terrorism Thriller (16 page)

She smiled. A closed-lipped smile at first,
then a broad smile that showed her perfect white teeth. The oddest
thought crossed Austin’s mind—that a diet rich in natural,
unprocessed foods must be excellent for dental hygiene. They all
had great teeth here.

He rolled to his left as another wave of
nausea threatened to spill his last sips of water into the
dirt.

Emmanuel’s wife made a soothing sound—the
kind that mothers instinctively make when caring for sick
children—then dipped the cloth back into the bucket and rubbed it
over his face, arms, and neck.

The sound of the children’s voices outside
changed. Deeper voices joined them. Emmanuel’s familiar voice said
something to his son.

Feet shuffled through dirt, and bodies
brushed through the shed’s narrow door. Then voices were inside and
Austin opened his eyes to see two men in yellow Tyvek suits with
AK-47s in their hands. They stood over him, hunched down under the
shed’s low roof.

Austin closed his eyes and waited for the
bullet.

Her mother was an Olympic silver medalist.
And every time Eric brought it up in front of strangers in the
cafeteria, she wanted to take her tray and smack him in the head
hard enough to make his thick, red hair pop right off his head. But
she didn’t, of course. Instead, she smiled and looked at the
disbelief around the table. Nobody ever believed it.

“No,” Eric’s old friend Robert said.

Olivia nodded to confirm and continued to
chew her food.

Robert asked, “So your mother is really a
Russian Olympic medalist?”

Olivia swallowed, took her billfold out of
her purse, opened it up to the pictures she had saved inside, and
laid it on the table for everyone to see.

Eric had seen it before and took the
opportunity to shovel food into his mouth. He had to shovel. He had
such a mound on his tray that if he ate at a normal pace, he
wouldn’t finish before their lunch break was over. Olivia couldn’t
figure out why he wasn’t obese.

She flipped the photos in their little clear
plastic sleeves. She found the old one of her mother on the
platform, hands raised, and a medal around her neck.

Robert—without asking—reached out and scooted
the wallet closer. He leaned over as did his coworker Joan. “She’s
gorgeous,” Robert said.

That wasn’t unexpected. Olivia had heard the
comment too many times for it to have any impact.

Joan was a little more catty. “I was
expecting—”

Of course, she didn’t finish. Everyone
expected female Russian athletes from the mid-eighties to look like
brutish men full of growth hormones. Olivia’s mother was nothing
like that. If she’d been taller, she’d have looked like one of
those magazine cover models.

“What did she earn a medal in?” Robert asked
with a vaguely lustful look in his eyes, glancing first at the
photograph, and then over to Olivia. There was a strong resemblance
between the two, though Olivia thought she had nothing close to her
mother’s beauty.

“Biathlon,” Olivia answered.

“You have her eyes,” Robert said. It was what
guys always said when they saw a picture of her mother. It probably
wasn’t even true. What Olivia thought it meant was, “I want to have
sex with you and pretend you are your mother.” Comments about her
eyes never got guys very far with her.

“I don’t watch the Winter Olympics,” Joan
told the table, “What’s a biathlon?”

“Skiing and shooting.”

“Skiing and shooting?” Joan laughed. “Are you
kidding? In the same event?”

Olivia often wondered what it was about most
Americans that made them so laughably proud of their ignorance of
any sport that wasn’t American-style football. “Google it.” She
took another bite of her salad and thought again about smacking
Eric with the tray.

“So, is your father Russian, too?” Robert
asked.

“American, I guess.” Olivia answered.

Idly, Robert added, “My dad’s from Iowa. His
family was surprised when he married a girl from Michigan.”

Everyone laughed politely.

“So,” Robert turned his attention back to
Olivia, “Your mom is Russian, your dad is American. Did you grow up
in the States?”

“Some,” Olivia answered. “I was born in
Texas.”

“Texas?” Joan asked. “I’m from Midland.”

“We moved to Pakistan when I was little. We
lived in Islamabad until I was thirteen. Then we came back to the
US. I’ve been here ever since.”

“So you learned Russian from your
mother?”

