Ebola K: A Terrorism Thriller (18 page)

The saddest part of the whole endeavor wasn’t
even the work. It was the hopelessness, made visceral by the bodies
and the smells. Salim had touched the skin of many of the dead.
He’d brought hollow comfort to the dying by holding their hands. He
saw mothers weeping for dead husbands, children crying over their
mothers, and fathers—men with wiry muscles and calloused
hands—wailing over their dead children.

When he and Jalal were switched to the water
detail, Salim thanked Allah for the change.

Salim was trying to wash the memories of the
dying out of his mind with the sound of the water Jalal was pumping
into the pails. He watched two men in yellow Tyvek, armed with
AK-47s, standing lazily in the middle of the town’s only
intersection, with red dust covering their feet and fading to
orange up around their knees. Other freedom fighters were working
their way in and out of houses by then. Some were carrying in
water. Some were carrying out buckets. Some were taking out bodies.
Some stood around in gaps between the houses, talking and
gesturing. Their body language showed their suspicions and
fears.

Salim looked around to make sure no one but
Jalal was close enough to hear what he was about to say. “It
doesn’t make any sense.”

Jalal pumped the handle to draw more water
out of the well. “What doesn’t?”

“None of it.”

Jalal kept pumping. “That’s a broad
statement, mate. We’re helping these people. That’s what they said
we’d do. They said it was our cover story. It makes sense.” Jalal
looked at Salim. “It doesn’t to you?”

“Of course it does. It makes fantastic
sense.” Salim rolled his eyes.

“Sarcasm won’t make your point,” said Jalal.
“Tell me what doesn’t make sense.”

“Well—” Salim gestured toward the yellow
HAZMAT guys.

Jalal shrugged and pumped more water. “What
about them?”

“Are you kidding?” Salim asked. “Are
they
with us? They told us when we got off the truck that
they were aid workers. Why do they have guns? Why don’t they aid
anyone?”

Jalal looked at the men in yellow standing
with their guns and doing nothing but looking bored. “They’re here
for security. You know how these kinds of situations get.”

Salim lowered his voice as his impatience
rose. “No, Jalal, I don’t know how these situations get.”

“Well it makes sense that we might need
security, right?” Jalal asked.

“Yeah, of course.”

“There, then,” Jalal concluded.

“Why the yellow suits? Why don’t
we
have suits?” Salim asked.

Water sloshed out of the top of one of the
water pails as Jalal moved it away from the pump. Jalal pointed to
the main hospital building. “That one next.”

Salim looked over at the school. “We did all
three buildings there. Are we taking anything to the church?”

Jalal laughed quietly, but harshly.
“Christians?”

Salim shrugged, and they walked up the dirt
road toward the hospital building.

Jalal said, “It’s typhoid. We don’t need the
suits.”

“Then why do
they
need them?” asked
Salim.

Jalal smiled. “Maybe they’re ignorant
wankers.”

Salim shook his head and walked a bit. “Why
aren’t
we boiling the water?”

“Because it would be a lot of trouble.” Jalal
stopped in the road. Salim stopped and looked at him. Jalal said,
“We’re drawing water from a well in the middle of Africa, mate.
It’s probably cleaner than the water we get at home.”

“I think typhoid spreads through the water
system.” Salim told him flatly.

“That’s not what I heard,” Jalal
countered.

“Heard? Heard from whom?”

“I remember from school,” said Jalal.

“What do you remember?”

Jalal started to walk forward with his
bucket. “I don’t know.”

Frustrated, Salim asked, “Then why did you
say that?”

“What do
you
remember about typhoid
from school? Did you take a class in diseases or something?” asked
Jalal.

“No, I don’t remember where I learned it. I
just remember it’s a disease that spreads through water.”

“Fine. Is it a virus or a bacteria?”

Salim was getting frustrated. “Why are you
being such an asshole? I’m not trying to argue with you about
something you think you know, but don’t. I just want to understand
what’s going on.”

“Take it on faith, Salim.”

“What, that you think you know something
about typhoid, but don’t?”

