Prions from Wuhan

By Hugh Cameron and Edna Quammie

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
The darkness comes again.
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
—W. B. Yeats


This is a noir novel looking at the dark side of contemporary life, with romance, love, and fear amid the very real horrors of the present and the probability of the nightmare to come as Western civilization collapses.
Jasmine, a budding artist, and her new boyfriend, Colin, become inadvertently involved in a terrorist/hostage situation in London. Kidnapped at gunpoint, Jasmine is smuggled to Iraq where she becomes an unwilling ISIS bride. Eventually she ends up as a concubine in Saudi Arabia. The Western authorities show no interest in trying to locate her.
As a result of willful government misunderstanding of events during the kidnapping, Colin ends up in jail. After experiencing terrifying encounters in prison, he is finally freed with the help of his Hong Kong–based mother using exceedingly unconventional means.
Several years later, while still a captive, Jasmine meets Colin. With the help of his mother, and her underworld associates, he undertakes a violent rescue from a Saudi yacht in the harbor in Monaco. During her captivity Jasmine has overheard a plot to explode nuclear devices in the United States. After her rescue she faces the very real problem of trying to alert a complacent and corrupt world to this impending catastrophe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 25, 2021
• ISBN: 9781664171169

Hugh Cameron

Hugh Cameron, born in Scotland, is an internationally known orthopedic surgeon who lives, works, and teaches in Toronto. He was one of the developers of modern joint replacement surgery. Most patients with artificial hips are walking on the technology he was instrumental in developing. He was the lead designer of many artificial hip and knee implants, some of which are currently being implanted. For more than thirty years, he and a group of surgeons crisscrossed the world teaching and demonstrating modern joint replacement surgery. He is the lead author of more than two hundred scientific papers and continues to publish, now mostly on issues related to pain. He has published two technical books and several novels of which this book is the fourth in a series about the decline and fall of the West and its possible redemption.

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Copyright © 2021 by Hugh Cameron and Edna Quammie.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,

recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,

without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the

product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance

to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 04/23/2021

Xlibris

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CONTENTS

Abstract

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1     Death Sentence

Chapter 2     Romance

Chapter 3     Terror

Chapter 4     Love and Loss

Chapter 5     Justice

Chapter 6     Seoul

Chapter 7     Faust’s Bargain

Chapter 8     The Contractor

Chapter 9     Unexpected Liaison

Chapter 10   Despair

Chapter 11   Rose

Chapter 12   Slave

Chapter 13   Hook

Chapter 14   A New Beginning

Chapter 15   The Opening Door

Chapter 16   She Lives

Chapter 17   Unmasked

Chapter 18   Sniper

Chapter 19   The Rescue

Chapter 20   Hong Kong

Chapter 21   Gotterdammerung

Chapter 22   The Dilemma

Chapter 23   The Masque

Chapter 24   Silence

Chapter 25   Armageddon

Chapter 26   A Dance with the Devil

Chapter 27   Ragnarok

Chapter 28   Payback Time

Chapter 29   Denouement

Chapter 30   Quandary

Envoi

About The Authors

ABSTRACT

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

The darkness comes again.

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

—W. B. Yeats

This is a noir novel looking at the dark side of contemporary life, with romance, love, and fear amid the very real horrors of the present and the probability of the nightmare to come as Western civilization collapses.

Jasmine, a budding artist, and her new boyfriend, Colin, become inadvertently involved in a terrorist/hostage situation in London. Kidnapped at gunpoint, Jasmine is smuggled to Iraq where she becomes an unwilling ISIS bride. Eventually she ends up as a concubine in Saudi Arabia. The Western authorities show no interest in trying to locate her.

As a result of willful government misunderstanding of events during the kidnapping, Colin ends up in jail. After experiencing terrifying encounters in prison, he is finally freed with the help of his Hong Kong–based mother using exceedingly unconventional means.

