Executive orders - Tom Clancy [158]
That was when the smell hit them, a familiar African smell from the entry of the monkeys a few hours earlier, decidedly not something one would associate with Paris or a place as clean and orderly as the Pasteur Institute had to be. Next, Maria Magdalena looked around and realized that the signs on the walls were not in French. There was no way she could know what the situation was, there were merely grounds for confusion, to be followed by questions-and then, just as well, it was time, before the questions could be asked. A soldier appeared and took her arm and led her away, too uncomprehending still to say anything. She merely looked over her shoulder at an unshaven man in surgical greens, a sad look on his face giving greater substance to her confusion.
What is this? Who is she? the director of the project asked.
It is a rule of their religion that they cannot travel alone. To protect their chastity, Moudi explained. Otherwise I could not have come here with our patient.
She is still alive? He hadn't been there for the arrival.
Moudi nodded. Yes, we should be able to keep her going another three days, maybe four, he thought.
And the other?
Moudi dodged: That is not for me to say.
We could always have another-
No! That would be barbaric, Moudi protested. Such things are hateful to God.
And what we plan to do is not? the director asked. Clearly Moudi had been in the bush for too long. But it wasn't worth fighting over. One fully infected Ebola patient was all they needed. Get cleaned up and we will go up to see her.
Moudi headed off to the doctors' lounge on the second floor. The facility was actually more private than its Western counterparts, as people in this part of the world had higher standards of body modesty. The plastic suit, he saw with some surprise, had survived the trip without a single tear. He dumped it in a large plastic bin before heading into a shower whose hot water was supplemented with chemicals-he hardly noticed the smell anymore-and there he enjoyed five minutes of sanitary bliss. On the flight he'd wondered if he would ever be clean again. In the shower now, his mind asked a similar question, but more quietly. He emerged to don fresh greens-fresh everything, in fact-and to complete his normally fastidious routine. A medical orderly had placed a brand-new suit in the lounge for him, this one a blue American Racal fresh out of its box, which he put on before heading out into the corridor. The director, similarly dressed, was waiting for him, and together they walked down toward the suite of treatment rooms.
There were only four of them, behind sealed, guarded doors. The Iranian army ran this facility. The doctors were military physicians, and the orderlies all men with battlefield experience. Security was tight, as one would expect. Moudi and the director had cleared security on the first floor, however, and the guard at the post touched the buttons to open the doors into the air lock. These opened with a hiss of hydraulics to reveal a second set, and they could see that smoke from the soldier's cigarette was sucked into the secure area. Good. The air system was working properly. Both men had a strange prejudice against their own countrymen. It would have been preferable for this entire facility to have been built by foreign engineers-Germans were popular in the Middle East for such things-but Iraq had made that mistake to its sorrow. The orderly Germans kept plans of everything they built, as a result of which so many of their projects had been bombed to dust. And so while a lot of the building's hardware had been bought elsewhere, the facility had been constructed locally. Their very lives depended on the exact performance of every subsystem here, but that could not be helped now. The inner doors would not open unless the outer ones were locked tight. That worked. The director activated them, and they proceeded.
Sister Jean Baptiste was in the last room on the right.