Pandemic by Daniel Kalla Page A

practically built the hospital in which he now sat, but when the time came to appoint a director, an underqualified party hack, barely out of his teens, was placed ahead of him. None of it softened Wu's rigid ethical conduct, until his eighty-year-old parents became too frail to live in their own hovel. In order to help them, he needed to supplement his income. So he did what he had to. What he was entitled to do, for all his years of service.
    It had begun harmlessly enough. He accepted small gratuities for providing priority access to diagnostic services like lab tests or X-rays for people who might have otherwise waited months. In that first year, the money barely covered the expense of the homecare worker he hired to help his parents. From there, his services expanded. For a larger fee, he would move people to the top of elective surgical waiting lists. Soon surgeons began to pay for more operating time to work on their own "private" patients. For a substantial fee, Wu would even "doctor" disability and other pension applications.
    When he first heard Lee's offer in exchange for allowing two "relatives" to visit a dying infected patient, he balked at the idea. But the black marketer offered more than Wu had ever seen before. In spite of huge misgivings, Wu could not resist. The moment he laid eyes on the foreigners, he knew they were not honest in their intentions. He tried to convince himself that they were just reporters, capitalizing on a sensational story and that they needed privacy to capture the virus's victims on film but in his heart he never believed that. He knew something more sinister was at work.
    When hours after their visit, a nurse discovered that the dying patient had puncture marks over his jugular vein, Wu managed to cover it up. However, he could lie to himself no longer. They had stolen the man's blood and with it the virus. And he had facilitated the theft.
    Wu had long since quelled the stirrings of self-recrimination about his acts of petty corruption. It was understandable, even expected to some degree, within the system he lived. But his life had been dedicated to the practice of medicine. Never before had his profiteering been undertaken at the patients' expense. His role, inadvertent as it was, in disseminating the virus beyond Gansu was beyond rationalization. Or forgiveness. And in the week since the men had stolen the virus, he barely slept at night.
    Satisfied his thoughts were in order, he put his glasses back on, reached for the computer keyboard, and began to type. He addressed the e-mail to his immediate superior, the hospital's young director, Dr. Kai Huang.
    Dr. Huang,
    I am writing to inform you of a critical breach in hospital security that occurred seven days ago.
    I accepted money from a man, Kwok Lee, whom I know to be a black marketer. In return for the bribe, I arranged for Mr. Lee and two of his accomplices to see one of the afflicted patients. Mr. Lee claimed the two men were relatives of the dying man, but I knew differently as they appeared to be of Malaysian or Indonesian descent. I assumed they were reporters, but I did not dwell on their identity or intentions.
    They spent five unsupervised minutes with the patient The patient died an hour after the men left. While preparing the body, one of the nurses discovered recent puncture marks over the left jugular vein. No medical procedures had been performed at that site. My only possible conclusion is that the men withdrew vials of venous blood.
    From our experience, we know that body fluid of infected patients is highly contagious. Since he was suffering from overwhelming sepsis, this patient's blood would have had a particularly high concentration of the virus.
    I have no knowledge of how they mean to use this infected blood, but I can only assume that it involves criminal intent. And I cannot exclude the possibility of terrorism or the use of the virus as a weapon.
    Yours,
Ping Wu

    Wu reread the e-mail, satisfied. He