Ebola K: A Terrorism Thriller (17 page)

Through the goggles Austin saw medium brown
skin, black eyebrows, and familiar black eyes. “Rashid?”

“You are Austin.” It wasn’t Rashid’s voice,
but his brother’s older, harsher voice.

“Najid?” Austin asked. “Why?”

“You did me a kindness.”

Austin was confused. He was asking why Najid
was in Kapchorwa with gunmen, why he’d killed Nurse
Mary-Margaret—not for a moment of warm, fuzzy emotional shit. What
the hell was he doing?

Najid said, “You are a friend of Rashid’s.
You telephoned me out of concern for him. I returned the kindness
by not having you killed.”

Austin tried to put the words “fuck you”
together, but was having trouble getting his mouth to
cooperate.

“Not that it matters. You’ll soon be dead I
suspect. It seems that nearly all who are in the advanced stages of
the disease are dying.”

Austin looked to his left to see the
ward.

Guessing the question, Najid answered in a
detached voice. “Forty-eight so far.” He looked to the other end of
the ward. “The doctor says another ten or twelve will go within the
hour.”

To his right, Austin saw Rashid lying on the
cot next to his. A HAZMAT guy—the doctor, Austin guessed—sat beside
Rashid doing some kind of exam.

Najid’s voice grew sad, and he shook his
head. “Rashid has a better chance than the rest of you. He is
getting the best medical treatment available under the
circumstances.”

“But—” That was the entirety of the question
Austin had the energy to put together.

“It’s not fair?” Najid shook his head,
exaggerating the gesture. “No, it’s
not
fair. Rashid gets
care that will double or triple his chances of surviving, and you—“
Najid paused, “lying right next to him, in fact, lying right next
to a box that contains enough drugs to treat you and maybe a dozen
others—get nothing. Do know why?”

Because you’re a piece of shit.
But
those words couldn’t find a voice either.

“That is exactly what is going on now.
American doctors with Ebola have been flown out of Liberia and are
responding well to a new American miracle drug. The supply is small
and the price is high. So poor Africans don’t get it. They die.
That is the world, Austin. You don’t understand it because you have
been a rich American all your life, and you have had more of
everything than you ever needed, while others suffered to provide
it for you. At this moment, that is no longer the case. Rashid has
more drugs to treat this disease than he will ever need. And you
have nothing. The sadness of the world’s reality looks different
from this perspective, doesn’t it?”

Austin slowly shook his head.

Najid laid a gloved hand on Austin’s arm. “I
know you will not believe this, but I do hope you live. That is why
I had my men carry you off the mountain. Do not run again. Our
activities here must be kept secret and the value of the kindness
you showed does not compare to that need.” Najid took his hand off
Austin’s arm, turned to the doctor in the yellow Tyvek suit, and
started speaking in Arabic.

“Will he live?” Najid asked the doctor, using
the convenience of his native tongue to hide the conversation from
Austin.

“There is no way to tell. I do all that I
can. There is no cure for Ebola, you know that.” Dr. Kassis stood
up, took a syringe, and injected some medicine into Rashid’s IV.
“All I can do is treat the symptoms and try to keep the symptoms
from killing him.”

“What is that drug you just injected?”

“It is an anticoagulant,” replied the
doctor.

“An anticoagulant? That does not make sense
to me. It is my understanding that hemorrhagic fever causes one to
bleed until he dies.”

“Yes, but it is more complex than that.”

“How so?” Najid leaned forward. He needed to
know as much as he could about the disease he was hoping to unleash
on the West.

Dr. Kassis sat back down. Without waking
Rashid, he checked his temperature with an infrared scanning
thermometer. “The process is complex. In the early phases of the
disease, blood clots form and float freely in the bloodstream.
These clots clump together and clog small veins.”

“Like a stroke?” Najid asked.

“Exactly like a stroke. That explains the
dementia symptoms we see in Ebola and Marburg patients. Parts of
the brain are deprived of oxygen and cease to function correctly.
When the oxygen supply is cut off for too long, that part of the
brain dies.”

