Ebola K: A Terrorism Thriller (20 page)

Olivia was excited about the challenge of the
new project and the added—though unofficial—responsibility. Her
thoughts drifted as the day dragged on. Long hours had a
cumulatively deleterious effect on her focus. She needed to jog
some long miles. She needed a few good, full nights of sleep. She
needed another cup of coffee, and she needed to stop staring out
the window at the clouds. Barry was talking to Christine about
phone records, and the mention of the name Almasi brought Olivia’s
thoughts back into the room.

Almasi. Najid Almasi.

The credit card numbers had been tied to an
account linked to him. Katherine, the CIA liaison, had nearly
sloughed off her mannequin façade and turned into a real, live,
excited person when Kevin Sylvan announced the name across the
conference room. That was the moment when Olivia’s doubts about
having wasted the time of overqualified people on a data
association game disappeared.

Something real was happening. Something the
data would help them sniff out.

Olivia looked at her watch. Eric would be in
at any moment. He had a meeting in another wing of the building
that had wrapped up ten minutes prior. Before going to the meeting,
he promised he’d be right back—Eric was chronically punctual.
Minutes later, the conference room door swung open and Eric
entered.

He glanced around the room. “Looks like
everybody just opened a Christmas present. Olivia, what’d I
miss?”

All eyes turned to Olivia.

She drew a quick, calming breath and said,
“The accounts have all been tied to Najid Almasi.”

Eric was surprised into silence. He looked
around the room at confirming nods. “All right,” he said, settling
back into the seat he’d occupied on and off since the project had
taken over conference room D-3. He smiled slyly.

As Olivia started to say something, she
couldn’t help but notice Barry and Christine—the two who’d been
talking about Almasi just a moment before—were squirming in their
chairs. To Barry, Olivia said, “You guys came up with something new
just before Eric got here?”

“Yes,” Barry nodded, then looked over at
Christine. “It’s good, but it’ll be more significant to talk about
after you cover the account information.”

Olivia motioned toward the screen, “Kevin,
would you mind going over the account data for Eric?”

“Sure,” he answered, as he stood up and
commandeered the cord to the projector. Looking at Eric, he
expounded, “I put together a flow chart.” Adept with the projector,
Kevin got it plugged in quickly, hit a few keys, and seconds later
the pull-down screen glowed with a six-foot image of his computer’s
LCD. “We’ll go through this from a bird’s-eye view and drill down
as necessary into the details.”

Kevin stood up and walked over to the wall.
It was covered in glowing boxes and triangles connected by labeled
lines. He spent ten minutes going through the steps, following the
money from the transaction back to an account held by Najid
Almasi’s father at a Swiss brokerage—an account controlled by
Najid. Kevin talked for a moment about how the data had been
acquired—at least where that extra information was available—as
well as how confident he was with each step in the process. His
bet, he explained, was placed on the money coming from Najid
Almasi.

“How confident are you?” Eric asked.

Still standing in front of the room with the
contents of his computer screen glowing behind him, Eric simply
said, “Ninety-eight percent.”

“That solid?” Eric was not surprised.

“Yes,” Kevin confirmed.

Eric looked around the room. No one voiced
disagreement. He stopped on Olivia. “This is your baby. What do you
think?”

“I agree with Kevin,” she said.

“And you’ve been over all the data in
detail?” Eric asked.

“In detail. As did Barry and Christine.”
Olivia tried her best to keep a clinical air about her. Outward
excitement over the importance of the account data would undermine
her credibility with Eric. It would make him want to look at the
data himself.

Eric leaned back in his chair, clasping his
hands behind his head. “Good. Very good. I think we can say for
certain something is up. Katherine, please notify your boys at the
CIA.”

“I have,” she answered. “Preliminarily. I’ll
let them know you concur.”

“Let’s see if we can figure out what we’ve
got here.” Eric looked to his right. “Barry—” He stopped and looked
back at Olivia.

Olivia was surprised that he was deferring to
her. He was trusting her to run the investigation. She swelled with
pride as she turned to Barry. “Please tell us what you and
Christine came up with.”

