Ebola K: A Terrorism Thriller Page 5

  So when the Ebola outbreak came up in the news that summer, Paul was aware and felt a little remiss. The disease had been spreading from Sierra Leone to Guinea and Liberia—West African countries—for months before enough people had died to make it newsworthy. By then, it was the largest Ebola outbreak on record.

  The kicker was that Austin, Paul’s son, was already in Uganda for the summer.

  Paul had been passively fretting over the stories out of Africa for weeks, thinking about his son near some little town named Mbale, close to the Kenyan border. Paul searched his usual news websites for information. He surfed sites he’d never heard of, groping for headlines. He researched the disease on Wikipedia to fill the gaps in his media-based knowledge of the disease. Through the process, his worry grew.

  He checked a map program for the distance between Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, and Kampala, the capital of Uganda. He sat back in his chair, astounded. A little relieved, but astounded.

  The distance from Los Angeles to New York in a country with arguably the best transportation infrastructure in the world was just under twenty-eight hundred miles. The distance from Monrovia to Kampala was over four thousand. He had never realized the tremendous scale of Africa.

  How likely was it that anyone with the disease could get himself from Monrovia to Kampala, let alone Mbale, across thousands of miles of dirt roads—and a lot of them had to be dirt roads—or even by airplane? Paul decided that chance was small. Poor Africans weren’t as mobile as affluent Americans and Europeans. Ebola was more likely to leap to London or New York than it was to Uganda.

  And that gave Paul comfort. Austin was as safe from Ebola in Mbale as he was in Denver.

  It was after the networks reported the story of two Ebola-infected doctors being flown from West Africa to Atlanta that Paul’s concern ratcheted up again.

  Bringing Ebola to America on purpose. What the fuck kind of craziness was that?

  Paul put serious thought into driving down to the wholesale club and loading his truck with rice, beans, and peanut butter, or whatever the hell preppers stored in their basements. But he didn’t. Instead, he vented his concerns in an evening of ranting on various Internet forums.

  Now, Paul Cooper was sitting in his cubicle staring at a spreadsheet full of esoteric formulae when his phone chirped with an incoming text message. Heidi, with her own fears growing, told him that a traveler returning from West Africa had been hospitalized in New York and was being tested for Ebola.

  “Shit.”

  Someone in the next cubicle said, “Huh?”

  Paul didn’t respond. He was thinking about what would happen if the Ebola virus got a foothold in America.

  He’d read enough about Ebola to know it spread through the transfer of bodily fluids or maybe just by skin touching skin. That was a big maybe to bet one’s life on. He also read enough to know that the idiosyncrasies of many African cultures left them susceptible to the disease, as it wasn’t uncommon for them to use their bare hands when tending to their sick or handling the dead.

  He’d also seen a graph emailed to him by his daughter that showed the growth in the number of Ebola cases and the number of deaths. To Paul, it looked like an exponential curve. That curve made him afraid the West African outbreak might be due to an airborne strain of the virus. That, of course, flew in the face of what every single doctor or medical body said. Still, he had his fear, and fears aren’t always rational.

  One thing he did know, fear or not, was that an airborne strain of Ebola would devastate the world.

  So with that fear in mind, he returned to one important question: what the hell do Doomsday Preppers keep in their basements, and how much of it would he need?

  He’d seen magazine ads for post-apocalyptic meal kits, a kind of civilian version of MREs. They were really expensive, and would probably be impossible to get with Ebola epidemics in the news. Paul was sure every prepper in the country was topping off their own supplies.

  But the problem wasn’t that hard to figure out. People with a lot less education had been feeding themselves for millennia before Paul was born. The question became for how long would he need to prepare? A month? A year?

  Would that really be necessary?

  Paul closed the spreadsheets he’d been working on and opened up a browser. He knew that in a pinch, he could get by on fifteen hundred calories a day. Twenty-five hundred would be better, but a few months on rations wouldn’t be a bad way to lose those extra pounds that had accumulated around his waist over the decades. He searched for the number of calories in a pound of pinto beans, a pound of rice, and a pound of cooking oil.

