Chapter 84

Althea Crenshaw loved to fly. When she’d first taken her job with Jayanesia Health and Hospitals, she’d been trepidatious about the idea of getting into a helicopter and traveling all over the island chain that made up her recently-adopted country with so little between her and a long plummet to the Earth, but it had quickly become a favorite part of her job - so much so that she’d been learning to fly the craft herself in her spare time and on her own dime. There was just so much beauty to the tropical archipelago that she might never see otherwise.

And Fisher Island certainly had beauty to spare. It had been built up a lot since her first visit almost three years earlier, but what had been built here seemed to respect the surrounding landscape. The last time she’d seen it, the town of Covenant Bay had just been a nameless airstrip and fewer than a dozen prefabricated buildings. Now it stretched out, winding and narrow to follow the island’s one prominent river as it snaked its way from the base of the long-dormant-and-hopefully-extinct volcano Mount Tausimauga that dominated the island and rose thousands of feet out of the turquoise sea.

U’ilani, the young woman who’d met them at the airstrip had proudly informed them that, between the town, the still-being-built Stryker University extension campus, and the teaching hospital, there were more than eight hundred people currently living on the island. Althea doubted there had been many more than eight on her last visit.

Althea hadn’t needed U’ilani to tell her that the population was continuing to grow in leaps and bounds even though the guide had done so with some excitement. Construction equipment, scaffolding, and half-finished buildings were everywhere. She’d also seen the temporary workers’ villages farther down the coast, the wharf full of boats, and the steady stream of work trucks moving down the highway as their plane had circled on approach.

Even as she had to admire the progress and industry, Althea reminded herself that all of this was in the service of one man’s ego. If it weren’t for Nick Coyle, this island would almost certainly still be uninhabited apart from a couple of research stations and a small marina operated by the Jayanesian Coast Guard. He’d had the town built, brought in the college and the teaching hospital, and recruited most of the people to come live there from around the world.

And today, it was Althea’s job to ask him to stop it - at least for the time being.

Technically, she reminded herself, it was her boss’s job. Dr. Moretti was the director of emergency response at JH&H and had personally assembled the taskforce now responding to the growing threat of an epidemic.

More than a dozen workers at Jayanesia City International Airport had come down with what was first thought to be a particularly virulent strain of pneumonia, but had since been diagnosed as the novel coronavirus out of Wuhan. Back on the main island, Sirona General Hospital had established a special isolated ward to treat them.

As a public health worker, Althea had been following the news coming out of the East. With daily flights to and from Tokyo, Honolulu, and Beijing, it was often said around the office that when Asia sneezes, Jayanesia catches a cold. More people passed through the country on their way between the US and Asia each year than lived here full-time.

Even so, Althea had been surprised to be called into a meeting first thing yesterday morning and told along with about forty other people that the country was preparing to go into lockdown until the crisis had passed. Before Althea could even register why this was so shocking, one of her coworkers expressed what her main point would be: “But, Jayanesia doesn’t do lockdowns.”

Althea might not have expressed it quite like that. She might have said that Jayanesia barely had a government with which to enforce a lockdown. It had a small police force and coast guard. Its courts were almost entirely focused on enforcing contracts and its criminal code was short enough to print as a trade paperback. Pretty much all essential services were outsourced to third parties. It was, for better or for worse, widely held up as an example of one of the most libertarian places in the world. People came here from all over the world to engage in activities their home countries considered illegal.

When she’d first come here with her boyfriend Marcus, Althea had very much approved of Jayanesia’s devil-may-care approach to governance. Originally meant as a first-and-last dose of irresponsible personal independence wedged between an unhappy childhood and what was promising to be an unhappy college career, her two-week rumspringa (as Marcus had called it) instead turned into a permanent residence. In those first two weeks on the island, she’d smoked weed for the first time, gotten drunk for the first time, and exposed her breasts in public for the first time. She’d also had a lot of sex - that not for the first time. She and Marcus had been together that way for almost a year by then, but it was the first time that they’d done so without worrying who would find out what they were up to. In hindsight, Althea suspected she’d always planned to stay in Jayanesia, but couldn’t even admit it to herself until she got the hell out of Tennessee.

