autopsy suffered the same grim fate as Ustinov, having accidentally pricked himself with a needle while extracting a sample of Ustinov’s bone marrow.
Before burial, Ustinov’s body was covered in disinfectant and wrapped in plastic, then placed in a metal box that was welded shut. The virus that killed him, however, endured. It was extracted from Ustinov’s organs. His colleagues labeled it Variant U, in Dr. Ustinov’s honor. The Ustinov strain was cultured and stockpiled and placed on ballistic missiles with multiple-entry warheads.
* * *
—
TRAPPED IN SAUDI ARABIA by the quarantine, Henry spent his time in the field with Majid. The huge Health Ministry in Riyadh had a poorly used research facility. Majid confiscated whatever Henry needed to make it functional, but he couldn’t provide knowledgeable lab assistants with experience in developing vaccines. Henry fought the disease with the only weapon he could muster: antiserum from the survivors.
He and Majid knew the risks. The program specified the regular bleeding of victims who were completely symptom free. Each was commanded (this was an absolute monarchy) to surrender five hundred milliliters of whole blood every week. Blood-filled tubes were placed in a centrifuge, which stripped away platelets and blood cells. An amber layer of serum floated on top of the red blood cells, containing all of a person’s antibodies. The serum from one survivor was enough for a single injection of antiserum, so the quantity was far from adequate to deal with the hundreds of thousands who had been infected, and the purity was impossible to determine. The danger was that the serum might contain pathogens, including Kongoli itself, that hadn’t been filtered out.
Marco and the team at the CDC were trying the same thing, hoping to find the correct dosage. “So far we’ve had excellent success in vitro, and we’re trying it in monkeys,” Marco said. “What are you seeing with your human patients?”
Henry shook his head in puzzlement. “For some reason, I can’t get the records from the Health Ministry. I’m going to demand an answer tonight when I see Majid. There must be a reason for this. He knows as well as I how important this is.”
Majid had been visiting hospitals all day. When Henry came back to the palace and found him in his study, he was clearly exhausted and discouraged. “There is no place to put all the patients,” he said. “It feels as if half the country is ill. We’ve turned sports stadiums into additional wards, but we don’t have the staff to support them. This is a challenge, Henry. I don’t know how the kingdom can endure another month of this.”
“All the more reason to concentrate on the antiserum regime,” said Henry. “We’ve expanded our pool of donors considerably, but without the data there’s no way of measuring our success. You must tell me what’s going on. Is it simply bureaucratic incompetence or is there something else at work?”
Majid looked away, unable to face Henry directly. “I’m so ashamed to tell you this,” Majid said, his voice little more than a whisper. “My family has commandeered the entire supply of antiserum we’ve secured so far.”
“Do they understand the danger?”
“What they see is people dying, and they are frightened. So, because they are princes, they assume they are entitled to save themselves first.”
“If I believed in an immortal soul, I would say it is the first organ to be contaminated by disease,” Henry said.
“We Muslims believe that illness is a test that God brings upon us.”
“That sounds like punishment.”
“Not at all. The Qur’an instructs us that if God were to punish humanity for what it deserved, there would be nobody left on earth! We are also instructed that, for every ailment, there is a cure. And so it is up to us to find it, my friend!”
Majid walked over to the bookshelf to find a passage in the hadith to support his argument. “I forget the exact language, but I will—” As he was talking, a lamp suddenly flew across the room and Majid himself rose into the air in slow motion, his robe billowing around him, and was then hurled into a wall with shocking force, followed by shards of glass and masonry and a massive roar that ended when the lamp collided with Henry’s head.
When Henry came to, the room was swirling with dust and smoke. He was alive. His breath was shallow. He was not in pain, but he was numb and confused, and for a moment he couldn’t remember where he was. Someplace