Najid shook his head and laid a gloved hand
across Rashid’s forehead.

“Just as importantly, the clots form in the
liver, the kidneys, the lungs, the intestines—all of the organs,
even the heart.”

Najid nodded. “That is why you give him the
anticoagulant, to stop that process?”

“Exactly right.” Kassis said. “If we can stop
the clotting, we have a chance when we reach the next phase of the
disease.”

“The bleeding?” Najid asked.

“Yes. The bleeding occurs because the blood
has run out of coagulants. That coincides with tissue death all
over the body. Where the tissue has died, eventually it
bleeds.”

“Everywhere,” Najid concluded.

“Yes. Everywhere. It flows from every
orifice, catastrophically. However, if we can use the
anticoagulants to limit the damage from the clotting, we can later
use coagulants to limit the bleeding. We keep him hydrated in the
mean time and hope what we are doing helps.”

“So, anticoagulants to reduce the damage, and
later coagulants to keep him from dying,” Najid summarized, more to
get it straight in his own mind than to let Dr. Kassis know he
understood.

“Yes,” replied Kassis.

“How do you know when to stop using one and
start using the other?”

“That is my job, Najid.”

“I trust your judgment.” Najid looked down
for a long time at his brother, imagining the sorrow his father
would feel to lose him. It would be worse because his father was
the one who had forced Rashid to spend his summer in Africa, seeing
what life looked like from the other side.

“When Ebola has spread the world over, do you
have a plan for how we will survive?” Dr. Kassis asked.

Najid looked up at the doctor. “The Western
countries will develop a vaccine or an effective treatment. They
have the technology and the experience. As we discussed, it is only
a matter of time. When that time comes, we will buy enough for
ourselves.”

Dr. Kassis raised an eyebrow, hidden under
his goggles. “And if the Americans won’t sell it?”

“The Americans likely won’t, but I am
converting my father’s fortune to gold. There will never be a time
in this world when I won’t be able to find a man willing to sell
his soul for a handful of gold.”

“Gold? How so?”

“I have instructed our man in Switzerland to
sell everything, purchase gold bullion, and have it shipped to my
father’s compound within the next few days. Gold will be the only
currency with value when the world economies fall apart. My family
may come out of this as the wealthiest on the planet. I have little
doubt that I can pay corrupt Americans for all we need.”

Dr. Kassis adjusted his mask. It was becoming
a habit, along with the fear of not knowing which was worse, an ill
fitting mask, or a snug mask being touched by contaminated hands.
“It is possible that gold will be worthless? It may be that only
bullets, water, and food will have value.”

Najid laughed out loud. “Your faith in men
runs deeper than mine, doctor. In all of man’s history, except for
the age of electronics, gold has never had any intrinsic value. At
best it was made into trinkets that didn’t rust. But men have
always traded weapons, water, food, even their lives to possess it.
It will be so in the future. The value men place on gold has never
been rational. So it will continue.”

“Wiser than proceeding down this road with
only a hope for a cure would be to have a backup plan.” Dr. Kassis
laid a gloved palm across Rashid’s forehead. “I will speak
candidly.”

“Of course.”

Dr. Kassis turned to face Najid. “In case I
fall ill and am unable to offer it at a later date, I wish to tell
you now?”

Najid scrutinized the doctor. “Do you think
you might fall ill?”

“I don’t know. The risk is great. Our clean
room is not so clean. I don’t know whether every man follows the
procedures as required. It only takes one lazy man failing to
remove a bit of contaminated protective gear for all of us to
become infected.”

Najid’s anger rose. “Have you seen someone do
this?”

“No,” Dr. Kassis shook his head slowly,
showing his fatigue. “When men get tired, they make mistakes. That
is all I am saying.”

“If one has made a mistake and we become
infected, or if we simply aren’t protected well enough and we fall
ill, what is this alternative?”

“I know you educated yourself a great deal
about this disease before we came here. Did you read about the
outbreak in Kikwit in 1995?”

“I am not familiar with that outbreak,”
replied Najid.

“More than three hundred fell ill. Eighty
percent died.”

