Chapter Thirty-one

THE FIRST THING he did was set about sealing the garage under his small apartment and turning it into a makeshift bio-containment laboratory.

He had one advantage in performing the work – there was a good example close at hand. While everything else at the El-Mina hospital was falling apart, it had a two-bed isolation ward and an attached lab. Because anthrax was endemic to the region, the hospital had been able to take advantage of a World Health Organization programme to help developing nations combat the disease. Forget that the hospital didn’t have some of the most rudimentary equipment necessary for saving lives, the Geneva organization had provided a small fortune to build a first-rate facility.

As far as the Saracen knew, it had only been used once in ten years and had become little more than a temporary storage shed. Nevertheless, it was an excellent blueprint for his own lab, and it also ended up providing half the practical equipment he needed – incubators, a microscope, culture dishes, pipettes, sterilizing cabinets and a host of other items. They were never even reported missing.

Over the following week, using a computer and an Internet connection he had set up in the lab, he assembled a list of over sixty bio-tech companies worldwide which would provide DNA material of fewer than seventy letters without asking for name verification or any further information.

A long time later, on first hearing this, I didn’t believe it. To my despair, I went online and did it myself.

But before the Saracen could order DNA he had to locate two crucial pieces of equipment: gene synthesizers – machines about the size of a decent computer printer. It took him an hour. The dizzying progress in the bio-tech industry meant the market was awash with equipment at hugely discounted prices which was no longer the fastest or the best.

He found two synthesizers in excellent condition, one on eBay, the other on usedlabequipment. com. Combined, they cost under five thousand dollars and the Saracen was thankful that doctors were well paid and he had always lived such a frugal life. He could well afford them from his savings and what was even more important to him was that the sellers also had no interest in who the purchaser was – all they wanted was a valid credit-card number. An anonymous Western Union money transfer was just as good.

He started work the day the second machine arrived and, that evening, he was surfing the Web, adding to his already vast library about viruses and biology, when he glanced through the latest online edition of the prestigious periodical Science. One of its lead stories was about a researcher who had just synthesized an organism with 300, 000 letters. In the short time since he had decided on his course of action, 185, 000 letters had already faded into history. That was the pace at which genetic engineering was advancing.

After he finished the article he knew that smallpox was within his grasp and his date with destiny confirmed. He prayed late into the night – it was a huge responsibility and he asked Allah to make sure he used it well.

Six months later, having glued and re-glued, backtracked, researched and re-learned – using not only his knowledge but the vast array of cheap equipment that was rapidly becoming available – he completed the task.

To the best of his ability, one molecule at a time, he had re-created smallpox. According to every test he could run, it was identical to its naturally occurring equivalent.

In the thousands of years since the virus had made the jump from some other life form into humans, there have been two different types of smallpox – Variola minor, often called cottonpox, which was rarely fatal, and its bigger brother, Variola major, the disease which had proved devastating to human populations ever since mankind had started to congregate in large tribes. It was that virus – with a death rate of about 30 per cent – which the Saracen had synthesized. However, within Variola major there were a host of different strains, some far more lethal than others.

Knowing that, he began to refine and challenge his virus, a well-established method of forcing it to mutate time after time, attempting, in the slang of some microbiologists, to KFC or deep-fry it, trying to turn it into a red-hot strain of what was already the hottest agent on earth.

Satisfied that it was as lethal as he could make it, he set out to modify its genetic structure. That was the simplest, but also the most dangerous, part of the entire exercise. It was also the most necessary …

Once the naturally occurring form of smallpox had been eradicated from the planet, the World Health Organization found itself holding a huge stockpile of vaccine doses. After several years, when everyone was convinced that the virus would not re-emerge, that protective reservoir was destroyed. Similarly, although a vast number of people had been routinely vaccinated against smallpox – primarily children in the Western world – the Saracen also knew that the vaccine started to wear off after five years and, as a result, virtually nobody on earth had any immunity.

That was ideal for his purposes – except for one problem. The United States, the target of his assault, had become increasingly concerned about a bio-terror attack and in the wake of 9/11 had decided to produce and warehouse over three hundred million doses of vaccine, one for every person in the country. When the Saracen had first read about it, the information had cast him into despair. Sitting up for an entire night researching vaccination, he learned that anything up to 20 per cent of a population would remain unprotected: the vaccine didn’t take in a significant number of people and it can’t be given to pregnant women, newborn babies, elderly citizens or anyone with a damaged immune system.