Several years later, while still a captive, Jasmine meets Colin. With the help of his mother, and her underworld associates, he undertakes a violent rescue from a Saudi yacht in the harbor in Monaco. During her captivity Jasmine has overheard a plot to explode nuclear devices in the United States. After her rescue she faces the very real problem of trying to alert a complacent and corrupt world to this impending catastrophe.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There are many quotations, intentionally not all entirely accurate. They are mainly from Kipling, Marlowe, Marvell, Milton, Dylan Thomas, Dowson, Shakespeare, Byron, Tennyson, John Donne, T. S. Elliot, Neil Munro, Yeats, FitzGerald, both Browning’s, Coleridge, and the Bible. Special thanks to Alasdair Cameron for advice on weaponry.

CHAPTER 1

Death Sentence

Bad news, he said. Really bad news.

She looked at his face, bleak and unsmiling and ineffably sad. Normally he was loud and jovial. She had known him for many years, ever since her father’s arthritic hips had needed to be replaced. Her mother’s knees had also finally worn out and had been replaced a couple of years ago. As a child, she had accompanied her parents to the orthopedic clinic. Since he had heard of her ambition to be a painter, he had joked with her.

"Are you going to be a real painter like Van Ruisdael or waste a supreme talent like Dali or be a cheap crook like Picasso? No, cheap is not the right word. Two masterpieces a day for thirty years is certainly not cheap. Picasso could probably buy this whole hospital, me included. You have to give him an A for effort and P for Ponzi, the world’s greatest con man."

Initially she did not know what to say, but as she grew older and realized he was joking with her, she would verbally fence with him, which he encouraged.

All you like is kitsch, she would say, smiling at him, scandalizing her listening parents, to whom this man was their savior. Many of their friends and acquaintances had had hip and knee replacements carried out with results that were not up to expectations. Neither her father nor her mother had had any problems at all with their new joints. For years now, they, like all other joint replacement recipients, had turned up annually to have their new joints x-rayed to see if there was any wear or impending loosening.

The surgeon had told them that this would happen eventually, as all things wear out, and what they were walking on was a piece of plastic, but those problems could be seen on an x-ray years before they developed any symptoms. He had always insisted that they look at the x-ray images with him so that they knew what was happening.

This is not rocket science, he would say. Artificial joints are no different than the brakes on your car. Everything wears out in time. Even we humans wear out. We don’t get out of this one alive.

One of the patients in the next bay was listening, having heard the doctor say that before. That sure is true, but if you are on this side of the grass, you are having a good day. Many of the surrounding patients were elderly and had heard that truism many times previously and knew the truth of it. They laughed at the statement.

Jasmine liked the outpatient clinic. It was inside a small hospital where all the surgery was elective and only joint replacement was done. Consequently, there was no trauma, no emergencies, and no sick people. As the surgeon would say, If you are sick, don’t come here. Get well and then return. This is the body shop, not the wrecker’s yard. All the patients found that amusing because it was so true. If you were really sick, a worn joint was the least of your problems.

The clinic was a big room, with a stretcher in every corner. The only operation their surgeon did nowadays was replace hips and knees, so the patients were a mixture of some being assessed for the need for joint replacement and many being seen for follow-up, some like the parents of Jasmine, being multiyear veterans. Many knew each other, as they would come back for annual or rechecks every two or three years, or sooner if there were any concerns. Some patients from northern Ontario would drive down together and make the visit to the big city of Toronto a mini holiday.

The surgeon encouraged new patients to discuss their fears and concerns with those who already had had a joint replaced. New patients contemplating surgery would find it very reassuring when the surgeon should ask others in the room, Anyone here had a hip or knee and willing to talk to this newcomer?

There was always someone who would say, Yes, me.

Then talk to Mrs. Jones here. She needs to know what it is like. No secrets here.

Jasmine—or Jazz, as the surgeon called her—knew several of them, including James, a patient whose hip the surgeon had replaced thirty-five years before, with still the original components.

How in hell it has not worn out, I don’t know, the surgeon would say. James here must live somewhere with zero gravity.

That day, hearing again that her parents were good for another few hundred miles, as the doctor would put it, Jasmine was happy. But she felt wonderful for another reason. Her life was opening up like a storybook. As a child, she had been accepted into one of the two art schools in Toronto. Having completed that with honors, she had gone to university. After a couple of years of that, she became utterly fed up. All she could see around her was postmodernist indoctrination, with essentially no instruction on art or literature or anything else of practical value. She despised her fellow students rushing around, waving placards, and protesting about this or that, which their professors encouraged and, to some extent, pressured them to do.

