“He says it’s clean, the air conditioning works, and he checked the engine himself,” Gonzales told Daniels with only the slightest hint of a smirk. “He wants to know what the problem is.”
“As if you didn’t know,” Daniels complained. “Was that the smallest car you could find? Why not a Yugo?”
“Don’t worry, don’t worry.” Gonzales laughed. “He will take you to where we’re staying in his own Jeep.”
Key put a hand on Daniels’s shoulder. “Didn’t think you wanted to go scouring the hospitals with me anyway.”
“That’s what you’re going to do?” the sergeant asked, wincing with anticipated boredom.
“Yeah. And schools. Anyplace we can find out if anybody else”—he looked at Gonzales—“went boom.”
“Hospitals and schools?” Daniels echoed. “You think you’re going to find out anything there?”
“Got to start someplace,” Key told him. “And got to start fast.”
Daniels shook his head curtly. “Let me bring our stuff, whatever’s left of it, to the hotel, then I’ll bring my own prodigious intellect to the problem.”
Key had known the sergeant too long to get unduly worried by that statement. Even so, he felt impelled to give Daniels a disclaimer. “Okay, but keep in mind that even with Captain Logan’s influence, we don’t have much pull here.”
“And,” Gonzales added, “keep in mind that, according to Arabic laws, women may not be in a room alone with a man who is not a relative.”
Daniels shook his head. “Oh, ye of little faith.”
Gonzales laughed. “Oh, we of much faith in knowing what you do. And, by the way, it’s not a hotel.”
“Okay, okay,” Daniels said as he waved them away like annoying gnats. “Go off on your wild goose chase, and let the grown-ups get the goods for you.”
Key waited until Daniels had gone off with the young scurrying man before getting into the passenger seat of the Yaris.
“You think Morty’ll be okay around here?” Key solemnly asked Gonzales, who was in the driver’s seat.
“I was just going to ask you the same thing,” Gonzales answered, half-jokingly. “Let me tell you something. When Sultan Qaboos took over in 1970, he decided to make Oman accessible to non-Muslims and Westerners—in order that we might ‘appreciate the beauty of Islam.’ If Morty was anyplace else in the region, we’d probably find him in pieces being eaten by camels when we got back. But here? They don’t even allow corporal punishment in the schools anymore. He’ll be fine.”
“There’s a ‘but,’” Key observed.
Gonzales sighed a little. “He’ll be fine—probably.”
Key nodded in hopeful agreement as Gonzales started the Yaris’s one-point-five liter, four-cylinder engine.
“Where to, Corporal?”
“Call me Joe,” Key finally suggested. “And take me someplace I can find a translator who won’t spook the locals, and an expert on communicable diseases.” Key looked at the mechanic apologetically. “Preferably both. And step on it.”
Chapter 9
Key didn’t know whether it was his increasing exhaustion and desperation, or simply the seemingly bottomless, concerned eyes of a new player, an assistant professor, that suddenly turned him very, very honest. Whatever it was, Key felt certain that time was running out. And not just for him.
He didn’t think he was just being an alarmist here. That wasn’t his nature. But how many times in human history had something unanticipated, like fleas on rodents, caused something unexpected, like the Black Death, that killed around 200 million human beings and came perilously close to wiping us out?
Probably more than I’m aware of, Key thought, wondering how many extinctions had taken a poke at the dinosaurs before their clock was punched by an asteroid.
Gonzales had been driving him all over the capital in search of what he had asked for, a universal translator as well as an expert in communicable diseases. They had used up most of the eight hours they had gained by flying here going from hospital to hospital. Muscat had at least five dozen of them, and almost nine hundred clinics, dispensaries, and medical centers.
But Gonzales may have introduced him to both when they finally stepped into an office marked Professor Basheer Davi at Oman Medical College—the first private Health Sciences College in Oman—and met the twenty-seven-year-old Esherida Rahal.
“I’m sorry,” she said while coming around a lab table covered with equipment, “but the Professor is not in.”
To Key’s ears, it sounded as if she had been saying that a lot—so much, in fact, that it was beginning to become automatic.
“That’s all right,” he answered, the weariness in his voice matching her own verbal knee jerk. “My friend here”—he motioned toward Gonzales—“thinks you might be able to help us just as well.”
Key watched a variety of reactions flit across her face like a wheel of fortune: it’s too late in the day, I’m really too busy, you’ll have to make an appointment, and some unformed others. But then her oval head and deep eyes lowered, and he saw a resigned, empathetic smile touch her soft, smooth, dark rose lips.
“Please,” she said politely. “Come sit down.” She led them into what was obviously Professor Davi’s office, which reminded Key of many a professor’s office he had seen over the years. Amid piles and piles of papers and books crammed everywhere in the small rectangular room, two simple, inexpensive school chairs flanked a small desk.
“What is the problem?” she asked, her voice the same modulated, lightly accented English it had always been, as she rested against the edge of the desk. Gonzales stood by the door, naturally, and seemingly automatically, assuming the role of a lookout. Key, however, tiredly and gratefully thudded into the chair nearest her.
As Key and Gonzales had come through the halls, they had seen students, both male and female, wearing black pants, white lab coats, and running shoes. There were even coeds without headdresses. But Rahal wore Omaniya, the national dress of the country, only hers was a deep red, and her waqaya headscarf was dark and beautifully embroidered with what looked like representations of constellations. Despite it covering her from her forehead to the ankle of her five-foot-four-inch frame, he could tell she was a fit, very poised young lady.
“The problem”—Key sighed—“is that something is making people explode.” Despite his tiredness, Key carefully noted her reaction of shock. Key’s admission was so blunt that the normally reticent Gonzales stepped forward.
“It’s true,” Gonzales informed her. “I witnessed it. First in Shabhut, and then in Thumrait.”
Rahal’s mouth opened and closed several times as she blinked. To her added credit in Key’s mind, she didn’t even suggest the two were joking. “Explode—exactly how, if I might ask?”
Key nodded in satisfaction. “Good question,” he answered appreciatively, then plunged ahead without reservation. “It wasn’t as if there were a bomb in their chest or anything like that. It didn’t explode outward in that pattern. Their entire bodies seemed to be afflicted. Every limb and every joint.”
“The eyes bulged, tearing just before the detonation,” Gonzales said. “Hot, dark, lumpy liquid came out of every orifice we could see.”
“Hot?” she echoed.
“It was smoking,” Key added.
“Light or dark smoke?”