The Nightmare Scenario (4 page)

After a couple of minutes, she started her report in the monotone clinical voice typical of a coroner talking into his tape recorder: “Edema in the lungs, which are completely filled with blood. Asphyxiation from this is the likely cause of death and would also explain the cyanosis. There is also substantial hemorrhaging in the stomach. I don’t know what to make of it. Some form of pneumonitis maybe?”

“Dr. Summers,” said Aeolus, leaning over the table and looking intently at the screen, “can you have a look at some of the bodies with different symptoms?”

Rebecca walked to another hut and approached a body that had bled from various lesions. After a quick autopsy she reported:

“This one has no blood in the lungs, but general bleeding from the mucous membranes in several intestines. I cannot determine the cause of death at this stage.”

“Dr. Summers, your thoughts?” asked Aeolus.

“I don’t know. It could be something completely new, like SARS when it surfaced. Toxins maybe. We will have to do proper autopsies before I can give you an informed opinion. I’ll say this much, though: I don’t think these people died from bad water.”

“I am inclined to agree. A deceptive mistress of the Devil, this one,” said Aeolus. “Anyway, enough with this speculation,” he continued. “We need to bring back bodies. What is your capacity with regards to this?”

Rebecca spoke to a man off-camera and came back, saying, “Unless we bring in reinforcements, no more than five.”

“That should be enough. Try to get a sample with varied visual symptoms. And I want that nun!”

“Roger that.”

“Furthermore, we have to try to exclude all trivial possibilities. Find their water source and bring back a sample. Go through their waste. See what they have been eating and bring samples of that as well. Lastly, whatever this is, we need to have an idea of how it ended up there. Check the surrounding wildlife and domesticated animals. Did they keep any poultry or swine? Things like that. Bring specimens. You know the drill.”

“Sure. We’ll take it from here. Over and out.”

The screen went black. Aeolus interlaced his fingers again and placed his hands in his lap. No one wanted to be the first to speak.

“Hank,” said Aeolus, “I am going to ask the Indonesians to burn the village.”

“Why on earth would you want to do that?” Hank burst out. “Whatever that was is surely dead. Any animals carrying are already miles away. The only thing you’ll do is start a panic. And panic is the real danger here. There’s no reason to go all medieval on this place.”

“We’ll keep a lid on it. No communication about the findings until we have the results from the autopsies and have gone through all the materials. I have sympathy for your position, but this
is
a prudent precaution. I’m surprised you’re so vehemently against it.
I’ve never known you to be squeamish about bringing in the military.”

“Fine. Burn the damn village and everything around it. But I want the results from the site transported
here
for analysis by Dr. Summers. Not to Geneva. I want to take a closer look at this situation myself! And we are doing
nothing
else about this until we have Dr. Summers’s report.”

“Agreed,” said Aeolus, ending the meeting.

What followed was an activation of processes and protocols well known and drilled. The staffers rapidly collected their things and left the room. Walt informed the necessary UN representatives, who contacted the Indonesian government, who put their military into action. The junior staff started drafting preliminary reports under the supervision of the seniors, to be ready for distribution pending the outcome of Rebecca’s report.

After the others had left, Aeolus sat still for a long while; so long and so still that the motion-activated lighting went off. He sighed in the darkness. This could be it. This could be the moment he had trained for his entire life; his years at Harvard Med School; his five years in the field in Africa; his consecutive PhDs in Virology and Epidemiology. It all came down to this.

Maybe it was nothing. Maybe it was just bad luck. Something like a mutated bird flu strain that made one jump to a human, killed a small village and then died out, not to be seen again for decades.

Or, she was finally here. He shuddered at the thought and thanked God that they had dodged it this
time. But deep inside, he felt that she had come, and that she would show herself again – soon. And although he despised himself deeply for it, he could not deny that this was something he had hoped for somewhere in the darkest corners of his soul – a chance to redeem himself, a chance to fulfill his purpose.