Since then, the appeal of a barely-there government had lost a lot of its shine. Althea still enjoyed a lot of the things that had made Jayanesia seem like a paradise at first. She liked drinking and smoking to relax. She still loved the sun on her bare skin. But, working in hospital administration, she’d seen and heard far too many of the downsides of letting people ingest, imbibe, smoke, and snort whatever they want and then interact with other people. When the government stayed out of the business of keeping people from making the worst possible decisions, the people with the worst possible ideas tended to flock to your shores.

This reminiscence passed through Althea’s mind in a flash and was gone because Dr. Moretti was explaining that Jayanesia had previously not done lockdowns and that such policies had nearly destroyed the country. He then ticked off the pandemics that had swept through the small island nation - bird flu, swine flu, AIDS. Even ebola had made an appearance on Jayanesia’s shores and been tricky to contain. For the people who didn’t know (and this included Althea, ) he explained that there had been a decision made at the highest levels after the H1N1 outbreak in 2009 that the country and its subcontractors would put a mechanism in place for lockdowns in the future and that they had, without fanfare, started writing these provisions into the contracts that they signed with customers and suppliers.

The next part, Althea already knew. Jayanesia did subcontract most of its services from third-party corporations like Jayanesia Health and Hospitals, but almost all of those corporations were partly or wholly-owned subsidiaries of the Stryker-Stone Jayaneisia Holding Company. JH&H, Jayanesia Ports and Airports Corporation, and Jayanesia Real Estate Holdings all ultimately answered to one board of directors and it was that board that had handed down the orders they were now executing.

“But, isn’t this premature? The WHO couldn’t even decide whether or not to call this a PHEIC yet,” another coworker Althea didn’t recognize pointed out.

Althea would later learn that the acronym stood for “public health emergency of international concern,” but Dr. Moretti’s answer gave her the gist of it. “I hope this is premature and that this all blows over, but I’ve advised the board that we should act now and I stand by my recommendation. I was here in 2009 and I know what a difference even a few days can make.”

There was a bit more grumbling, but most of the people in the room had worked emergency response before and, from the looks on their faces, a few had even been looking forward to taking a more aggressive posture than they had in the past. The team settled down and focused long enough for Dr. Moretti to get three slides into his presentation before another question sent the whole room into animated discussion.

That slide showed that the Ports Corporation was planning to shut down interisland ports within forty-eight hours. Someone asked, “Won’t people just use the international ports to get from island to island?”

Dr. Moretti switched to the next slide in his presentation. It read, “72 Hours: All international ports and airports close for a minimum of three days.”

An explosion of questions and arguments clarified the point. Three days from now, it would be nearly impossible for anyone to get in or out of the country. All commercial traffic would cease. Small craft would still be able to travel freely, but the flow of people would slow to a trickle.

“The economy will collapse,” someone pointed out.

“There are people working on the policy side to ameliorate that as best they can, but it can’t be our concern in this room. Our only concern is slowing the spread of this disease to buy ourselves as much time as we can to respond when it hits us in earnest.” Dr. Moretti had told them.

Althea only asked one question in that meeting and she waited until it had largely broken up to ask. As the room was emptying, she approached her new boss. “Dr. Moretti, I’m happy to help however I can, but I have to ask why I was pulled onto this team. I normally work in purchasing.”

“Purchasing is essential in this sort of emergency,” Dr. Moretti answered.

“There are people with a lot more experience than me in that department,” Althea pointed out. “I didn’t see any of them in this room.”

“This is going to be less about experience and more about adaptability. You’ve worked on setting up three new medical centers in remote locations in less than three years and you were instrumental in arranging to have that Japanese tuna fleet deliver supplies to the tribal hospital last year when the regular courier went out of business abruptly, weren’t you?”

