Amanda's Story (16 page)

At least they had given her a television. The first couple days all she could pick up were the local channels out of Enid, but ten days ago someone ran a wire to a cluster of plugs and outlets on the wall and she suddenly had basic cable. She searched the 24-hour news channels for any information, but it appeared as if either no one knew or cared about the lost Red Cross team. It was strange, because the news cycle was fairly sparse and the loss of so many Americans in a foreign country should have invited hours of the typical empty speculations and over-analysis of official statements, at least until the next big thing happened.

They had asked her the same questions either directly or with subtle twists, over and over again. Her family history as far back as she could remember was scrutinized in frustrating detail. Her medical history, although scant, was dissected to the point of absurdity. Every cold, flu, and sniffle she could remember drew tremendous interest. They asked her to review a six-page list of medications and check the ones that she had ever taken, circle the ones she had taken within the last six months, and underline those that she had taken the past thirty days. The following day they gave her back the same six-page list and asked her to review it for any allergies. They spent several days interviewing her about what exactly happened in Honduras. Each aspect was examined from every conceivable angle, from the moment that she landed in El Progresso until she landed on the USS Theodore Roosevelt. She was given a pen and drawing paper and asked to sketch the lesions and their locations on as many of the victims as she could remember. After several days of the intensive, almost non-stop debriefing, everything began to run together and she started to contradict herself, which led to only more and deeper questioning. She began to sense their frustration and perceived a subtle shift in their attitude. She was no longer the victim, no longer the sole survivor of a horrific experience.

On her fourteenth day they suddenly shifted their focus, and a nurse spent three hours with her recounting the events of the previous three months in detail. She had come armed with a computer tablet that contained most of the answers, and every time Amanda deviated from their timeline she was asked to explain. When the woman corrected her for at least the tenth time, Amanda simply took the tablet from the woman's hand and scanned through it.

“You have reconstructed my entire life.” She turned the screen of the notebook to the stunned woman. “You know more about me than I can remember; why are you asking me this? I'm not hiding anything.” The poor woman stared back at Amanda with wide eyes, seemingly afraid to reach for the notebook or even move. “I'm not going to hurt you, whatever your name is.” When the woman had first arrived she hadn't even bothered to introduce herself; she simply sat in one of the two plastic chairs that had been added to the room's decor and informed Amanda that she had some questions. Amanda's anger, fueled by isolation and loneliness, flared for a moment with this latest demonstration of the institutional mind-set of depersonalization, but instead of acting on it she cooperated for as long as she could.

“Here, take it.” Amanda extended the small notebook. The frightened woman didn't move. “Okay, I'll leave it here if you change your mind.” She placed it on the chair next to her.

“Now it's my turn to ask some questions,” Amanda said after her interviewer recovered and retrieved her notebook. “I have been here two weeks now and have yet to hear back from my family. I was told that they were informed of my whereabouts.” She waited for a response.

“I don't know anything about that.” Her voice had found some of its former authority.

“Well, I am telling you and whoever is watching this that I will not cooperate further until I hear from them.” No one responded, although she was convinced that she had been heard. “Well, I guess we have nothing more to discuss,” she said to her nameless guest. The woman quickly stood and walked as fast as her self-respect allowed and entered the airlock. Amanda watched through the glass as the woman stripped out of her suit, but only after storing the small computer tablet in a sealed container. They were taking her isolation seriously. She idly tried the door and once again found it locked. Obviously, someone had been watching to release the electronic lock and then re-engage it.

“Okay, now what do we do?” Paul Oxford asked his partner, Gage Moore. On loan from the Army Medical Corp, the pair were distinct from the Combined Services Medical Group that staffed the rest of the facility. They were both battle-tested medics with twenty years experience between them, and the best they could rate was monitor duty. It had taken them only hours to learn that they were in with some very fast company; even the laboratory technicians had more training and experience than either of them.

“You know what we have to do,” Gage, the senior NCO, answered, reaching for the phone.

“Hold on just a second.” Oxford grabbed the phone. “Why don't we keep this in-house? Colonel Bennett is here. I'd rather deal with him than that asshole Martin.”

“That asshole just showed up,” said a voice behind the two medics. They turned to find Martin, in his clean white lab coat, and their temporary commanding officer, Colonel William Bennett. “What's the problem?” Martin ignored the insult.

“She refuses to cooperate until she hears from her family,” Gage answered, while Oxford literally and figuratively kept his head low.

Bennett turned to Martin. “This is your call; you set this in motion.” It was a small violation in protocol for Bennett to be so forward in front of enlisted men, and if Martin had truly carried rank he would have excused the two medics.

“We continue as we have.”

