The Deadliest Strain

Chapter Twenty-One

Fahimah could have stayed the night at her friends' house and returned the following day. She had given Jalal's name to the Americans, though, and she didn't want to risk them going after the old man in the morning.

It was half past twelve when she had them drop her off at the corner, one block west of the Shahan Hotel. She wasn't about to risk exposing others. She feared that anyone who was connected with her — family, friend or whatever — would be considered guilty by association by Agent Newman.

She saw no pedestrians on the street, but there were still a few cars. Across the road, a small white car slowed down and the driver and a man in the backseat called out the windows at her. Realizing they were about to make a U-turn, she ran the remaining half block to the front door of the hotel. It was locked. Glancing back as she knocked on the door, she saw the white car coming slowly down the street toward the hotel.

"Come on," she murmured in Kurdish, knocking harder.

A sleepy doorman appeared and opened the door just as the car pulled up in front. Fahimah hadn't seen him that afternoon, but he let her in and locked the door.

As she gave the doorman her name, she looked out at the street and pointed to the white car. Two sets of eyes were watching her. The doorman looked out, and the car immediately pulled away from the curb.

"Mamnun," she said, thanking him.

The doorman told her that they were waiting for her. She didn't have to ask whom he was talking about. Thanking him again, she went up the stairs to the second floor.

All the rooms they'd taken were adjacent to one another. None of the soldiers were in the hallway. No one to guard, Fahimah decided.

She didn't know which room was Austyn's, so she tapped softly on both of the doors adjacent to hers before putting the key into the lock of her own room.

Her door opened before she could even turn the key.

"You're back," Austyn said, relief written all over his face.

His hair, though short, was standing on end, as if he'd been running his fingers through it. He was dressed in an old T-shirt and khaki shorts. As he stepped out and looked up and down the hallway, she thought he looked tense, weary, and somewhat worse for wear.

"I told you I would meet you back at the hotel," she said, going past him and into her room. "I suppose we need to talk."

He followed her, slamming the door shut behind him. "You're damn right!"

She glanced over her shoulder, surprised at the show of temper.

"How could you do that to us?" he asked, the look of relief completely gone. "Do you know everyone who traveled with us from Afghanistan is out searching the city for you right now?"

He needed to vent. She let him. She peeled the scarf off her head and threw it on a chair before walking to the bathroom.

"U.S. military barely has any presence whatsoever here in Erbil, and still they had to call every off-duty soldier they could find to help with the search," he continued.

Fahimah turned on the water in the sink, waiting for it to warm up. The temperature had dropped outside. She'd left the windows open in the afternoon. It was cool in her room.

"Would you mind shutting the window?" she asked.

Even as he shut the window, he continued to lecture. She tuned him out and looked at her face in the mirror. She wasn't used to this — actually seeing her reflection anytime she wished. She looked at the dark circles under her eyes. Her cheeks were almost sunken. She was too pale. She ran a hand across her head. Her hair had been reddish-brown for all of her adult years. She wondered what color it would be now that it had a chance to grow out. She noted a thin streak of gray on one side. She could live with that.

Her friend Banoo had told her that at first they hadn't recognized her. Banoo and her husband and son had been in a car waiting near the place where Jalal spread his rug. As big a city as Erbil was, word traveled fast. They heard that Fahimah had arrived that afternoon, and they had a good idea where she would be heading. It was Banoo's son that had come to her at the open-air bazaar. The last time Fahimah had seen the boy, he'd been a mere toddler.

In the old days, Banoo and her husband had lived in Baghdad, and both of them taught at the same university as Fahimah. Now Banoo taught at Salahaddin University in Erbil, while her husband had given up teaching and was making a career for himself in real estate development. They'd taken Fahimah back to a beautiful, sprawling house on the outskirts of the city where she'd met the newest addition to her friends' family, a baby girl of two years.

Life hadn't stood still while she was away. Looking into the mirror, she realized that she, too, had once had dreams of her own. But that had been a lifetime ago, and dreams sometimes go to waste.

She bent over the sink and cupped her palms, filling them with warm water. She splashed her face again and again, trying to wash the saltiness of her tears away.

It was some time before she lifted her face and looked into the mirror again. Her eyes were red-rimmed. Her face was flushed. She saw Austyn's reflection in the mirror. He was leaning against the doorway, watching her, his arms folded across his chest.

"Are you finished lecturing me?" she asked.

"I wasn't lecturing. I was… reprimanding," he corrected. "There's a difference."

"Yes, I know. But I wanted to give you the benefit of the doubt."

He raised one eyebrow.

Fahimah took a towel off the shelf and dried her face. "You lecture someone out of concern, worry. You reprimand a person if you think they have done something wrong. Now, which is it?"

He didn't answer. She turned around and saw the struggle so plainly reflected in his face.

"You didn't have to come back," he said, his tone much more gentle.

"I know. But I told you I would."

"I should have trusted you," he said quietly.

"You should have trusted me," she repeated.

He turned and disappeared inside the room. As she hung the towel on the rack, she heard him talking to someone on the telephone. He was contacting the others to call off the search.

Fahimah took her time. She wanted to be composed, have her emotions under control. When she stepped out of the bathroom, he was sitting on a chair near the window. Other than the bed, the only place to sit was a bench by the same window. She grabbed a blanket from the foot of the bed and went to the bench.

"You must be hungry. I ordered room service."

