Chapter Nineteen

A TINY SALVAGE diver worked tirelessly on the wreck of a Spanish galleon as five beautiful clownfish swam through the bubbles pouring from his helmet.

The wall-sized aquarium’s eerie glow lit the waiting room of the institute’s lavish executive wing, casting a shimmering shadow of the Saracen across the opposite wall. As he moved through the silent space – close to despair, not sure which corridor or alcove to explore next – he hesitated at the sight of the brilliantly coloured fish.

He hadn’t seen them for twenty years or more, but he knew what they were. ‘Amphiprion ocellaris, ’ he said, surprised he could remember their biological name after so much time. Of all tropical fish, they had been his father’s favourites and, often, when he worked at the weekend, he had taken his young son into his sea-front office and planted him among the huge research tanks. The largest was filled with sea anemones, the beautiful but treacherous flowers of the marine world.

‘Look at the clownfish, ’ his father would say. ‘They’re the only fish in the world which the anemone’s tentacles don’t poison and kill. Why? That’s what I’m trying to find out. ’

Now, so many years later, alone in a secret weapons establishment, the irony of it wasn’t lost on the Saracen. Just like his father, he too was consumed by the search for something which gave protection against a deadly pathogen.

He would have liked to linger with the fish a moment longer, try to remember more of what innocence was like, but there was no time. He started to turn away – and stared straight down a dark passage that he hadn’t even noticed. At the far end was a door, and somehow he knew it was the room he was searching for, even before he saw the Red Crescent fixed to the wall.

The sign, the Islamic version of the Red Cross, indicated it was the building’s first-aid and medical centre. He had been told of its existence by a former employee – a nurse he had worked with at the hospital in Lebanon – but it was his father’s clownfish which had guided him to it and he took that as a sign from Allah.

The door into the first-aid clinic wasn’t locked, and he moved inside fast, heading through the treatment areas until he found the supply rooms at the back. The purpose of the centre was to handle any on-site illness and to conduct physicals for new employees – hence it had ECGs, treadmills, defibrillators, respirators and enough other equipment to make any hospital proud.

In the centre of it all was a drug dispensary, and the Saracen entered it with the easy familiarity of someone with years of experience in hospitals. The wall behind a counter was taken up with boxes of pharmaceuticals and racks of surgical supplies. Another wall housed locked cabinets faced with steel grilles which the Saracen knew contained the Class A drugs: narcotics, hallucinogens, amphetamines and various opiates used as anaesthetics.

He ignored everything – at the back was a smaller room, and in it he saw the row of refrigerated cabinets which had brought him to this godforsaken country and forced him to live like a dog in a parking lot.

In a surge of hope and anxiety, he moved along the glass-fronted refrigerators. His expert eye registered pouches of blood products, vials of temperature-sensitive drugs and, as in hospitals everywhere, the food and drink of the staff. But nothing of what he needed. With each step his desperation grew – maybe every scrap of gossip he had heard, every assumption he had made, had added up to nothing more than a grand delusion. Like a fool, he had believed what he wanted to believe …

Then he looked in the last cabinet and bowed his head in a silent prayer. On a rack were eight cardboard containers holding rows of tiny glass bottles, and printed across the front of them was a complex technical description that told the Saracen they were exactly what he was looking for.

He opened the unlocked cabinet and removed six of the vials from a half-empty box. The clear fluid they held was the direct result of an experiment in a small English village two hundred years earlier, and it occurred to the Saracen, wrapping them in a cloth and putting them in his pocket, how much he and the clownfish would soon have in common. He too would be able to move through a beautiful but hostile environment totally protected from the deadly poison it contained. It can’t be overstated what it meant to him: in the desperate months during which I tried to find him, and even as my journey escalated into a horrifying race, I only ever discovered two scraps of paper that pointed to his identity. On each of them was written the word ‘clownfish’.

With the vials safely in his pocket, he turned to the drug register lying on a counter and accounted for the bottles by carefully altering several entries going back three years to make sure nobody ever found out that any of them were missing. He put the register back, headed to the corridor, closed the door and, thanks to his plastic gloves, left the clinic with no forensic trace of ever having entered it. He ran past the aquarium and into the long, silent corridors which led to the front doors.

He estimated that in two more minutes he would be home free. There was only one problem – the prisoner in the SUV was about to beat him across the line.