The majority of my information came from the World Health Organization. The UN is a bureaucratic masterpiece, so many nuggets of valuable data buried in mountains of unread reports. I found incidents all over the world, all of them dismissed with “plausible” explanations. These cases allowed me to piece together a cohesive mosaic of this new threat. The subjects in question were indeed dead, they were hostile, and they were undeniably spreading. I also made one very encouraging discovery: how to terminate their existence.

Going for the brain.

[He chuckles.] We talk about it today as if it is some feat of magic, like holy water or a silver bullet, but why wouldn’t destruction of the brain be the only way to annihilate these creatures? Isn’t it the only way to annihilate us as well?

You mean human beings?

[He nods.] Isn’t that all we are? Just a brain kept alive by a complex and vulnerable machine we call the body? The brain cannot survive if just one part of the machine is destroyed or even deprived of such necessities as food or oxygen. That is the only measurable difference between us and “The Undead.” Their brains do not require a support system to survive, so it is necessary to attack the organ itself. [ His right hand, in the shape of a gun, rises to touch his temple.] A simple solution, but only if we recognized the problem! Given how quickly the plague was spreading, I thought it might he prudent to seek confirmation from foreign intelligence circles. Paul Knight had been a friend of mine for a long time, going all the way back to Entebbe. The idea to use a double of Amin’s black Mercedes, that was him. Paul had retired from government service right before his agency’s “reforms” and gone to work for a private consulting firm in Bethesda, Maryland. When I visited him at his home, I was shocked to find that not only had he been working on the very same project, on his own time, of course, but that his file was almost as thick and heavy as mine. We sat up the whole night reading each others findings. Neither of us spoke. I don’t think we were even conscious of each other, the world around us, anything except the words before our eyes. We finished almost at the same time, just as the sky began to lighten in the east.

Paul turned the last page, then looked to me and said very matter-of-factly, “This is pretty bad, huh?” I nodded, so did he, then followed up with “So what are we going to do about it?”

And that is how the “Warmbrunn-Knight” report was written.

I wish people would stop calling it that. There were fifteen other names on that report: virologists, intelligence operatives, military analysts, journalists, even one UN observer who’d been monitoring the elections in Jakarta when the first outbreak hit Indonesia. Everyone was an expert in his or her field, everyone had come to their own similar conclusions before ever being contacted by us. Our report was just under a hundred pages long. It was concise, it was fully comprehensive, it was everything we thought we needed to make sure this outbreak never reached epidemic proportions. I know a lot of credit has been heaped upon the South African war plan, and deservedly so, but if more people had read our report and worked to make its recommendations a reality, then that plan would have never needed to exist.

But some people did read and follow your report. Your own government…

Barely, and just look at the cost.

Bethlehem, Palestine

[With his rugged looks and polished charm, Saladin Kader could be a movie star. He is friendly but never obsequious, self-assured but never arrogant. He is a professor of urban planning at Khalil Gibran University, and, naturally, the love of all his female students. We sit under the statue of the university’s namesake. Like everything else in one of the Middle East’s most affluent cities, its polished bronze glitters in the sun.]

I was born and raised in Kuwait City. My family was one of the few “lucky” ones not to be expelled after 1991, after Arafat sided with Saddam against the world. We weren’t rich, but neither were we struggling. I was comfortable, even sheltered, you might say, and oh did it show in my actions.

I watched the Al Jazeera broadcast from behind the counter at the Starbucks where I worked every day after school. It was the afternoon rush hour and the place was packed. You should have heard the uproar, the jeers and catcalls. I’m sure our noise level matched that on the floor of the General Assembly.

Of course we thought it was a Zionist lie, who didn’t’ When the Israeli ambassador announced to the UN General Assembly that his country was enacting a policy of “voluntary quarantine,” what was I supposed to think? Was I supposed to really believe his crazy story that African rabies was actually some new plague that transformed dead bodies into bloodthirsty cannibals? How can you possibly believe that kind of foolishness, especially when it comes from your most hated enemy?

I didn’t even hear the second part of that fat bastard’s speech, the part about offering asylum, no questions asked, to any foreign-born Jew, any foreigner of Israeli-born parents, any Palestinian living in the formerly occupied territories, and any Palestinian whose family had once lived within the borders of Israel. The last part applied to my family, refugees from the ’67 War of Zionist aggression. At the heeding of the PLO leadership, we had fled our village believing we could return as soon as our Egyptian and Syrian brothers had swept the Jews into the sea. I had never been to Israel, or what was about to be absorbed into the new state of Unified Palestine.

What did you think was behind the Israeli ruse?

Here’s what I thought: The Zionists have just been driven out of the occupied territories, they say they left voluntarily, just like Lebanon, and most recently the Gaza Strip, but really, just like before, we knew we’d driven them out. They know that the next and final blow would destroy that illegal atrocity they call a country, and to prepare for that final blow, they’re attempting to recruit both foreign Jews as cannon fodder and… and — I thought I was so clever for figuring this part out — kidnapping as many Palestinians as they could to act as human shields! I had all the answers. Who doesn’t at seventeen?

My father wasn’t quite convinced of my ingenious geopolitical insights.

He was a janitor at Amiri Hospital. He’d been on duty the night it had its first major African rabies outbreak. He hadn’t personally seen the bodies rise from their slabs or the carnage of panicked patients and security guards, but he’d witnessed enough of the aftermath to convince him that staying in Kuwait was suicidal. He’d made up his mind to leave the same day Israel made their declaration.

That must have been difficult to hear.

It was blasphemy! I tried to make him see reason, to convince him with my adolescent logic. I’d show the images from Al Jazeera, the images coming out of the new West Bank state of Palestine; the celebrations, the demoiv strations. Anyone with eyes could see total liberation was at hand. The Israelis had withdrawn from all the occupied territory and were actually preparing to evacuate Al Quds, what they call Jerusalem! All the factional fighting, the violence between our various resistance organizations, I knew that would die down once we unified for the final blow against the Jews. Couldn’t my father see this? Couldn’t he understand that, in a few years, a few months, we would be returning to our homeland, this time as liberators, not as refugees.

How was your argument resolved?

“Resolved,” what a pleasant euphemism. It was “resolved” after the second outbreak, the larger one at Al Jahrah. My father had just quit his job, cleared out our bank account, such as it was… our bags were packed…our e-tickets confirmed. The TV was blaring in the background, riot police storming the front entrance of a house. You couldn’t see what they were shooting at inside. The official report blamed the violence on “pro-Western extremists.” My father and I were arguing, as always. He tried to convince me of what he’d seen at the hospital, that by the time our leaders acknowledged the danger, it would be too late for any of us.