Chapter Nine

IT WAS GERMANY, so the trucks arrived right on time. It was just after 6 a. m., with a light rain falling, when they drove through the security gates at Chyron.

Just as the drivers had done a thousand times before, they swung past the glass-fronted administration building, ran down factory row and stopped at the loading bays in the rear. The warehouse guy – the tall Muslim whose name none of the drivers could quite remember – was already at the wheel of a forklift, waiting to help load the boxes of pharma for shipment to America. He didn’t say anything – he never talked much – but the drivers liked him: he worked fast and seemed a damn sight more intelligent than most of his colleagues.

The consignment was a large one – it included everything from pallets of vaccines to crates of antibiotics, millions of doses of different drugs – but even so, the Saracen had it loaded into the back of the trucks in under five minutes. He had all the documentation ready too, and the drivers knew that with him there was no need to check – it was always correct.

They grabbed the paperwork, ran through the rain, scrambled into their cabs and were heading back towards the A5 freeway in record time.

Had they glanced in their rear-view mirrors, which none of them did, they would have seen that the Saracen didn’t move from the forklift: he sat in quiet contemplation and watched them until they were out of sight. He knew that the rain and the roadworks on the A5 – there were always roadworks on the ’5 – would slow them down, that was why he had hurried, but not so much that they wouldn’t make their designated flights.

At last he lowered his head, rested it on his forearms and floated in some place between prayer and exhaustion. It was over, it was out of his hands, and the relief was so overwhelming he felt tears sting the back of his eyes. The crushing responsibility of the last three years, the great burden of doing Allah’s work, had been lifted. The weapon was flying free and the fate of the mission, the welfare of nations, the survival of whatever innocence remained in the world, rested on a system of border controls which the Saracen believed was so tenuous as to be virtually non-existent. But that was not within his control; he had done all he could: everything rested now in God’s hands.

With a growing sense of freedom, he raised his head and stepped out of the driver’s seat. He walked back inside the warehouse, went to his locker and cleaned it out. For the first and only time since he had started work at Chyron, he didn’t wait for his shift to end: instead, he slung his backpack over his shoulder, passed unnoticed through the security gates and, heart soaring, walked down the empty road in the drizzling rain.

He returned to his tiny apartment – nothing more than a bed, and a table and a sink in a corner – threw out the food in the cupboards, packed his spare clothes in the backpack, put the keys on the table and slammed the door behind him. He made no attempt to pick up the wages that were owed to him, to get a refund on his rental deposit or farewell the men at the Wilhelmstrasse mosque who had been so generous to him. He left as mysteriously as he had arrived.

He headed fast through the waking town to the railway station, bought a ticket and, a few minutes later, the express train to Frankfurt came into view. There he would retrieve his luggage and medical kit from the long-term locker, go into a toilet stall and revert to the clothes and identity of a Lebanese doctor who had been visiting for a conference at the Messe.

For weeks, as his mission had moved closer to completion, he had increasingly thought about what he would do then. He had no desire to stay in Germany and no reason to return to Lebanon. Within days, he knew, a modern plague – the black pox was how he thought of it – would burst into the public consciousness. Its presence would start slow, like a match in straw, but it would rapidly become what scientists call a self-amplifying process – an explosion – and the whole barn would be on fire.

America – the great infidel – would be ground zero, the kill-rate astronomical. Deprived of its protector, Israel’s belly would be exposed and at last it would be left to the mercy of its near enemies. As economic activity fell off a cliff, the price of oil would collapse and the ruling Saudi elite – unable to buy off its own people any longer or fall back on the support of the United States – would invoke a fearful repression and, in doing so, sow the seeds of its own destruction.

In the short term, the world would close down and travel be rendered impossible as nations sought safety in quarantine and isolation. Some would be more successful than others and, though a billion people had died from smallpox in the hundred years before its eradication, nothing like it had ever happened in the modern world – not even Aids – and nobody could predict where the rivers of infection would flood and where they would turn.

As the dying time – as he called it – came closer, he had felt a growing certainty that, whatever happened, he wanted to be with his son. If they lost their lives, then that was Allah’s will and all he asked was to be with his child so that he could hold him and tell him that they had nothing to fear either in this world or the next. If it was God’s plan that they lived, then, as soon as was practical, he would take him to Afghanistan. Together they would walk along shaded river-banks, and perhaps he would show him the mountain slopes where he had brought down the fearsome Hind gunships. And as summer turned to autumn they would make their way through distant valleys to the fortress of Abdul Mohammad Khan. What better place to raise his son than among the devout and the brave? And when the time was right they would return to Saudi and laugh and grow old together in the land where the soul of his father was closest.

To be with his son? The thought had sustained him through everything in Karlsruhe. One night he had gone to an Internet café and searched the Web, and he had already found a rooming house suitable for a devout Muslim man in Milas.

Yes, he would re-emerge in Frankfurt as a doctor, take the train to the airport and board a plane. He was flying to Bodrum.