Chapter Ten

YOU COULDN’T REALLY call it sleep – after a restless few hours lying on the covers in Whisperer’s guest room, I got up with the first light. I had heard the back door of the house open earlier, so I wasn’t surprised to find the fiction of my new life sitting on the kitchen bench.

I opened the battered suitcase – the Samsonite I had supposedly used for years on both family vacations and work assignments – put the rest of the material inside and went back to the bedroom.

After showering, I looked through the clothes that had been supplied and was pleased to see that most of them had tags from stores in New York. Somebody knew what they were doing. I selected an outfit that an FBI special agent would wear when travelling to an exotic place. In other words, I dressed like I was going to the office but left off the tie. I checked the leather wallet with its credit cards, slipped it into my jacket and looked at the passport.

At some stage during the previous night Whisperer and I had taken a photograph of myself against a white wall and he had emailed it to the CIA over in Langley. I looked at the photo now, pasted into the well-used book, and I had to say the techs had done a good job with their nuclear-powered version of Photoshop. The hair was a different style and there were fewer lines around my eyes. It was me, just five years younger.

I checked my possessions one last time, packed the clothes and toiletries into the Samsonite and turned to the carry-on they had provided. Inside I put my travel documents, passport, laptop and a partly read copy of a book they had given me for the plane. I looked at its cover and smiled.

I guess somebody had thought hard about what an FBI special agent would use to entertain himself on a long-haul flight and decided that a serious work dealing with the science of investigation would be ideal. It was my book. I have to say I was pleased – not out of vanity, but because it meant I wouldn’t have to wade through a novel on the off chance that some border guard questioned me about it.

On top of the book I placed the Beretta 9-mil pistol in its holster – standard issue FBI – and the box of ammunition they had provided. It would have to come out first and be shown to airport security, along with the document in my wallet that gave me authority to carry it ‘in all and every circumstance’.

I closed the door quietly and, wearing another man’s clothes, left the house in the shallow light between dawn and morning. I passed the guard in his security box but he didn’t do anything more than glance in my direction then turn away. The taxi was waiting on the other side of the electronic gates, and I threw my suitcase and carry-on into the back seat and climbed in.

Whisperer had organized for it to take me to my meeting, but I had already decided to change the arrangements. I told the driver to head to Union Station and drop me at the car-rental offices. I wanted to try out the passport, driver’s licence, credit cards and anything else I could think of in Brodie Wilson’s wallet. It was better to find out that somebody had screwed up whilst I was in DC than under surveillance at Istanbul airport.

Everything went through, and after a few minutes I had entered the address of my meeting into the vehicle’s navigation system and was heading into the morning rush.

Forty minutes later I pulled through the gates of a Virginia horse farm, drove down a long drive and stopped in front of a beautiful farmhouse. Almost immediately a man came out to meet me. In his early eighties and lonely in his rolling acres – his wife dead for ten years past and the horses long since gone – he was only too happy to spend a couple of hours talking to me about his life’s work.

A Nobel prizewinner, he had once been the world’s leading virologist, part of the team that had long ago planned the eradication of smallpox. He had been told I was an FBI researcher conducting a threat analysis into biological weapons. The truth was that Whisperer wanted me to have as much knowledge as possible in the hope that some tiny detail, a fragment of information, would prove to be the key at some later date. It was either a very good idea or an index of his desperation – take your pick.

From his library the old guy produced bound volumes of scientific journals and faded notebooks containing his research notes. While I read through the information he fed me I asked him if anyone had ever come close to finding a cure for any version of smallpox.

He laughed – that dry, rasping laugh some old people have when there’s not much life left. ‘After the virus was eradicated, science lost interest – all the money and research went into AIDS, that’s where the glory was.

‘There were no prizes awarded because there was no pressing need, and no cure because there was no research, ’ he said.

‘So all we need is half a dozen suicide infectees and we’ve got a full-on catastrophe, ’ I replied.

He looked at me like I was crazy. ‘What’s wrong? ’ I asked.

‘Human vectors? ’ he said. ‘Is that what you’re saying? And tell me, how will these suicide infectees get here – in carts with stone wheels? ’

‘What do you mean? ’ I asked.

‘Four thousand years ago the Hittites sent people infected with plague into the cities of their enemies. As far as I know, that was the last time anyone used human vectors in biological warfare. ’

He might have won a Nobel Prize, but his history didn’t sound right to me. ‘No, all the government studies have been based on people being sent into the country—’

His skull-like head started wagging in anger. ‘That’s because governments don’t know shit, ’ he said. ‘Even British soldiers – who weren’t exactly scientific geniuses – came up with the idea of using contaminated goods to wipe out Native Americans. ’

‘Blankets you mean—? ’

‘Of course I mean blankets – fresh from their smallpox ward. That was almost three hundred years ago, and things have come a long way since then. You read the news? Every week there’s some story about poisonous pet food from China being recalled, adulterated toothpaste turning up on the docks, imported baby food contaminated with melamine. And these are accidents. Imagine how easy it would be to do it deliberately. ’

He looked up to see if I was following him. I got the feeling he had been beating the drum for years but nobody had started marching.

‘Go on, ’ I said.

His voice was quieter, but it wasn’t due to fatigue or old age: it was resignation. ‘You know, we’ve outsourced everything in this country. Do we actually make anything any more? When you rely on imports for so much, there’s no security. Not real security. Who the hell would bother with vectors?

‘I’m not an alarmist, I’m a scientist, and I’m saying you can forget them. It’s contamination that is the risk. Find something ordinary and send your pathogen in from overseas – the new version of the blanket. That’s how a modern, intelligent enemy would do it. ’

He ran his hand through where his hair once would have been. ‘I’m old and I’m tired, but it will happen, and it’ll happen in the way I’ve explained. A writer called Robert Louis Stevenson once said that “sooner or later we all sit down to a banquet of consequences”.

‘He was right – so I say pull up a chair and pick up your fork, the time is coming when we’ll all be chowing down. ’