She had always been interested in art and literature and had read widely on her own. In some of her classes, she felt that she was in the ridiculous situation of knowing more than her so-called lecturer, as most of them were actually fairly junior, extremely poorly paid, teaching assistants. As she could see that she was wasting her time listening to essentially illiterates, she dropped out and went to one of the Toronto community colleges, which had been famous in North America for producing artists before computer graphics decimated that field almost overnight.

She was experimenting with various styles and was already quietly selling her paintings at various private galleries in the city. She agreed with the surgeon who would laugh at some moron buying a toilet as art. The surgeon thought that the artist was clever; it was the moron who was duped into buying a toilet bowl as art who was the fool. The ultimate joke was that someone spent $125,000 buying a banana duct-taped to a wall, and the buyer had to change the banana himself every other week or so. Then again, art is in the eye of the beholder.

At college, she kept quiet about recognizing such idiocy for what it was—idiocy. It would not help to point out that the emperor had no clothes. Her father had told her a long time ago to keep her head down. If you stick your head above the parapet, someone will put a bullet in it, and, It is the tall poppy that gets cut down. He told her that in real life, the little boy who pointed out that the emperor had no clothes would never have been feted. Instead, he would immediately have been clapped in a dungeon and then quietly strangled, or maybe publicly executed to encourage the others to keep their mouths shut.

Taking what she had been told at home to heart, she looked at this utter rubbish masquerading as art and oohed and aahed with the rest. She could never decide, and never dared to ask, how many of her classmates oohing and aahing with her were fools and pretentious idiots and how many were like herself, quietly amused at this lunacy. She knew the surgeon thought it was all a giant Ponzi scheme, set up by those who could not actually paint, as evidenced by Picasso, when he was trying to draw during his so-called Blue Period.

The surgeon, who was an internationally well-known designer of artificial joints, would say, People have to walk on what I do. So if my designs are fake and futile, people know pretty quickly. It is difficult to pontificate about the beauty and significance of an artificial joint if you can’t walk on the damn thing.

All you like is ancient, Jazz would tease him. If it was not painted by a Dutchman or Turner, you don’t like it.

My father told me years ago, the surgeon once said to her, that if he could do it, it was not art. So if I can hang a toilet on a wall or drop a used bedsheet on a floor, then by his definition, it is not art.

Ah but think of the existential beauty and significance of it, she once told him, quoting one of her more pretentious teachers.

Existential rubbish! the surgeon had said. "I don’t even know or care what the word existential means. Nowadays, it is like Alice in Wonderland. A word means what I say it means. Art, by Kant’s definition, is supposed to be something which enhances life, or that is what I think he was trying to say. The only philosophers who really could write intelligibly were Hume and Hobbes. But if that is true, then the artist is supposed to communicate with me. If he is not prepared to make the effort to communicate, then neither am I."

Teasing him, she said, But my professors would say that that is a Philistine’s approach.

Philistines. Yes, that’s me. Goliath of Gath, before the poor guy’s pituitary adenoma half blinded him so he could not see that David was slinging stones at him.

Jazz had attended a black Evangelical church with her parents, so knew the story. Goliath was blind?

Likely was. He was a giant because he had a tumor in his pituitary, and sometimes that tumor presses on the optic nerve, and they go partly blind, usually a quadrant of an eye.

So it wasn’t a miracle?

Don’t be so dismissive. Miracles do happen. If you are in the medical business as long as I have been, you will see the odd one. Completely inexplicable, like the finger of God reaching down from the naked sky.

Jazz was amazed that the surgeon never seemed to be in a hurry when he talked to her, or any other patient, and yet could see a clinic of fifty patients in a day, so she never felt that she was wasting his time.

You mean as in the Sistine Chapel? That is the ultimate kitsch.

Right now, the crowds in Rome are so bad it is not worth trying to see, but someday a cardinal will give a famous young lady artist a private showing. Wait till then.

Oh yes! You think?

Dream dreams, Jazz, and work for them, work hard. Nothing comes without work.