  A quick calculation told him that a fifty-pound bag of rice would be enough to keep him and Heidi on subsistence rations for three weeks. Not yummy—not by any means—but a fifty-pound bag of rice was cheap insurance. Throw in a fifty-pound bag of beans and maybe a five-gallon jug of cooking oil, add that to what was in the pantry on any given day, and he and Heidi would be good for three months on less than a hundred dollars. He’d dump the food in the back of the basement and it would keep forever—at least forever enough.

  Extrapolating from there, four or five hundred dollars might be enough to keep them in boring food for a year. That left the problem of what to do about water. But those were thoughts for another day. One step at a time.

  Paul got up from his desk. It was three o’clock. To hell with it. He crossed the aisle and leaned into his coworker’s cubicle. “Hey, I’m heading out early.”

  “Okay.”

  Paul stepped back into his cubicle and packed up his laptop. Five minutes later, he was in his truck. Ten minutes after that, he was driving into a Costco parking lot, feeling frightened, self conscious, and silly all at the same time. But as silly as the whole exercise felt, he kept telling himself that a hundred bucks was a small price to pay to take the worry off his mind.

  Chapter 15

  A guy checked his membership card and rolled an enormous basket in front of him, wide enough to sit a few adults snuggly inside. Paul accepted the basket and pushed it down a long corridor of boxes stacked twice as tall as him, each with a ten-square-foot full-color picture of the flat panel television inside.

  As Paul looked at the warehouse shelves, stacked forty feet high in rows past the flat panel gauntlet, he realized there was probably enough food in the building to keep him alive for the rest of his life. At the same time, he wondered—when society faltered under the strain of a real epidemic—whether looters coming to steal food would first grab a giant high-definition television or if they’d pick up a case of baby food instead. And those that carted a television out in one of these enormous baskets, would they do it because they were too stupid to take the food, or because they were too optimistic to think they’d need it?

  Paul exited the flat panel cave and passed into a labyrinth of tables piled high with folded clothing. Once through that, he turned down the first of the food aisles looking for inexpensive calories. Instead, the aisle was full of snack crackers of every flavor imaginable, in boxes and plastic jugs each big enough to feed him and Heidi for a few days. But twenty dollars for two days’ worth of snack crackers was a high price compared to a fifty-pound bag of rice that could feed them for three weeks.

  Nevertheless, self-consciousness was setting in. He wanted the rice, beans, and oil, but he didn’t want to look like an Ebola-fearing prepper, even if that was exactly what he was. So a giant-sized box of granola bars found its way into the basket. They were expensive calories, but a granola bar every other day would add a little variety to a diet of rice and beans. It would also be a distracting snack food when the cashier scrutinized his purchase. His feeling of silliness was setting in, and he was pretty sure the cashier was going to ask him why he needed food in such bulk.

  He found the rice two aisles over. A fifty-pound bag of sugar made it into the basket—everything tastes good with sugar on it—along with a five-gallon jug of cooking oil. A double pack of large peanut butt
er jars joined all of that along with a gallon of honey, four pounds of salt, and a case of Cokes. No beans, though.

  He made several circuits of the store looking for the beans. There were none to be found.

  He picked up a jug of bleach, recalling from his Boy Scout days that a capful in some measure of water would render it drinkable. He didn’t know if boiling would become necessary, or even doable. The bleach would give he and Heidi access to water sources that might otherwise be unusable.

  Once in line at the cashier, his self-consciousness made him look around nervously, especially when he compared his load with the mixed greens, a bottle of wine, salmon, some fresh cut flowers, and a bag of apples being bought by the woman in front of him. She was planning on cooking a nice dinner and plying some guy with enough wine to make her wrinkles invisible so she could get him into bed.

  The cashier rang up the woman and sent her on her way.

  To Paul’s relief, when his turn arrived to check out, neither the cashier nor her helper commented on his obvious Doomsday Prepper hoard. A few minutes later, the hoard was stashed in the back of his truck and he was driving home, wondering how he was going to explain fifty-pound bags of dry goods to Heidi.