Even so, the existence of the vaccine stockpile shook him badly and, just before dawn on that long night, he had considered abandoning his plan and looking for a different weapon. But, once again, the ongoing explosion of scientific knowledge – or Allah – came to his rescue.

Delving deeper into the literature, he found a research report from a group of Australian scientists. Working at a facility in Canberra, the nation’s capital, the scientists had been trying to find a way to control the breeding cycle of mice. Working with mousepox, a disease closely related to smallpox, they had spliced a gene from the immune system known as IL-4 into the virus. What they found was startling: the virus crashed through any vaccine that had been given to the mice and wiped them out.

The addition of one gene – just one gene – had made the virus into a vaccine-buster.

The Saracen, with hope renewed, started following the obscure research trail. In rarely visited corners of the Web – frequently following nothing more than casual leads mentioned in scientific forums – he found that a number of researchers throughout the world had tried, with varying degrees of success, to duplicate the Australians’ result.

With daylight flooding into the world outside his cocoon, he worked on and stumbled across a newly posted report from several Dutch agricultural scientists working with cowpox. They had decided to splice a slightly different gene into the virus and had not only succeeded in evading the vaccine but had managed to repeat the process every time.

The Saracen knew that the gene in question was readily available from the same companies that had supplied him with the nucleic acid base pairs. He ordered it immediately, opened the tiny package two days later and took science into uncharted waters.

He knew that the massive dose of vaccine that he had used on himself would provide no protection if he was successful in constructing a weapons-grade smallpox virus: he would be as good as naked in the hot zone. As a result, he stole a complete bio-hazard suit from the hospital to protect himself against infection and then drove to the coast. He travelled slowly along the road that ran parallel to the sea until he found a diving shop. Inside, he paid cash for four scuba tanks of oxygen and an air regulator, loaded them into the back of his car and returned to his cocoon.

Every time he worked on his vaccine-resistant virus it took him twenty minutes to put on the pilfered bio-hazard suit and attach his specially modified breathing apparatus, but the scientific work was easy. Partly as a result of the expertise he had gained and partly because the new gene contained only three hundred or so letters, he finished splicing it into the virus less than a month later.

It was this potential cataclysm that was contained in the two glass vials with the extra zero, and there was a simple reason why the Saracen had brought them to Afghanistan: all his remarkable work would have been for nothing if he had made a mistake and the virus didn’t work. He was well aware that smallpox occurred only in humans – not even our closest relatives, chimpanzees and monkeys, were capable of catching it. That meant the only way for him to be certain it was as deadly as the original and to discover if it could crash through the vaccine was to conduct a human trial.

It was deep in the mountains of the Hindu Kush that he planned to find the three subjects necessary for his dark experiment.

Leaving Kunar Province and its US patrols far behind, he found a dry riverbed which, due to the decay of the country’s infrastructure, now served as a road. For days on end he walked along it, sprayed with dust by passing trucks and the ubiquitous Toyota 4-WDs, but, finally, on a blazingly hot morning, he realized he was getting close to his destination: ahead, silhouetted against the sky, he saw four men on horseback with AK-47s, standing guard.

The Saracen led his small caravan forward, turned a bend in the river and saw, some distance ahead, a town of mud and stone that appeared little changed since the Middle Ages. On the opposite bank, commanding a pass deeper into the mountains, stood a heavily fortified group of buildings built into a cliff face.

Once a nineteenth-century British fort, it had been turned into a home, a stronghold and a seat of regional power. The Saracen passed under the remains of a road bridge, climbed on to a pitted blacktop and headed towards it. Halfway along what had once been a major road, he walked between a jumble of giant boulders and – emerging on the other side – found himself face to face with two of the horsemen.

They commanded the road, their rifles levelled casually at his chest. The Saracen knew they would be more than happy to pull the trigger.

‘Who are you? ’ the one with fine gold inlay along the stock of his weapon – the more senior of the pair – asked.

The Saracen started to answer but stopped, realizing the name he was using – the one on his passport – would mean nothing. Instead, he indicated the entrance to the fort.

‘Give him a message, please. Tell him the boy with the Blowpipe has returned. ’