“I ... was,” Althea answered slowly. Her boss at the time had clearly wanted to chew her out for going outside of normal channels to help with that problem, but by the time he knew about it, the deal was all lined up and being praised by tribal leaders who had been bracing for a shortage of supplies that could have lasted months. Instead, he’d been passive-aggressive towards her ever since.

“That’s why I want you on this team and not the more experienced people you’ve been working under. I need someone who can start sourcing supplies today and using whatever resources we can get ahold of. Supply lines break down in global pandemics and pretty soon you’re scrambling for the basics - masks and gloves and things. I need you to get as many of those as you can in the next three days and then to keep getting them here once the ports are closed. We’ll have special dispensation for the ships carrying them, but most shippers won’t be agile enough to handle those orders. Also, there are three Outer Islands with big enough airfields to queer this whole deal because they’re not under contract with the Ports Corporation. You’ve worked on two of them. If you’ve kept any of the contacts you made while doing those jobs, I hope you can leverage them to get us a fair hearing.”

“The Outer Islands ... like Fisher Island, you mean?” Althea had asked carefully.

“Yes and...” Dr. Moretti spun his hand by his ear in a trying-to-remember gesture. “The one the techno-utopians are leasing. It used to be called Unamori Island, but they’ve changed the name.”

“It’s called the Asymptote now,” Althea had answered weakly. “I don’t ... keep a lot of contact with either place, but maybe somebody remembers me fondly.”

Since that meeting, Althea had been going nonstop. She’d been given a budget and an office and told to bring in two or three reliable people to help her. She’d pulled in the three most effective people she knew in purchasing and mentally flipped off her old boss in doing so. The four of them had spent sixteen hours between meetings and phone calls finding out what was needed and where they could get it from fast. After about four hours of sleep, she’d been driven to meet a small island-hopping plane that took her and Dr. Moretti to Fisher Island while the sun was still rising.

She was glad to be helping with the effort and pleased that Dr. Moretti had recognized the value of her previous work, but she could also see that getting Fisher Island closed off to traffic was important enough to him that he’d come out here himself when so many other priorities were demanding his time. And it made her wonder if that wasn’t the real reason she’d been chosen for this job.

She’d more or less decided not to ask that question, deeming it too trivial to worry about in the face of the looming health threat. Living in Jayanesia meant being surrounded by people who were very matter-of-fact about sex and sexuality and didn’t think twice about leveraging that part of themselves or others for personal gain. But, as they emerged from the helicopter at the heliport inside the caldera of Mount Tausimauga and U’ilani left the two of them alone while she went to get the Jeep that would take them the rest of the way on their journey, she said quietly, “You know, I don’t know if Nick will even remember me.”

Dr. Moretti looked surprised. “You’ve met Nick?”

If he was acting, he was much too convincing an actor for Althea to be able to tell. She let out a sigh of relief and nodded. “Yeah, when my boyfriend Marcus and I were helping get the teaching hospital set up, he wrangled an invitation for us to go to a party Nick was throwing down at the wharf. I met Nick there.”

“Well, every point of contact can be useful. You didn’t insult him or embarrass him, did you?” Dr. Moretti prompted.

Althea looked away. “No, like I said, he probably won’t even remember me.”

Dr. Moretti didn’t say anything to that, but his eyes did make a quick pass up and down Althea’s body. Compared to how explicitly other coworkers had commented on her looks in the past, it was an act of the deepest subtlety. JH&H did have rules against sexual harrassment, but those rules set a higher bar on what constituted an actionable offense than had been true back home.

At least, Althea thought they were different. She’d never actually had a job in America, but a friend who’d worked for the summer at Stuckey’s had complained bitterly that “nobody followed the rules” because they were always commenting on and ogling her tits.

Jayanesians seemed more likely to comment, but less likely to ogle you unless you encouraged them to do so. Office romances weren’t discouraged and she’d witnessed several couples openly pursuing each other at work and being quite comfortable acknowledging those relationships when they flourished. Several young men at the office had asked Althea out and she’d been intrigued, but not enough so to overcome her sense that she would be doing something wrong if she agreed to go out with them. So far, they’d all taken rejection with relative grace.

