Snakehead (36 page)

Lucy was alarmed now. ‘What’s wrong, Dr. Campbell?’

‘Just do what I tell you, please.’ Margaret slammed the door and crossed to her desk, digging out the phone list from her bag with trembling fingers, and snatching the phone from its cradle. Her breathing was tremulous and erratic, her body wracked by uncontrollable shivering. Fear and dread had balled themselves up together in a huge knot in her stomach. She listened as the phone rang twice at the other end before the operator picked up.

‘USAMRIID Fort Detrick. How may I help you?’

‘Dr. Margaret Campbell for Colonel Robert Zeiss. It’s an emergency.’

‘One moment, please.’

The one moment stretched into eternity. Margaret rounded her desk and dropped into her chair, but perched on the edge of it, only barely in control.

‘Colonel Zeiss.’

‘Colonel, I think I’ve got the flu.’

There was a brief silence at the other end of the line. Margaret could almost hear the colonel thinking. ‘Why do you think that?’ he asked.

‘Because I’ve just had two bouts of vomiting, I’m sweating and shaking from head to toe.’

Another pause, then Zeiss said, ‘Stay where you are, Doctor. I’ll have a team with you as fast as I possibly can. We’ll need isolation facilities. What’s closest to you?’

‘Hermann Hospital, I think. They have an infectious diseases facility and isolation rooms.’ She could almost see the hospital, in Medicine City, from her window.

‘I’ll alert them.’ He paused again. ‘Who have you been in contact with in the last few hours?’

‘My secretary, my autopsy assistant. Li Yan, the Chinese criminal justice liaison…’ Her heart sank at the thought. Please, God, not Li as well. ‘But he’s on a plane to Washington, via Dallas.’

‘Shit!’ Zeiss almost whispered the oath. ‘What airline?’

‘Air Tran.’

‘We’ll try to intercept him. Make certain that your autopsy assistant and secretary have no contact with anyone until we can get them isolated. Is there anyone else?’

Her mind raced. ‘INS Agent Hrycyk,’ she said. ‘Councilman Soong, and about a dozen Houston police officers — but that was several hours ago.’

She heard Zeiss groan. ‘Let’s just hope you’re wrong about this,’ he said, and she wondered if he only hoped that in order to save himself trouble. ‘Sit tight until the team gets there.’

He hung up, and she sat holding the phone, feeling like a criminal. As if somehow it was her fault that she had got the flu and had knowingly gone spreading it around. She replaced the receiver and sat numbly, wondering how she could possibly have contracted the virus. It could only have been during autopsy. Or could Steve somehow have passed it on to her? And, then, what had triggered it?

She looked around her office, her eyes lighting on all the little personal things she had gathered there over the months. The Chinese wall hanging she had been given by Li’s former boss in Beijing, a soft woollen pencil case she had kept from her schooldays — sentimental value, something that connected her with who she had been in happier times. There was a paperweight that her father had given her. It was just a big flat pebble he had found on the lake, with the fossil of a fish clearly visible on the top of it. A photograph of herself sandwiched between her mother and father on the occasion of her tenth birthday. She looked at the chubby, round red cheeks and the bobbed hair, the shining blue eyes, the fondness in her father’s gaze, the distance in her mother’s. There was a pair of old shoes, moulded to the shape of her feet, that she kept for changing into on return from a crime scene. They seemed ancient and empty and neglected, and she wondered if she would ever put them on again.

Depression and self-pity descended on her like a chill mist on an autumn morning. All these things, she thought, belonged to someone else, someone with a life, someone who did not expect to die, at least not for a long time.

The phone rang, crashing into her thoughts like a bucket of iced water. It was an internal call. She snatched at it. Lucy’s voice, small and scared, asked, ‘What’s wrong, Doctor? What’s going on?’

Margaret said, ‘I’m sorry, Lucy. It is possible I have contracted a virus. Some people are going to come and take us all into an isolation facility at Hermann Hospital. Even if it’s confirmed, the chances are I won’t have given it to you.’

There was a long silence. Then, ‘What virus, Doctor?’

‘It’s the flu, Lucy. A particularly nasty form of flu.’

