Pandemic

She repeated the pattern, riding the elevator up and down with groups of hotel guests, growing weaker with each trip. On her fourth trip back up, the door opened on the second floor. A striking young woman stepped into the elevator with her two small girls. The pretty sisters wore matching pink bathrobes. Their hair was wet, and each one held a pool towel. They were close in age; the older couldn't have been more than six.

Jahal watched in horror as the mother moved her two girls toward her and the elevator control panel. "I promised they could press the buttons," the mother explained to Khalila with a warm smile.

The room spun. Jahal felt another coughing spasm building. She turned her head to the wall and covered her mouth as she hacked, desperate to keep the bloody virus-soaked sputum from the two little girls.

Jahal backed away from the mother and girls, making her way to the far side of elevator. She wanted to scream at them to leave the contaminated buttons alone, but she knew better. Tears welling in her eyes, Jahal watched as both girls took turns pressing the same button for their floor. And when the youngest daughter reached for the alarm button, her mother's hand shot out and brushed against the steel panel, pulling her daughter's hand away. The mother leaned forward and spoke in a hushed tone to the little girl. Scolded, the little girl's lip began to quiver. And then, for comfort, she stuck the same thumb that had just touched the buttons into her mouth.

CHAPTER 13

POLICE HEADQUARTERS, CAIRO, EGYPT

Sergeant Achmed Eleish patted the pockets of his jacket, desperate for a smoke. After an anxious moment, he remembered tossing the pack in the bottom drawer of his desk — his halfhearted stab at giving up smoking. Ever since the long night he'd spent in hospital with crushing chest pain, later diagnosed as angina, the detective had been under attack from all sides. Samira, his two daughters, his doctor, and even the mosque's imam had been haranguing him to quit. While the others were concerned with Eleish's health, the imam focused on what he perceived as a breach of Islamic taw — according to Mohammed it was a sin to deliberately harm your health or to waste money.

Eleish had to admit they were right. At age fifty, he already carried fifty pounds too many on his tall frame along with his family's propensity for coronary artery disease. But as a dedicated family man, policeman, and otherwise good Muslim, Eleish believed he had the right to one vice, even if it meant smoking himself into a premature grave. So he rummaged through the drawer until he found the pack. He slid a cigarette out and tucked the pack back into the pocket of his rumpled gray suit jacket, knowing that he would need another soon.

He lit the smoke and savored two long puffs before turning his attention to the pile of "open case" files in front of him. As he was reaching for the top file — the tragic, but familiar story of an unsolved rape and murder of a fourteen-year-old prostitute in the slums of Cairo — his phone rang.

"Eleish," he said into the receiver. It was an unusual manner of salutation for a Cairo Police officer, but he had borrowed the idiom years earlier from one of his favorite detective novels, and it had stuck.

"Sergeant, it's me," Bishr Gamal said in a hushed tone.

Eleish could hear traffic noises in the background of the public pay phone, from where Gamal usually called. He could picture the little informer whispering nervously into the phone while constantly checking over his shoulder. He took another drag from his cigarette, then asked, "What is it, Bishr?"

"I am getting back to you about the mosque," Gamal said, referring to the Al-Futuh Mosque. A well-known hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism, the mosque's charismatic cleric, Sheikh Hassan, had enough political cunning and popular support to ward off the local authorities' attempts to rein him in.

"And?" Eleish asked.

"Very interesting things, Sergeant."

"Bishr, I don't have time for mind games," Eleish said, though secretly he enjoyed the drama that Gamal always infused into their conversations.

"But, Sergeant, this is worth more than our usual arrangement," Gamal said.

"Gamal, you always say that! And more often than not, your tips aren't worth anything." Eleish paid Gamal out of his own pocket on a tip-by-tip basis. "But tell me what you know," he sighed. "If it's useful, I'll pay you double."

"Triple." Gamal said.

"Double and a half." Eleish smiled to himself. "Not a piastre more!" He could imagine himself in a raincoat and fedora, speaking the line Bogey style. He suppressed a laugh.

"Okay, Sergeant, okay," he said. "Your man disappeared."

Eleish's smile vanished. He dropped his cigarette into the ashtray. "What do you mean he disappeared?"

"He usually comes for prayer twice a day, but no one has seen him in over eight days," Gamal said. "I asked others at the mosque. No one knows where he's gone."

"Hmmm," Eleish grunted. "Okay, Bishr, what else?"