“I understand Mr. Coyle’s parties are something to behold,” Dr. Moretti said, breaking Althea’s reverie.

“I’ve heard a lot of people tell all kinds of wild stories about them, but the one I went to didn’t seem that crazy. It was mostly just people dancing on the beach ... and drinking of course. If they were getting up to anything wilder than that, they weren’t doing it where I could see them.”

Althea wasn’t telling the whole truth. From the moment she’d walked onto that beach, she’d felt out of place. Even after a year of living in Haven with its college-town atmosphere and its near-constant supply of parties to attend, there was something in the air that made her feel like an awkward pre-teen all over again. There had been three massive bonfires on the beach and the people who danced around them seemed to her like pagans engaged in some fertility celebration. The way they moved with and against each other was like a single, slow-moving act of seduction. In the shadows, everyone seemed to be kissing everyone else. In defiance of her upbringing, Althea was militantly anti-homophobic, but she suspected she’d seen more boys kissing boys and girls kissing girls that night than she had in her entire life up until that point.

She’d also discovered that, under the influence of just enough alcohol, she could fit in with any crowd. Unlike other beach parties she’d been to since arriving in Jayanesia, a lot of the women arrived topless and then started drinking. Althea was proud of her body, but there were so many painfully beautiful people at that party as to make her self-conscious until much later. But, at some point, she felt free and beautiful enough to let everyone see what was under her bikini top.

That alone had felt brave, but it hadn’t ended the night. At some point, Marcus had begged off any more dancing, but she’d kept going. Althea didn’t know how many times she made a fool of herself that night or with whom, but at some point, she did find herself dancing exuberantly with a beautiful Japanese woman who teased her way closer and closer until they were close enough to meet chest to chest, hot bare skin to skin.

Kiki Sato wasn’t the first woman Althea had ever kissed, but it was the first time she’d done so with such enthusiasm. Her first lesbian kiss had been with a beautiful black woman that first week in Jayanesia when she and Marcus had been staying at a hostel in Haven and much more experimental. She’d enjoyed it and been excited by it, but never felt her heart pound like she did that night. She’d never felt like anything could happen beyond what she planned to do until she found herself making out with Kiki by that bonfire.

“I should have known to look for a tall, sexy blonde to give me a hint where you’d gone,” said a man’s voice behind her.

She wasn’t sure what she intended when she turned to face him, but whatever that intention was, it fled when she saw the man’s face. Nick Coyle was the only person she was likely to recognize at this party and there he was.

Nick was probably Jayanesia’s youngest billionaire. He’d wound up holding a thousand-year lease on Fisher Island following some epic financial deal that some people said had saved Jayanesia from financial ruin and some argued had been set up from the start to force the holding company to hand him control of all this land.

In her role helping to set up the teaching hospital here, Althea had been in a number of group video calls with Nick and found him fairly easygoing for a billionaire, but still very much on top of the work that was being done. He’d even asked Altea a couple of pointed questions about inventory levels and what all could go wrong with the periodic delivery of perishable medicines to a remote island.

Of course, he’d been wearing a shirt during those meetings and he hadn’t been calling Althea sexy. It was a very different experience to encounter him when the flickering firelight was casting deep shadows across his well-defined chest and abs. Nick wasn’t built like a weightlifter, but those Zoom calls had done nothing to prepare her for how damned fit he was or the way his eyes took her in now.

Behind her, Kiki wrapped an arm around Althea’s waist and purred. “I may have a type.” She kissed Althea’s neck. “This is Althea.”

“We’ve met. Althea’s working for me. Pretty much everyone here is working for me,” Nick reminded Kiki.

“We’ve never met, met exactly,” Althea heard herself say.

Nick’s gaze swept over Althea one more time. “I’m glad you could make it to one of these parties.” Before she could answer, he turned to Kiki. “I’m going to make an early night of it. Are you planning to join me?”