  Chapter 16

  Getting the four-wheel drive vehicles undetected over the Ugandan border from Kenya was as easy as it was in any other part of the Third World. Najid Almasi and his men hadn’t seen anything but shrubs, trees, animals, and farms since heading east across the road north of Kitale. They crossed the border far from any roads and far from any towns. No bribes needed to be paid.

  More importantly, no questions needed to be asked. No witnesses needed to be paid extra to hold their tongues about eight armed Arab men who’d crossed the border—once into Uganda and once back out—with a sick young man riding along.

  Having successfully crossed into Uganda on their way to Kapchorwa, they stopped their Land Rovers in the middle of the dirt road and they all got out.

  One of the men took several boxes out of the back of Najid’s Land Rover, opened them, and started passing out plastic-wrapped packets. Each of the eight men received one yellow Tyvek suit, a pair of elbow-length rubber gloves, goggles, a chemical protective hood, and a surgical mask. The men donned the gear. It was hot, suffocating equipment in the humid East African sun, but it was necessary, given the dangers ahead. They loaded back into the vehicles, and with air conditioners running at maximum, they drove the last few miles into Kapchorwa.

  Chapter 17

  They sat in a booth at the restaurant, because they always sat in a booth—usually the same booth. They ordered their usual pizza from their usual waiter, Nick. And as usual, Paul felt a pang of guilt because they spent too much money eating out. The evidence being that they had a usual booth, a usual pizza, and a usual waiter.

  Heidi started checking her Facebook page on her phone as soon as Nick left the drinks. She checked in at the pizza place, checked the newsfeed, and wrote a comment about something that made her laugh to herself.

  Paul swirled the ice in his glass with the straw and when the cubes had jingled against the glass enough times, he said, “You might think this is a little weird.”

  “What?” Heidi didn’t look up from her phone, which wasn’t unusual. She liked to tell herself that she was a multitasker, when in fact she was just good at lying to herself about ignoring people.

  Paul was used to it. “After that story on the news yesterday I went to Costco and bought some stuff.”

  “Uh-huh.” Heidi slid her finger down the screen, glanced up, smiled, and looked back down at her phone.

  “I bought a fifty-pound bag of rice, five gallons of cooking oil, and some other stuff.”

  Heidi scrolled again, read some more, stopped, then looked up. “You what?”

  “It’s probably nothing. I mean, I may be worried about nothing, but after that story in the news about that guy showing up in New York with Ebola, I got worried.”

  “You think Ebola is here?” she asked.

  “I honestly doubt it.”

  “What does this have to do with buying fifty pounds of rice at Costco?”

  Paul looked around to assure himself that no one was listening to the conversation. “I’m a little embarrassed about it.”

  Heidi put her phone down on the table. She was ready to give her full attention.

  Knowing that wouldn’t last long, Paul continued, “I kind of feel like a prepper.”

  “A prepper?”

  “You know. Like those Doomsday Preppers you see on TV.”

  She cringed. “You bought rice because you’re a Doomsday Prepper?”

  “No, not really. Maybe a little. Like I said, I got worried because of that Ebola thing in New York. If there’s an outbreak there, things could kind of go to shit pretty quickly in the rest of the country. I just figured if I spent a hundred bucks or so at Costco, we’d be safe. In theory, we’d have enough to eat for two or three months in case we couldn’t go out.”

  “Rice?” Heidi’s tone made it clear she was displeased. “Please don’t tell me it’s white rice.”

  “They only had white in bulk. I couldn’t find any brown.”

  “Bland, boring white rice.” Heidi’s face showed clear disappointment.

  She was missing the point. Paul said, “Yeah, I didn’t say we were going to like the food. Only that we’d have something to keep us alive, just in case.”

  Heidi leaned forward and put her elbows on the table, entirely serious. “You know this sounds a little nuts, right? I’m not saying you’re nuts, but you know, people might think that. Do you really think there’s a danger?”

