"Her facility was supported by the Iraqi government," he reminded her. "Wouldn't it be a feather in her cap if she passed on the information of this deadly strain?"
"She is my sister," Fahimah said passionately. "We lost both of our parents in the chemical attack on Halabja. She would never give them anything that could destroy people, regardless of who was paying her."
"She worked for them," he said stubbornly, making it clear that he wasn't convinced.
"I worked for them, too, at the university. Half of the professional positions in the city of Baghdad were somehow funded by the government. That is the way things were. But that doesn't mean we were all terrorists," she told him.
"You taught. She worked in a chemical lab."
"How many pharmaceutical research labs are there across the United States? Couldn't every one of them be called a chemical lab? How about the research facilities at the universities? Aren't most of them funded by government dollars? Even the clinics where there are experimental programs for cancer or mental illness or for different kinds of dependencies." She didn't wait for him to answer. "You can call people whatever you want. Everyone's job and the interpretation of them stand at the mercy of some political power. If you go back and really spend the time and study everything that Rahaf presented at all the conferences she attended around the world… if you read the papers she has published… you will see the truth. But you cannot just select the facts that suit your argument."
"What was her area of interest?" he asked.
"Cancer in survivors of chemical warfare. Detection, treatments, cure," Fahimah told him. "I told you before. Halabja is not behind us. The survivors are the ones who are facing the greatest battle right now. But she couldn't spend all of her time on that, so there was other work she did, depending on the latest funding for her lab. Never, though, did she work on building bombs or anything that could be used for biological warfare."
Fahimah realized the two Peshmerga soldiers in front were quiet, with the driver every now and then sending a nervous glance in the mirror at her.
"They think we're fighting," Austyn commented.
"Aren't we?"
"No, we're not," he said. "I'm trying to understand the truth about your sister."
"I will tell you the truth about my sister," she told him. "But believe it. I do not lie "
"She's your sister."
"Do you think I would have wasted five years of my life in prison if I thought Rahaf was responsible for making weapons that could be used on our own people?"
"Sometimes we're blind to the faults of those closest to us."
"You haven't heard anything I have been saying, have you?"
"Of course I have. Make me believe in her innocence," he shot back as sharply. "Why did she send you to destroy her files? Why not go there herself?"
He knew everything else. As well, he needed to learn this last bit of the truth.
"She was exposed to the strain in her lab by accident. She told me a vial fell and broke. A very small amount of the contents touched the skin on her right leg where the broken vial had left a cut. As you already know the bacteria spreads through the body with great speed. She had some remedy, but it wasn't enough." Fahimah would never forget that day. "She called me. Asked me to find a surgeon, to convince the person to come to my house. She told me she was hurt, but no matter how much I pleaded she wouldn't go to the hospital."
"Why not go to the hospital?" he asked.
"I didn't understand it myself until later, when she came over."
"How did she get to your house?"
"By cab," Fahimah told him. "I called a friend of ours who was a doctor. He called someone who knew someone else, and by the time Rahaf arrived at my house, the surgeon was there, too."
"Did she know she was exposing you to the microbe, too?" Austyn asked.
Fahimah shrugged. "I believe everything was new to her, too. She wouldn't let me near her. You said it is a similar strain to what you see in the U.S., but I think it must have slightly differences. She had a little more time to act, and what she contracted seemed to be less contagious. I was never infected, but then again, she would not let me touch the wound or dress it. Even the remedy was a solution that had been passed on to her from a friend for some other illness. As far as how effective it would be, she could not be sure. It had something to do with counteracting the bacteria in the bloodstream, before it infected cells."
"What happened?"
"She asked the surgeon to amputate her leg. But he wouldn't do it at the house. Rahaf was in excruciating pain." Fahimah found herself shaking again. "The surgeon convinced me that we should at least take her to a nearby clinic. The wound was growing on her leg. He agreed that the leg had to be amputated. Rahaf kept injecting herself with this solution, too, which seemed to make her horribly sick to her stomach. But she believed it was helping her."
"Did you take her to the clinic?" Austyn asked.
"Yes. And when we got there, the surgeon amputated the leg," she said, feeling chilled to the bone. She was no scientist. No physician. But she'd been in the room with her sister when her leg had been amputated. She'd gladly have given any part of her own body to relieve her sister's pain. A tear dropped down her cheek. She reached up quickly and dashed it away.
Austyn took her hand in his. "She did the right thing. The antidote obviously worked. The amputation saved her life. And no one else was infected?"
"No one."
"What happened next?"
"Rahaf was upset because the people at the clinic, even the surgeon, were asking too many questions. No one had seen this kind of flesh-eating wound. The surgeon knew Rahaf was a scientist. So she asked me to take her out of the clinic before more people started asking questions."
"Right after the amputation?"
"The next morning, at dawn, before the nurses came to check on her. She was still bleeding. I took her back to my house. She wanted to hide in the basement. I wasn't to tell anyone that she was staying with me. She was afraid."
"Of what?" he asked.
"Of how people could use this to their advantage. The wrong kind of people. The country was in chaos. No one seemed to be in charge. Every day, bombs were dropping on Baghdad. Saddam's people were fighting back. Kurds were fighting alongside of the Americans, but that didn't mean we could trust them, either." They'd been crazy to stay in Baghdad. Both of them should have left as soon as things got worse with the war. "Rahaf knew the nurses and doctors at the clinic might talk. The surgeon would, for certain. And she would have no way to stop them."
"Did she ever say how she discovered this strain of bacteria?" Austyn asked.
"She told me they were doing research on different types of streptococcus bacteria. It was during tests on the microbes that she discovered this monster."
"While she was recovering from the amputation, that was when she sent you to her lab?"
Fahimah took a deep breath. The events of those two days were as clear in her mind as yesterday. "Yes. She sent me there with specific instructions on what to do, what to destroy, where the files were, what was important and what was not worth my time."
"Weren't the other people who worked there suspicious of what you were doing there?" he asked.
"There were only a few there on that day, and they knew me. I stopped there occasionally and picked up Rahaf on the way to dinner. I used the excuse that Rahaf was under the weather and I was taking some files home for her. In reality, I was taking the printed files to the basement and putting them through the shredder."