At this point the camera swung away from them, catching a white flash of sunlight before finding blue skies over the leafy tips of trees. A black dot grew quickly into a single-engine plane, coming in low over the forest. In an instant it swooped down, blurring hugely in the monitor. As the camera followed, it spewed a fine mist from its undercarriage.
"Crop duster," Allen remarked, stating the obvious out of sheer befuddlement.
The plane banked right, leaped over the trees, and disappeared.
Angry words poured from the speakers as the camera panned to the men speaking them: "Wadika!" "Unakwenda wapi!" "Salop!"
"That was French!" Stephen said. "I heard salop. That's French for . . . Well, it's not a nice word."
"Nimekasirika!" "Espece de pauvre con!"
"French again. Con means idiot."
As the mist blanketed them, the workers closed their eyes to it, coughed, and shook their fists at the spot where the plane had disappeared. Brushing off a flourlike dust, they spoke in sharp tones to one another and spat at the ground.
"Wait a sec," Julia said, moving a finger to the keyboard and causing the image to freeze. "The countdown's at plus twenty-two seconds now." She moved the cursor on the screen to the rewind button and tapped her finger. In reverse, the workers appeared to powder themselves with dust that magically floated off their bodies and sailed into
the air. Julia froze the image again. "Negative five seconds." She started clicking a button. "Four . . . three . . . two . . ."
"The mist from the plane is just coming into view at the top of the screen," Allen pointed out. Despite Bonsai's predictions about the converted file's poor quality, the resolution was perfect.
"One."
The mist was just hitting the tops of their heads.
"Zero."
The star's head was only a vague shadow behind the layer of dropping mist.
"That's it," Julia said. "The countdown was to this point."
"When whatever was in that mist hit their lungs," Allen said.
Dead silence filled the van like smoke as the three gazed at the image on the screen. After a few moments, Julia clicked a button to reactivate the video in real time. They had already seen this part: the men hurling insults at the sky, dusting themselves off, checking their food for residue . . .
"So what African countries speak French?" Julia asked, turning to Stephen and shifting in the big chair to tuck a leg under herself. She kept flicking her eyes toward the screen, waiting for something new. Despite being with two civilians, mentally she had donned her investigator's hat and was getting into the rhythm of corporate deductive reasoning.
"Zaire," Allen said. He whipped a crumpled pack of Camels out of his breast pocket and shook one out. After tossing it into his lips, he said, "It's obvious, isn't it? Ebola? Zaire?" He replaced the pack and removed a bright red Bic lighter from the same pocket; instead of lighting up, he rolled it between his fingers and raised his eyebrows at her. "The two are practically synonymous."
"It adds up," Stephen agreed.
Julia nodded and turned back to the screen. She wasn't really sure why it mattered at this point, but Donnelley had taught her that every fact, no matter how seemingly insignificant, played a part—sometimes a crucial part—in unraveling the mystery at hand.
"Okay, Zaire," she said quietly and watched as the camera
panned slowly over the faces of the complaining men, lingering a moment on each one as if to record their identities.
"I don't like where this is heading," Allen said.
She brushed her bangs away from her forehead. Without turning away from the screen, she said, "If we really are dealing with Ebola, I think we just witnessed the intentional infection of these people."
"What bothers me more is that Ebola spreads through body fluids, blood usually." Allen shifted, agitated.
Julia paused the display as the camera was pulling back to frame the entire group again.
Allen's unlit cigarette wagged like an accusatory finger when he spoke. "As far as we know, no one has ever been infected by an airborne strain. Monkeys, yes; never a human. Big difference. If the vector to transmit the disease was in that dust, it's a strain more dangerous than any we've ever seen. And it's gone unreported."
"Maybe nobody knows," Stephen whispered.
"Look at the date," Allen said, indicating the screen. "Whoever's controlling it has had over a year to perfect the delivery system. A crop duster when this video was made—what now, a breeze?"
Julia stared at him a long time, lost in thought. At last she punched the button that continued the video.
fifty-seven
The video flicked to a new scene.
The doorway set in a whitewashed wall again—the skinny black man's home. The date and time set the moment at the fifth morning after the crop duster's visit to the man's work site. The man's friend approached the door, knocked. A woman answered, worry as plain on her face as the bright red housedress on her body. She shook her head and closed the door.
Blackness.
The scream pierced through the speaker even before the shadows swam into recognizable objects on the screen. The man—Julia's star—bellowed in agony from a battered cot in a small, dark room. Naked to the waist, he was curled in a fetal position, clutching at his stomach, rubbing his chest. Perspiration sluiced in thick streams from every inch of exposed flesh. With savage effort, the man hooked his head over the cot's edge and vomited into the black hole of a rusty pail.
"Lord, have mercy," Stephen whispered.
Positioned somewhere above the cot, the camera perfectly framed the convulsing figure. The woman who had answered the door glided into view and began wiping the man's head and neck with a drenched cloth, comforting him with soft cooing.
With a bolt of quick static, the day passed. The man still lay in a knot, wet, miserable, accepting water from a rag pressed to his fever-blistered lips; only the time on the display had changed. Another flash of static and the man was blistered and bleeding, flailing on the bed, splashing ribbons of blood across the walls and curtains. His mouth stretched in a silent scream. His eyes, solid red, searched blindly for help.
Julia's palm covered her mouth.
A man in a blood-drenched smock, a stethoscope slung around his neck, tried to hold down the dying man. A woman in a white-and-blue dress—a nurse, Julia thought—covered her mouth much the way Julia did and backed away from the bed and out of frame. A geyser of blackish blood erupted. The doctor staggered back, arms raised against the horror before him.
The body convulsed, then was still.
Soft chanting now; the mournful throb of a single drum. A corpse, wrapped from head to toe in white linen, lay like a ghost on a chest-high bier. Weeping softly, the woman who'd comforted Julia's star, his wife perhaps, dipped a flambeau into the kindling under the body. Within seconds, flames had completely engulfed the corpse.
"The medical staff didn't report the cause of death," Allen said, shaking his head. "Health officials never would have released the body."
The camera panned over the faces of the mourners, many of them recognizable from the work site scene when the crop duster had vomited its obscene cargo over them. As smoke darkened the sky, the scene faded to black.
The next act opened at the work site, familiar men laboring under a scorching sun.