“I’ll be along in a bit. Will you be in the cabana?” Kiki asked.

“Yeah, I think so.” Nick looked away, distracted. “I like the cabana.”

That had been the extent of their conversation before Nick headed off again. Kiki had tried to recapture the moment between her and Althea, but quickly sensed that the mood had shifted. “I should probably head out.”

Althea had felt a wave of loss at Kiki’s words that she couldn’t entirely hide. “Yeah, all right.”

Kiki reached up and touched her face, “If you wanted to join us, I’m sure Nick would be happy to have you.”

“To ... have me?” Althea squeaked.

“Well ... yeah.” Kiki smirked. “I’d also be happy to have you.”

Althea looked around desperately. “I should really probably find my boyfriend and head home ... not home, but to the trailer we’re staying in ... out by the teaching hospital. We ... have to work in a couple of days.”

Kiki laughed at her awkwardness, leaned in, and gave her one soft, final kiss. “All right. Get home safe, Althea.”

And that had been it. Althea had worked for another month on Fisher Island and been in a dozen more calls with Nick, but he never mentioned that night. He called her by name several times during those calls, but he seemed to make it a point of pride to know everybody’s name. She had seen Kiki in print and on the Internet many times since then and come to think of her not entirely ironically as “international sex goddess Kiki Sato.”

As she climbed into the back seat of the Jeep, she asked herself for what felt like the millionth time if she hadn’t completely overblown that night in her mind. But, soon after that, it had become a crucial turning point in the narrative she’d built up of how her relationship with Marcus had ended. Things had been going well, but she’d begun to think that she wasn’t adventurous enough for her boyfriend. The two of them had grown up together in a small town that was entirely centered around God, guns, and football. Her parents had been more interested in the former, his in the latter. Then, they were both growing as people in Jayanesia and temptation was everywhere. Compared to who she’d been, Althea felt like she was on a wild adventure, but Marcus wanted to go even faster and with fewer safety nets than she did.

She wasn’t sure if Marcus heard from someone what she’d done with Kiki that night or saw them or if it was just coincidence, but he started pressing harder for them to be more open in their relationship and to try new things. Althea had just started to cherish the idea of one day being Marcus’s wife and raising a family together and was afraid that she would lose him if they went too fast. Instead, she lost him by moving too slow. He started working on a cruise ship that traveled from Jayanesia to Hawaii and back again. She ended up seeing him four days out of every fourteen then, after a few iterations, he started having things to do when he was in port and those four days might only be one or two.

At the same time, Althea had been moving ahead at work. She’d passed her citizenship test and her probational job at JH&H had transitioned into a full-time role with real responsibilities. She was now making enough money to start looking to move into a real, more permanent apartment in Jayanesia City instead of the constrained-term housing they’d found in Haven. She had been so excited to tell Marcus about the place she found when he got back that she missed any number of warning signs that he might not share her enthusiasm. That night, when she’d hoped to show him the new place, ended up with them agreeing that she should move into the new place and he would stay in Haven when he was in port.

As the tropical forest of Fisher Island passed by on both sides, Althea forced her mind to stop going down that path. It had been over a year since she and Marcus broke up and she’d more or less stopped dwelling on how it had happened. Only the combination of fatigue and a return to this place had brought it on so strongly again.

“Nick should be at the cabin by the time we get there,” U’ilani was saying.

“He’s not there now?” Althea asked, immediately worrying how much time they might lose waiting for the young billionaire to join them.

“He ... may be. I know he was out camping near the northern edge of the lake last night when you called, Dr. Moretti. It’s only a couple miles to get back to the cabin, but I think it’s a choice between a long, winding path and the trackless jungle between the two points. I did get the sense that he was treating this as a matter of some urgency.” U’iliani answered.

“It is a matter of great urgency,” the doctor reassured her.

“I can check in if you like, but it would require using my iPad and I should really pull over first. I should have had it in hands-free mode before I started driving, but I didn’t think of it. I’m sorry,” said U’ilani.

