Chapter Three

ALL THE LABELS on the tiny glass bottles were in place. And the Saracen had done it right on schedule.

He had worked tirelessly, but luck had also played a part – one of his colleagues had been in a car wreck and that had allowed him to pull a series of double shifts.

Right from the outset, he had organized the work like a production line, setting himself up in a section of the storage area hidden behind towers of flattened packaging. Undisturbed, he had a garden hose, a waste drain, a trash compactor, a commercial glue gun and various large plastic tubs at hand.

He filled the tubs with the chemical solvent, slit open the shrink-wrapped slabs of legitimate drugs and immersed the tiny glass vials in the solution for two point five minutes – the optimum length of time, he had found, for floating off the labels. He then laid the labels out in front of a space heater for two minutes to dry – the same time it took him to feed the unwanted bottles into the compactor, crush them to oblivion and hose the liquid drug they had contained down the waste drain.

The slowest part of the process was coating the back of the labels with the glue gun then reattaching them to his own glass vials. At first he had thought it was so slow that he would never make his deadline, but he soon found that not overthinking it, getting into a rhythm, treating himself like a robot with a glue gun, increased the throughput dramatically.

Fortunately for him, the warehouse had its own shrink-wrap machine to repair any packaging which had become damaged during the manufacturing and dispatch process. As a consequence, the Saracen had no difficulty in re-sealing his deadly bottles into the correct packaging.

By the end of his first evening’s work he had one thousand tiny glass vials which were, for all practical purposes, identical to those used by Chyron. They were filled with a similar-looking clear fluid, fitted with the correct labels for a widely used drug, sealed in genuine plastic packs and plastered with legitimate bar codes, serial numbers and dispatch dockets. The only difference, impossible to detect by any other means than sophisticated chemical analysis, was that a potentially lifesaving agent had been replaced by the Saracen’s home-made apocalypse.

Being a doctor, he knew the exact process that would occur once the vials hit America. A medical practitioner or a suitably qualified nurse would insert a syringe with a needle length of one inch or longer into the top of the bottle. The needle length was important, because the material they thought they were injecting had to be administered by what was called the intramuscular route. It would be injected into the deltoid muscle of the upper arm, and a needle of at least one inch was necessary to penetrate the muscle tissue of adults and older kids properly. In the case of infants and young children, a needle length of seven eighths of an inch was sufficient, but the injection would be given in the rear of the thigh.

No matter the age of the patient or the site of the injection, once the virus was in someone’s body – and, with an intramuscular injection, there would be no misses – that person could not be saved. They could be described, totally accurately, as a zombie – one of the walking dead.

The Saracen also knew that one small group in any community – newborn babies – would be precluded from being given the so-called legitimate drug, but he didn’t care. With ten thousand vectors unleashed and smallpox being an airborne pathogen, transmitted like the common cold, the only way for babies and anyone else to avoid infection would be to stop breathing.

With the one thousand glass vials completed, and confident he could go faster, he clocked off on that first night and made his way home brimming with hope and wild excitement. Dawn was just breaking but instead of falling into bed in his tiny rented apartment he started a ritual which he would follow for the next week.

He turned on the TV and watched the Weather Channel.

In the early hours of the morning, it carried a comprehensive update on the weather situation in the continental United States. To the Saracen’s great joy, he saw that an unseasonal cold front was forming slowly in the north of Canada and was forecast to move across the United States. All the channel’s experts were predicting that an unusually cold fall was coming early.

The seemingly innocuous development guaranteed that the impending attack would be, if it were at all possible, even more devastating. All airborne viruses – not just smallpox – were far more contagious in cold conditions, and most experts estimate that such conditions accelerate their transmission by at least 30 per cent. The reasons are straightforward – people cough and sneeze more, they take the bus instead of walking, they eat inside restaurants and not at sidewalk café s. As the temperature drops, populations unwittingly wind themselves more closely together and provide a far better environment for the transfer of viral material.

Several days later, by the time he had finished processing the last of the ten thousand vials, the Saracen saw that the cold front was growing stronger and more widespread.

He moved the plastic-sealed packages into the warehouse proper, placed them in the right shipping bays for their intended destinations and checked one last time that all of their dispatch documents were in order.

In twenty-four hours, several trucks, part of the endless convoy which regularly passed through Chyron’s European manufacturing plant, would pick up the packages and convey them the ninety miles through the town of Mannheim, past the huge US military base at Darmstadt and on to Frankfurt airport.

The flights to America would take about ten hours, the packages would then be transported to the company’s regional freight centres and – about twelve hours later – be loaded on to trucks and delivered to doctors’ offices throughout the United States.

Alone in the cavernous warehouse with only his thoughts and God for company, the Saracen was certain that in forty-eight hours the storm – both literally and figuratively – would hit the Republic.