Chapter 20. Terrorist
Present day. Kigoma, Tanzania.
Guido Macchione was alone with his thoughts as the minivan rumbled along the beat up rocky road to the Kigoma Missionary Baptist Hospital. He was very nervous. He had never seen a hot Level 4 in the field before. He was engaged, and his wife back in Rome was expecting. He did not want to die without seeing his child. He kept telling himself that his orange RACAL suit and his multiple layers of clothes would protect him, but part of his brain warned him to get the hell out of this minivan right now and run for it. He checked the duct tape on his wrists and ankles again and looked over his space suit for rips. Graciano could see the anxiety on his subordinate's face.
"Guido, as long as you follow the procedures with your suit, nothing can hurt you," assured Graciano. "I already checked out your suit. You do not have any tears."
"Yeah, I know, but this thing really scares the hell out of me."
"It is perfectly natural to be scared, but let's not forget we are here to do a job."
"Sure, boss. I will be okay."
"Can't you turn on some AC in this bucket? I am melting in here!" yelled Antonio Paciello to their driver. With his long hair and glasses, Paciello was suffocating in the RACAL suit and the one hundred degree Tanzanian heat. Their driver, a small dark-skinned man with several gold teeth, motioned to the men in the back seat.
"I am sorry, the van does not have air conditioning," said the driver.
"Antonio, relax," said Graciano, "We are almost there." Graciano looked at his map. The hospital should be about a mile away.
"OK, now we are going to go to oxygen in about one minute. You know the hand signals. Let's check the tanks now."
Graciano instructed the driver to wait a block away until they were finished. The three investigators made a few checks of their oxygen tanks, and they all seemed to be working. They instructed the driver to pull them around the back of the hospital so as not to attract attention. Graciano slipped on his helmet. He slid up his oiled chest-zipper, sealing his body inside. The oxygen tank went on immediately. They would have about three hours on the tank.
11:00 a.m. Mexico City, Mexico.
Hector Ramón had the best job in the world. He was the only employee of the Corporación Diversificada Colosal on the Eleventh Floor of this suburban office building. He had answered an online advertisement a year ago. He had no idea how or why he had been hired. His only two previous jobs were as a maintenance man, and he had been fired from both of those, once for sleeping on the job and once when his porn collection was found in the janitor's closet. His only job here at the company was to check the mail every day and if anything came, to notify his boss with an e-mail. Nothing interesting other than junk mail ever came to this office, so the job was easy. And for some reason, no one had de-activated the porn-searching feature of his company laptop, so his days were spent researching such interesting sites as "BigBoobs.com," "BarelyLegal.com," and "LatinSluts.com." Occasionally, if he was in the mood, he would play Call of Duty. Yet, for some reason, he got a 5,500 peso paycheck every week, signed by a mysterious "Jerome Brown," probably an American. He had no idea what the company did or who Jerome Brown was. He had never met the man. Hector had once tried to research the company on the Internet but quickly became bored. Who cares what the company did? It was none of his business. Five thousand, five hundred pesos for sitting here eight hours a day in these swanky offices, watching porn, and answering the mail? Life was good. Hector was a lazy man, with curly, uncombed black hair, unkept, grizzly hairs on his chin, and slitty eyes. He was short and stocky, and his gigantic beer gut hung over his jeans like a fleshy beach ball. He was clearly not qualified for many jobs. How he had landed this one was anyone's guess.
Moments ago, FedEx had delivered a large package to the office, which he signed for. He looked at the marking on the outside of the package. "Tanzania?" Where was Tanzania? He searched his memory for any reference, and all he could come up with was that brown cartoon guy on Bugs Bunny that spun around in a tornado and growled at people. Wasn't he called the Tanzanian Devil? Or was it Tasmanian? He couldn't remember. He laughed for a minute, thinking of the cartoon. He looked at the box. It looked like a cooler of some kind. What could be in there, a dead head or something? He laughed at himself again. He sure thought he was funny. Well, he better call this one in. It was probably important. He plopped the cooler on top of his small desk and sent an e-mail to Jerome Brown, advising him of the arrival of the cooler from Tanzania. An hour later, Hector Ramón was dead of a gunshot wound to the forehead and the cooler was gone.
10:00 a.m. Kigoma, Tanzania.