Barry smiled at Olivia, also deferring, which
didn’t surprise her. Left to his own devices, Barry Middleton might
turn into a brilliant troll living under a bridge, but with someone
to lead him who appreciated his talents, Barry was a loyal team
player.

He leaned over the table. “This is going to
be
really
exciting.” All of his pent-up, squirmy excitement
was coming through his voice. He took a deep breath and sat back,
then looked over to his right. “Christine found it. I’ll let her go
through the details.”

Barry motioned for Kevin to pass the
projector connection cable across the table to him. He plugged it
into his own computer.

Christine looked away and flushed. She
clearly didn’t want to be in the spotlight. She cleared her throat,
sat up straight in front of her laptop, and pointed at the image of
Barry’s computer monitor, projecting only blue on the screen.
“Barry will have something for us to look at in a second. Without
going into the technical details, I was able to collect data that
ties a couple of satellite phones to Najid Almasi.”

Eric sat up and smiled. “I already like where
this is going.”

“One of the phones hasn’t been used in days,”
Christine said, “but one has been steadily calling numbers all over
Europe and the Middle East for the past forty-eight hours.”

“Who is he calling?” Eric asked.

“This is better,” Barry interrupted.

The computer screen projected on the wall
flashed from solid blue to the image of a map.

Christine proceeded, “I’ve been focusing on
the origin of the calls rather than gathering information about
who’s on the other end.” She pointed at the projected map, and all
eyes in the dimly lit room turned to the screen.

Olivia couldn’t believe what she was
seeing.

Christine continued, “This is a map of
eastern Uganda. You know the departure city of each of the airline
tickets we’re tracking put all of the men in Nairobi. This part of
Uganda isn’t maybe but a six- or eight-hour drive from there. We
think Najid Almasi is in or near a little town in Uganda.” She
stood up and walked over to the map, pointed to a cluster of short
roads at the intersection of two others, north of a big
green-colored park area. “Kapchorwa.”

Olivia gasped.

Najid turned away from watching the two young
men run. “Seven doctors were coming this way up the road. They are
dead now.”

Dr. Kassis nodded.

“More doctors will come with soldiers—or
without—but there will be more soldiers eventually. We cannot hold
out against the Ugandan army if they come in force. We didn’t come
here prepared for that kind of confrontation.”

“So we leave,” replied the doctor.

“Yes, we leave. However, we need more time.
We need to get these men on their planes before the world
understands what evil face this Ebola virus has exposed here. Once
they understand that evil—the way that we understand it—we will be
out of time.” Najid looked down the road at his two runners nearing
the place where the diesel tank stood.

“But what do you hope to gain by burning the
village?”

Najid turned and looked at Dr. Kassis, unable
to read anything unspoken. The Tyvek, the mask, and goggles hid his
face. The goggles pulled at the skin on the doctor’s face and
contorted the subtle movement of muscles around his eyes, and the
mask fogged and dripped inside with condensed sweat. Looking at
Kassis wasn’t much more effective than looking at a telephone for
unspoken inflections during a conversation.

Najid took a breath. “I am not an evil
man.”

“Of course not,” Dr. Kassis instantly
offered.

“It was never my wish to kill any of these
people, certainly not these villagers. They have done nothing,
aside from being unlucky enough to be here when airborne Ebola
arose.” Najid thought for a moment about how to put his thoughts
into words. “Perhaps one day if the West prevails, they will work
their way back through events and figure out what happened here. If
they do, their history writers will paint Najid Almasi in colors
more evil than Adolf Hitler. My family’s name will become an
epithet of evil in the next century.”

Najid drew a deep breath to cover the pain he
felt at that possibility. Such a thought would be enough to break
his father’s heart. “But if we prevail, this Kapchorwan incident
will be seen as it is, a necessary tragedy. These people, like the
soldiers in ten thousand armies since men first picked up swords
and swung them at their enemies, unwittingly and unwillingly pay
for the victories of their generals and kings.”

