Chapter Forty-three

FORT DETRICK, PART of the United States Army Medical Command, is made up of a collection of buildings and campuses set on twelve hundred high-security acres just outside the town of Frederick.

One of the largest of the campuses houses the nation’s leading biological-warfare agency – the Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, an organization so steeped in secrecy that a number of conspiracy theorists have claimed that it was the lab where the government created HIV.

If they were right, perhaps the long, low building not far from what used to be known as Anthrax Tower was also where NASA staged the moon landing. Nobody knows, because very few people, not even those with security clearances as high as mine, have ever been allowed on to the site.

It was at one of the facility’s bio-safety labs that the sealed box from Afghanistan arrived on a Sunday morning. Because nobody at the Overlook hotel knew what they were dealing with, it hadn’t been marked as top priority.

For that reason, it was placed in a queue and wasn’t opened until just after 9 p. m. By then, the only microbiologist working was a guy in his forties called Walter Drax – a petty, resentful man who was happy to work the graveyard shift because it meant he didn’t have to put up with what he called the assholes and knuckle-draggers. In his mind, the A& Ks were a large cohort, one that included most of his co-workers and certainly everyone in management – the people who, he believed, had blocked every possibility of promotion and the higher pay it provided.

Working alone under what are called Biosafety Level Four conditions, in a lab kept at negative air pressure, wearing a suit not dissimilar to the Saracen’s, his air regulator connected to an overhead supply, he unsealed the box in a special cabinet, removed the small piece of saddle cloth and prepared it for analysis.

Peering at the screen of his electron microscope, he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Heart racing, sweating hard inside the bio-safety suit, he checked it three times – even changing out the microscope and going back to his work station and consulting the relevant literature and the institute’s classified manuals – before he was convinced.

He was looking at Variola major. Instinctively, he knew that it was a very hot strain, but what really terrified him was what he saw when he looked deep into the knot of DNA at the centre of it: it had been genetically engineered. He had no doubt that it was a weaponized, military strain of the pathogen – a no-holds-barred weapon of mass destruction.

By unpicking the DNA knot and comparing the images in the manuals with what he could see through the microscope, he quickly learned that somebody had inserted a specific gene into it. There was only one reason he could think of why somebody would do that: the virus had been constructed to be vaccine-evasive.

If it worked – and Drax could see no reason why it wouldn’t – nobody in the world, not even the Nazis with their cattle cars and canisters of Zyklon-B gas, would ever have been in possession of a more efficient killer.

The normal procedure in such an event – if anything in such circumstances could ever be considered normal – was for Drax to phone his duty supervisor at home and inform him of what he had found. But Drax didn’t want to do that. He was damned if he was going to give any of the A& Ks a place in the institute’s history – that celebrityhood – that he knew the discovery of weaponized smallpox would entail.

I mean, he told himself, the whole place still talks about the guys who found the Ebola virus in a damn monkey.

Instead, he decided to make an end-run around them all and speak to his cousin. He didn’t like her much either, but she was married to a special assistant at the National Security Council – a man who Drax privately called Lip Gloss, given how smooth he was at sucking up to his superiors.

When he got him on the line, Drax – without explaining anything about the small square of saddle blanket – said he needed to speak to the highest-ranking member of the US intelligence community he could contact this late on a Sunday night. Lip Gloss laughed and said things didn’t work that way and he’d better tell him what it was all about and, anyway, what was wrong with his own superiors, and surely they had a protocol in place—

Drax wasn’t in any mood for delay. ‘Oh, sorry, ’ he said. ‘Perhaps you need some directions to Shut-Up Village. There’s a secure line directly into the lab. Now do it – get somebody to call me, it’s a national emergency. ’

He hung up before Lip Gloss could reply and then sat down to wait. He hadn’t felt so good in years.

It was the phrase ‘national emergency’ and the fact that Drax worked for the pre-eminent bio-defence laboratory which convinced Lip Gloss to call the Deputy Director of National Intelligence, a man whom he knew well because their teenage sons played baseball on the same team.

As a result, it was the deputy director who called Drax and listened with avalanching dismay as the technician told him about the piece of material that had arrived from Afghanistan and the different types of smallpox.

‘Given the panic something like this would cause, I wanted as few people as possible to know – I thought it best to try and go straight to the top, ’ Drax told him.

The deputy director congratulated him on his foresight, told him to speak to nobody and to sit tight until he called back. The deputy director, however, had one immediate and overwhelming problem: was Drax telling the truth? Hadn’t it been a scientist in the same unit at Fort Detrick who had been suspected of manufacturing anthrax and sending it through the post to several US senators? On the other hand, while the guy he had been speaking to on the secure line certainly sounded like a nightmare, that didn’t necessarily mean he was a Fort Detrick nut-job.

He called the head of the institute, a high-ranking military officer and a well-respected scientist in his own right, swore him to secrecy, explained what he had been told and asked him – no, ordered him – to get to the lab immediately to confirm the provenance of the sample and examine Drax’s findings.

Forty minutes later, sitting in front of Drax’s electron microscope, the head of the institute called back and gave the deputy director the news the guy had been dreading. Now the machinery of government, and the sense of panic, started to go into overdrive. All that occurred while only two people at the nation’s huge bio-defence facility – the organization that should have been at the epicentre of events – had any idea what was actually happening. As far as end-runs went, it was spectacular.

For the rest of us, it was fortuitous – it meant the government at least had a chance of keeping the situation secret. If the Saracen were to learn he was being hunted, he would either go to ground immediately or accelerate his plans. Maintaining secrecy was paramount and, in that regard, the next few hours would be critical …