“Just so I am clear, we continue to lie to her.” The last thing Bennett wanted was for this house of cards to fall on his head. The addition of Martin at the last minute had changed everything, and the executive order that put him in charge was enough for the colonel to consider retirement.

“Would you rather tell her the truth?”

Martin had meant the question to be rhetorical, but Bennett saw it as an opportunity. “Yes,” he said clearly, in front of two witnesses who would be unimpeachable.

“We would be knee-deep in lawyers and would lose this opportunity forever. I am following the letter of the law, and it is my decision, my responsibility.”

“None of her cultures have turned positive,” Bennett said, satisfied that Martin was now clearly and solely on the hook.

“It's only been two weeks, and we have only blood and fluid cultures.”

“So you still plan on moving on to an invasive investigation?”

“I don't see that we have a choice,” Martin said as he bent to exam the image on the monitor.

“Once again, just to be clear, you wish to perform invasive procedures on this patient to determine whether she is safe to be released, or to identify the source of her resistance, which exceeds your mandate?”

Martin's face reddened. “I am very tired of the military second-guessing every decision I make. It is not up to you or your superior officers to interpret my mandate,” Martin said sharply. He laid his briefcase on the table, opened it, and gave Bennett a series of photographs. “That, Colonel, is an unidentified virus that in four days killed over a thousand people. It could have been tens of thousands if the Hondurans hadn't evacuated. Exactly one individual survived that outbreak.” He pointed at the monitor. “We don't know what this thing is …” he began to tick off each point with his fingers, “where it came from, or how it got there. And most importantly, how to treat it if this thing suddenly pops up in Detroit.” He snatched back the grainy pictures of a six-sided wheel. “In case you haven't been paying attention, we are the only ones trying to answer those questions.”

“Then level with her. Tell her what you just told me. Let her family know that she is alive instead of lost in Honduras.”

“I never told them that she was lost in Honduras,” Martin said with a false sense of innocence. “Besides, we can't take the risk of losing her.”

“No US military personnel will assist you in violating this woman's civil rights.” Normally Bennett was in command of the Tellis Medical Facility, and while he still retained command of the troops working there, he had been ordered to place all his resources at the disposal of Dr. Nathan Martin and the Centers for Disease Control. “Not even the President of the United States can order them to ignore their duty.”

“It's an interesting legal point, but completely moot. I am not going to ask anyone to ignore their duty or violate this woman's civil rights.” Martin pulled from his jacket pocket a single sheet of paper and handed it to Bennett. “Tomorrow a small group of technicians and physicians will arrive and perform these tests. They should be here less than a week, so we won't inconvenience you too badly.” Martin turned back to the monitors as Bennett read the directive.

“What you are doing is immoral and unethical by all reasonable standards,” Bennett said. Appealing to Martin's morality was an exercise in futility, but it was all Bennett had left. Martin had the legal authority to “examine and treat” Amanda Flynn; he was not bound by reasonable standards, moral or ethical. A decision had been made far above Bennett's head that this woman posed an exigent risk, and Martin had been given the responsibility to quantify it, presumably by whatever means he felt prudent.

“I think it's time I met Amanda,” Martin said, leaving the room without further comment.

The isolation suit prevented Amanda from fully assessing the man who had just entered her cell. He was shorter than most of the soldiers who had attended her; dressed in the first business suit she had seen in months, he appeared to be someone of importance. “So someone is finally taking me seriously, and all it took was for me to hold my breath and turn blue.”

“That we could deal with, Amanda. I am Dr. Martin, one of the physicians looking after you.”

“Good. So let's start with why you are keeping me in this cell?”

“I promise to get you into a less restrictive environment once we know it's okay. So far everything looks encouraging.” He smiled and crossed his legs. “We have discussed your situation with some of the experts in the field of infectious disease and we are all in agreement that for now this is the best place for you.”

“Have you discussed this with my family?”

“I believe that they have been kept abreast of your condition.” He said confidently. “We need your full cooperation, Amanda. I don't need to tell you how bad this could have been had this contagion showed up in Miami, as opposed to Tela, Honduras. And I'm sure that you understand that we need to know everything that happened down there, as well as everything there is to know about you, so that we can determine how you survived.”

“I understand that. I also understand that you haven't answered my question.” Amanda stared into Martin's eyes and realized that she didn't like what was beneath them. He was more of a politician than a physician.

“Part of the difficulty we have with outside communication centers around our location.” He paused. “This is a military base that, shall we say, has no real address. Bringing unauthorized individuals here would violate about a half-dozen laws that would probably land a lot of people in jail.”

“All right, what about a phone call or the internet?”

