He wiped his cheeks as best he could, taking another handful of paper towels and stuffing them into his jacket pockets to use to cover his face should the bleeding from his nose and eyes begin again. He left the bathroom on unsteady legs and made his way back to his seat to place a call to Walter.
He noticed the seats on either side of him were now vacant. He wrinkled his nose; even he could smell the sour smell of his sweat-soaked jacket. No wonder his neighbors had sought seats elsewhere.
A pretty Mexican stewardess, a worried look on her face, paused near his aisle seat to ask, “Are you all right, sir?”
He nodded as he was dialing Walter’s number. “Just a bad case of the flu and this altitude may have ruptured my sinuses. I’ll be okay. I have nosebleeds all the time on airplanes.”
He wiped his eyes and nose, fighting back convulsions that were twisting his stomach into knots. An older Mexican woman in the seat across the aisle from him gave him a lingering stare as Walter’s phone began to ring.
He didn’t notice how she quickly crossed herself and began to murmur the Lord’s Prayer in Spanish.
Walter Simmons opened Fitzhugh’s briefcase in a basement room under the glare of a halogen lamp, peeling back a thin layer of a cardboard material to get at what was in the hidden chamber.
A shriveled piece of deerskin adorned with hammered silver and gemstones rested in the false bottom of the case. “Aztec all right,” he said quickly, for there was no doubt. He peered closely at one silver filigree symbol. “Just as Fitzhugh had said, it was an animal collar, and I can clearly see that’s the royal Aztec symbol for Montezuma. He was known to keep a menagerie of exotic pets at his side at all times.”
Beatrice, Walter’s wife, leaned over for a better look. “It is the royal symbol, the Thunderbird. If this thing is genuine and not a forgery, it’s worth at least several hundred thousand, perhaps a bit more if we take careful photographs and if it is described in any of the writings of Díaz’s letters home to Spain.”
She touched one of the stones. “These are huge emeralds. There are six of them, and the silver work is so intricate. We’ll ask four hundred and seventy-five thousand and see if we have any takers.”
Simmons got off his stool. “I’d better call the hospital to see how Malcolm’s doing. I’ve never seen anything like it. He was bleeding all over the place, from his nose and mouth, even his eyes and ears. He sounded worried over the phone, but I did not expect anything so serious.
“Everyone was so busy hovering over him when he collapsed in customs they never paid any attention to me or to the briefcase. There was blood all over the floor. It looked like he was going to bleed to death right there before the ambulance arrived. He couldn’t talk and his eyes sort of glazed over. It was weird. I’d better call his sister in Dallas. For all I know he could be dying. I never saw so much blood in my life.”
Beatrice put her hand on her husband’s arm. “Walter, calm down, you’re babbling. But just in case he doesn’t make it, don’t say anything to his sister about the artifact.”
She grinned nastily. “One hundred percent of four hundred and seventy-five thousand is twice as good as fifty percent.”
Maria Gomez embraced her son, then her daughter as soon as she put her suitcase on the sofa. “It is so good to see you, mi hijo y mi hija. It was a terrible ride on the plane. The man sitting in the seat across from me became very ill. He was bleeding. Dios! I think maybe so he has the cancer, like Tío Roberto. Blood was on my dress. See here?” She pointed to a dark brown stain on one side of her pale yellow skirt.
She took her children by the hand and led them into the back room, then the kitchen, where her husband Rodolfo was eating his lunch. Maria embraced him warmly and kissed his cheek.
He gave her a smile. “It is good to have you home, mi esposa. Both of the children have missed you very much,” he said.
And then he stared into her eyes. “What is it, mi amor? You do not look well. Did you get sick while you were in Jalisco? Your skin feels hot like you have a fever.”
Aboard Mexicana Airlines Flight 1151 a twenty-year-old stewardess named Carmen Villarreal collapsed in the bathroom at twenty thousand feet following a four-hour layover in Houston before taking off for its return trip to Mexico City. She had been serving drinks and sandwiches until she suddenly felt nauseous.
Another flight attendant found her, using a special tool to unlock the bathroom door when Carmen did not return to her duties after twenty minutes. Rosa Hernandez screamed when she saw blood all over the tiny bathroom floor coming from Carmen’s nose and mouth.
The pilot was notified immediately and Flight 1151 made a looping turn toward the San Antonio Airport, radioing for an ambulance to meet the plane on the San Antonio tarmac instead of making its scheduled return flight to Mexico City with eighty-four passengers onboard, all but fourteen of them having eaten sandwiches or consumed drinks handled by Carmen Villarreal.
Dr. John Meeker, Chief of Internal Medicine at Houston Baptist Hospital, spoke to his head operating room nurse in a gravelly voice through his surgical mask. “Go ahead and remove the needle from his vein. He was bleeding faster than we could put blood in him anyway.”
Meeker’s eyebrows knitted, staring into the opening he made in Malcolm Fitzhugh’s chest cavity. “He’s gone past hemorrhagic shock and every clotting agent we’ve tried has failed. There’s apparently nothing we could have done to stop his massive internal bleeding. Bring me his blood work numbers as soon as they’re ready. For the life of me I can’t imagine what this is. He’s a healthy individual otherwise.”
Suddenly the hairs on the back of his neck stirred and he had a terrible premonition. “Warn the lab to use every precaution in case this is Ebola or some other exotic virus. He must have been sick for days and I can’t imagine why airport officials let him board a plane, bleeding from his tear ducts and nose and ears. Surely someone noticed the bleeding.”
He looked down at his gloved hands covered in blood. “We may have been contaminated ourselves. I didn’t think to wear the isolation suits. If it’s a virus we have to notify the CDC immediately.”
He looked into Nurse Hopkins’s eyes. “We’d both better pray this is something else. Have someone find out what flight he was on and where it originated, where he got on the plane. We may have to consider the possibility that every passenger on that flight was contaminated.”
He gazed down at Malcolm Fitzhugh again, remembering how he’d massaged the heart after numerous adrenaline injections failed. “What we may have here is a human time bomb that just went off on an airplane and in Houston International Airport, depending on what the blood tests show.”
He sighed and backed away from the operating table a moment. “And it may have sunk its deadly teeth into us and everyone who came in contact with him, the ambulance attendants, emergency room staff, passengers at the airport, the works. I sure as hell hope I’m wrong, but just in case I’m not, you’d better notify hospital security. We’ve got to lock this place down now! No one else in or out until we’ve figured out what is going on.”
He looked down at his bloody hands again and noticed they were shaking. He said in a quieter voice, “Nurse Hopkins, as soon as you’ve had security lock the hospital down, have the hospital operator call the CDC and transfer the call to my office. I have a pint of bourbon in my desk drawer and I think I’m gonna have a drink.”