“It’s not a problem. Nick will arrive when he arrives and so will we. If we have to wait, will we be able to make some phone calls from up here?”

U’ilani brightened. “Completely. You can make them now if you like. Everything from the heliport to the main house to the cabin is blanketed with cellular coverage. There are also Iridium phones at the cabin that you can use if need be, but regular cell phones are almost always loud and clear out there.”

“Have you been working with Nick long?” Dr. Moretti asked politely.

“Kind of. I’ve been on his account since I started call center work, but I only started working for him in the field right before Christmas.” U’ilana said. She seemed to notice some incomprehension. “Oh, gosh! I should have mentioned it at the beginning. I’m a junior field agent with Stryker-Stone Concierge Service. We provide concierge services to Nick as well as thousands of clients worldwide. When the unusual is your everyday, SSCS can help!”

Althea gave a snort of laughter. “Can you get me twenty-five thousand N-95 surgical masks delivered by tomorrow?”

“That is exactly the kind of thing we do,” U’iliani said happily.

Althea had been kidding, but she felt a bubble of hope in her chest. “What would something like that cost me?”

“You would have to ask your point of contact about pricing. If you want to call in, I can get you started,” said U’iliani.

Dr. Moretti was looking back over his seat at Althea. She gave him a questioning look. He shrugged and smiled. “It can’t hurt to talk to them.”

With U’ilani’s guidance, Althea dialed a phone number and was immediately connected to a very professional-sounding young woman. Althea repeated her own name, then U’ilani’s and Nick’s as a reference and the woman on the other end said. “My name is Reina and I’ll be happy to handle your request. What can I help you with today?”

“I need twenty-five thousand N-95 surgical masks delivered to Sirona General Hospital in Jayanesia City by tomorrow. What would something like that cost me?” Althea asked and held her breath.

“Do you work for the hospital?” Reina asked.

“I work for the Jayanesia Health and Hospitals Corporation,” Althea answered.

“Oh, we’re almost coworkers then!” Reina answered. “The Stryker-Stone Jayanesia Holding Corporation is a major shareholder in SSCS. I should be able to get you a preferred rate.”

Reina quoted a price that would have been reasonable for a delivery ninety days in the future under normal circumstances. It was so far below the number Althea had been braced for that she immediately asked, “Okay, but what’s the total cost?”

“That would be the total cost including goods and delivery. We can have it to you by five PM local time if that suits you,” said Reina.

“What would the preferred rate be, then?” Althea asked.

“That is the preferred rate. I have a request in to approve your account to always get that rate, but in the meantime, I can use my discretion to assign it to you for this initial request, but future requests may be at a higher rate. Should I go ahead with that?” Reina asked.

Althea sat gobsmacked for a second before answering. “Yeah. I’m just ... sorry I didn’t ask for a hundred thousand.”

“I can get you sixty thousand tonight and an additional forty thousand by five PM tomorrow if that would suit you. The cost for the second batch would be a little bit more expensive because it needs to travel further, but I can have it on a plane in an hour.”

Althea was so stunned, she almost didn’t know how to respond. Even if this thing turned into a highly-communicable pandemic, that would be enough masks to last almost a year. Finally, she found it in herself to ask for all the details. When Reina had explained everything and given her a final price, she managed to say, “All right. Do that, please.”

Dr. Moretti looked back at her and beamed. “I knew I picked the right person for this job.”

Nick’s cabin on the lake shore turned out to be a two-story house bigger than anything Althea had ever lived in. A second Jeep, a sporty little convertible, and three black SUVs with the insignia of Gibraltar Security Services sat in a small parking lot outside. Inside, they were met by two young women - a light-skinned Indian in her late twenties and a brunette with a pixie cut who didn’t look to be much out of her teens. The older woman shook their hands. “I’m Tanvi Agnihotri, Nick’s personal assistant and this is Angel Rodriguez-Stone, his factotum-in-training. Nick took a moment to jump in the shower while he was waiting for you, but he’ll be down momentarily. Is the kitchen all right for your meeting?”