When they arrived at the hospital, Graciano, geared up in his space suit like Neil Armstrong on the moon, greeted Dr. Beladar and his nurse at the door of the hospital. Graciano handed them each a sheet of pre-written instructions, advising them to remain in the quarantined room of the hospital. By writing on a legal pad and questioning Dr. Beladar, he was able to confirm that Dr. Beladar had sent over a dozen blood and tissue samples to Mexico City yesterday afternoon. Graciano's two assistants then proceeded to the main ward of the hospital, going bed to bed taking blood and tissue samples from the patients. The patients were terrified when they saw the two men in the space suits, but the Kigoma medical staff was able to assure the patients that these men were just here as a precautionary measure. While the assistants were in the main ward, Graciano remained with Dr. Beladar and his nurse in the quarantined room, where he answered some of the doctor's questions about the AVI drug. After a few minutes, the young head of Italy's Level 4 Pathogen Research Lab left the quarantined room and walked down the steps into the basement of the hospital, looking for the furnace room. Shining a flashlight, and brushing away the cobwebs in the dark utility room, Graciano traced the natural gas service line where it entered into the building and ended at the furnace. He checked the furnace pilot light. It was not lit. That was good. Taking a hacksaw from his duffelbag, Graciano sawed through the service line, making sure he did not nick his space suit. Once he got almost all the way through, he yanked on the service line with his hand, pulling it apart, and allowing the natural gas to pour freely into the room. He was not asphyxiated by the odorless natural gas because his HAZMAT suit had a self-contained oxygen tank. Graciano next took a thermos out of his duffelbag which was filled with gasoline. He laid a trail of gasoline from an area just below the sawed-off natural gas line, down the floor, and up the steps to the floor of the hospital above him. The trail led all the way to the front door. Then Graciano went back into the main ward of the hospital, helping his subordinates take blood samples from the other patients.
During the next hour, the natural gas levels built up in the basement of the hospital. Every five minutes, Graciano walked out in the hall away from the two other scientists and pulled out of his pocket a yellow gas-to-air meter that he had brought with him. When the meter read that the levels of natural gas were approaching the lower limit of flammability, Graciano went into the doctor's staff room. Kigoma Missionary Baptist Hospital had one other doctor on staff. This attractive young, black doctor was about the same height and weight as Graciano. Graciano looked at the doctor's name tag.
Graciano wrote on a legal pad: "Dr. Haane, may I have a word with you in private please?" Graciano picked up his blue duffelbag and led the doctor out of the hospital. Once he was outside the hospital, Graciano took off his space helmet.
"Let's go to the other side of the street where we can talk." Once they were safely on the opposite side of the street, Graciano turned to the young doctor.
"Doctor, no one has been giving your team much information, so I wanted to take a minute to level with you to tell you what we are dealing with here. We have a Level 4 Hemorrhagic Fever Virus, similar to Ebola Zaire, in your hospital."
"Seriously?" The doctor looked terrified. "Are we exposed?"
"It does not appear that any of your staff other than Dr. Beladar and his nurse were exposed to the virus. We have quarantined the patients who are suspected to be infected in the quarantine room. But we have one problem. All of your patients have agreed to submit blood samples except for one. You have a patient in there in Bed 17 who refuses to submit to a blood test until you tell him that it is OK. He is your patient. I want you to go in there, but frankly, I am concerned for your safety, so I thought I would pull you out here, give you the facts and see what you want to do. I have one extra HAZMAT suit in my bag here. It is very easy to operate. If you want, we could suit you up, you could go in the ward, and assure your patient that it is OK to give us a sample. What do you think?"
"Can I just write something down for you to take to him?"
"No, he is insisting on speaking with you in person."
"Is there any danger if I am in the suit?"
"None at all, as long as you do not cut your suit. And even if you did cut your suit, I do not think you need to worry. You have been around the patients in that ward earlier this week and you do not have any symptoms yet. I do not think this thing is airborne. Ebola is traditionally not an airborne virus, so the likelihood of you being exposed is very slim."
The young doctor thought for a moment, but his sense of duty to his patient won out.
"OK, I guess so, if you can show me how to get into this thing."
"Great," said Graciano.
