Ebola K: A Terrorism Thriller (12 page)

Austin looked around. Faces were slack as
though people wore emotionless masks of themselves. When they
weren’t vomiting and defecating clotted blood into their buckets
and beds, they were bleeding out of their gums, ears, noses, and
every other orifice. They stared at nothing—dolls or corpses with
raspy breaths. Some cried. Most didn’t have the energy for
that.

When the dying started, Dr. Littlefield had
to press their captors to allow the bodies to be removed from the
ward. After that, he and Austin were charged with the task of
carrying them outside and stacking them beside the pit where Austin
had been dumping waste buckets.

Najid’s men, still in their yellow Tyvek
suits, kept their distance. A few held their places inside, a few
in front of the hospital, a few out behind the building—all with
weapons they apparently didn’t have any qualms about using.

The thing that struck Salim the oddest—as he
sat in a contoured plastic airport chair, looking across an expanse
of shiny terrazzo flooring in the Allama Iqbal International
Airport in Lahore—was how much it looked like any airport in
America. Only the clothes were different. Of course, some people
wore Western clothes. Many wore what looked to Salim like
pajamas.

Jalal sat in the chair beside Salim, looking
out the tall windows at the airplanes, probably speculating about
where they were going, what they’d be doing.

A hundred yards away, Salim was watching
Zameer. Probably not his real name, but that’s how everyone
referred to him in whispers. He didn’t know the man’s title or
position and never asked. Those weren’t the kinds of questions to
ask when one wanted to keep his head—literally. Salim did know—or
suspect strongly—that the guy was in charge.

Salim had seen this man before. He had been
through their small camp on three separate visits. Each time, the
trainers were nervous and deferential. On one occasion, Zameer
berated the trainers loudly, and with more than one slap and a kick
to get his point across.

But now, Zameer—short-tempered as he
was—stood nervously, shuffling his feet, checking the clock,
looking around.

“Where do you think we’re going?” Jalal asked
in a soft voice that was easily lost in the noise of the
airport.

“Far away,” replied Salim.

Jalal looked at Salim, disappointment on his
face. “We’re at an airport. We’re in the clothes we wore when we
arrived. We have our passports. C’mon Salim, I don’t think that
guess took a lot of effort.”

Salim scanned the terminal again. He was good
with faces, and he knew he saw at least two others who had been in
the van the day they all arrived in Lahore. Now they were all being
sent somewhere internationally. The passports, returned to them
with the rest of their possessions, assured that. “We’ll know when
they give us our tickets.”

“We’ve been waiting for three hours.” Jalal’s
impatience was starting to show.

“Does it matter how long we’ve been
waiting?”

Jalal stood up. “I’m going to the loo.”
Occasionally, his English dialect seemed out of place.

“I’ll be right here when you get back.” But
as Jalal started to walk away, Salim reached up and caught his
sleeve.

Jalal stopped and looked down at him, a
question on his face.

Salim asked, “Have you seen any of the others
here? I think I’ve seen a few.”

“Who?” Jalal asked.

“Some from the van, the day I arrived.”

Jalal looked around. “Good. We’re off to do
something, I reckon.” Jalal spun and hurried off.

Salim went back to watching the formerly
important Zameer wait on somebody more important. Salim started to
wonder whether he’d see one of the familiar faces from the
newscasts back in America—one of those high-profile terrorist
targets. Now,
there
was a temptation. What if he did see
such a man, with a two million dollar price tag on his head? Was
his faith in jihad strong enough not to find a telephone and call
in a tip? Was his hatred of America strong enough to keep him from
doing it?

Being honest with himself, he didn’t
know.

Two million dollars would put Salim in a
different world. He wouldn’t be a powerless middle-class nobody
anymore. Perhaps the world looked different when
you
were
the one standing on the backs of the poor, rather than being stood
upon. And that’s how Salim felt—stood upon, powerless, another of
the faceless billions under the boot of America’s greed.

