Chapter Seventeen

THE ENCRYPTED KEY card which the Saracen had taken from Tlass’s wallet did its job instantly, and the front doors of the institute slid open.

Although the security desk was unmanned and the building deserted, the metal detectors were still operating. He stepped through without any difficulty – hours ago, he had taken off his watch and emptied his pockets. He strode six more paces and stopped.

In front of him was a narrow corridor – the only way forward and blocked at the far end by an automatic steel door. Between him and that, the floor consisted of a long metal panel.

Through the plate-glass window, while supposedly enjoying the broken air-conditioning conduit, he had unlocked one of the building’s many security secrets: the floor was a hidden scale. Before stepping on to the metal you had to swipe your encrypted card through another reader. A computer then married the name on the card to a database which checked the weight of the individual.

If it hadn’t been for that precaution, the Saracen could have grabbed Tlass by the scruff of the neck and walked through behind him. But two men of one-eighty standing on the floor would have shut the building down.

Still wearing the surgical gloves, the Saracen ran Tlass’s card through the reader. He stepped on to the scale with no idea what tolerance for error the system operated on, half expecting shutters to fall from the ceiling, trapping him.

Nothing happened – his guess that Tlass had been the same weight as him was right. Now for the last hurdle: a retina scanner. He put the ice containers on a ledge and took an eye in each hand, noting which was left and which was right. Holding a slippery ball in his thumb and forefinger, he jammed them hard against his own eyelids, deep into the bony socket. Unable to see, with only hope and prayer to sustain him, he turned to face the scanner in the wall.

He knew his gloved hands were no problem – the system was designed to ignore plastic or wire-framed glasses, contact lenses, make-up and anything else. It was interested in only one thing – the blood vessels in the membrane at the back of the eye, each pattern unique among the six billion individuals on earth, even those born as identical twins.

The manufacturer claimed the technology could not be beaten and, while it was true that the retinas of dead people decayed very fast, the real question was whether eyes taken from a living person and fewer than three minutes old would have enough blood left in them to convince the software that this was Bashar Tlass standing in front of it. The Saracen had no way of knowing the answer, and probably nobody else did either – it wasn’t as if someone had ever volunteered to find out.

As a result of his observations, the Saracen knew that most people faced the scanner for about two seconds, so he forced himself to count to three and turned away. He dropped the eyes in the ice and turned towards the metal door at the far end. Again he started counting – the longest he had seen anybody wait for it to open was to a count of four.

He reached a slow six and knew he would have to run. His abort strategy was to smash through the plate-glass window on the assumption that the key card and doors would have been frozen by the system. Once outside, he would drive the SUV to an area near a garbage dump which he had already reconnoitred, terminate Tlass and walk twenty miles to the bus station. He would then take the first bus to the border and hope he could get across before they closed it.

At the count of eight he was turning away, his planning curdling into self-loathing, fear hammering urgency into every movement, when the steel door slid open. He was in.

The reason for the delay would remain a mystery – perhaps subtle changes to the eyes had confused the system and forced it to use a more complex algorithm, or maybe it had to rouse itself from a stand-by mode – but he didn’t care. He strode along the corridor, through the steel door and into a large atrium, all the time anticipating a sense of elation at his achievement. Instead, his hopes plunged.

Because of high walls, razor wire and surveillance cameras, he had never seen anything of the institute except the front facade. Without thinking about it, he had predicated the size of the building on that information. As it turned out, that was a serious error – perhaps a fatal one. Now inside the atrium, he could see that the place was huge.

Only Allah knew how long it would take him to find what he was looking for in a place so large, while out in the world, at some stage, probably very soon, Tlass would be missed. When his friends or family couldn’t reach him in the office or on his cellphone, somebody undoubtedly would drive into the parking lot to look for him.

How long that gave him, the Saracen couldn’t tell – maybe they were already on their way – but he knew now that time was short and the job was huge. As a Turkish proverb says, it was going to be like digging a well with a needle.

Unarmed, totally at the non-existent mercy of anybody who came, he sprinted down the first of five broad corridors and jagged right when he reached an intersection. He stopped in mid-stride: armoured glass and an unmanned security desk blocked the way.

Two guards, sharing a weekend tea with him just after he had arrived, had mentioned a special security measure somewhere deep in the building which, based on their description of it, told him that it included a backscatter X-ray. Impossible to smuggle anything past because it rendered you as good as naked, the X-ray could also check a huge range of body measurements – the length of the right femur, the distance between the nose and an ear lobe. Unlike with a retina scanner, you had to be who you claimed you were.

No advanced medical facility in the world boasted armoured glass and backscatter X-rays, and the Saracen knew that behind them undoubtedly lay all the most horrific things which were really being researched at the institute. He never thought he would be able to access the inner bastion, and he didn’t care. If he was right, he didn’t need to.

He turned and returned fast to the intersection – a foreign man in a foreign land, desperately trying to find something rare but, strangely, completely harmless – just a box of small bottles used to protect the people who worked there.

As he plunged into the next maze of corridors and offices, through pools of deep shadow, past looming shapes that could have concealed any manner of threat, lights along the baseboards and in the hallways suddenly burst to life. He stopped and wheeled on the spot.

Somebody had entered the building and activated the lights! He listened with every cell of his being for a clue to their position. From far away he heard a phone ring, a tap dripping, an exterior shutter banging in the wind. Its beat was almost identical to the rhythm of his pounding heart. He listened for footsteps, the squeak of clothing, the clink of an unholstered weapon. Nothing.

Then he realized, and fear went back into its cave – the lights were on a timer and night must have fallen outside.