"This is Erbil," she reminded him. "We're not in London. .or New York."

"Really?" he said with a straight face. "Well, whoever answered in the kitchen said he'd brew us some tea "

"He's going to add hot water to the tea from this afternoon."

"That's okay with me, so long as he brings up the five lumps of sugar I asked for."

"Five?"

"Sure, I'm learning how to drink tea here. You just put a cube between your teeth and drink your tea through it."

"And you need five for that."

"Well, you said yourself that the tea was going to be strong."

Fahimah smiled and shook her head. "You're going to rot your teeth before leaving Iraq."

She opened one of the windows a little and then sat on the bench, wrapping the blanket around herself.

"You did just ask me to close that, didn't you?"

"Yes, I did."

They said nothing for a while, and she was thankful that he let her just sit. A cool, dry breeze wafted in and Fahimah closed her eyes, breathing in the familiar smells. Everything she'd heard tonight played back through her mind. The news of a mass grave they'd found on the road to Halabja. The news of their other friends. The fate of the few family members Fahimah and Rahaf had left behind. The names of all those who had died during the years of senseless violence that was ripping their country to shreds.

The American soldiers might have been fooled the day they took Fahimah, but Banoo and her husband knew soon enough about them arresting her instead of her sister. They suspected immediately, but Rahaf had told them about it not long afterward. No one knew where to look for her, though.

Her peace and quiet was short-lived.

"Are you going to tell me where you went?" he asked.

"No."

"Why not?"

"I won't tell you where I went because it has nothing to do with what you're after."

"Did you see your sister?"

"No."

"Do you know if she's in Erbil?"

"Yes… no."

"Which is it?"

"I know she is not in Erbil."

"Are you going to tell me on your own what you found out, or do I have to keep asking questions?"

"Yes, I will tell you on my own," she said, realizing that she'd been taunting him.

There was a knock on the door.

"It must be your old tea," she said, starting to get down from the bench.

"You sit. I'll get it."

Fahimah watched him reach under the back of his T-shirt. That's when she saw the gun tucked into the waistband of his shorts.

"You're armed," she said, as if that should be news to him, too.

He made a hush sound at her and went to the door. There were no security peepholes. He put his foot and shoulder to the door before opening it a crack.

"Chai," someone said from the other side.

"Uh…. mammon." Austyn opened the door and took the small tray from the doorman's hand.

"You're learning the language," she told him, putting her feet down so that there was room on the bench for him to put down the tray.

"I only know tea and thank you."

"That's very good for half a day. If you learn the word for food, you'll be ready to apply for residency."

He put the tray down next to her and sat down on the bench, as well. She touched one of the glasses. "It's cold.

He must not have had any hot water in the samovar, so he just added cold water to the afternoon tea."

"No big deal. Beggars can't be choosers."

"At least he didn't forget your sugar cubes," she commented, picking up one of the glasses of tea. She drank half of it down in one gulp. She hadn't realized how thirsty she was.

"I had a telephone call from the U.S. before you got back tonight."

His tone was once again serious.

"There's been another outbreak of the bacteria," he told her.

Fahimah wished it would go away. She wanted this to be like the anthrax scare that she'd watched on the news back in 2001, but obviously it wasn't going to be.

"More casualties?"

"One confirmed dead," he told her. "But this time the attack was in Washington, D.C. In a very populated area. The chance of it spreading is huge. Whoever is behind this is getting bolder by the minute."

"Rahaf isn't behind it," she reminded him again, to make sure he hadn't forgotten.

"Do you know where she is?"

Fahimah nodded, debating with herself how much to tell him.

"Will you take us to her?" he asked.

"Your soldiers in American uniforms can't go where she is."

"Where is she?"

"In the mountains."

"Which mountains?"

'The Zagros Mountains."

"Zagros…" he repeated, thinking. "But isn't that a huge mountain range?" he asked.

"More than fifteen hundred kilometers. They run from Kurdistan down through northwestern Iran to the Persian Gulf," she explained, putting the glass of tea back on the tray. "But we don't have to search the entire length of the Zagros to find her."

"Do you have a specific location?"

She nodded halfheartedly. "I know the general area. Rahaf is working in the refugee camps on the Iranian side of the border with Kurdistan. There used to be four camps… Sahana, Pavana, Saryas and Jwanro. I'm told she goes between them as needed."

Fahimah knew that it would be a problem for U.S. soldiers to get there. After five years in prison, she'd needed to read only a handful of headlines to know that relations between the Iranian and American governments were as hostile as ever.

"What's she doing there?" he asked.

"The people I met tonight told me my sister is working there as a doctor."

"But she didn't go to medical school, did she?"

She stared at him for a long moment. "Over the past three decades, five thousand villages have been destroyed by the Iraqis. When you're forced to pack a lifetime of belongings onto the back of a truck or a mule and cross the mountains to escape the genocide that is happening to tens of thousands of your people, when your home for more than a decade has been a tent on the side of a mountain and you rely on others' generosity to eat or clothe your children… you are not so foolish as to ask for the credentials of the doctor who is caring for your sick child. Especially when that doctor is one of your own people."

Fahimah and Rahaf had lived in those camps themselves after the horror at Halabja. Even back then, with thousands of people being in dire need of medical assistance, real doctors had been a rarity.

He watched her silently for a few heartbeats. "Is that where Rahaf has been for the past five years?" he asked.

"Yes," she told him. "And I will take one of you to her."