42. Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter forty-two
Sam sat in stunned silence. The office sounds seemed to recede into the background, become distant, then fade to nothing.
She gripped the phone but the line was dead.
Trevor had hung up. How long she sat there, Sam didn’t know and couldn’t say.
The cubicles were a hive of activity. People passed memos over dividing walls, went back and forth to the coffeemaker, and laughed at jokes.
Sam saw none of it. She thought about Trevor, thirty thousand feet overhead, and she had to fight back tears.
He was in Belgrade because of her. She had dispatched him to the village.
She had been the one who decided they needed someone on site, gathering intel first hand.
She had disobeyed orders and bucked rank in order to confirm her suspicions.
She had been so certain she was right. And she’d been willing to risk Trevor’s life to prove it. That’s what it really came down to.
Sam could have just as easily gone herself.
Why hadn’t she? Because it would be easier for Trevor to disappear a few days than for her?
That’s what she told herself, but was that true?
Hadn’t she sent him because she’d started thinking of herself as the boss?
The queen bee, pulling the strings and dispatching her minions to do the grunt work?
Sam finally put the phone down, propped her elbows on the desk and sank her face in her palms. If Trevor was sick… If he was dying, it was her fault.
Tears finally started to well up. Wetness seeped out from her clamped eyelids and dampened her palms. Her shoulders hitched a few times.
If anyone in the surrounding cubicles noticed, they didn’t say anything. Sam was left to cry in silence while the rest of the office went on with their jobs.
At last, Sam managed to turn off the water works. She searched her desk for tissues, mopped the runny mascara from her eyes, and took a moment to compose herself before crossing the floor to Kearns sanctuary. She knocked but didn’t wait for a response.
“Got a situation,” Sam announced as she opened the door.
Kearns sat at her desk, a poison bullfrog crouched among thick green hedges. The expression on her face would have curdled milk. She looked up from her computer, saw Sam in her doorway, and said, “Come right in.”
“Trevor de Camp is sick,” Sam told her.
“What?” Kearns stood up like someone had run an electric current through her chair. “He’s… Isn’t he..?”
“He’s on a commercial airliner half way over the Atlantic,” Sam confirmed. “And he’s sick.”
Kearns slowly lowered herself back down. Her brow wrinkled. Her piggy little eyes searched the office like she might find answers hidden in the plants. She opened her mouth, worked it soundlessly for a few seconds, then said, “How is that possible?”
“I don’t know.” Sam leaned on the back of one of the chairs facing Kearns’s desk. “But it doesn’t matter how. He’s sick and he’s on a passenger jet full of people because you wouldn’t approve a private flight.”
Kearns leapt up again. This time she wagged a finger at Sam. “Don’t try to blame this on me. I didn’t send him to Belgrade in the first place.”
“If I hadn’t sent him, we’d still wouldn’t know the virus was man-made. We’d be sitting on our hands while a terror group passed around deadly contagions like party favors to all their terrorist buddies at Christmas time.”
“And we wouldn’t have an infected CIA officer on a commercial flight full of people bound for Dulles International.” Her bullfrog neck turned red. The color crept right up into her cheeks. Her eyes were hard black dots.
Sam closed her eyes and massaged a spot on her forehead with her fingertips. “This is getting us nowhere. We could stand here all-day pointing fingers.”
“Agreed,” said Kearns.
“Question is what do we do now?” Sam asked. “We have a planeload of potentially infected people bound for Dulles International.”
Kearns took a moment to calm herself. It looked like it took a monumental effort. Finally she asked, “How certain are we that de Camp is sick with the virus? Could it just be a cold? Something he ate?”
Sam shook her head. “He’s locked in the airplane bathroom throwing up every few minutes.”
“Not proof positive, but proof enough,” Kearns said. “Probably too late to reroute the flight to a smaller airport and that wouldn’t do us any good anyway. We need to isolate it as soon as it lands.”
“That might cause a panic,” Sam pointed out.
“What other choice do we have?” Kearns hitched her shoulders.
“If we don’t? And if de Camp really is infected?
We would be responsible for letting two hundred potential carriers spread throughout the beltway.
There are nearly six million people living in and around D.C. You really want to take that chance?”
“No,” Sam admitted.
“Me neither,” said Kearns. “Start making phone calls. I want that plane quarantined as soon as it lands. Let airport authorities know there is a potential deadly contagion aboard. Nobody on or off until CDC is on scene.”
“Consider it done,” Sam said. “What are you going to do?”
“I have to alert DDI Nguy?n. He’ll want to notify the President.”