JULY 10
^TH
, 10 PM, JAKARTA AIRPORT, INDONESIA

A
fter having passed through security and check-in, Rebecca found herself strolling through the corridors of the Jakarta airport. The security officers had, as usual, threatened to withhold some of her equipment as illegal to export without permit in their hunt for a bribe. Usually, things like these were a real hassle, but after quick call to Walt in Geneva, it had been over in ten minutes. She had no idea how he did it, whom he called, or what he said, but clearly he had more pull in Jakarta than the corrupt underpaid guards at the security gate.

The airport had been completely refurbished since the last time she was here. Gone were the green linoleum carpets that had come loose, curling up at the side. Instead, the floor was now solid, polished granite. The small shops selling trinkets had been transformed into upscale stores for local handicraft and major Western brands. It even smelled fresh – no longer like a
football team locker room. What did remain the same, however, were the dumplings in the first-class lounge. They were still as dry as the Mohave Desert. They must have been at least a day old.

She left the lounge in search of a drink; something stronger than the watery beer in the lounge. It was a Muslim country, so alcohol was generally in short supply, but there had once been a bar somewhere, she was sure of it. After having walked up and down the corridor in the departure hall twice without finding one, she gave up and settled for a ‘skinny extra shot iced vanilla latte’ at Starbucks.

She pulled the most recent issue of
Nature
from her bag and started leafing through it casually, without any real interest. Her mind was drifting between the horrific images of victims she had seen eight hours ago and thoughts about what could have caused this to happen.

As she took a sip of her coffee, she heard a voice behind her.

“Twinkie?”

She recognized the voice instantly. It was the voice of Roger Burton.

She froze and rapidly scanned her surroundings for a reflective surface, a metal cup, a window, any surface where she could check how she looked. She eventually gave up and turned around. She forced a smile and brushed a lock of brown hair from her eyes.

He looked just as she remembered him. His hair had lost a bit of its dark-brown color and there was that George Clooney-like salt-and-pepper thing going on with his stubble, which covered his slightly too-rosy
cheeks. But he still wore the same second-hand tweed jackets with patched elbows and too long arms. If anything, his slouchy posture had an even more pronounced supercilious air to it than before.

“Roger? What are you doing here?”

“I’m good, thank you,” said Roger in a slightly annoyed tone, “and how are you, my dear?”

“Ah. Sorry. Yes, I’m fine, but what
are
you doing here?”

“I’m doing a documentary about the persecution of the Chinese in Indonesia during the 1998 Suharto uprising.”

“Sounds like a story right up your alley. I saw the one you made on the South African private army, what was it?”

“
Executive Outcomes
.”

“Yeah, that’s the one.”

“On late-night TV, I guess?”

“Yes, I’m afraid so.”

Although Rebecca had not made any particular effort to follow Roger’s career, she knew that he had fallen out of the good graces of the media establishment and the prestigious periodicals for which he used to write. Instead of
The Economist
and
The New York Review of Books
, he had been demoted to freelance documentary work for independent production companies, typically of the sensationalist kind. His taste for going after stories no one else would touch, sometimes with shaky sources, had just proven too much for the mainstream editors.

“By God, Twinkie, you look great. You haven’t aged a day. What’s it been, five years?”

“Yeah, something like that.”

“And what are you doing here? I hear you’re at the CDC now? Do I smell a story? An outbreak? A cover-up?” Roger asked with a jesting wink.

“Yeah, you wish.” answered Rebecca, “I’m just doing some basic boring data gathering for a WHO study on prions. Prions, like in the mad cow stuff, you know. It’s nothing exciting really. How’s…Mary, was it?”

“Yeah, not too great. We got divorced a two years ago. She couldn’t stand the smearing I received from her friends in the intelligentsia.”

Rebecca’s heart skipped a beat as a mixture of hope and disappointment washed over her. Why hadn’t he told her? Why hadn’t she made an effort to find out?

Her smile became slightly less forced, warmer, more relaxed. She extended her arm, gesturing for him to take a seat across the table.

They started talking. At first quite strained, the conversation gradually loosened up and after an hour it was just as if they were back in their old dorm room. Their reunion ended abruptly, as the loudspeaker announced the last call for her flight in broken English.