Olivia nodded. Her reputation for languages
was something Eric also bragged about.

“And Pakistani?” He asked.

“Urdu,” Olivia nodded. “I also speak Punjabi,
Pashto, and obviously, English.”

“Jesus.”

Olivia shrugged. The languages had always
been easy.

Robert said, “All the languages I know are
things like SQL, Java, C++, stuff like that.”

“And English.” Eric laughed again, but the
others only smiled.

“Are you in IT, also?” Olivia asked Joan.

“Project manager,” Joan confirmed. “How long
have you worked with Eric?”

“Worked
for
him,” Olivia smiled.

“Oh, yeah,” Robert exaggerated, “Eric’s a
manager now. I keep forgetting.”

“A year,” Olivia answered.

“Before that?” Robert asked.

“I’ve been with the agency since I finished
grad school.”

“So the NSA is your first job?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, God,” Robert laughed, “Well, start
working on your resumé, or you’ll end up like him. He looks like
he’s forty, but he’s only been here a few more years than you.”

More laughs.

Thankfully, the rest of the lunch
conversation centered around Joan’s teenagers and Eric’s
toddlers.

After they finished eating, Joan and Robert
walked together down a hallway that led to the IT sections of the
building. Eric badged in at the elevator, and when they were
inside, badged again to access the third floor where both he and
Olivia worked.

“What’s that thing you were working on before
lunch?” Eric asked, “How’s that going?”

“With Salim Pitafi?” Olivia answered.

“Is that his name? Pitafi? The one from
Denver.”

“Yes. He was passed to us by Harvey
Singleton’s group. For a few years now he’s been taking an interest
in radical Muslim websites. When he bought a ticket to Pakistan, he
fell into our lap.”

“You’ve been monitoring him?” Eric asked.

The elevator door opened and both Eric and
Olivia stopped talking. Eric directed Olivia to one of the dozens
of glass-walled conference rooms situated around the edges of the
cubicle farm. Once inside, they pulled up chairs across from one
another at a small table.

Olivia said, “Once he landed in Lahore, he
disappeared. Not a trace of him came up anywhere for three
months.”

“Training camp?” Eric asked.

Olivia wasn’t ready to make that call for
certain so she went through her analysis. “No debit card usage that
I could find. Not a single phone call. His phone is still active on
his parent’s account, but it’s been dead. He has relatives in
Multan—that’s where his family is from.”

“First generation?”

“He was born in Multan,” said Olivia. “His
parents immigrated to the US when he was young. He was three or
four at the time.”

“So he’s been here all his life?”

Olivia nodded. “For all practical
purposes.”

“In the same place?”

“In Denver,” she answered.

Eric asked, “And he flew out of Lahore
yesterday?”

“A little after noon, local time.”

“Destination?”

“Nairobi,” she said.

“Nairobi? So maybe he was visiting relatives
in Multan, and decided to go see elephants and giraffes?” Eric
guessed.

“You know that’s unlikely.”

“I’m playing devil’s advocate,” Eric said.
“Tell me why I’m wrong.”

Olivia didn’t take offense. Questions were
part of the analytical process. “If this was truly a social visit
to Multan, then why the silence? He didn’t use his phone. He didn’t
post any pictures to his Facebook account. He didn’t log into any
computer under his name or an alias that we’re aware of.”

“And he would have posted something?” Eric
asked.

“He was an active Facebook user until about
three or four months before he flew to Lahore. He posted pictures
of ski trips, hiking trips, whatever. He even posted pictures of
him and his buddies at the Denver Zoo.”

“When?” Eric asked.

“Six months before leaving,” Olivia said. “He
was skipping classes at the local community college.” She didn’t
mention that the community college was just fifteen minutes from
her dad’s house. That detail wasn’t important, and it wasn’t
relevant. It was only disturbing because the jihadist had lived
relatively close to her father.

“Maybe he just got tired of Facebook.”

“Safari tours in Kenya are expensive,” said
Olivia. “His family here in the US doesn’t have any money. At
least, not the kind of money to finance a globe-hopping tour for
their son. In addition to Salim, they’ve got two other kids nearing
college age. They’ve got too much credit card debt and payments on
two fairly new cars. They live paycheck to paycheck.”