Jalal shook his head. “It sounds like you
don’t know anything about typhoid, either. You’re stressed and
you’re trying to think of reasons why you think they’re going to
screw us. But think about it, mate. Why would they screw us? How
could they screw us? We’ve already promised our lives to the cause.
What more could they get out of us?”

Salim shrugged. “I don’t know. Have you seen
anybody taking pictures of us? Weren’t they supposed to be taking
pictures of us to post?”

“Just do your work. There are a lot of us
here. They’ll get to us.”

“We’ve been here for eight hours, at least,”
replied Salim.

Jalal didn’t answer. They climbed the stairs.
Salim opened the hospital door and followed Jalal inside.

Jalal took his pail and a metal cup and
started on one side of the center aisle. Salim went to work on the
other. They stopped by each bed or mat, tried to get the patient to
drink, then moved to the next.

By the time Salim had visited ten beds, he’d
already come across two patients he was sure were dead. Several
were alive but unresponsive. Most of them had blood-red eyes, and
some of them had blood on their blankets, clothes, and skin.

About halfway up on his side of the ward,
Salim came to a cot that held a young Arab man. He had an IV—the
only one Salim had seen. He was clean. He wore blue hospital
scrubs—recently washed. His sheets weren’t stained in filth. A man
in a plastic yellow suit hovered over the young man and waved Salim
past.

The next surprise was a pair of Caucasians—a
young man on a cot and a woman with absent eyes on a mat on the
floor. Salim shuffled up between them, knelt by the
familiar-looking young man, shook him awake, and held the cup of
water up near his face.

The young man’s eyes snapped open. At first,
he just stared at the ceiling. Salim helped him to sit up a bit and
held the cold cup of water to the boy’s lips. But instead of
drinking, the boy looked at Salim’s face, studied it, and croaked,
“Sam?”

In that same second, Salim recognized the boy
as Austin Cooper. They’d gone to high school together.

What the hell?

Then the terror set in. It wouldn’t go well
for him if anyone realized the sick boy knew him. Those in charge
would jump to conclusions, and those conclusions would be bad.
Salim stood straight up—looking up as he did—and saw the guy in the
HAZMAT suit beside the tidy Arab kid’s bed staring at him.

Eric stopped by the conference room. Inside,
Olivia Cooper and Barry Middleton shared the desk. The room was
bigger than the one Eric and Olivia had occupied earlier in the
day. It held an oblong table designed to seat six. In the center of
the table sat a conference call phone set and a projector, which at
the moment wasn’t hooked up to either computer.

Eric dropped himself into a chair and asked,
“What do you have?”

Olivia pointed at Barry and said, “Barry got
us the lists of passengers on all the flights for the past several
days, including Salim’s flight.”

Eric took a drink of his coffee. “And?”

“I’m working on the information, but it looks
like there’s been a big spike in passengers flying from Lahore to
Nairobi on Western passports.”

“A big spike?” replied Eric.

“It seems to have gone up significantly
compared to the day before.”

Eric shook his head. “By itself, that
information is somewhat meaningless.”

“Yes,” Olivia agreed. “Barry is pulling in
information from the past month so we can see how far it deviates
from the trend.”

Eric shook his head. “Statistical anomalies
are interesting, and they may mean something, but you know if you
go into a problem with a bias toward finding a certain solution,
even in random data, you’re going to find a pattern that supports
your solution. All you have to do is look long enough.” Eric
glanced at Barry. “I shouldn’t have to tell you that.”

Olivia spoke up to pull the attention back to
herself. “This isn’t all we’ve found. Thirteen of those Western
passport holders are young men from the ages of nineteen to
twenty-seven. All left the United States within the past four
months.”

Eric said, “You have my attention.”

“They are all on our list.”

In the department, The List didn’t need to be
named specifically. It was the list they were tasked with
monitoring—US citizens who’d gone abroad under suspicious
circumstances—those under suspicion of potentially joining an
anti-American radical group.

Eric turned to Barry. “You confirmed
this?”

Barry nodded. “It gets better.”

“How’s that?” replied Eric.

Barry pointed at Olivia. “I sent her the info
just before you walked in.”