Najid looked in Dr. Kassis’s eyes and did his
best to convey the gravity he saw in his decision. “I understand
what I do, and why. It is not evil that drives me, but necessity. I
wish to keep this strain of Ebola and knowledge of it hidden in
this village for as long as I can.”

Dr. Kassis said, “Most Africans are
uneducated folk.”

“I am aware of this.” Najid didn’t like being
schooled, and he let his tone communicate his displeasure.

“You asked for my honesty.”

Najid inhaled and tamped his anger. That was
an emotion that never led to anything good. “Continue.”

“Many of these people do not trust modern
medicine. They do not trust doctors or hospitals. You might have
seen in your research that in the first two outbreaks of Ebola in
1976—north and west of here in what was Sudan and Zaire at the
time—the epicenter of one outbreak was the hospital, and the
epicenter
became
the hospital when a few sick Sudanese
infected the staff, who in turn infected the other patients.”

Najid turned and looked at the hospital
doors. “Are you saying that this hospital is the epicenter of this
strain of Ebola?”

“I think the whole town of Kapchorwa is, but
that is not my point. People talk. Stories spread. The story of
fifty villages being devastated by this horrible disease—with
Belgian nuns at a hospital being at the source—is a story too
wicked not to pass along. I don’t doubt that everyone on the
continent has heard it. I have little doubt that if these villagers
tell scary stories to frighten their children at bedtime, that has
got to be one of them.”

Najid asked, “What is the point of your
story?”

“How many villagers have your men found in
their homes?” asked Kassis.

“Many.”

“How many more do you think fled the village
when they realized what was going on, taking the virus with them?
How many do you think ran when we showed up in our yellow suits
with guns?”

“Too many,” replied Najid.

“My point is that this strain of the virus
has traveled outside this village already and is slowly spreading
across the country on the feet of frightened peasants.”

“I can only hope that the runners are only
recently infected, not symptomatic. Some things are beyond my
control. I must accept that,” said Najid. “It may be a week or two
before those turn.”

Kassis paused before speaking. “That is an
overly optimistic guess.”

“That doesn’t matter. We are already
committed to this course of action. We’ll control what we can, and
leave the rest to Allah to decide. That will buy us time. Burning
the village will not prevent the medical community from figuring
out that this strain is airborne, but it will
delay
them
finding out. The villagers in the jungle and the men blocking the
road will delay them finding out. They will protect that road until
they can’t. Then they will fade into the forest and shoot any
medical personnel they see in the village. All of these things only
buy us hours or days. But hours and days are all we need.” In
Najid’s mind, it all made perfect sense.

“But the brutality of burning these people
alive!”

“It is a mercy. They’ll suffer less in a fire
than of the disease. Do you disagree with that?”

“The length of their suffering will be
shorter. I can’t say that it will be less.”

Everyone in the conference room was staring
at Olivia. Olivia was staring at the map. It looked just like the
map she’d seen days earlier on Dr. Wheeler’s computer.

Eric asked, “Olivia?”

Olivia’s heart was racing as she thought of
Austin. Could he really be in that tiny Ugandan town with a
terrorist? Austin’s was probably the only white American face in
that town—a town too small for it to go unnoticed. And if he was
there in the presence of an Arab, who was executing an operation to
terrorize someone or to blow up something, Austin was in the
gravest of dangers.

“Olivia?” Eric asked again.

She slowly turned, blinking unexpected tears
back into her eyes. She opened her mouth but her voice cracked and
gave her away. “My…my brother is there in…in Kapchorwa.”

A few jaws dropped. That took them all by as
much surprise as it had taken Olivia.

Eric recovered the quickest. “Your brother is
in Kapchorwa, Uganda? Right now?”

Olivia nodded.

Eric’s confusion showed on his face. He hated
coincidences, and everyone knew it. But they also knew they came
across them all the time. With enough data and enough time, any two
random people or events could be tied together, kind of like that
Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game. “What’s he doing in
Kapchorwa?”