Chapter Thirteen

OLD PASSENGER JETS thundered down the asphalt at another airport – this one was in Islamabad. The Saracen had followed the Trans-Afghan Highway down to Kabul and found himself in an outer ring of hell – the Afghan city was overwhelmed by US and Coalition forces and haunted by the constant threat of suicide bombers.

After a day of prayer and uneasy rest, he had travelled the well-trodden invasion route down to the Pakistan border, crossed the frontier among a tide of other travellers and made his way through Peshawar and on to Islamabad.

The flight to Beirut was late – every flight out of Pakistan was late – but he didn’t care. He was safe. If the Americans or Australians or whoever they were who had almost captured him up at the ruined village had somehow managed to discover his identity he would have been grabbed the moment he handed over his passport at check-in.

Instead, it was just the normal situation – the perfunctory look at the passport, a glance at the ticket and then the obligatory small talk while the counter clerk waited for his ‘tip’ to make sure that the checked suitcase was sent to Beirut and not to Moscow. He paid the bribe and headed towards the gate. Heavily armed men in uniform were everywhere but there was nothing you could call genuine security: as usual, too many guns, not enough brains.

He boarded the flight, flew to Beirut, returned to his bleak apartment in El-Mina and immediately went to work. He had resigned from the local hospital months earlier, but before he left he had raided its chaotic storeroom and taken with him two white biohazard suits and their air regulators, boxes containing ten thousand small glass vials which he had ordered especially for his purposes and a book of the hospital’s official dispatch dockets.

All of these things he had stored in his garage. Wearing one of the suits and an oxygen tank, he set about producing as much of his super-virus as possible. Perhaps it was because of the spectacular results he had seen in the Hindu Kush or maybe it was thanks to his growing expertise, but the process went much faster than he had expected.

Day after day, working with large pharmaceutical tanks he had rigged into a sort of makeshift bio-reactor, he transferred the deadly virus into the glass vials, sealed their rubber tops with a special machine he had acquired for the purpose and stored them in industrial refrigerators he had purchased second-hand in Beirut.

As he approached the end of his production run, he took a day off, travelled to Beirut and stood in a queue for two hours to buy a newly released cellphone, the one featured in a Hollywood movie that all the young kids seemed to want. He paid cash for it and then walked several miles and bought a pre-paid SIM card which would give it a year’s cellular service. The only thing that remained was to gift-wrap it.

The following Friday after prayers, he gave the present to another member of the congregation – a teenager with whom he had become friendly shortly after arriving in town. The boy reminded the Saracen a lot of himself at the same age – fatherless, deeply religious and full of fiery dreams about the irresistible rise of Islam.

The kid was so poor that when he pulled off the wrapping paper and saw the gift his eyes widened and he was barely able to believe it was his. The Saracen explained he was leaving El-Mina to find work and a new life in one of the fast-growing Muslim communities in Europe. The phone was a gift to remember him by, and all he asked in return was that the young man do a simple favour for him.

‘When I have found somewhere to live, I will call on the new phone, make arrangements to send a key and ask you to open my garage for a Beirut courier who will pick up some boxes. Do you understand? ’

The boy nodded and repeated the instructions perfectly. Men – even young men – in the Muslim world take the obligations of friendship far more seriously than their counterparts in the West, and the Saracen had no doubt that the teenager would fulfil his request to the letter. With tears in his eyes and no inkling of the plot in which he was now a participant, the teenager reached out and embraced the Saracen, a man he had often wished had been his real father.

The Saracen walked away without looking back. He had already spoken to the Beirut courier – twice weekly, his refrigerated truck arrived at the hospital to pick up or deliver blood and drugs. The Saracen told him there were boxes of medical supplies in his garage which would need to be sent to him and asked him to be on standby for a call.

With his arrangements almost complete, the Saracen arrived back at his apartment and went into the garage. The gene-sequencing machines, bio-safety suits and other equipment were already gone, smashed and burnt into an unrecognizable pulp and taken out to the local garbage dump in the boot of his car. He boxed up the vials of sealed virus, attached the hospital’s official dispatch dockets and, in the appropriate field, marked them as ‘expired vaccine’. The exact address they were being sent to would have to wait – he didn’t know it yet – but he could rely on the boy with the cellphone to fill it in when the time came.

He put the boxes in the refrigerator, locked the garage and went upstairs to his living quarters. Sweating, he packed the only other things that he really cared about – photos, keepsakes and small mementos of his wife and son – into a crate which would go into a storage locker he had rented in Beirut. He was almost finished when three men from a local charity arrived in a pick-up truck to collect his single bed, desk and other household goods. Once the items were loaded, he stood alone in his empty apartment.

He looked around at the two rooms one last time – they had been good years, productive years. Lonely years, too. There were times he missed his wife and boy so much that the pain was almost physical but, looking back, maybe the way things had turned out had been for the best. No, it was definitely for the best. It was Allah’s will.

Known only to himself, he had set a date for the soft kill of America, a day that would live in history long after he was gone. The date was 12 October, which he knew was Columbus Day, the day when America was discovered by Europeans and all the world’s real troubles had begun.

How appropriate, he thought to himself with pleasure, that future generations would mark that same date as the beginning of the far enemy’s decline.

He had worked hard but, if he was going to meet his deadline, there was still no time to waste. He walked out of the door, turned the key in the lock and headed for Germany.