Chapter Thirty-six

I DON’T SUPPOSE there are many good ways to die, but I know one of the worst: far from home and family, chained like a dog in an abandoned village, your body collapsing under the onslaught of smallpox and only a bearded face at a sealed glass window to hear your screams for help.

All the prisoners had woken late the following morning with a headache hammering at the base of their skull. They wondered if it was a reaction to the food but not for a minute did they think they might have been drugged. Why would anyone do that? It wasn’t as if they might escape – they were chained to ringbolts in a stone cell.

When the two men finally dragged themselves up to wash at a small basin, they both found what appeared to be a small bite mark: a reddened area on one man’s tattooed bicep, the other guy with one on his thigh. Their immediate thought was scorpions or spiders, and they set about using an oil lamp to search every inch of the cell, to no avail.

As the day wore on, and through the next twelve days, the fevers and night sweats got steadily worse. It fell to the woman to try to tend to them in the stifling cell. She changed their blankets, brought them food, mopped their burning bodies and washed their soiled clothes. All the time she was surrounded by their sweat, their breath and their spittle – she didn’t realize it, but she was swimming in an unseen ocean, surrounded by billions of molecules of infection, a place white-hot with the pathogen.

On one occasion, desperate to get fresh air into the cell, she stood on one of the water casks and looked out of the window to try to attract the Saracen’s attention. What she saw scared her more than any other thing during their long ordeal, and she couldn’t say why. He was standing thirty yards away and was talking animatedly on a satellite phone. Up until then, she had assumed he was just a labourer in their particular enterprise but now she thought he might not be the monkey after all – perhaps he was the organ grinder. Due to the way he was holding the phone, she could see his face clearly and she thought from the movement of his lips and the few words which she could decode that he was speaking in English. He rang off, turned and saw her at the glass. A look of dismay, followed by wild anger, crossed his face and she knew in that instant she had witnessed something she was never meant to see.

It didn’t help her, though.

That afternoon, all the men’s symptoms, which had been steadily accruing, avalanched – the fever went suborbital, the blisters that had been forming on their limbs swept across their outer extremities and filled with pus, the nights became filled with hallucinatory dreams, their veins and capillaries started to burst, turning their skin black from haemorrhaging blood, forcing the flesh to split from their skeleton, their bodies expelling strange odours, and the pain got so bad that they screamed for two days until they probably died from exhaustion as much as anything else.

Every few hours, the Saracen’s face would appear at the window to check on the progress of his creation. What he saw, to his delight, was the results of a very hot virus indeed and, while he couldn’t be sure, it appeared to be a type of Variola major called haemorrhagic smallpox. Known among researchers as ‘Sledgehammer’, it causes catastrophic bleeding in the body’s largest organ – the skin – and is one hundred per cent fatal. One hundred per cent.

By the time the men had died, the woman herself was suffering from a rocketing temperature and horrifying night sweats and she knew that she was now rapidly circling the drain. Late one night the Saracen watched with satisfaction as she staggered to the basin to cool her burning face and found the first blisters on the back of her hand. In that moment, the Saracen knew that not only had he synthesized a red-hot virus which was highly infectious but the addition of the extra gene had also allowed it to crash through the best state-of-science vaccine. It was, without question or salvation, a terror weapon to end all terror weapons.

Because she had seen the future, both for herself and the unborn child with which she had already fallen in love, she took it even harder than the men, and the Saracen resorted to gazing at the spectacular view, stuffing his ears with cotton and reciting the Qur’an to drown out her cries.

When she finally bled out, he didn’t move. He wanted to savour the moment: the three bodies proved that he was now within reach of an event which terrorism experts have found so frightening they have given it a special name. They call it the ‘soft kill’ of America.