“Not as bad as some outbreaks.”

“No.” Dr. Kassis stood up and stretched.
“Let’s walk a bit.”

Najid stood up and the two men waded through
the prone townsfolk, with their distant, empty faces and
near-lifeless bodies. They followed the center aisle to the front
doors and went out to stand on the patio.

The doctor leaned on the porch railing. “Near
the end of the outbreak, one of the nurses fell ill, a Zairian
woman. This disturbed the Zairian doctors greatly. They had all
been taking precautions, including this nurse. They wore goggles,
masks, gloves, and suits. They disinfected themselves with bleach,
sprayed it on the suits, and waded through pools of bleach on the
way out of the sick wards. All procedures were followed, but still,
she fell ill.”

“That is a frightening prospect,” said
Najid.

“For one thing, it tells us how dangerous
this disease is. It takes a dozen or fewer virions—”

“Virion? I do not know this word.”

“It is an individual virus—a strand of RNA or
DNA wrapped in a shell of proteins. An individual package—the
infectious particle designed for transmission of any virus is
called a virion.”

“Interesting that you don’t talk as though it
is alive.”

Dr. Kassis nodded, “Yes, it is good that you
caught that. Viruses exist somewhere between living and nonliving
things, as we traditionally think of them. The point I’m making,
though, is that given the unimaginably tiny amount of material it
takes to make up a dozen virions, it takes only the imperceptibly
smallest of mistakes to become infected.”

“That is not encouraging, Dr. Kassis.”

The doctor shook his head. “That is exactly
what the Zairian doctors thought. And after seeing one of their
own—the nurse—contract the virus, they knew that any one of them
might be next. Who can say if it was that, or pure altruism
motivating their subsequent choices? Regardless, they took a risk
on an experimental treatment.”

Najid gave Dr. Kassis his full attention.
“What do you know of this experimental treatment?”

“Some of the Ebola patients survived. Indeed,
some were on the road to full recovery. They clearly had the
antibodies in their blood to fight off the virus. That is how
immunity works in humans.”

Seemed pretty basic to Najid. “I understand
that.”

“The risk they took—against the wishes and
objections from the American and European doctors—was to transfuse
a measure of blood from one of the healthy survivors to the sick
nurse.”

“What happened?”

“The nurse got better.”

Najid stood up straight and couldn’t hide the
surprise in his voice. “That sounds miraculous.”

Nodding, Dr. Kassis said, “The Zairian
doctors then tried the same treatment on seven other patients.”

“Against the wishes of the Westerners?” Najid
asked.

“Yes.”

Najid thought for a moment. “Did they
survive?”

“All but one of them did.”

“In seven out of eight, the treatment
worked?” Najid confirmed.

“It
appeared
to have worked,” replied
Kassis.

“What do you mean by that?”

“The decision to test the new treatment
occurred at the end of the outbreak. There was no way to know
whether or not the virus had mutated to a less lethal form of
itself.”

“So no one knew for sure if it was the
treatment that cured them.”

“No.” Dr. Kassis looked at Najid. “There may
come a time when we are desperate enough to try this same treatment
to save our lives. There may come a time when it is the only hope
we have.”

“Then save Rashid. If I have to take
another’s blood in a transfusion, it is Rashid’s I’ll have.”

“Are you of the same blood type?”

“I am.”

Salim and Jalal’s team of four broke up early
in their shift. They’d been carrying bodies out of houses at first,
moving them to a shockingly large pile of human remains behind the
hospital. They started at one end of town, working their way from
house to house. Those who were sick, they helped or carried to the
hospital or school.

Most houses had at least one corpse inside,
surrounded by wailing family members. At many houses, the residents
lied about sick family members. Some resisted physically. But a
brandished AK-47 always brought an end to their resistance.

Most of the ailing couldn’t make it to a
recently opened space in the hospital or school under their own
power and had to be carried. In the humidity, heat, and stench,
Salim’s shoulders, back, and arms cramped from the work. Two
months’ training in Pakistan had left him in the best shape of his
life, but he had found the limits of his physical abilities.