Graciano showed the doctor how to get into the space suit, zipped him up and led him back into the hospital. Graciano pointed to the ward and gave the doctor the thumb's up. With some trepidation, the doctor in the orange space suit entered the ward of the hospital toward Bed 17. As soon as that occurred, Graciano grabbed his blue duffelbag, walked out the front door of the hospital, closed the double doors, and inserted a tire iron through the two door handles. Then he took out a second thermos, and poured a trail of gasoline fifty feet down the street. Graciano ducked around a corner, took off his space suit, throwing it into his duffelbag. Then he took out a cigarette lighter, lighted the trail of gas, and ran as fast as he could away from the hospital. The flame quickly sprinted in a line down the sidewalk and into the front door of the hospital. Five seconds later, the line of flame reached the natural gas in the hospital basement, and the entire hospital exploded, leveling the entire block. When the very unskilled Kigoma Fire Department later investigated the explosion, they would conclude that there had been a gas leak, which killed the three nice investigators from Rome.
Matteo Graciano got a quick taxi to the airport, where, with a fake passport, he would get a flight to Morocco. From there, he would spend two weeks on a freighter vessel bound for Mexico, where his new life as a biological terrorist would begin. Also riding on that freighter, in a small cage, was one very important bat.
Present day. Mackinac Island, Michigan.
Most people can identify the State of Michigan's famous Lower Peninsula, with its characteristic "catcher's mitt" appearance, but few remember that Michigan also has a second peninsula further to the north and west. The long-ignored Upper Peninsula, which looks like a diving board off the State of Wisconsin, runs east-west like an eyebrow over Lake Michigan and comes close to touching the middle finger of the catcher's mitt--but not quite. There is a small waterway separating the two land masses called the Straits of Mackinac (pronounced "MAK-in-naw"), which also separates Lake Michigan and Lake Huron. Nestled just to the right of the Straits of Mackinac, like a stepping stone between the Upper and Lower Peninsulas, is the tiny island of Mackinac. The Native Americans living in the area hundreds of years ago called the island "Ojibwe mishi-mikinaak," which means "big turtle." The name is quite appropriate because nothing ever moves fast on the Island of Mackinac.
Local ordinances on the 3.8 square-mile island prohibit nearly every form of motor vehicle. Travel around Mackinac is by bicycle or horse-drawn carriage. With its bright white Victorian Grand Hotel, its famous fudge shops, and its topiary rose bushes shaped like colossal horses, the Island of Mackinac looks like a picturesque postcard from 1910. Blue jays, yellow warblers, crimson cardinals, and the black-and-orange American Redstarts dot the trees in late summer, while foxes, raccoons and rabbits peek in and out of lush bushes and forest trails. The island is also home to over six hundred species of plants, including Violets, Forget-Me-Nots, Buttercups and the zebra-patterned Jack-in-the-Pulpits.
For Bill and Kelly Monahan, the African chimpanzee researchers, nothing topped off a summer of primate research better than some breezy, autumn days spent on the Island of Mackinac. They would spend a week here before they returned home to Ann Arbor to begin the new school season teaching at the University of Michigan. It had been six days since the Monahans had eaten in the Ujiji Fish House in Tanzania.
The primate researchers, tired of months in the bush, decided to pamper themselves at the Victorian Grand Hotel. Proper attire, meaning jackets and ties for men, dresses for ladies, was a requirement at the Grand Hotel. The Monahans relaxed in their green and white striped easy chairs, dining in the cool night breeze on the half-mile long patio, while tuxedoed waiters walked across the polished wooden deck and served them perfectly grilled steaks and roasted herb-encrusted chicken. They were animal lovers, it was true, but they were by no means vegetarians. The night would be topped off with a visit to the Fudge House. What a feast!
The next morning, Kelly Monahan woke up with a splitting headache and back ache. She was in pretty good shape, so this was surprising to her. She was only 45. She wasn't that old to be getting back pain from just sleeping. At least she hoped not. She went into the bathroom in her hotel room, hoping to find the Motrin she had brought with her in her straw purse. She found the bottle and poured three orange capsules--hell, make it four capsules, she thought, this headache was terrible--and downed them with a glass of water from the faucet. She looked up at her reflection in the mirror and was surprised to see that her eyes were bloodshot--in fact, more bloodshot than she could ever remember. That was strange. She searched her purse for some Visine. She hadn't brought any. She returned back to bed to talk to Bill.
"Honey, did you bring any Visine? My eyes are really bloodshot this morning."
Bill said nothing and was facing the other way.
"Bill?"
Bill said nothing.