It had been too short – far too short. They exchanged cards and agreed to meet up again.

As she walked to the plane, Rebecca’s mind was no longer with the villagers. Instead she was reveling in warm memories of Roger. She was cursing herself for her decision, grounded in the pride and ambition of youth, to leave him for that internship in Albuquerque. She was reminding herself of that dreadful feeling of discovering his marriage upon her return. She was
blaming herself for not recognizing what a rare gift a real connection to another human is. She was recalling, vividly, all failed relationships since, and how poorly other men had measured up to Roger. She was realizing, just now, how much she had really missed him. She was deeply regretting her biggest mistake.

As she boarded her plane, she thought that George Bernard Shaw had indeed been right. “It is a sad irony of life, that youth is wasted on the young.”

JULY 14
^TH
, 10 AM, CDC HEADQUARTERS, ATLANTA, GEORGIA

R
ebecca straightened her pencil skirt before entering Hank’s office. She felt exhausted, having slept very little the last three days, and she knew it showed. Hank had already opened the videoconference and the large flat-screen display on the wall showed the WHO Strategy and Health Operations Centre at the other end. The SHOC was filled with the usual mix of junior and senior staffers. Walt sat at the center of the table, looking slightly out of place as always.

Aeolus stood at the end of the table. He was a striking figure, not attractive, but striking in an imposing way. He was tall with blond hair and icy blue eyes, hinting at his Scandinavian heritage on his mother’s side. He was, as always, impeccably dressed in a well-tailored suit, which Rebecca could only assume was from Savile Row. He dressed in a way very few men did these days: wearing a pair of red suspenders, a navy-blue grenadine tie and a pocket square. The fact that he leaned gently on
his cane did not make him look weak. Rather, the cane further accentuated dominating presence. Rebecca had never figured out if he really needed it – and if so why – or if it was just an artifact he used to project power.

She looked over at Hank, whose appearance could not have been more different. He was relatively short and sturdily built. He was fat, but not in the flabby way of people who subsist on way too many double-chili cheeseburgers washed down with milkshakes. His stomach was large but dense, almost like a pregnant woman’s, the telltale sign of beer consumption above healthy levels. He had gray hair, weathered skin and looked a great many years older than fifty. He was a man worn down by stress and the burden of responsibility.

The other notable difference on her side of the conference was that there were fewer people. Besides Hank and Rebecca, there was only the lead pathologist and the junior staffer who had been responsible for the non-pathological parts of the investigation. There was no one else present. Hank, being a military man, was paranoid about confidentiality. The last thing he wanted was a leak from his organization. Also, it was part of his management style to keep the power that stems from the advantage of information to himself.

The speaker came to life with Aeolus’s voice on the other end: “So, shall we get this show on the road?”

Rebecca cleared her throat. She realized she was nervous, much more so than usual. It was understandable. She was presenting on a potential global killer to the world’s two most influential men in her field. She wiped her sweating palms on the back of her skirt
and bit the inside of her cheeks in an attempt to get more saliva into her too-dry mouth. She realized she should probably have taken beta-blockers, known by all doctors as the surefire way of curing nervousness. The thought hadn’t even entered her mind. It had been a very long time since she had felt apprehensive about giving a presentation.

“I am afraid to say,” she began, clearing her throat one more time, “that the results of the autopsies are as inconclusive as the on-site investigations. Symptoms are varied and there are multiple causes of death. Also, despite a very thorough scan of most organs, we haven’t been able to find any viruses or bacteria. The decay of the bodies and the following collapse of the cellular structure were just too far progressed.”

She flicked on a presentation. A slide showing a sliced-open lung was projected on the wall.

“Case One had blood-filled lungs similar to the first autopsy conducted in the field, and there was a gathering of fluid in the pleural cavity. The following tissue sample, from the superior lobe,” she said while clicking to the next slide, “is filled with a grayish-brown liquid. Also, if you examine this picture of the bronchi, they are noticeably red. Although not conclusive, we believe that this is a case of pneumonitis. This is also the cause of death of the nun, for whom the observations are similar.”