When they got to the communal well a hundred meters down the road from the hospital, Salim hung his pail on the hook under the pump and went to work slowly raising the handle, then slowly pushing back down. He watched the stream of cool water fall into the pail. Anything to keep his mind off the horrifically dying and their blood-red, lifeless, zombie eyes.
“Jalal, I can’t keep doing this.”
Jalal looked down the road and squinted, as though he might be able to divine some information from the cane field, far down where the road curved. “They won’t keep us here much longer, I think.”
“Why do you say that?” asked Salim, wiping sweat from his brow.
“They don’t want us to catch what is killing these people.”
“What if we already have it?” It was the first time Salim had that thought, and it frightened him.
“If we were in danger of contracting the disease, we wouldn’t be here.” Jalal nodded up and down the road. “Look how many of us are in the village. Why would they bring us in and train us, just to catch a disease and die while we’re trying to create a cover before going back to the states?”
Salim stopped pumping and looked around at what he could see of the village. “How many of us do you think are here?”
“I’d say a hundred,” replied Jalal.
“A hundred? Do you really think that many?”
“I don’t know. There are a lot of us.”
Salim pulled his pail down and Jalal hung his on the hook, taking his place at the pump.
Jalal, it turned out, had a talent for appearing to be working hard on the pump while delivering almost no water to the bucket. Salim silently thanked him for his theatrics and took the time to rest and let his mind drift off to oblivion. He didn’t want to think about anything. He didn’t want to see or smell or touch anything else. He just wanted to leave.
A Land Rover—one of the two dusty new ones that had been parked by the hospital—came speeding up the dirt road.
Salim observed, “Either that was quick, or we’ve been out here a long time.”
“Who cares?” Jalal took his pail off the hook, and the two started their slow walk back toward the hospital building.
The driver of the Land Rover got out, hurrying with weapon in hand into the hospital.
When Salim and Jalal had crossed half the distance to the steps, the HAZMAT guy with the AK-47 came out with the tidy kid’s attendant. They stopped on the porch and started talking.
Jalal hesitated. “Slow down. Let them talk.”
Salim pointed to the old hospital building off to the left of the new one. “Let’s do that one next.”
Jalal answered by altering his course a little to the left. However, when they were within a car’s length of the new hospital’s front porch, one of the men on the porch commanded, “You, there.”
Jalal stopped in his tracks. Salim turned and saw the HAZMAT men looking at them. One was pointing at him—it was the one who had heard Austin say the name, Sam.
Chapter 48
The pointing finger skewered Salim’s guilty, apostate thoughts, bleeding out their despair. He knew he was caught, and though exposure was tantamount to death, the shame of being caught was wholly consuming. With eyes unable to look at his accuser, he shuffled through the road dust toward the porch stairs with Jalal on his heels.
Salim knew the tidy Arab boy’s yellow clad attendant had ratted him out. Nothing had been said at that moment, but at the time there was no man nearby with a gun. But now there he stood on the porch, beside that plastic-covered rooster of a strutting, barking little man.
Salim twitched his face into a tired, innocent guise and went to work on his lie—the white American kid was delirious. It was that simple.
Salim repeated the lie in his head. No! He’d start with ignorance. The incident was so insignificant that it was hardly worth remembering. Who gave a care about the dying utterances of a delirious boy? What did the boy even say? Salim hadn’t even understood him.
Oh, the power of a well-spoken lie, from a face stretched in innocence, the essence of hope.
“Dump those water buckets,” said the rooster man, who gestured with a recently acquired AK-47.
Salim looked up and responded by emptying his water into the dirt. Jalal did the same.
The man with the weapon pointed toward the edge of town. “Down there, past that white-walled building, you’ll see a rusty tank raised on a metal framework. See if it contains diesel fuel. Let me know how much is inside. Go quickly.”
Salim bit his cheek, tasting the warm salt of his own blood. Anything to hide the unexpected joy that comes from sidestepping despair. A grin would have raised a question that he wouldn’t be able to answer. He turned on eager feet and took off at his fastest run.
Chapter 49
The nice thing about conference room D-3 was the window, which provided a view of open fields, tall loblolly pines, and sky. Because of the way the building curved back on itself—like an apostrophe with an extra leg—the mirrored glass walls of the cafeteria and another wing of the building were visible.
Rain falling from the overcast sky made Olivia Cooper think about the only thing she didn’t like about her job. The NSA’s Whitelaw building at Fort Gordon lacked windows. Or that’s to say, the windows were there, but they offered views into offices and conference rooms. From the cubes, situated mostly in the center of the building, they couldn’t be seen. Days passed—mostly in winter—when she was absorbed in a project, coming in early, having lunch at her desk, and even staying a little bit late, when she wouldn’t see the light of day. There was one stretch during the previous winter when she’d worked six consecutive days without seeing the sun. That particular week, they’d worked on Saturday as they had for many Saturdays over those months.
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?”