50. Chapter Fifty
Chapter fifty
It took Sam the better part of three hours to finally access the tagged and sealed container with Trevor’s belongings.
First she’d been forced to run the security gambit into the restricted quarantine area, which had become a quagmire of airport security, local police, FBI, and CDC.
Her DHS credentials allowed her to breeze past police and airport officials.
FBI and CDC were another matter entirely.
Thankfully the Department of Homeland Security bona fides cooked up by the Alibi Shop stood up to scrutiny and, after donning a hazmat suit in a heavily secured CDC sterilization center, she broken into the plastic container with Trevor’s clothes and luggage.
Working inside the hazmat suit made everything slow and difficult.
She had limited peripheral vision and could hear her own breathing, incredibly loud inside the headgear.
But she reminded herself, everybody else would be suffering from the same restricted sight lines.
She craned her neck up to make sure no one was watching.
A dozen CDC first responders were all busy running tests, jotting notes, and collecting samples. The situation was chaotic at best. They knew, or thought they knew, that Sam was a DHS official gathering information for the President, and they let her get on with her work.
She made one last check of the bin, to be certain nothing else would point back to a CIA officer named Trevor de Camp, then slipped the phony wallet and credentials from a secret housing on the ruggedized tablet she’d carried through decontamination.
The fake credentials went into the box, then Sam stashed Trevor’s real identity into a sealed baggy that she closed up in the back of the tablet.
She carried his laptop deeper into the tent housing all the passenger luggage and she left it on a shelf.
The laptop was heavily encrypted and password protected.
And all the cargo would eventually be thoroughly decontaminated.
Some of it would undoubtedly go unclaimed.
In any large-scale operation like this, things got lost and misplaced.
With a little luck, the laptop would be counted among several other items of discarded and forgotten luggage.
That done, Sam could have walked away. She probably should have walked away.
Instead, she made her way through the series of interconnecting tents to the hospitalization area, stopping to display her fake DHS badge half a dozen times along the way.
Finally she reached the actual doctor overseeing the patients.
A small makeshift emergency ward had been erected on the runway, with over two dozen gurneys surrounded by thick plastic sheeting, with large black rubberized cables snaking over the blacktop and held in place by duct tape.
Seven doctors in hazmat suits were busy attending to people in beds. At first glance, most of them seemed fine, though scared. Sam caught one of the doctors and introduced herself. “Samantha Klein, DHS.”
“I’m a little busy, Mrs. Klein,” the doctor said, her voice muffled by a plastic faceplate.
“I understand, doctor. I’m not here to interrupt your work, but the President needs an update. Are all these people sick?”
The doctor huffed and rolled her eyes, like being forced to update the President of the United States on the well-being of her patients were a regular and annoying occurrence. She said, “Most of these people are experiencing functional symptoms due to sociogenic illness.”
“Er…” Sam had no idea what any of that meant. But it didn’t sound good. She asked, “Is that serious?”
“No,” the doctor told her. “It happens all the time. A local news channel puts out a report about chicken infected with salmonella and the next thing you know the local ER is flooded with people experiencing the very symptoms the news told people to be on the lookout for. Half of them never even ate the chicken, but they’re certain they’ve been poisoned. ”
“So they’re imagining it?”
“More or less.”
“That’s a relief.”
“To you maybe,” said the doctor. “For us it makes a lot of extra work figuring out who’s really sick and who is just scared.”
“How many people are actually sick?”
“So far just one.” She pointed to the very end of the unit where one patient was hooked up to half a dozen machines.
“May I speak with him?”
“How did you know it was a man?”
Sam had to think fast. She said, “DHS. We’ve got people everywhere.”
The doctor arched a brow. “You can try. He’s mostly in and out of consciousness. I don’t know if he’ll be able to answer any questions.”
“Will he survive?”
The doctor put a hand on her hip. It caused the heavy hazmat suit to rumple. She turned for a look at Trevor. “Honestly, we don’t think so. He was in a pretty advanced state when the plane landed. I’m surprised we’ve managed to keep him alive this long.”