But to have America’s greed working
for
him as he sat on a beach, luxuriating in the dividends
that two million dollars’ worth of that greed could provide—that
might feel pretty good.

The powerful man shuffled some more, walked
in a circle, checked his watch, and checked the clock on the wall
again.

Jalal sighed as he walked up. “It’ll be good
to go back to London.” He stretched. “I miss the fog.”

“You’re kidding, right?” Salim shook his head
to emphasize his remark. “Fog?”

“No. I’m not kidding. I might be the only
Englishman who likes it. I don’t know why. But I do.”

Salim asked, “How long did you live in
London?”

“All my life.”

“And your parents?”

“From here. Both from Lahore,” answered
Jalal.

“How come we never talked about this before?”
Salim asked.

Jalal shrugged. “How come you never
asked?”

“Such questions are discouraged,” Salim
answered sadly.

“I know.” Jalal grinned. “When your CIA is
waterboarding you, you can’t tell them what you don’t know.”

“Seems pointless now.” Salim looked for the
important man. He seemed to have disappeared.

“How’s that?”

“Now that we’re off to go somewhere and
actually do something. For all we know, we’ll be dead
tomorrow.”

Jalal dropped back into the seat beside
Salim, and exhaled a long, slow breath. The gravity of their
choices had stopped being a romantic adventure. Youthful
self-righteousness was turning into something with real
consequences. Jokes about torture at the hands of the CIA might
soon stop being funny.

Still unable to see the important man—unable
to contain his curiosity, and definitely wanting to keep his
options open on that two million dollars—Salim reached out,
stretched his arms, and stood up in an attempt to get a better view
down to the other end of the terminal.

Where did Zameer go?

Damn.

Zameer had vanished, probably off somewhere
with his contact.

Salim thought about walking down to the other
end and looking around. That was a gamble. He didn’t know if Zameer
was meeting anyone of consequence. He did know that to walk away
from where they’d been told to wait was a punishable offense. He
shuddered to think what that punishment might be.

So he sat down and peered through the sparse
crowd, searching the faces he could see.

A man walked up—young, like both of them.
“Salim? Jalal?” he asked.

Jalal looked at Salim with the same question
that was on Salim’s mind. Yes or no?

Before Salim had chosen how to answer the
question, Jalal looked back at the standing man and said,
“Yes.”

The man extended an envelope to Jalal,
turned, and walked off.

“Instructions?” Jalal asked, looking at
Salim.

Salim shrugged.

Jalal opened the envelope, reached in and
pulled out two tickets. After taking a moment to look at them, he
announced, “We’re going to Nairobi.”

“Nairobi?”

“Our flight leaves in fifty minutes.”

The layover in Dubai was long enough to
distract Salim from staring at the back of the seat in front of
him, but barely long enough for anyone to get off the plane, except
for a few women in black burqas and their chaperones.

Before long, the big jet was back in the air,
carrying Salim, Jalal, and possibly others like them, southwest
toward Nairobi. Where they were going after Nairobi was a mystery.
They had cryptic instructions about taking a cab to some address
and waiting on a street corner until they received further
instructions.

Salim didn’t think they would arrive at the
street corner until two or three a.m. And there they’d be,
foreigners standing on a corner, in a country neither of them had
ever been to, in the middle of the night. If the local police took
an interest, how would they explain their presence? They couldn’t.
Lying would be their only option and lying was pointless. They
didn’t know enough about anything in Nairobi to construct any kind
of plausible lie. They might as well say they’d been abducted by
aliens.

Salim was depressed.

He knew it was a matter of faith and
discipline—getting on the plane, not knowing where he’d end up, let
alone what he’d be doing. Of course, he assumed some jihadist
activity awaited him, although at the same time, he felt just as
powerless as he always had in America. An outsider. Untrusted. A
grunt.

And he started to think that everything had
been a mistake. He had the heretical thought that he might not be
fighting America to change the world, but fighting simply to put a
new repressive authority in power, just one with a different name
and different set of corrupt values.