  Paul leaned back and tried to look casual. “No, not really. I just worry about it, that’s all. I guess I figured a hundred bucks was a small price to pay to assuage my fears over this Ebola thing. We can stick it in the basement and not worry about it. If we need it, it’s there. If we don’t, we’re not going to miss a hundred bucks.”

  “This isn’t like you.”

  “I know,” Paul agreed. “I hate white rice too. But like I said, they didn’t have brown.”

  “No, not the rice. You’re always so…I don’t know. You don’t worry about stuff. That’s my job, isn’t it?”

  Paul shrugged. “This one concerns me a bit.”

  Uncharacteristically wordless, Heidi looked down at her iced tea.

  “I’m probably overreacting.” It seemed like the right thing to say, and maybe it was. Nonetheless, Paul couldn’t shake the feeling that maybe he hadn’t done enough. He was trying to find the happy balance between doing enough and feeling embarrassed for doing anything.

  Looking back up at him, Heidi asked, “Do you think we’ll see an epidemic here, like they’re having in West Africa?”

  “No.” Paul’s brow furrowed while he thought about that snap answer. “A lot of people are sick. A lot. A lot of people have died. More than in that SARS thing a few years ago.”

  “It’s been going on for three or four months, right?” Heidi asked. “That’s a while. So you’d think more people would catch it, right?”

  Paul nodded. Her point was valid. “I just don’t get how it spread to so many people in that short amount of time. It’s supposedly transferred through bodily fluids, but it seems like too many people are infected for it all to be explained by just that.”

  “I don’t understand. What are you getting at?” Heidi glanced down at her phone. Her newsfeed was calling.

  “I’m only speculating, but I wonder if there isn’t an airborne strain that’s spreading over there.”

  Heidi shook her head while she thought about it. “Taking the reverse argument, if it was airborne and it’s been around since March or April, wouldn’t a lot more people be infected?”

  It was Paul’s turn to sit back and ponder. “Yeah. I think you’re right. Just the same, we’ve got some food in the basement.”

  “You know what worries me?”

  “If your phone battery is going to l
ast through the day?” He smiled.

  Heidi kicked him under the table. “No. With Austin in Uganda, what happens if the epidemic spreads? Will the university bring him home early?”

  Looking at her across the table, Paul saw the worry growing on her face.

  “I know he’s not my son, but I feel like he is.”

  Paul grinned. “You’re getting maternal?”

  Heidi kicked again, but missed. “Don’t be a butt. You know how I feel about him.”

  “Yeah, sorry.” Going back to the previous question, Paul said, “I don’t know if the university will bring him home early or not. It honestly never crossed my mind.”

  “Do you want me to call tomorrow and find out?”

  Paul knew what that really meant was that Heidi was going to call tomorrow and was just letting him know. Still, things worked better if he played the game. “Yeah, that sounds like a good idea.”

  “Did he give you any contact information?”

  Paul shrugged. “No.”

  “Didn’t you ask?”

  “Of course.”

  “Do you know the name of the program he went there with?” Heidi asked.

  Paul shrugged again. “No.”

  “I thought you asked him for that.” There was exasperation in her voice.

  “I did ask. I don’t remember him emailing me the information.”

  “Did he send you his contact information in Africa?”

  “No.” It came out a lot more sheepishly than Paul intended. “I asked him to send it. He just didn’t.”

  “He didn’t send you anything? Did you ask again?”

  “Don’t nag.”

  Heidi huffed. “You have to nag him sometimes. You know how he is. This is about his safety in a third-world country halfway around the world. Doesn’t it bother you? Aren’t you worried?”

  “Yeah.” One word was all he could get in.

  Heidi shook her head. “I swear, Paul. You’re lucky you have me around, or you wouldn’t know anything about what’s happening with Austin. I’ll call Texas A&M tomorrow and find out which summer abroad program he went over there with, and I’ll find out who his faculty sponsor is, and I’ll find out if they have an emergency contingency plan.”