Eric turned to Olivia. She was staring
wide-eyed at her screen. “Barry?” Her voice was tentative as she
glanced sideways at him, then back at her screen. “Tell me I’m
understanding this correctly.”

“Judging by the look on your face, I’d say
you are.”

“What?” Eric asked.

Glancing between Barry and her screen, she
turned to Eric. “Pass me that cord.”

Eric passed her the plug to connect her
laptop to the projector. Olivia plugged it into her computer,
fiddled with a few keys, and an image of her computer’s screen
illuminated the wall.

The projected image on the wall contained a
spreadsheet with a column of names—some highlighted in yellow—a
column of amounts in some currency not relevant at the moment, a
couple of date columns, and columns of flight numbers, carriers,
flight times, destinations, numbers of stops, what appeared to be
account numbers, and a column that seemed to randomly contain the
letter W or blanks.

“Sort by column D,” Barry told Olivia, as she
maneuvered the mouse across the top of the spreadsheet.

Olivia clicked a few menu options, and the
information was ready for review. She said, “The rows highlighted
in yellow are the thirteen I told you about a moment
ago—Americans.”

Eric scanned the document, trying to see what
was so obvious and important to his two subordinates. “Help me out
with this.”

Olivia moused over one of the
yellow-highlighted names. “This is one of our boys.”

Eric read out loud, “Salim Pitafi.”

“Look to column D,” Olivia moused down the
column and highlighted six rows.”

“And that column is?” Eric asked.

“The credit card number used to pay for the
ticket.” Olivia glanced at Barry.

“That’s right.” Barry was excited. “That
column next to it. That’s when the purchase was made.”

Eric looked at it for a moment. “Are you
telling me that all six of those tickets were purchased with the
same credit card number at the same time?”

“That’s exactly what it says.” Olivia
scrolled down the page and highlighted contiguous rows, in groups
of six. “It happens again and again—nineteen groups of six—all for
tickets purchased in a two-hour window.”

“Scroll down slowly from the top,” Eric
requested.

Olivia moved the mouse to the top of the
spreadsheet and scrolled.

Barry nodded emphatically after the second
yellow highlighted name was passed.

When they got to the bottom, Eric said, “By
my count, nine of those grouped purchases contain at least one of
the guys on our lists.”

“Yes,” Olivia answered.

“Exactly.” Barry confirmed.

“You think these guys are all related
somehow?”

“The accounts prove that,” Barry blurted.

Eric turned to Barry, “Yes. No doubt. But
what is the relationship? That’s the important thing, right?
Without a doubt this is compelling, but we don’t know if a travel
agency is booking these boys on safari on behalf of some university
travel abroad program, some church is sending groups of
missionaries, or they’re part of some elaborate terrorist plot. Am
I right?”

Olivia sank in her seat.

Barry flatly replied, “You’re right.”

“I’m not saying this is or isn’t something,”
Eric told them. “As I said, I’m curious. I’m even suspicious. I’ve
kicked the inquiry about your boy Salim and the other two upstairs.
I’ll pass along the other ten names. But until we can get more
information on what these card numbers relate to, or until we can
get some information on who these others are, we can’t make an
educated guess. We can make a guess, but we have to recognize
that’s all it is—a guess. As I already mentioned, we’re looking for
terrorists here. We expect to find them. So every bit of evidence
we find is going to smell like terrorist shit. You understand what
I’m saying?”

“Yes,” Olivia responded.

Barry nodded.

Eric stood up, walked over to the glass door,
and pulled it open. He stopped with one foot out. “Both of you—move
your stuff to conference room D-3.”

Olivia looked across the floor to the line of
three large conference rooms on the opposite wall.

“I’m sending Katherine to join you. She’ll
liaise with our friends at the CIA and see what we can come up with
on these other names. Kevin will help you get into the bank
information. Christine can dig into the phone data. Save me a place
at the table, ‘cause I’ll be checking up on you guys frequently.
We’ll order some food in later.” Eric walked out and let the door
swing closed behind him.

“Holy crap,” Barry said.

Olivia smiled, but felt anxious, “I hope I’m
not sending everyone off chasing nothing.”