The camera panned. Hardened Washington, DC, and national journalists, one of the most jaded groups of people known to man, stood with moist eyes. Some of them were openly weeping. Luke caught a brief glimpse of Ed Newsam in a dark pin-striped suit, leaning on crutches. Luke had been invited as well, but he preferred to be here in this hospital room. He wouldn’t consider being anywhere else.
Susan came to the microphone. The audience quieted, just enough so she could be heard. She put her hands on the podium, as if steadying herself.
“We’re still here,” she said, her voice shaking.
Now the crowd exploded.
“And you know what? We’re not going anywhere!”
Deafening noise came through the ear buds. Luke turned the sound down.
“I want…” Susan said, and then stopped again. She waited. The cheering went on and on. Still she waited. She stepped back from the microphone, smiled, and said something to the very tall Secret Service man standing next to her. Luke knew him a little. His name was Charles Berg. He had also saved her life yesterday. Over an eighteen-hour span, Susan’s life had been on the line almost nonstop.
When the crowd noise died somewhat, Susan stepped back to the podium.
“Before we talk, I want you to do something with me,” she said. “Will you? I want to sing ‘God Bless America.’ It’s always been one of my favorite songs.” Her voice cracked. “And I want to sing it tonight. Will you sing it with me?”
The crowd roared its assent.
Then she did it. All by herself, in a small, untrained voice, she did it. There was no celebrity singer there with her. There were no world-class musicians accompanying her. She sang, just her, in front of a room full of people, and with hundreds of millions of people watching worldwide.
“‘God bless America,’” she began. She sounded like a little girl. “‘Land that I love.’”
It was like watching someone walk out onto a high wire between buildings. It was an act of faith. Luke’s throat felt tight.
The crowd did not leave her out there by herself. Instantly, they began to flood in. Better, stronger voices joined her. And she led them.
Outside the darkened room, somewhere down the hall in the quiet of an after-hours hospital, people on duty began to sing.
In the bed next to Luke, Becca stirred. Her eyes opened and she gasped. Her head darted left and right. She seemed ready to spring out of the bed. She saw Luke there, but her eyes showed no recognition.
Luke took out his ear buds. “Becca,” he said.
“Luke?”
“Yes.”
“Can you hold me?”
“Yes.”
He closed the cover to the laptop. He slid into the bed next to her. Her body was warm. He gazed at her face, as beautiful as any supermodel’s. She pressed herself tight against him. He held her in his strong arms. He held her so close, it was almost as if he wanted to become her.
This was better than watching the President.
Down the hall, and everywhere in the country, in bars, in restaurants, in homes, and in cars, the people sang.
CHAPTER FOUR
June 7th
8:51 p.m.
Galveston National Laboratory, campus of the University of Texas Medical Branch – Galveston, Texas
“Working late again, Aabha?” a voice said from Heaven.
The exotic, black-haired woman was almost ethereal in her beauty. Indeed, her name was a Hindi word for beautiful.
She was startled by the voice, and her body jerked involuntarily. She stood, wearing a white airtight containment suit, deep inside the Biosafety Level 4 facility at the Galveston National Laboratory. The suit which protected her also made her look almost like an astronaut on the moon. She always hated wearing the suit. She felt trapped inside of it. But it was what her job demanded.
Her suit was attached to a yellow hose which descended from the ceiling. The hose continually pumped clean air from outside the facility into the containment suit. Even if the suit ruptured, the positive pressure from the hose ensured that none of the laboratory air could get inside.
BSL-4 labs were the highest security laboratories in the world. Inside them, scientists studied deadly, highly infectious organisms that posed a severe threat to public health and safety. Right now, in her blue-gloved hand, Aabha held a sealed vial of the most dangerous virus known to man.
“You know me,” she said. Her suit had a microphone that would carry her voice to the guard watching her on closed circuit television. “I’m a night owl.”
“I know it. I’ve seen you here a lot later than this.”
She pictured the man watching over her. Tom was his name. He was overweight, middle-aged, she thought divorced. Just her and him, alone inside this big empty building at night, and he had very little to do but look at her. It would give her the creeps if she thought about it too much.
She had just removed the vial from the freezer. Moving carefully, she approached the biosafety cabinet, where under normal circumstances, she would open the vial and study its contents.
Tonight wasn’t normal circumstances. Tonight was the culmination of years of preparation. Tonight was what Americans called the Big Game.
Her co-workers at the lab, including Tom the night watchman, thought the beautiful young woman’s name was Aabha Rushdie.
It wasn’t.
They thought she had been born into a wealthy family in the great city of Delhi, in northern India, and that her family had moved to London when she was a young girl. It was laughable. Nothing like that had ever happened to her.
They thought she had obtained a Ph.D. in microbiology and extensive BSL-4 training from King’s College, London. This wasn’t true either, but it might as well be. She knew as much about handling bacteria and viruses as any Ph.D. candidate, if not more.
The vial she held contained a freeze-dried sample of the Ebola virus, which had wreaked such havoc in Africa in recent years. If it were just an Ebola virus sample taken from a monkey, or a bat, or even a human victim… that alone would make it very, very dangerous to handle. But there was much more to the story.
Aabha glanced at the digital clock on the wall. 8:54 p.m. One minute to go. She need only delay for a very short time longer.
“Tom?” she said.
“Yes?” came the voice.
“Did you watch the President on the TV last night?”
“I did.”
Aabha smiled. “What did you think?”
“Think? Well, I think we got problems.”
“Really? I like her very much. I think she is a great lady. In my country…”
The lights in the laboratory went out. It happened without any warning – no flickering, no beeping, nothing at all. For several seconds, Aabha stood in absolute darkness. The sound of convection fans and electrical equipment that was a constant background hum in the lab slowed to a halt. Then there was total silence.
Aabha put what she hoped was just the right note of alarm in her voice.
“Tom? Tom!”
“Okay, Aabha, it’s okay. Hold on. I’m trying to get my… What’s going on in there? My cameras are down.”
“I don’t know. I’m just…”
A bank of yellow emergency lights came on, and the fans started up again. The low light turned the empty lab into an eerie, shadowy world. Everything was dim, except for the bright red EXIT lights which shone in the semi-dark.
“Wow,”