Chapter Thirty

HE COULD NEVER have done it without the internet. As the search for him became increasingly desperate, I finally discovered that, several years after he had graduated in medicine, the Saracen took a job in El-Mina, an ancient town in the north of Lebanon.

He worked the night shift in ER at the local hospital – hard and exhausting work in a facility that was under-equipped and understaffed. Despite the constant fatigue, he used every spare moment to secretly pursue what he considered his life’s work – jihad against the far enemy.

While other soldiers-of-Allah were wasting their time at hidden boot camps in Pakistan or fantasizing about getting a US visa, he was reading everything he could find about weapons of mass destruction. And it was only the Internet that had given a doctor at an old hospital in a town nobody had heard of widespread access to the latest research into every major biological killer in the world.

In one of those unforeseen but deadly consequences – what the CIA would call blowback – the World Wide Web had opened up a Pandora’s box of terrible possibilities.

The Saracen hadn’t been raised like Western kids so he didn’t know much about computers, but he knew enough: by using a good proxy connection he managed to undertake his relentless search in complete anonymity.

For months, helped by his knowledge of medicine and biology, he concentrated on what he considered the most achievable bio-warfare candidates – ricin, anthrax, pneumonic plague, sarin, tabun and soman – all of which were capable of causing widespread death and even greater panic. But all of them came with enormous shortcomings – most of them either weren’t infectious or were most effective if used as part of an aerial bombing campaign.

Frustrated at his lack of progress, fighting waves of despair, he was in the middle of researching anthrax – at least the raw bacteria was obtainable; it was widespread in the Middle East, including Lebanon, but it would still have to be ‘weaponized’ – when he read something that changed the very nature of the world in which we live.

Nobody much noticed it.

In the online pages of The Annals of Virology – a monthly which doesn’t exactly fly off the shelves – was an account of an experiment conducted at a lab in upstate New York. For the first time in history, a life-form had been built entirely from off-the-shelf chemicals – all purchased for a few hundred dollars. It was late in the afternoon and for once the Saracen forgot to kneel for maghrib, the sunset prayer. With increasing wonder, he read that the scientists had successfully recreated the polio virus from scratch.

According to the article, the aim of the researchers was to warn the US government that terrorist groups could make biological weapons without ever obtaining the natural virus. Good idea – there was at least one terrorist who had never thought of it until he read their research. Even more alarming – or perhaps not, depending on your degree of cynicism – was the name of the organization which had funded the programme with a three hundred thousand dollar grant. The Pentagon.

The Saracen, however, was certain that the startling development had nothing to do with the Defense Department or scientists in New York – they were merely the instruments. This was Allah’s work: somebody had now synthesized a virus and opened the door for him. On the other side was the Holy Grail of all bio-terror weapons, a wildly infectious agent transmitted by the simple act of breathing, the most potent killer in the history of the planet – smallpox.

In the weeks which followed, the Saracen learned that the researchers, using polio’s publicly available genome – its genetic map – had purchased what are called ‘nucleic acid base pairs’ from one of the scores of companies that sell material to the bio-tech industry. Those base pairs cost the princely sum of ten cents a piece and, according to an account on an Internet discussion forum for biology geeks, were ordered by email. Because the sales company’s online system was fully automated, the report on the forum said, there was no name verification and nobody asked why the material was being purchased.

Once the New York lab had acquired the microscopic building blocks, the scientists spent a year arranging them in the correct order and then – in a skilful but publicly known process – gluing them together. The Saracen, being a doctor and with a dozen manuals on molecular biology at hand, soon understood enough of the process to suspect that what could be done at a lab in upstate New York could be duplicated in a garage in El-Mina – if he could locate one thing.

He had read about it somewhere, and he started searching. After two hours online he found it – the smallpox genome. Once one of the world’s most closely guarded secrets, the virus’s complete chemical and genetic map had fallen victim to the explosion of knowledge about biology and the worldwide dissemination of complex scientific papers over the Internet. There were no gatekeepers any more, and potentially lethal information was haemorrhaging all the time – while it had taken the Saracen two hours to locate the genome, had he been more experienced at searching the Web he would have found it on a dozen biology or research sites in less than half the time. I know because I did.

From the article in The Annals of Virology the Saracen knew that polio had 7, 741 base pairs, or letters, in its genome. Now he saw that smallpox had 185, 578 letters, greatly enhancing the difficulty of re-creating it, but he was riding a wave of knowledge and optimism and he wasn’t going to let a small thing like an extra 178, 000 letters deter him.

He quickly decided his first objective was to protect himself: smallpox is a merciless pathogen and it was almost certain that somewhere in the complicated and unstable process of trying to synthesize it he would make a mistake. Many mistakes, probably, and the first he would know of his exposure would be when the fever hit and, a short time later, a rash of fluid-filled blisters appeared. By then it would be over: no cure for smallpox has ever been found.

He had to locate a vaccine, and it was the pursuit of that goal that made him take a six-week vacation. Instead of heading to Beirut and flying to Cairo to visit friends, as he had told the medical director of the hospital, he had boarded an early-morning bus for Damascus. There he killed Tlass, stole the vaccine, used the double-pronged needle on himself and crossed the border back into Lebanon.

He spent five days locked in a hotel room fighting the terrible fever which had accompanied the huge dose of vaccine he had taken. Once that had passed and the telltale scab and scar had formed on his arm, he returned to El-Mina. Though, outwardly, nothing had changed, his life had entered an entirely new phase: he was ready to start on his history-making journey.