She kept her mouth shut and did work, and as a result of that work, and maybe a little affirmative action, she got a scholarship to study and paint at the College of Beaux Arts in Paris for a summer. She had received confirmation and booked her flight the day before she accompanied her parents for that annual recheck with the surgeon.

The City of Lights, she told the surgeon. I am going to paint in the City of Lights.

He beamed proudly at her. That is great, Jazz. When I was a boy, I wanted to work for a famous surgeon there who had his own hospital in the Sixteenth Arrondissement. You will absolutely love it. The Louvre is full of junk, but make sure you see the Rodin Museum. When do you go?

In a couple of days. Incidentally, I have had this little pain in my hip for a couple of weeks. Probably nothing, but it seems worse when I walk.

Since you are going away, we had better have a look at it. Hop up on the stretcher, Jazz.

She lay down on the stretcher where her parents had been examined and pronounced fine for another year. He lifted her leg, bent her knee, and wiggled her hip.

Full range of movement. Any pain, Jazz?

Just a very little in the groin.

Probably nothing, but since you are going away we should probably x-ray it. Let’s get you registered and up to x-ray.

Half an hour later, she was back. Her parents accompanied her. She stood with him as he clicked her x-ray images up on the computer screen. She saw the images of her hip and, as an artist, recognized what they were, but the details meant nothing to her. He flicked slowly through the three images. She looked at him. He said nothing, but he was no longer smiling and looked bleak and then ineffably sad.

Bad news, he finally said. Really bad news.

What is it? she said in alarm.

I am so sorry, Jazz, he said, turning to her and putting his hands on her shoulders. She saw tears in his eyes.

What is it? she asked again, dreading the answer. What else could make a tough, jovial senior surgeon so sad? The bottom fell out of her world. She knew the answer before he gave it.

I don’t know how to say this, Jazz, but it’s cancer.

He let go of her and opened his arms. Instinctively, she came inside them, and as he held her close, she whispered, How bad?

As bad as it gets.

What do you say when your life is over, when you have been given a death sentence? She had thought her young life was opening like a flower. In the glad morning of my days, or as she had read of the poet Coleridge, With hope like a fiery column before thee, or like the poem,

When all the world was young lass

And every tree was green

And every goose a swan lass,

And every lass a queen.

She shuddered. Her dreams were over. She was going to die.

What is it? she whispered to him.

Cancer, spread all over. The pain in your hip is because the tumor is eating away the bone, and the bone is about to break. The pain is the impending fracture. It will have to be nailed, and the other hip too. It is almost as bad.

Rose, the mother of Jazz, broke in, What’s going on? What is it? I was a nurse before I retired after my knee replacements. What’s wrong with Jasmine?

Silently, the surgeon pointed to the x-rays, and explained the obvious holes in the bone. Rose looked at them, horror-struck. You’re sure?

Let’s take some more x-rays just to be sure. We’ll get shoulders and skull.

The surgeon personally took Jazz and her parents up to x-ray on the second floor. He spoke to one of the x-ray technicians to get her to do Jazz ahead of all the other patients who were waiting. He then went back to the clinic to see more patients while she was being x-rayed. When they came back, he brought up the images. There was no doubt. Rose, who had not looked at an x-ray for years other than her own knees and her husband’s hips, could clearly see the defects in the bones of the skull. Wordlessly, the surgeon pointed to lesions on the shoulders. Jazz was riddled with cancer. Rose could think of nothing to say.

How long have I got? asked Jazz.

I don’t know. Maybe a few months, maybe a little longer, maybe a little less. It is too widespread for any treatment to be effective.

Can I go to Paris?

Not as you are. Your femur will break.

Can you fix it so I can go?

Yes. If we can get your femurs nailed to reinforce them, you can go, because there is no other treatment worth giving you.

Can you do it?

Not here. Not in this hospital. We don’t have the equipment, but the docs at the cancer hospital can.

Can you organize that?

He threw up his hands in the gesture of helplessness. You know this is Canada. It is state medicine. It moves at the speed of a glacier. God knows when we could even get you seen, probably several weeks or even months.

But I don’t have that much time.