* * *

The team arrived in under half an hour. Margaret saw them from the window of her office. Three army ambulances, drivers wearing Tivek suits and HEPA filter masks. Three two-man medical crews wearing full protective STEPO suits brought out litters for carrying contaminated patients. The litters were hooded in clear plastic and fitted with their own filtered air supply. They were all part of the national biowarfare defence force put in place during the Clinton regime. The sight of them made Margaret shiver.

III

The army interception team missed Li at Dulles by minutes. He had called home during his stopover at Dallas and told Xiao Ling to get a cab out to the airport to meet him. He needed to talk to her, away from Xinxin. To his astonishment, he had been met by both of them, Xinxin laughing, delighted to see him, gambolling around her mother as if they had never been apart. The transformation in Xiao Ling, too, was astonishing. Something had breathed life back into her broken spirit.

Both were concerned by the state of his face; it was even worse than when they had last seen him. And the three of them had stood hugging on the concourse, wrapped in their unexpected happiness, for a long time. Half shell-shocked, Li had told their driver to take them to the Washington Harbour complex on the Potomac, down the hill from Georgetown. It was a stunning fall day, a warm wind blowing up from a clear sky in the south and softening the air. They could get a drink at Tony and Joe’s and sit out in the sunshine and watch the roller bladers cruise by on the boardwalk.

The harbour was busy. The sun had brought the people of DC out from premature winter hibernation to enjoy the warm autumn sunshine and make the most of this unexpected reprise of summer. Tables and sunshades were laid out along the waterfront, and people crowded the steps to the fountains. The traffic on the Whitehurst Freeway was a distant rumble. This had once been a derelict area of crummy parking lots and scrap yards, transformed now into an upscale development of restaurants and shops and plush offices occupied by government lobbyists. Only the airplanes, threading their way along the curve of the Potomac, heading for Reagan, spoiled the peace. By law they could not overfly the White House on the DC side or the Pentagon on the Virginia side. And so the river had become the flight path into the National Airport. But after a while you stopped hearing them. Li sat with his sunglasses on, watching the sunlight coruscating on the river, drinking a beer, and smoking a cigarette. He felt relaxed for the first time in days. Xinxin finished a tall coupe of ice-cream and persuaded her mom to let her go and watch the joggers and the kids on roller blades. Xiao Ling told her okay, as long as she stayed inside the fence. She took a sip of her Coke and for the first time allowed her anxiety about her brother to show.

‘Are you all right?’

He nodded. ‘A few cuts and bruises. I’ll survive.’ He took a pull at his cigarette and looked at his sister fondly. She was like the old Xiao Ling, the little girl he remembered as a child. Whatever scars the last few years had left were on the inside now. For the moment nothing showed on the outside except her smile, and her clear concern for Li. He leaned forward and took her hand. ‘You’re safe now, Xing,’ he said. ‘We’ve got the
ah kung
. He’s in custody.’ And he realised he had used, without thinking, the nickname he had given her when they were kids. Xing.

She squeezed his hand. ‘I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, Li Yan…’

But he was anxious to hear what had passed between mother and daughter, and interrupted. ‘What happened with Xinxin?’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t know. I woke up this morning, and she was in bed beside me. Curled into my back, fast asleep. I’ve no idea how long she’d been there.’ There was moisture gathering in her eyes. ‘It was like she was saying to me, okay, I don’t know why you went away, but you’re back now and I forgive you, so where were we…?’ Xiao Ling laughed as the tears ran down her cheeks. ‘And, you know, now I can’t for the life of me understand why I did leave.’

‘Make that two of us,’ Li said.

Shame fell across her face like a shadow. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry. It was like…like some kind of madness. I can’t explain it. Something took over inside me. Something irrational, beyond my control. When I look back, it’s as if I was another person.’ Li wiped the tears away from her face. But she was determined to get it all off her chest. ‘I’m a different person now. I know that. Different from then, different from before then. So much has happened.’ She forced a smile. ‘What does a farmer’s wife from Sichuan know about anything?’

‘A lot more now,’ Li said wryly.

She nodded, and then suddenly she said, ‘Li Yan, I don’t want to go back to that immigration court.’

Li frowned. ‘Xing, you’ve got to. They placed you in my custody. I have to take you back.’

She shook her head vigorously. ‘No, you don’t understand. I don’t want to apply for political asylum. I want to go home. I want to go back to China with Xinxin.’

