I said nothing, fuming. It was true.
Chris said, “Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
Her gaze did not waver. The voice in my ear was molten steel. “You and I and Major Nakamura are going to wait for your test results. If your blood work is negative, you’re coming with me to Nevada to help track this thing. I want your eyes on the ground.”
“That would have been easier if you’d leveled with us from the start.”
“While on the job, you will function as effectively as if Admiral Galli remained in charge. Do you understand me?”
“I understand.”
“You’ll ask the same questions you’d ask otherwise. You’ll make the same connections. We’re going to Creech Air Force base outside Las Vegas. I’ll forget your rudeness this once, because loyalty is an admirable quality. You’ll give me one hundred percent or I’ll lock you away so fast you won’t know what hit you. Was there something else you wanted to say?”
“No.”
We broke contact. I went back to reading about leprosy. Eddie sat two feet away, grinning like an idiot.
“You sure told her,” he said. “No one pushes you around. You are one tough Marine, man. I must say, she may be Burke’s lapdog but she’s cute even when she bites.”
“Eddie, do me a favor. Shut up.”
The blood tests were late in coming.
Were we infected? Was the lab repeating the tests?
The tingling increased in the fingers of my right hand. I flexed them. Was feeling seeping back into them? I told myself, You’re imagining it. Just work.
“Leprosy,” I read out loud, “was so common in medieval Europe that one out of thirty people suffered from it. In extreme cases it killed, usually by blocking nerves, or causing gangrene or infection. Or victims had no feeling, so they cut or hurt themselves without even knowing it. Listen to this, Eddie. Until recently, it was believed that leprosy victims lost fingers or toes to the disease, but it turns out they’d accidentally damage themselves because they lacked feeling. In India, leprosy sufferers have lost their fingers and toes to rats.”
“Rats?”
“Yeah. The rats ate them while they slept. They felt nothing.”
But it wasn’t just symptoms up on-screen, but the horrible social aspects. The separating disease, it was called. Throughout history, lepers had been shunned, forced from homes and families, called witches, hounded from villages, locked away in filthy hospitals, feared and stigmatized. I saw a shot of a leper hospital in Jerusalem, 1843, and another, hidden away in the swamps of Louisiana, and a leprosarium on the outskirts of London… virtual prisons for people who had done nothing wrong except fall ill.
Eddie read, “Some scientists think the Crusaders brought leprosy back to Europe from the Middle East. Some say it’s the other way around. Either way, by 1300, hundreds of muddy French and Italian villages were filled with figures in dirty shrouds, wrapped in rags, tormented, hungry, and sick. By law they had to carry a bell, warning all in their paths that they were coming. Chanting, ‘Unclean.’”
Eddie shook his head. “I was sure this thing was going to be chemical, One. Toxic chemical. Not this.”
“Fifteen hundred years before Christ, Egyptian doctors recorded cases,” I read. “In ancient Greece, Hippocrates treated sores and destroyed flesh. The first medically proven case of leprosy was confirmed in 2009, from fifty years before Christ! A Yale team dug up a skeleton near Haifa, and radiocarbon-dated it. Perfect DNA match.”
“Says here ninety-five percent of people have natural immunity to leprosy, One. But over half the people in that camp caught it. So does the infection spread because of the other part of the chimera, the second part of the mix?”
Question after question. “Says you can’t grow it in a lab, Eddie. Natural spread, you think?”
“Plus, if thirty percent of Europe had it at one time, what made it die out? Wait! It didn’t die out. Numbers dropped in the 1600s, but shot up again two centuries later, mostly in England and Norway.”
“Why those countries?” I asked. Is this a clue?
I read, “England and Norway were seafaring nations carrying on trade with India. Sailors brought it back. Then, in 1873 a Norwegian scientist, Armauer Hansen, ID’d the bug. That’s why leprosy is called Hansen’s disease today.”
Eddie looked up. “I’d rather have a ball team named for me. The Nakamura Angels!”
“Still two million cases in the world today,” Chris said outside, stamping her feet to keep warm.
“Two hundred thousand new cases a year.”
“But only a few in the U.S., and most of those are immigrants from Mexico,” said Chris. “Hey! Get this! The only other creature on the planet that carries leprosy is an armadillo. You can catch leprosy from eating their meat.”
I envisioned the odd-looking creature, “hillbilly speed bumps,” in parts of the South. An armor-plated, semiblind insect eater, a remnant left over from the dinosaur era.
Eddie scratched his head. “Hey, Chris, about those victims in Nevada? Did any of them visit Mexico recently?”
“We’ll ask. Look, Creech is the major operational center running Air Force drones overseas. Our attacks against Al Qaeda leadership, the Taliban, Somalia… the boys and girls who control those drones do it from Creech.”
“That doesn’t sound like coincidence.”
She nodded. “Couple of drone pilots came into the base hospital. Then a mechanic and a pilot’s girlfriend. All deteriorating fast. The docs thought at first they suffered from some crazy fasciitis…”
“Flesh-eating bacteria,” Eddie said, referring to the staph infections that could kill in a day, bacteria that got into open cuts then traveled through the fat layers connecting cells. The microbe had started out as fairly innocent, I knew. It caused nothing more serious than pimples or boils. Penicillin killed it. But in the 1950s, a new strain appeared. Its toxins caused tissue to deteriorate, and it wiped out red blood cells. That penicillin-resistant strain killed by brain abscess. It could enter the body through the tiniest cut, then spread so fast it could kill a healthy person — in extreme cases — in a day.
Fasciitis was the nightmare hospital infection. You could pick it up in an ER, but unfortunate victims have also contracted it after swimming in the ocean, or falling on a dance floor. Some survivors lived only because doctors amputated their limbs to stop the spread of the infection.
I said, “But you don’t get fasciitis in groups either.”
“I know. I’m just telling you what doctors initially thought. An ambulance was set to transport victims to Vegas. Better facilities there. But then two more people came down with it. Civilians in Galilee. Then another airman.”
“Did they all get moved to Vegas?”
She shook her head. “RDS,” she said, shorthand for rapidly developing situation. “At that point, judgment call. The base commander called D.C. No one knew if we had something contagious. The idea of bringing seven possible high-infection cases into a major metropolitan area didn’t work, and Vegas doesn’t have level four wards.”
“Montana’s got one in Missoula,” I said, remembering that federal dollars built a unit at Saint Patrick Hospital there, in case staffers from the Rocky Mountain Lab in Hamilton ever came down with the deadly diseases they worked with, like Ebola.
Chris nodded. “Missoula was the call. But then more patients started coming in, and we found others in the barracks. Missoula can handle four. We had more. At that point it was clear that we might be under attack. That’s why, when you called from Africa, the committee was already in session, trying to figure out what to do.”