Chapter Twenty-three

THE OLD BUS sputtered and belched through the night, crawling through the extensive roadworks on Syria Route One and – having negotiated them – was forced to stop only for fajr, the dawn prayer.

When it finally reached the border, surly immigration and customs officers examined the Saracen’s documents, looked him up and down and only treated him with anything approaching respect when they realized he was a doctor. Had they bothered to search him, though, they certainly would not have found four of the glass vials – their contents were hidden in a place far beyond their reach. They were in his bloodstream.

The last thing he had done before leaving the wash cubicle in Damascus was to take a special two-pronged needle from his medical bag, dip it into the contents of the vials and prick and scratch the solution into the skin of his upper arm until it was bleeding freely. He knew the dose was four times greater than normal, but he intended to do everything to give himself as wide a margin of safety as possible. He bandaged his arm, put his shirt on and crushed the empty vials beyond recognition. That was what he had dropped in the garbage bucket along with the rubbish from his meal.

As he was being processed at the border, he was already, as he had anticipated, coming down with a fever, prickling sweats and a searing headache. He just hoped he could make it to a cheap hotel in Beirut before it got too bad. The symptoms he was feeling were almost identical to those experienced by a young boy in the English village two hundred years ago, the first person to undergo a procedure thought up by a local doctor called Edward Jenner. He was the scientist who pioneered vaccination.

For that is exactly what the Saracen had done – he had risked his life, broken into a weapons lab and killed a man he had never met in order to steal a vaccine. And here was the truly strange thing – in the washroom he had vaccinated himself against a disease which no longer existed, that presented a threat to no one, which had been totally eradicated from the planet just over thirty years ago.

Prior to that, however, it was the most catastrophic disease known to man, responsible for more human death than any other cause including war, killing over two million people annually as late as the 1960s – the equivalent of a new Holocaust every three years. The disease was known to science as Variola vera and to everyone else as smallpox.

The complete eradication of the virus was one of the reasons why so few places on earth even had the vaccine – apart from research facilities and secret weapons labs, it was no longer needed. Not unless – of course – like the Saracen, you were planning to synthesize the virus and were worried that one tiny mistake in that almost-impossible process would infect and kill you. For that reason he had sought out a state-of-the-art vaccine, one which no doubt had been thoroughly tested and proven effective, and which would now allow him to make as many errors as he needed.

Not all vaccinations ‘take’, and not all vaccinations work the same way in different people. In order to try to compensate for that and – as I said – offer himself as much protection as humanly possible, he had quadrupled the dose. No wonder he was feeling sick but, for the Saracen, the fever was good news: it meant that his body was being challenged and his immune system was mobilizing to fight the invader. The vaccine had ‘taken’.

While an immigration officer was waiting for the computer screen in front of him to assess the Saracen’s passport, a phone in the nearby office started ringing. By the time someone had answered it and relayed the order to close the border, the officer had waved the Saracen through and into Lebanon – a man with a false name, a real passport and a growing immunity against the world’s most deadly pathogen.