You don’t. Let me try. Worst case, I will send you across the border to the US to an old friend, a great surgeon I know in Cleveland. Lou Keppler is a real good guy, and if I ask, I am sure he would see you today and maybe operate tonight. But with no insurance, even if he and his anesthetist do it pro bono, the hospital cost would be high.

He called over his assistant, a surgeon from Korea who was working for him for a year, and the physiotherapist, who assisted in the clinic.

I will be on the phone for the next couple of hours. Can you guys finish this clinic for me? Anyone who has to be seen can come back next week or stay, and I’ll get to them eventually.

Turning to her he said, Jazz, don’t have anything else to eat or drink in case we can get surgery organized in Toronto.

He turned to the waiting patients. Sorry guys. I have to look after this girl. Dr. Park and the physio here will look after you. If there are any problems, wait for me, but this is going to take time.

He stepped across the corridor into the dictating room and picked up the phone. Jazz and her parents sat in chairs in the corridor outside. They could occasionally hear snatches of the conversation, which was punctuated by long silences.

Well, find him … I don’t care, get him for me … OK, he is in the OR. I’ll wait. No, I’ll wait on the telephone. Tell him I am waiting … I know you are busy … Al, Al, it’s me, Fred. Thank you for taking this call … I know you’re busy … For Christ’s sake, this girl is dying, and this is her life’s dream … For the love of God, give her her last wish … please! I will move anyone you want to the head of my surgical waiting list, which is now over one year. Yes, anyone you want for the next year. Yeah, yeah. A hip or a knee. They can go to the head of the list. Any number you want … It’s both hips, both need nailed. Forget the radiation. She’s riddled with mets. Just nail her so she can go to Paris for a few weeks. She knows. She’s brave, she’s tough as they come. You’ll nail her tonight? Thank you so much, Al. I’ll send her over.

He came out and spoke to her. Go to the cancer hospital and ask for a Doctor Langer. He will see you in his office and organize the necessary tests. He says he will nail you this evening. If they have no beds available in the hospital, I will take you back here tomorrow from their recovery room. Have nothing to eat or drink until surgery.

She hugged him. Thank you, was all she could say. The next few hours were a nightmare. She and her family drove across town to the cancer hospital. She found the cancer surgeon’s office. He was not entirely pleased to see her.

You are the young lady that Dr. Buechel threatened to break my arms if I did not see. Thank God most of my consults don’t come with threats of mayhem.

Oh dear. I did not know.

Hard to say no to Fred Buechel. Anyway, he said that you are on your way to Paris and need both femurs nailed. You know the diagnosis and prognosis?

Yes, he explained it to me.

Give me the x-ray disc.

She passed it over. He put it into his computer and pulled up the images. Yes, no question, you need nailed. But going to Paris after. That’s a risk.

Dr. Buechel says he has a friend in Paris who can look after me.

Huh! The only docs he will know are other joint replacement surgeons, but they probably have friends. OK. Let’s get you down to Admitting. I have put you on the emergency operating list, which starts when the elective list is over. With cancer surgery, you never know how long any operation is going to take. I’ll get you done sometime tonight. But God knows when.

"Thank you so much, Dr. Langer. I’ll bring you back a painting from France.’

I’d like that, said the doctor with a grin.

Her parents, being former nurses and having been through elective surgical procedures themselves, knew the routine of hurry up and wait. Registration; x-ray; blood work; consultations with the resident, the internist, and the anesthetist; and the long, long interminable waits when no one could even hazard a guess as to when the next step would occur as the system slowly ground through. Her parents, who knew that there was no way of hurrying the process, sat with her and did their best to comfort her. But they were all so stunned; what was there to say? No one expects their child to die before they do.

Finally, six hours later, she was in the operating room, on the table, under the lights, the anesthetist talking quietly, leaning over her; and she drifted off to sleep.

Jasmine woke up in the recovery room with pain in both hips, which were bandaged. She also had some pain and bandages just above her knees, which she did not expect. She drifted back to sleep, thankful that the surgery had eventually been done without bankrupting her parents. The hospital had no empty beds. They were all full. So in consultation with Dr. Buechel, she was transferred from the recovery room to his hospital early next morning.

