Peyton had just fallen asleep again when a noise from the bedside table woke her. She froze, listening, but it stopped suddenly.
It came again: something brushing up against the table.
A vibration.
A glow emanated from beyond the lamp, throwing light up at the ceiling.
She exhaled, grabbed her buzzing cell phone, and checked the time—3:35 a.m. She didn’t recognize the number, but she knew the country code. 41. Switzerland.
She answered immediately.
“Peyton, I’m sorry to wake you,” Dr. Jonas Becker said.
The German epidemiologist led a rapid outbreak response team for the World Health Organization. Peyton held a similar job at the Centers for Disease Control. The two epidemiologists had worked together a dozen times in hot zones around the world, and over that time, they had developed a special bond.
“It’s okay,” she said. “What’s happened?”
“I just emailed you.”
“Hang on.”
Peyton’s bare feet again slapped against the hardwood floor as she raced to the second bedroom. She sat at the cheap Ikea desk, woke her laptop, and activated her secure VPN software, opening a remote link to her terminal at the CDC.
She studied the pictures in the email, taking in every detail.
“I see it,” she said.
“The Kenyan Ministry of Health sent us this a few hours ago. A doctor at a regional hospital in Mandera took the photos.”
Peyton had never heard of Mandera. She opened Google Maps and studied the location, which was in the far northeast of Kenya, right at the borders with Somalia and Ethiopia. It was the worst possible place for an outbreak.
“It’s obviously some kind of hemorrhagic fever,” Jonas said. “Rift Valley is endemic to the region. So are Ebola and Marburg. After the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, everybody here is taking this very seriously. I’ve already had a call from the director-general’s office.”
“Are these the only known cases?”
“At the moment.”
“What do we know about them?” Peyton asked.
“Not much. All three men claim to be westerners visiting the country.”
That got Peyton’s attention.
“The two younger males are Americans. They’re recent college graduates from UNC-Chapel Hill. They went to Kenya as part of a startup of some kind. The other man is from London. He works for a British company installing radar systems.”
“What kind of radar systems?”
“For air traffic control. He was working at the Mandera airport when he became ill.”
“They have an airport?”
“Not much of one. It was a dirt airstrip until a few months ago. The government has been upgrading it: paved runway, better equipment. It opened last week.”
Peyton massaged her temple. A functioning airport in a hot zone was a nightmare scenario.
“We’re inquiring about the airport—traffic, who was at the opening ceremony, other foreigners who might have worked on the project. We’ve also contacted Public Health England, and they’re already working on it. It’s eight forty in the morning there, so they’ll be in touch with the British man’s family and co-workers soon. When we know how long he’s been in Kenya, we’ll make a call on quarantining them.”
Peyton scanned the email’s text, noting the names of the two younger men. “We’ll start tracing contacts for the Americans, see if we can build a timeline of where they’ve been, how long they’ve been in the country. What else can we do?”
“That’s about it for now. The Kenyans haven’t asked yet, but if things go the way they did in West Africa, it’s safe to assume they’re going to need a lot of help.”
Help meant money and supplies. During the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, the CDC had deployed hundreds of people and supplied equipment including PPE, thousands of body bags, and countless field test kits.
“I’ll talk to Elliott,” Peyton said. “We’ll loop in State and USAID.”
“There’s something else. We’ve just had our security briefing here. Mandera County is a very dangerous place. There’s a terrorist group in the region called al-Shabaab. They’re as brutal as ISIS, not fans of Americans, and when they hear you’re in the region, it could get even more dangerous. We’ll be in Nairobi late tonight, but I was thinking we would wait for your team. We can link up with a Kenyan military escort and head north together.”
“It’ll probably be Saturday before we get there.”
“That’s okay, we’ll wait. There’s a lot we can do in Nairobi.”
“Great. Thank you, Jonas.”
“Safe travels.”
Peyton placed the phone on the desk, stood, and studied the world map that covered the wall. Colored pushpins dotted every continent. Each pin corresponded to an outbreak, except for one. In eastern Uganda, along the border with Kenya, deep inside Mount Elgon National Park, hung a silver lapel pin. It featured a rod with a serpent wrapped around it—the traditional symbol of medicine known as the Rod of Asclepius, most frequently seen inside the six-pointed Star of Life on ambulances. The pin had belonged to Peyton’s brother, Andrew. It was Andrew who had inspired her to pursue a career in epidemiology, and she always took his pin with her when she went into the field. It was all she had left of him.
She took the silver keepsake off the map, placed it in her pocket, and pushed a red pin into the map where Kenya, Ethiopia, and Somalia met, marking it as an outbreak of a viral hemorrhagic fever.
She always kept two duffel bags packed: a first world bag and a third world bag. She grabbed the third world bag and added the appropriate AC adapters for Kenya.