Salim asked Jalal, “Did you like living in
London? I mean, besides the fog.”

Jalal gave the question some real thought
before answering. “Mostly. Did you like Denver?”

Salim nodded. “I think when you can see past
the lie that everyone is equal, then yeah, it wasn’t so bad. Better
than living in the mountains and sleeping in a tick farm.”

Jalal had run out of energy, while walking
what seemed like miles across the airport in Nairobi, and he had
all but stopped talking. Salim found a cab driver that spoke
English. But finding one that spoke English
and
would take
them to the street corner where they needed to go—apparently in a
less-than-desirable part of town—was another trick.

Nevertheless, by four a.m. they’d been
standing on the corner for nearly an hour. Well…Salim stood. After
fifteen minutes of waiting, Jalal sat down, leaned against a wall,
and dozed off.

Salim wondered if Jalal had doubts about his
choice to go to Pakistan and become a jihadist. He realized that
the closer they got to wherever they were going, the less certain
he was of his course. But here he was in Bumfuck, Africa, with a
passport, a backpack, some clothes, toiletries, and enough
traveling money to maybe get a meal and a cab back to the
airport.

What then? A call to his dad, who
suspected—but didn’t know—his intentions when he’d disappeared to
go to Pakistan? The old man had been furious and broken-hearted.
His mother cried. And what was he going to do, get a ride back to
the airport? Beg his dad to fly him home? With what? His parents
lived paycheck to paycheck to support an outwardly upper-middle
class life. They had no savings and a ton of credit card debt. They
bought wholeheartedly into the new and improved American
Dream—permanent debt that ended in a reverse mortgage, so you
couldn’t even leave your children the one asset you thought you
owned.

Even if Salim could somehow find a way to
talk himself into calling his dad—
if
he could convince his
dad to forgive him for his disobedience—there was no way his father
could come up with the thousands of dollars on short notice to pay
for an expensive last-minute flight back to the US.

Could he find a way? Sure. If he had enough
time while waiting around the Nairobi airport. Then again, Salim
had seen too many videos of beheadings to think that he would live
that long, once it had been found out that he turned against his
new brothers.

They would think the only logical things. He
was a coward, so he deserved death. He was a traitor, so he
deserved death. He was a spy, so he deserved death. He was an
apostate, so he deserved death. He was just like every other
American, so he deserved death.

He’d never be able to talk his way out of
those.

What about the American embassy?

What would he tell them? The truth? He’d gone
to fight the Great Satan with his Arab brothers, but had changed
his mind. Sure, they’d take him in, listen to all he had to say,
probably catch Jalal as a result, and maybe even waterboard them
both for a few months before dropping them in Guantanamo to be
forgotten forever. Then, when budget and PR burdens became too
heavy, some future administration would free him to Yemen or some
such place, where he’d promptly lose his head in a desert, all
recorded for distribution on YouTube, so that his parents could see
their misguided traitor son be murdered by people he was stupid
enough to trust.

But he had his passport. There had to be a
reason for that.

They’d flown him to Nairobi. There had to be
a reason for that.

Perhaps it was the beginning of a plan to
ship him back to the US to do his jihad business there. If he was
patient, in a few days or maybe even weeks, he’d be touching down
in an American city with a network contact, maybe not unlike the
one he was waiting on in the middle of the night in
Nairobi—
where the hell is Nairobi?
Salim chastised himself
for not being a better student in school. He’d be picked up on some
anonymous street corner, taken to a safe house. Maybe even told to
go out among the Americans and fit in. That would be his chance.
He’d find himself a high-priced American attorney to protect his
rights, his freedom, and his neck, and he’d trade his information
to the FBI or CIA, whichever was in charge of buying it. In return,
he’d get immunity and a new identity.

Heck, if he played his cards right, he might
even be able to sell the movie rights to his story for a nice
bundle of money. Maybe an alternative to the two million dollars he
missed out on earlier.