‘Not to Xiao Xu?’ Li said, concerned suddenly. He had always disliked his brother-in-law, from the first time Xiao Ling had brought him home. ‘You know he’s living with someone else now.’

She shrugged. ‘Yes, I know,’ she said. ‘And, no, I would never have gone back to him. He was part of the madness, a part of what drove me away in the first place.’ She hesitated for a long moment. ‘When I told him I was pregnant again, he beat me.’

Li felt his hackles rising. Had he known that, he would have been on the first train to Sichuan to deal with his brother-in-law himself.

‘I didn’t tell you,’ she said, ‘because I knew what your reaction would be. You’re like all men, Li Yan. You think the only way to settle a problem is with your fists.’

He smiled sheepishly. ‘Not always,’ he defended himself. But he knew that in this instance she was right. His smile faded. ‘So where would you go?’

She tipped her eyebrows back on her head and made a face. ‘I don’t know. Beijing maybe. I’ll need to find a job.’

And he understood then that his destiny had been decided for him. He could not let Xiao Ling and Xinxin go back to China on their own. His sister was carrying the flu virus. She would need special care. ‘I’ll come with you,’ he said. ‘You will stay with me. Both of you.’

‘But your job…’

‘I will ask to be reassigned,’ he said. ‘Back to Section One. In the circumstances, I don’t think they will refuse me.’

She leaned forward and removed his sunglasses, and gazed into his eyes for a long time. She knew the sacrifice he was making. ‘I love you, Li Yan,’ she said, and she kissed him on the cheek.

IV

Margaret sat up on the bed in the small isolation room. Her sealed window unit looked out over the lushly watered Hermann Park. The midday sun had long since burned off all the dew, and she saw joggers plugged into Walkmans pounding their red-legged circuits around the park. She felt as if she were watching a movie, something unreal and unreachable. She had never had the least desire to go jogging, but suddenly it seemed like the most desirable thing in the world. Just to feel the sun on your skin, the air in your lungs, the ground under your feet. To be free simply to live.

She had been in a daze when they wired her up to the monitor and took her blood samples. She remembered a doctor in a space suit telling her that her temperature was normal, but they weren’t taking any risks. They had stuck a needle in her left arm and connected her to a bag of lactated Ringer’s solution — salt and water to counteract the effects of any dehydration. Like Steve, they had also put her on a course of rimantadine antiviral drugs. The thought of Steve conjured pictures in her mind of his last moments, writhing and manic, vomiting green bile. And the cold, steel fingers of her own fear closed around her heart.

She had been aware from time to time of people coming up to the observation window in the corridor and peering in at her, but she hadn’t paid much attention. A near hysterical Lucy and a very subdued Jack were in rooms further along the corridor. She had heard Lucy’s plaintive appeals to God as they wheeled her away. But Margaret had no faith that even if there was a God, He could or would do anything to change things.

There was a phone by the bed which she was told she could use to make calls through the switchboard. But she couldn’t think of anyone to phone. She had wondered if they had caught Li at the airport in Washington, but when she asked, no one appeared to know.

She felt like an animal caught in headlights, frozen by her own fear, unable to move, unable to change or influence her own destiny. And something dark behind the lights was waiting to crush her.

The strangest thing was, she felt fine now. Physically. No more hot flushes or cold sweats. No more nausea. In fact, she was almost hungry.

She looked up as a doctor came through the ‘airlock’. There was something very strange about him. His white coat hung open, a stethoscope dangling from his neck, dark, baggy pants belted at the waist, a pair of scuffed loafers on size ten feet. Everyman’s cliché of a hospital doctor. For a moment, Margaret looked at him, puzzled, before she realised what was wrong. He wasn’t wearing a spacesuit. She wasn’t even sure if he was the doctor who had spoken to her earlier. He was about forty, sandy hair flopping across his forehead. And he was leaving the doors open behind him. His loafers squeaked on the linoleum as he crossed to the bed and disconnected her from the drip. He pressed a small bandage on her arm and drew out the needle from beneath it. Then he sat on the edge of the bed and looked at her curiously.

He said, ‘Good news and…well, other news. I’ll let you decide if it’s good or bad.’ He paused. ‘You don’t have the flu, Doctor.’