Kelly went onto the bed and shook her husband's shoulder, trying to rouse him from his deep sleep. He wasn't turning over but she could hear him give a deep groan, as if he was in pain.
She was concerned now. She rolled her husband over by his shoulder. Those eyes! His glassy, unfocused eyes were bloodshot, too! And his face was covered in sweat. She looked at his blue Wolverines shirt, which was drenched. Suddenly, Bill darted out of bed and made a dash to the bathroom. She could hear a retching sound coming from the bathroom.
"Ohhh, God!" Bill moaned from the bathroom. She went into the bathroom to help him. Bill was bent over the toilet.
"God, I feel like death!" exclaimed Bill, still bending over the commode.
Kelly went over to feel her husband's forehead. He was burning up. He threw up again.
"God! What is wrong with me?" Bill pleaded. That is when Kelly noticed Bill's face. It had purple star-like welts or splotches on it. She knew then she had to get him immediately to the doctor.
"Come on, Bill. I am taking you to the Emergency Room!"
"Does this place even have a hospital?" asked Bill.
"I hope so, because I do not think you are going to make it to the mainland."
Kelly Monahan was right. There was a hospital--the Mackinac Island Health Center, a three-story white-clapboard structure near the center of the island. Unfortunately, however, the trip to the emergency room took much longer than normal because there were no cars allowed on the island. The fastest mode of travel for a sick person was the golf cart, but on this beautiful autumn day, all the hotel's golf carts at the moment were ferrying golfers down to the hotel's Jewel Golf Course. It took twenty minutes to finally get a hotel staffer named Cedric to bring a golf cart over to take the two researchers into town to the emergency room. Bill was seated in the front next to Cedric and began coughing violently. Cedric regretted his decision to help these two guests within the first two minutes of the drive. He frequently had to stop along the side of the road for Bill to throw up.
When the Monahans arrived at the hospital, the nurse at the reception desk looked at Bill Monahan, and saw he looked very sick. After taking their insurance cards, she relayed the Monahans to the Triage Nurse, instructing them to bypass the hospital waiting room. The Triage Nurse also could tell this was a serious case and immediately called over the intercom for the emergency room doctor on staff.
Dr. Boyd "Buzz" Adams, nicknamed by his parents after a handsome transport plane pilot in the play South Pacific, was the Emergency Medicine doctor on staff at the time the Monahans arrived, and that was not a good thing for the Monahans, as Buzz was not the brightest star in the medical firmament. Buzz had taken this post because it was easy. Hardly anyone ever got sick on the island. If they did get sick, it was usually nothing more difficult than poison ivy or sunburn. And then there were the hot young girls who would come up with their rich parents, bored with nothing to do in this Victorian town. Dr. Buzz knew how to entertain, all right. In fact, drinking and entertaining women were probably the two things at which he excelled the most.
When the Monahans came in, even Dr. Buzz Adams could tell the husband was very sick. What was with those red eyes? Dr. Adams eyed the wife. She was in good shape all right. What a mismatch with the husband! She probably had a lot of pent-up sexual frustration, he thought. Dr. Adams began taking a history from the husband, but most of the time, he was smiling and staring at the wife. She had pretty good legs, a good enough rack. Yeah, he would do her for sure, he thought.
Dr. Buzz Adams went through a long line of questions with Bill Monahan. When had he first started feeling bad? When did the fever start? How high was his fever? Did he have a history of blood disorders in his family? Did he have blood in his stool? Had he eaten anything strange recently? When did he first get the purple lesions under his skin? Did he have any food allergies? Had the Monahans recently traveled to the Southwest, like in Arizona or New Mexico? And on and on. But the one question Dr. Buzz Adams did not ask was whether the Monahans had traveled out of the country recently. That standard question would have yielded critical information for a proper diagnosis.
Dr. Adams went through the possibilities in his mind. Bill Monahan either had a bleeding disorder, a hematological problem, an allergy, an infection, or some kind of G.I. problem going on, like food poisoning, cholera, salmonella, something like that. The doctor ordered numerous blood tests, including a CBC, an ESR, a CRP, and coagulation studies. He ordered a chest X-ray and a urinalysis. The doctor would have liked to get an Infectious Disease Consult, but unfortunately they did not have an I.D. specialist on the island. If he wanted that, he would have to transfer the patient to the mainland. For now, he would wait and see how the tests came back. He left to see other patients, confident that the tests would tell him something. He told Kelly Monahan that everything would be okay and then flashed her a smile and a wink as he left the room. Kelly Monahan was disturbed by the doctor's wink. "Could he possibly be flirting with me when my husband is here for medical treatment?" she wondered.
