Bobby Adair - Ebola K

More laughs.

Thankfully, the rest of the lunch conversation centered around Joan’s teenagers and Eric’s toddlers.

After they finished eating, Joan and Robert walked together down a hallway that led to the IT sections of the building. Eric badged in at the elevator, and when they were inside, badged again to access the third floor where both he and Olivia worked.

“What’s that thing you were working on before lunch?” Eric asked, “How’s that going?”

“With Salim Pitafi?” Olivia answered.

“Is that his name? Pitafi? The one from Denver.”

“Yes. He was passed to us by Harvey Singleton’s group. For a few years now he’s been taking an interest in radical Muslim websites. When he bought a ticket to Pakistan, he fell into our lap.”

“You’ve been monitoring him?” Eric asked.

The elevator door opened and both Eric and Olivia stopped talking. Eric directed Olivia to one of the dozens of glass-walled conference rooms situated around the edges of the cubicle farm. Once inside, they pulled up chairs across from one another at a small table.

Olivia said, “Once he landed in Lahore, he disappeared. Not a trace of him came up anywhere for three months.”

“Training camp?” Eric asked.

Olivia wasn’t ready to make that call for certain so she went through her analysis. “No debit card usage that I could find. Not a single phone call. His phone is still active on his parent’s account, but it’s been dead. He has relatives in Multan—that’s where his family is from.”

“First generation?”

“He was born in Multan,” said Olivia. “His parents immigrated to the US when he was young. He was three or four at the time.”

“So he’s been here all his life?”

Olivia nodded. “For all practical purposes.”

“In the same place?”

“In Denver,” she answered.

Eric asked, “And he flew out of Lahore yesterday?”

“A little after noon, local time.”

“Destination?”

“Nairobi,” she said.

“Nairobi? So maybe he was visiting relatives in Multan, and decided to go see elephants and giraffes?” Eric guessed.

“You know that’s unlikely.”

“I’m playing devil’s advocate,” Eric said. “Tell me why I’m wrong.”

Olivia didn’t take offense. Questions were part of the analytical process. “If this was truly a social visit to Multan, then why the silence? He didn’t use his phone. He didn’t post any pictures to his Facebook account. He didn’t log into any computer under his name or an alias that we’re aware of.”

“And he would have posted something?” Eric asked.

“He was an active Facebook user until about three or four months before he flew to Lahore. He posted pictures of ski trips, hiking trips, whatever. He even posted pictures of him and his buddies at the Denver Zoo.”

“When?” Eric asked.

“Six months before leaving,” Olivia said. “He was skipping classes at the local community college.” She didn’t mention that the community college was just fifteen minutes from her dad’s house. That detail wasn’t important, and it wasn’t relevant. It was only disturbing because the jihadist had lived relatively close to her father.

“Maybe he just got tired of Facebook.”

“Safari tours in Kenya are expensive,” said Olivia. “His family here in the US doesn’t have any money. At least, not the kind of money to finance a globe-hopping tour for their son. In addition to Salim, they’ve got two other kids nearing college age. They’ve got too much credit card debt and payments on two fairly new cars. They live paycheck to paycheck.”

Eric sat back in his chair and thought for a moment. “So the kid spent a lot of time surfing jihadist websites prior to dropping out of sight for a visit to Pakistan three months ago. Now he’s traveling around South Central Asia and Africa with no apparent way to pay for it. And we don’t know why. Are the parents in communication with the kid at all?”

Shaking her head, Olivia said, “Not a peep since he left.”

“Okay. I’ll send it up the chain and see how they want to proceed.”

“What do you think will happen?” Olivia asked.

“I don’t know. They may send the FBI out to talk to the parents to see what’s up. They may put them under surveillance. Why don’t you keep working this and see what else comes out?”

Olivia said, “Something else already did.”

“What’s that?”

“Two other names popped up when I started looking before lunch. Both Pakistani-Americans, both took an interest in radical websites, both disappeared to Pakistan.”

“At the same time?” Eric was interested.

“One took off a month before. One took off a few weeks after.”

“Tell me about those two.”

Olivia said, “Both are en route to Nairobi or already there.”

“No shit.”

Olivia nodded. Her face was serious.

“Do we have any reason to believe these guys know each other?” Eric asked.

“None. They didn’t even take the same flights.”

“All right,” Eric paused for a moment. “Send me those names when you get back to your desk. I’m going to tell Barry Middleton to drop what he’s doing and lend you a hand.”

“I don’t know if I need help yet.”

“He has extensive experience with different types of data. Bring him up to speed. I want regular updates on this. I’m going to send the info upstairs.”

They were on the third floor of a three-story building. Olivia understood what upstairs meant. “You think there’s something going on?”

Eric nodded.

When Austin woke, he was lying on his side on a cot. Everything was still confusing, and thoughts were hard to string together through the fog and gaps in his brain. How long had he been out? Hours? A day or two? More?

One of the plastic buckets that he’d become so familiar with over the past days sat on the floor not ten inches from his head. It stank. The cot stank. The room stank.

On the other side of the bucket, on the floor, Margaux lay on her side facing him. Her face was slack, her eyes open—blood-red, not focused. They were doll’s eyes, horrible for their lifelessness. Her mouth dripped a brownish mucus—the remains of her last regurgitation. Except for the twitching of two fingers on the hand that lay by her face, she looked dead.

On Margaux’s other side, a young African woman was sprawled, with blackish red blood smeared on her face. A trickle of blood ran from her ear down to the floor where her head lay, well off her mat. One of her arms was resting across Margaux. The woman’s fingers were curled back over her palms, pulled closed by dead tendons. The woman’s chest didn’t rise, nor did it fall. There was no breath in her. Only the flies on her skin were alive, animated in hunger for her remains.

The absence of Benoit on a mat at Margaux’s side put a clear and certain thought into Austin’s mind. Benoit was dead. That meant his body was piled by the waste pit behind the hospital, waiting for somebody with enough commitment and energy to burn it.

A tear rolled out of Austin’s eye and tracked across the bridge of his nose, down the slope on the other side and across his cheek. The pain of Benoit’s death, mixed with all the other agony trapped in the confines of his skin, seemed too much to bear. And in moments of clarity, Austin knew the pain that lived behind the sallow, dejected eyes of all those third-world children on all those television commercials that begged for his latte money when he was back in Denver. With the pain branded so deeply on his own soul, he’d never look at those eyes again and keep his tears to himself.

In the next moment of lucidity, he recalled the prognosis of his predicament. Benoit was dead. Margaux was dying. Austin would soon see them on the other side and never again have to look at diseased children with big eyes and distended bellies.