a city that was partly quaint and partly posh. He could also feel Colonel al-Shehri’s condemnation emanating from the front seat like a warning siren that only true believers could hear.
Once inside King Abdullah University Hospital, Henry felt less of a trespasser. Dr. Iftikar Ahmed, a white-haired Pakistani, greeted them and walked them immediately to the scrub room, where they were fitted with gowns and gloves and masks. Dr. Ahmed was in a state of high anxiety, his eyebrows reaching nearly to his hairline. There was a faint sheen of sweat on his brow, and he spoke rapidly in a high voice with a singsong Pakistani accent. “We had four patients this morning, but now there are ten,” he said. “Ten! Ten! And one of them is a nurse.”
Henry noted the sanitary hallways and the properly gowned hospital personnel. They took an elevator to the fifth-floor isolation unit, which was behind a double set of air-lock doors. It smelled reassuringly of formaldehyde. Henry allowed himself a small measure of relief.
Six patients were in the ward, two of them already intubated. Henry asked Dr. Ahmed when the first case had appeared. “Only two days ago, we had one from Indonesia, then yesterday three more. Today, six, including this man here,” He pointed to a thin young man under an oxygen tent.
“Where did he come from?”
“Manchester, England,” Dr. Ahmed said.
Henry looked at the chart. The patient’s name was Tariq Ismail. His fever was 40.2 degrees Celsius—over 104 degrees Fahrenheit. A heart monitor registered minimal electrical activity. There was a chest tube to drain off the fluid on his lungs.
“He came complaining of an earache, so we didn’t take it so seriously,” Dr. Ahmed continued. “On examination, we discovered that the drum had ruptured. We did paracentesis to reduce the inflammation, but then the locus of pain moved behind the eye orbit. Now, he has lost his sight completely. The damage to his lungs is, I fear, beyond repair. And, as you can see, we have the onset of cyanosis.”
The young man’s lips were vividly blue, as were his fingers.
“What about the blood work?”
“Extremely high concentrations of interferons.”
“A cytokine storm,” Henry said. An uncontrolled immune response. Fever and the aches that wracked the joints were evidence of white blood cells pumping out cytokines, the body’s foot soldiers in the war against infection. A cytokine storm was triggered when the body felt itself to be under mortal attack, and every weapon at hand was put into play. It was total war. Henry had seen the results in the body of the young French doctor he autopsied in Indonesia. Her lungs had been liquefied by her own overwhelming immune reaction.
“Another odd thing,” Dr. Ahmed said. “Notice the swellings on the skin.” He indicated what looked like small hives along the neck and chest. “Subcutaneous emphysema. Like little balloons. Apparently from the air being forced out of the lungs.”
“Is he conscious?” Henry asked.
“He was earlier,” said Dr. Ahmed.
Henry leaned down toward the young man. They were separated by the oxygen tent and the respirator, so there was little chance of infection. And yet Henry knew that the air in the room was charged with the infectious particles of a nameless disease that no one yet understood.
“Tariq,” said Henry. “Can you hear me?”
Tariq’s eyes fluttered.
“Are you in pain?” Henry asked.
“Not pain,” he whispered. “Something else. Big. A big feeling.”
Henry knew the feeling he was describing. It was death.
“Tariq, do you remember meeting a man from Indonesia? Perhaps when you first arrived.”
A long moment passed. Then Tariq managed to say, “Can’t.”
“Can’t what?”
“Think.”
“This is important,” Henry urged. “Please try to remember. His name was Bambang Idris. Do you hear me? Bambang Idris. Maybe sixty years old. Did you meet anybody by that description?”
But Tariq was silent. The heart monitor let out an alarm that sounded like a scream. Dr. Ahmed looked at Henry, then switched off the monitor. Both Prince Majid and Dr. Ahmed said a quick prayer.
“Shit!” said Henry, forgetting where he was.
Dr. Ahmed and a nurse looked at him curiously. “Dr. Parsons is new to our religion,” Majid explained. “I am his guide.”
The others in the room broke into broad smiles. “Mashallah,” Dr. Ahmed said. “Allah be praised.”
“The purpose of our prayer is to prepare the believer for his journey into death,” Majid said, as if Henry were under his instruction. “We ask God to lift his burdens and make the place he is going better than the world he departs. I will teach it to you