“A surgical mask is sufficient,” Khong said. “Really.”
Colonel Pak gave a withering glare. “I was led to believe what you have is suitable for Doctor Ranjhani’s needs.”
“Please, please, please.” Khong waved his hand, motioning the men through the open door. “Come and see for yourselves.”
Doctor Khong walked like he spoke and led the little entourage haltingly down a narrow corridor. Naked incandescent bulbs spaced along the mildewed ceiling struggled to emit any light at all. Unmarked doors, like those in a cheap hotel, ran down either side of the hall. There were no windows and, Ranjhani noticed, no sound but the electric whir of unseen fans. The smell of mothballs and, oddly enough, boiling fish hung on the air. Khong paused at the sixth door on the right, produced four surgical cloth masks from the pocket of his lab coat. He passed them to the men.
Donning one himself, he waited a moment for everyone to stretch the elastic over their ears, then shouldered his way into the room before the colonel could chastise him again.
Ali stopped in his tracks on the hallway side of the door, a low moan escaping his chest. In spite of himself, Qasim Ranjhani held the scented kerchief to his nose. The colonel gagged a bit, quickly turning it into a cough so as not to appear weak.
“As you see,” Doctor Khong said, “the virus is virulent, just as I told you.” He pointed with an open hand to four hospital tables lined up on the other side of a head-high glass partition. The lab was glaringly bright in comparison to the dim hallway, like an operating room or dentist’s office. “Weak outside the body, but really, the virus runs wild once it finds a home.”
Ranjhani noticed a metal drain grate in the center of the floor, for easy cleaning. The colonel had bragged on the ride in how North Korean surgeons saved a great deal of money during their training by using Yodok prisoners to practice their craft. With an endless supply of patients, they could practice unneeded appendectomies and all manner of operations and experiments, generally without the benefit of costly anesthesia. It was a gruesome notion, but one Ranjhani could understand as long as the surgeries were for a scientific purpose.
On the far side of the glass partition, two women and two men occupied the four tables. Two lay faceup, two were facedown, illustrating the full effects of Doctor Khong’s project. All four were completely nude, their swollen bodies exposed to the bright light and chilly air of the laboratory. Wide leather straps secured their ankles to each individual table. Eruptions of angry red boils covered the patients, draining in horrific gore on the dingy sheets beneath them. Even the soles of their feet were not immune from the pustules.
“As you can see, the disease manifests outwardly through the formation of boils,” Doctor Khong said, waving a hand at the glass. The partition did not go all the way to the ceiling and proved to be more for appearance than any real quarantining effect.
The colonel stuck out his lip, feeling it necessary to prove he was in charge by giving at least some of the briefing, though he was just getting most of the information himself. “Everyone has likely had a boil at some point in his life,” he said. “It is easy to understand the intense pain this virus would cause.”
“Quite so, Dear Colonel,” Khong said. If he was upset at the interruption, he didn’t show it. “The boils are painful. Extremely so. But they are only a symptom. Death occurs due to acute respiratory distress. The Americans call it ARDS. In my studies with prisoners it has proven one hundred percent fatal.”
“Ah,” Ranjhani observed. “But these prisoners are half starved already.”
“That is correct,” Khong said. “But I feel certain that mortality would reach well over ninety percent, even in healthy Americans.”
“Let us now ask the real question,” Ranjhani said. “Is it contagious?”
“Very much so,” Khong said, “given the right set of circumstances.” His head bounced as if on a spring. His eyes began to dart again, as if he expected the bullet Colonel Pak had promised. “The virus must enter the bloodstream to be communicable.”
Pak sputtered in angry protest, obviously seeing a sale slip away.
Ranjhani raised a hand to calm him. “Interesting,” he said, leaning closer to the glass to get a look at the woman on the nearest table. “How old is this one?”
“Seventeen.” Doctor Khong spoke clinically, detached, as if the girl wasn’t another human being. “She is pregnant, nearing full term.”
“Hmm, I know this little bitch,” Pak said, lip inching out again. “Jeong Gyo. Her father spoke ill of the Dear Leader during one of his university lectures. A family of dogs.”
The pregnant girl’s head lolled to one side, facing them. A clear oxygen tube ran from her nose. Cracked lips parted, but she did not speak. Her left eye was swollen closed from a pustulent boil on the lower lid. A distended belly was knobby and red as if she’d been branded with a hot poker. One arm was thrown back above her head, exposing a nest of weeping boils that infested her armpit like wasp stings. Straining lungs filled with fluid. Her breath already impeded by the press of the baby against her diaphragm, she took short, shuddering gasps, drowning in the air.
Ranjhani found it difficult to look at but impossible to tear his eyes away.
A smile twitched across Doctor Khong’s face. “I am allowing the virus to run its course in the others. No intervention.” He was obviously pleased with himself. “However, I have sedated this one and put her on supplemental oxygen to ensure that she does not go into shock before the birth. It will be most interesting to see if the virus has passed to the fetus in utero.”
“Quite.” Colonel Pak nodded.
“Tell me, Doctor,” Ranjhani said, taking a breath through his mouth before he spoke, like the up-note of a snore. “Have you identified the disease?”
“That is the issue,” Khong said, his facial tics returning in full force. “We are not certain. We first saw it manifest last winter in a prisoner from the bachelor quarters. They huddle together at night for warmth, leaving their clothes outside in an attempt to freeze the lice. Blood, fecal matter, and other bodily fluids are in great supply in such places. A wonderful environment for such a virus. I’ve done a myriad of tests over the last year—”
The colonel’s lip curled out again, nearly as far as the plate-like brim of his hat. His face screwed into a disgusted sneer. “These prisoners keep company with pigs. They eat all manner of garbage. It is no wonder they catch some disease unknown to civilized man.”
“Quite so, Dear Colonel,” Khong nodded. “Pigs and other animals play a vital role. The exact host from which it sprang is still a mystery. In some ways it resembles smallpox. In other ways, it is closer to respiratory flu. The boils are interesting. Most such sores are full of bacterium from an infected hair follicle or minor cut. These teem with virus. Think of each and every boil as a swollen pocket of extremely potent influenza.” Dark eyes flitted over the lab tables. “No one has ever identified the particular disease that caused the plague of boils in the Judeo-Christian Bible. Perhaps this could be it.”
“What do you know of the Bible, Doctor?” the colonel snapped.
“Nothing more than scientific perusal, Colonel,” Khong said. “I assure you.”
“I am curious, Doctor.” Ranjhani took another long, thinking breath behind the surgical mask. “How much of the virus needs to enter the bloodstream in order to affect the host?”
Khong raised his forefinger, grinning. “That, sir, is the most wonderful thing. I have personally induced it with dirty needles, a small nick with an infected razor, even a dentist’s drill — all with a hundred percent success. Both these women contracted the disease through sexual contact with infected men.”