The Greatest Lie Part 17

The Karens delivered Nancee and me to a lonely outpost of the "Medicins Sans Frontieres", where I met and seduced a French AIDS doctor, Alain Richard. He arranged for me and Nancee to elude the corrupt Thai police and vicious Burmese war lords by engaging us as nurses to Lizette, a French medical intern who Dr. Richard suspected was stricken with the deadly SARS virus. We risked infection, and faced two weeks of quarantine, but the Thai border police had no desire to examine the exit papers of the two masked, gowned and gloved nurses who were taking the SARS patient to die at her home in Switzerland.

But the infectious disease research community is a small world. Alan Richard's boss was named Dr. Eduardo Rios. We would be quarantined with the patient, Lizette, at his institute. My means of escape from Thailand had placed me back in the custody of my despised father.

I looked across the cabin of the corporate Gulfstream IV at my sleeping colleague. We had shed our gowns as soon as we had gotten Lizette settled, and were just wearing our whites. In her spotless nurse's dress and cap Nancee would have looked just the part of the pretty, young Asian nurse, jetting off for a tour of guest work in Europe. Her N-95 mask made a jarring contrast to her picture-book appearance.

Our patient, Lizette, slept fitfully on her sofa bed just ahead of us. She took shallow breaths through her oxygen mask.

"This is the only way to fly. I love 'Gulfstream IV Airlines.'" Nancee looked at her cheap plastic watch. "Time for us to take another ribavirin and prednisone."

"Gulfstream is name of a plane, not an airline, Nancee. I think I'm going to pass on the prednisone, even though it's helped Lizette's breathing. I feel like I've over-amped on amphetamine."

"Good, I'll take another nap. I'll owe you another shift." Nancee stretched back on her oversize recliner. Shortly, her chest rose and settled with Zen breathing.

I picked up the cabin phone and called the pilots. "How much longer until our next stop?"