Another nurse, a young woman, came in to draw blood and take the urine sample. She was surprised to see purple lesions under the skin of the man's arms. She had never seen that before. When she stuck in the needle, blood shot out several inches, landing on the nurse's arm. She was surprised. That had never happened here on the island before. She tried to act like everything was normal. She cleaned up the blood with a towel. When she left the room with the samples, she quickly went to a wash basin and washed herself thoroughly with antibacterial soap. Whatever that guy in there had, she was determined she would not get it. Another orderly, a male, entered the Monahans' room about a half hour later, and wheeled the husband down to have his chest X-ray performed.
While they waited for the results, the Monahans each rested somewhat uncomfortably on hospital beds in a room in the Emergency Ward. Kelly Monahan thought about what the illness could be.
"Do you think that fish was bad at the Ujiji Fish House?" she asked her husband.
"The fish wasn't raw. They cooked it. I would think whatever was in there would die when it was grilled," said Bill.
"Yeah, that's what I would think, too," replied Kelly. "Maybe we caught something from one of the monkeys."
"Yes, I suppose that's possible. But we didn't handle their blood or their feces or any cadavers. We spent most of the time observing and photographing. I just cannot imagine getting anything from the chimps," said Bill. Bill then groaned and held his stomach. "Whatever it is, it is killing me, I can tell you that."
"Bill, don't talk that way! I am sure you will be fine."
"I feel like I am being gnawed from the inside out. Could it possibly be a parasite?"
"I guess anything is possible," said Kelly, "but I always thought parasites entered your body through your feet, and we always had boots on unless we were sleeping."
"No," said Bill. "I think you can get parasites all kinds of ways. We should ask the doctor when he comes back if it could be a parasite."
"We can ask him, but I did not get the feeling that guy knew what he was talking about. I think he was trying to flirt with me--in the emergency room! I would feel a lot better getting to a hospital back in Ann Arbor. We have to get out of here."
"I agree," said Bill. Then he buckled over the table. "Oh God! I don't think I am going to make it to Ann Arbor!" He ran in the bathroom to be sick again. After about a minute in the bathroom, Bill called for his wife. "Kelly! Can you come in here?" Kelly came into the small bathroom. Bill looked absolutely miserable. "Sorry to call you in here, honey, but I am getting worried. Look at that." She looked into the toilet and saw that his vomit was pitch black, the color of tar. Kelly recoiled at the site, holding her hand over her mouth.
"That can't be good, can it?" asked Bill.
"I have heard of blood in your vomit, but I have never heard of black vomit. What did you eat last night?"
"I had a steak, beans and mashed potatoes. That's it!"
"Don't flush it just yet, we need to show the doctor," said Kelly.
She went back to the Triage Nurse and asked for the doctor. He was nowhere to be found. The Nurse said not to worry, that he would be back soon. After waiting ten minutes with no doctor, Kelly decided to act. Kelly was, after all, a scientist. She did not like having unanswered questions. She decided she would research her husband's condition online. She had not brought her laptop with her, but she did have her cell phone, which had Internet access. She would look it up on her phone. Unfortunately, however, the cell phone reception in the hospital, as in many hospitals, was very poor, and she was unable to connect to the Internet. She went to the door of the bathroom and told Bill she was going to go outside the hospital for a minute, and he seemed disinterested. He cared more about the world war going on in his stomach. Kelly walked past the Triage Nurse's desk and the receptionist's desk and went outside into the bright sunshine, where she hoped to find more answers.
Dr. Adams was down the hall at the time checking on another patient. Poison oak. When he finished checking in on that patient, he went into his private office and updated his Facebook page until the tests came back. When the test results finally arrived, Dr. Adams noticed that the "sed rate" and the CRP did not seem to indicate that the cause was an infection. That was strange. He thought for sure it was some kind of bacterial infection. The coagulation studies did not seem to indicate a bleeding disorder. The chest X-ray was inconclusive. The urinalysis did not show a urinary tract infection. What in the world could this be? He made a mental note to check back on the patient in about an hour.