A short time after she arrived, he saw her.

OK, Jazz, you can get up and walk whenever you feel you can. You have big reinforcing nails down the inside of your femurs with transverse locking screws at the top and bottom. The incisions above your knees are where the locking screws were inserted to help unload the bone. You can get out of here as soon as the physiotherapist makes sure you can handle stairs. You can leave for Paris in the next couple of days, but to stop blood clots, I want you to take baby aspirin and to get up and walk around for five minutes every hour when you are on the plane and do the calf pumping exercise that the physiotherapist will show you. We will also prescribe you some support hose.

He gave her a sheet of paper. This is the name, address, and phone number of my oldest friend in Paris, Phillipe Cartier. I phoned him this morning. He only does knee replacements, but he will take your stitches out in a couple of weeks, and if you have problems, he will get some other appropriate doc to look after you. Here is my cell phone number. Call me if you have problems, Jazz.

Later, with the physiotherapist, she got up and walked. It really was not that painful. She knew her time was limited, so she wanted to get on with it. She discharged herself from hospital later that day and went home to complete her arrangements to go to Paris. She had mentioned nothing of her problems to the people she was supposed to be with in Paris in case they canceled the arrangements.

When she got home, her mother had little to say. That did not surprise Jazz. What was there to say? She saw no reason to change any of the arrangements she had made. Before they left for the airport, her mother took her in her arms. There were tears in her eyes.

Jasmine, the Bible says, ‘Yea though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death I shall fear no evil, for He is with me.’ Her voice broke. He will always be with you, Jasmine. Come back safely.

There was nothing else to say. Jazz waved to them as she entered the departure area and walked to the security lineup without looking back. She was wearing a loose skirt because her doctor had told her the metal in her hips would set off the alarms at the airport, and she might have to show her scars to the screeners.

CHAPTER 2

Romance

It’s a long flight, so you might as well be comfortable, her father had said. Upgrade to Economy Plus. It’s only a few dollars more. He made arrangements to do just that. On boarding the Air Canada flight to Paris, Jazz found her aisle seat. She had chosen that because her surgeon had told her to get up and walk around during the flight to keep the blood in her legs moving to reduce the risk of blood clots because of her recent surgery.

She dumped her tightly packed roller bag on her seat, and then tried to lift it into the overhead storage bin. As she did so, her hip hurt, and she groaned and lowered the bag. She was about to try again when a young man, who was already seated in the window seat, got up and took her bag.

Allow me, he said, took her bag from her, and put it up.

Thank you, she said gratefully as they both sat down and strapped themselves in. The stewardess came around with a tray of glasses. A glass of orange juice or champagne? she asked.

Champagne, said the young man and took a glass.

Jazz looked at it. Normally she drank very little alcohol, really hardly at all, so she was about to refuse it. But then she thought, Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.

Why not? she said and took a glass. She looked at the man seated beside her and raised her glass to toast him. He clinked glasses with her, and they both drank.

I don’t think it really is champagne, he said. I think it’s just white wine with bubbles.

Better than nothing, she said. My name is Jazz.

My name is Colin, Colin Choi Campbell, and I am very glad to meet you.

She looked at him. As an artist, she knew that most people don’t really look at each other. They see a fleeting image and assume the rest. She knew of the famous video clip showing two groups of people playing basketball. The test subjects were asked to count the number of times the red team passed the ball to each other. Someone dressed as a gorilla walked through the scene. Roughly 60 percent of the observers had been concentrating so intently counting the ball passes, that they never saw the gorilla. No one believed it, but as an artist, she had been shown other examples, like the Harvard Yard one, which was a similar visual distraction trick involving switching people. Based on these examples, she believed that it was the brain that saw things, not the eyes, a very important lesson for an artist and, she knew, for artificial intelligence.

It was because of this and other examples, she had been told, that most philosophers felt that art, great art, was of importance. The artist saw things that others did not see. Kant had emphasized that, as did others like Sir Roger Scruton, the English intellectual. It was by listening to some of Scruton’s lectures on YouTube that she had come to understand the concept. Certainly none of the almost useless lectures from the teaching assistants at university or college ever had even remotely expressed such a concept. Art and