Eric sat back in his chair and thought for a
moment. “So the kid spent a lot of time surfing jihadist websites
prior to dropping out of sight for a visit to Pakistan three months
ago. Now he’s traveling around South Central Asia and Africa with
no apparent way to pay for it. And we don’t know why. Are the
parents in communication with the kid at all?”

Shaking her head, Olivia said, “Not a peep
since he left.”

“Okay. I’ll send it up the chain and see how
they want to proceed.”

“What do you think will happen?” Olivia
asked.

“I don’t know. They may send the FBI out to
talk to the parents to see what’s up. They may put them under
surveillance. Why don’t you keep working this and see what else
comes out?”

Olivia said, “Something else already
did.”

“What’s that?”

“Two other names popped up when I started
looking before lunch. Both Pakistani-Americans, both took an
interest in radical websites, both disappeared to Pakistan.”

“At the same time?” Eric was interested.

“One took off a month before. One took off a
few weeks after.”

“Tell me about those two.”

Olivia said, “Both are en route to Nairobi or
already there.”

“No shit.”

Olivia nodded. Her face was serious.

“Do we have any reason to believe these guys
know each other?” Eric asked.

“None. They didn’t even take the same
flights.”

“All right,” Eric paused for a moment. “Send
me those names when you get back to your desk. I’m going to tell
Barry Middleton to drop what he’s doing and lend you a hand.”

“I don’t know if I need help yet.”

“He has extensive experience with different
types of data. Bring him up to speed. I want regular updates on
this. I’m going to send the info upstairs.”

They were on the third floor of a three-story
building. Olivia understood what
upstairs
meant. “You think
there’s something going on?”

Eric nodded.

When Austin woke, he was lying on his side on
a cot. Everything was still confusing, and thoughts were hard to
string together through the fog and gaps in his brain. How long had
he been out? Hours? A day or two? More?

One of the plastic buckets that he’d become
so familiar with over the past days sat on the floor not ten inches
from his head. It stank. The cot stank. The room stank.

On the other side of the bucket, on the
floor, Margaux lay on her side facing him. Her face was slack, her
eyes open—blood-red, not focused. They were doll’s eyes, horrible
for their lifelessness. Her mouth dripped a brownish mucus—the
remains of her last regurgitation. Except for the twitching of two
fingers on the hand that lay by her face, she looked dead.

On Margaux’s other side, a young African
woman was sprawled, with blackish red blood smeared on her face. A
trickle of blood ran from her ear down to the floor where her head
lay, well off her mat. One of her arms was resting across Margaux.
The woman’s fingers were curled back over her palms, pulled closed
by dead tendons. The woman’s chest didn’t rise, nor did it fall.
There was no breath in her. Only the flies on her skin were alive,
animated in hunger for her remains.

The absence of Benoit on a mat at Margaux’s
side put a clear and certain thought into Austin’s mind. Benoit was
dead. That meant his body was piled by the waste pit behind the
hospital, waiting for somebody with enough commitment and energy to
burn it.

A tear rolled out of Austin’s eye and tracked
across the bridge of his nose, down the slope on the other side and
across his cheek. The pain of Benoit’s death, mixed with all the
other agony trapped in the confines of his skin, seemed too much to
bear. And in moments of clarity, Austin knew the pain that lived
behind the sallow, dejected eyes of all those third-world children
on all those television commercials that begged for his latte money
when he was back in Denver. With the pain branded so deeply on his
own soul, he’d never look at those eyes again and keep his tears to
himself.

In the next moment of lucidity, he recalled
the prognosis of his predicament. Benoit was dead. Margaux was
dying. Austin would soon see them on the other side and never again
have to look at diseased children with big eyes and distended
bellies.

It occurred to Austin in that moment that he
should be dead already.

Austin felt the weight of someone sitting
down behind him on the cot. With all the slow care he could use to
keep his stomach from spewing whatever remained there, he rolled
onto his back. One of the guys in yellow Tyvek was sitting beside
him, looking down.