Pandemic

Sha'rawi looked over her shoulder. Though Jahal couldn't see the other woman's face in the near darkness, she could feel and smell her warm, garlicky breath. "I should go in your place, Khalila," she said earnestly.

Khalila stroked Sharifa's cheek, feeling the slight pocks of old acne scars. "I want to do this," Khalila said.

"But, Khalila, you are so beautiful and intelligent," Sha'rawi said and her voice cracked. "I am the slow orphan girl that no man would marry. I have no husband or children to live for."

"Hush, Sharifa. I don't like to hear you talk this way," Jahal removed her hand from the girl's cheek. "Women do not need to live for men or children. You are very special. You serve God here." Then she spoke in a near whisper. "Besides, my husband is dead."

"Please, Khalila, tell me more about Zamil," Sha'rawi said.

Jahal shook her head slowly.

"Is it too painful?" Sha'rawi asked.

Jahal shrugged, but pain had nothing to do with it. Every waking moment she carried the pain of his loss like a knife in her side, but she had decided not to discuss the memories of their perfect life together with anyone else. She had learned that protecting the privacy of those memories helped maintain their lingering sense of intimacy.

Sha'rawi groped for Jahal's hand and squeezed it tight. "I had no right to ask—"

"Zamil never wanted to go to Afghanistan, but he felt duty bound," Jahal said calmly. "He was a scholar not a fighter." She had a vivid mental picture of her scrawny, beautiful husband packing up his heavy books to drag to a dark cave in the middle of a war. "The night he crossed the border from Pakistan into Afghanistan, I found out I was pregnant"

Only when Jahal heard Sha'rawi's sobs did she realize that tears had begun to run down her own cheeks. "Ten days later, I miscarried," Jahal said slowly. "Everyone wondered why I mourned so hard for a baby I had only carried for weeks, but I knew."

"Knew what?"

"It was a sign." Khalila said. "A week later I heard Zamil had been killed by an American bomb that destroyed his cave on the same day I lost my baby." Her voice went hoarse. "The very same day"

Sha'rawi squeezed her hand even tighter but said nothing.

"I accepted the Fate God had chosen for me," Jahal said, feeling the resolve cement inside her. "I vowed to make myself useful. To commit the way Zamil had. Then Sheikh Hassan introduced me to Abu Lahab. And now here I am beside you."

Sha'rawi sniffed several times. "But you will leave in the morning. And without you…"

"Listen to me, Sharifa." Jahal let go of her friend's hand and placed her hand on Sharifa's cheek again. "You will be fine without me. Abu Lahab will take care of you."

Sha'rawi swallowed. "I will miss you so much."

"As I will miss you." Jahal tapped the woman lightly on her cheek. "Sharifa, I want you to promise me something."

"What?"

"That you will stay away from the Major."

"Major Sabri? Why?"

"He is not like the rest of us." She paused. "He is no fool but…"

"But?"

"Remember what I said about some men?" Jahal asked.

Sha'rawi nodded. "That they are full of hate?"

"And very dangerous," Jahal said wistfully. "Just like the Major."

CHAPTER 11

COMMUNIST PARTY HEADQUARTERS, JIAYUGUAN CITY

Like everything else he had seen from the Cultural Revolution era, the box of a boardroom struck Noah Haldane as austere. He decided that if the bank of windows lining the wall behind him were even half the size of the dour black-and-white portraits of the Party functionaries hanging on the other walls, the room might have come across as a little less oppressive.

Noah sat between Duncan McLeod and Milly Yuen at the large, rectangular board table. Helmut Streicher sat on the other side of the table beside the city's chief health officer, Yung Se Choy. A blueprint-sized, detailed map of Jiayuguan City covered the tabletop in front of them. In his late forties and skinny to the point of swimming in his navy-blue suit, Yung Choy had a mop of thick hair and a wispy mustache that failed to hide the scar of a repaired cleft lip. Dr. Kai Huang, the regional hospital's young director, sat on the far side of Choy and fidgeted distractedly with his pen. Both Choy and Huang spoke passable English, but Milly Yuen filled in as translator where necessary.

Streicher ran a finger over the map. "Here," he barked in his crisp Germanic accent. "All known cases of viral transmission have occurred among people living in these zones in red." He pointed to the north corner of the city, where several blocks had been circled in red. "And the blue lines represent the buffer zone," he said of the single blue rectangle that enclosed all the red zones plus a buffer of several city blocks.

"Fucking great, Streicher!" McLeod hollered. "No doubt all those potential Typhoid Marys knew better than to walk past the little red and blue lines."