“My hands are tied. Once here, no one has communication in or out of this base. It is the only way we can maintain the security that is required for these types of situations.” He gave her a pained smile. “Believe me, I want to leave here every bit as much as you.”

She waited a long minute staring at his shoes and then looked up at him. For a moment he held her stare, but then quickly stood to cover the effect she was having on him. “All right,” she finally said, “for now.” Martin's suit made an irritating crinkle sound as he took a half step towards the airlock. “No more for today. I will take your silly tests, and answer your inane questions again tomorrow, but not today.”

“That sounds fair. With the way that we've been pounding away at you, I can see that you need a break.” He smiled again and then tried to open the airlock, but for a second it remained closed. She heard a very soft click and he was gone a moment later.

He was lying about something. She didn't know how she knew, only that she was certain that he was hiding something. She hadn't sensed any real dishonesty from any of the other twenty or thirty people who had visited her cell in the last two weeks—only disinterest. She heard the other end of the airlock cycle and after a few seconds knew that he was watching her. She imagined him standing just in front of the one-way glass studying her, his white lab jacket draped over a sink in the corner, and another man, a tall man just in front of it staring at her as well, a disapproving look on his face. She walked to the mirror, picked a spot, and then tapped her finger where she imagined his nose to be.
I see you,
she thought.

“You lie well,” Bennett greeted Martin at the airlock. “Just the right mixture of truth, deflection, and small lies, and poof! The truth disappears. For a moment I actually believed that you had an interest in her welfare.”

“I'm not a monster, Bennett. I don't want to hurt that woman.” He watched as she turned to face the mirror. She had an odd and intriguing expression, as if she knew a secret. She walked directly in front of him and then tapped the glass less than an inch from his nose. He took a step back and a smile slowly crossed her face. His mind was split between Amanda's strange behavior and the irritating Colonel Bennett.

“But you don't want to treat her like a real person either,” Bennett countered.

“I don't want to have this discussion. I appreciate that you have limited your focus to this one individual, and as a physician that is your responsibility. My responsibility extends well beyond her welfare.” Martin walked up the metal stairwell, trying to come up with another way of holding Amanda that didn't involve the military.

“Unless you can give me a reason that this patient needs to remain in a restricted reverse laminar flow room, I can't authorize the expense,” General Dixon said over the phone. “I have reviewed her four- and six-week culture results and they remain negative. Aside from the humanitarian aspects of keeping an individual in the same room for 46 days, you have spent eleven million dollars, a third of it directly related to isolation.”

Martin wanted to bang his head against the wall. It seemed that at every turn he had a military officer questioning his approach, and now they were pulling the plug on his financing, his one true Achilles' heel. His executive order gave him control of the patient, but the funding flowed through a military spigot. He could fight this, but in the end he knew that he would lose. “I understand your position, General. I think it is reasonable to move her to a ward. I do not think that it would be prudent to move her offsite, as we are still waiting for more results.”

“Hmph,” the general responded. Martin knew that the general had played his best card, but also that he was stuck with this situation until Martin gave permission to release her. “Of course, once she has been transferred to a less restrictive environment we will look to your people to take over.”

It had been a month since Martin had last visited Tellis, and after his small group of technicians and physicians had finished their various biopsies of Amanda Flynn, Martin had become completely reliant upon military personnel to direct her care. “I don't understand, General?”

“Read the charter, Doctor. We are responsible for acute care alone, not custodial care. Tellis will remain at your disposal, but with only minimal personnel. The labs, housekeeping, kitchens, those sorts of things. The medical personnel will need to be supplied independently.”

Martin pounded his desk, making his secretary jump at her desk. “Cut that out,” she screamed at Martin.

The general had tricked him. Interest in this virus, now called EDH 1, had fallen exponentially with the passage of time and with no further outbreaks. Tela, Honduras, and Amanda Flynn were becoming old news in the circles that made decisions. For six weeks they had given him everything that he had asked for, and there was precious little to show for it. He could guarantee that no one would authorize another eleven million dollars chasing down an outbreak that was starting to look to the uninitiated as a one-trick-pony, and it was the uninitiated that were paying the bills.

Although
, he thought
, my own people would make things considerably easier.
The funding of the CDC was always tight, but they did have discretionary and emergency funds. A couple-million-dollar expenditure on a potentially infectious patient could be justified with a little work. And as a bonus, Amanda was falling off of the radar; fewer people were inquiring about her. “Of course, General. I believe we can have everything in place in a couple of days.”

“Another option is to simply release her.”

Martin was always shocked by the short-sighted nature of the military mind. “Just a little longer, General.” His voice was almost smiling.

“That's the response I was told to expect. Bye, Doctor.” Abruptly, the line went dead.