‘Don’t stare at me. I heard her say it – about a week after you arrived from Detroit. We were having coffee out there.’ She pointed towards the lawn that overlooked the lake.
‘Bill, Grace and I were watching you – the nanny had you down at the water’s edge, looking at the swans, I think.’
As young as I was, I remembered that – I had never seen swans before and I thought they were the most beautiful things in the world.
‘Bill wouldn’t take his eyes off of you,’ Mrs Corcoran continued. ‘To be honest, I’ve never seen a man so taken with a child. Grace noticed it too. She kept looking at him and then, very quietly, she said: “I’ve changed my mind, Bill – a child doesn’t fit in with us.”
‘He turned to her. “You’re wrong,” he said. “It’s exactly what we need. More kids – give this place some damn life.”
‘There was a finality to it, but Grace wouldn’t let it drop, determined to have her way – apparently they only had a few days to tell the agency if they were going to keep you.’
Mrs Corcoran paused to see my reaction. What did she expect – is there anyone who doesn’t want to think their parents loved them? ‘Yeah, Grace was an experienced shopper,’ I said. ‘She took everything on a sale-or-return basis.’
The old woman laughed. ‘That’s why I always liked you, Scott – you never let anything hurt you.’
I just nodded.
‘Anyway, the argument between them became increasingly bitter until finally Grace lost her temper. “You know your trouble, Bill?” she said. “You’re a porter – you see anyone with baggage and you’ve always got to help them.”
‘With that, she told him you’d be leaving in the morning, and headed for the house, claiming she was going to check on lunch. Nobody saw her for the rest of the day. Bill sat in silence for a long time, his eyes still fixed on you, then he said, “Scott will be staying at Avalon until he goes to college, longer if he wants. He’ll stay because the porter says so – and Grace will have to accept it.”
‘I didn’t know what to say. I’d never seen that steely side of him – I’m not sure anybody had. Then he turned to me and said the strangest thing.
‘You probably know Bill wasn’t a spiritual man – I never once heard him talk about God – but he said that every night he sat by your bed while you slept. “I think Scott was sent to us,” he told me. “I feel like I’ve been chosen to care for him. I don’t know why I think it, but I believe he’s going to do something very important one day.”’
Standing in the old house with so many years gone by, Mrs Corcoran smiled at me. ‘Did you, Scott? Was Bill right? Did you do something very important?’
I smiled back and shook my head. ‘Not unless you think finding a few lost canvases is important. But Bill was a fine man and it was good of him to think like that.’
From out on the lawn, we heard someone calling Mrs Corcoran’s name – she probably had to give a speech. She patted my arm, starting to go.
‘Well, who knows?’ she said. ‘You’re not old, there’s still time, isn’t there? Goodbye, Scott.’
But there wasn’t – time, I mean. I was still in my thirties, but my race was run. Only a fool would think it could turn out otherwise. So – say hello to the fool, I have often said to myself when I think back on those days.
Chapter Twenty-nine
THE SARACEN, NEWLY arrived in Afghanistan, was travelling fast, sticking to the sparsely populated valleys for as long as he could, always heading east. It had been almost fifteen years since he had been in the country as a teenage muj, but every day he still saw evidence of the old Soviet war: abandoned gun emplacements, a rusted artillery piece, a goat-herder’s hut bombed into oblivion.
Creeks and rivers ran along the valley floors, and they provided safety. The fertile strip on either side of the watercourses was planted with only one thing – marijuana – and the tall, moisture-heavy plants provided good cover from US thermal-imaging equipment.
Finally, however, he had to abandon the valleys and climb into the forbidding Hindu Kush mountains. In the steep forests he followed the tracks made by timber cutters, hoping the surveillance drones would see his packhorses and dismiss him as one more illegal logger. But above the treeline, every breath a labour because of the altitude, there was no cover and he had to quicken his pace even more.
Late one afternoon, in the distance, he thought he saw the mountain scree where he had brought down his first Hind gunship, but it was a long time ago and he couldn’t be sure. Toiling higher, he crossed a narrow ridge and passed shell casings and rocket pods of a far more recent vintage.
In the years since he had last seen the country as a muj, the Afghans had known little but war: the Russians had been replaced by the warlords; Mullah Omar’s Taliban had defeated the warlords; America, hunting Osama bin Laden, had destroyed the Taliban; the warlords had returned; and now the US and a coalition of allies were fighting to prevent the re-emergence of the Taliban.
The used ammunition told him he must be close to Kunar Province – referred to by the Americans as ‘enemy central’ – and, sure enough, that night he heard Apache helicopters roaring down a valley below, followed by an AC-130 gunship which people said fired bullets as big as Coke bottles.
In the following days he was stopped numerous times – mostly by US or NATO patrols but twice by wild men who described themselves as members of the Anti-Coalition Militia but who he knew were Taliban in a different turban. He told them all the same thing – he was a devout Lebanese doctor who had raised money from mosques and individuals in his homeland for a medical mercy mission. His aim was to bring help to Muslims in remote areas where, because the continuous wars had destroyed the country’s infrastructure, there were no longer any clinics and the doctors had fled.
He said he had sent his supplies by boat from Beirut to Karachi, flown to join them, bought a truck, driven through Pakistan into Afghanistan and, at the Shaddle Bazaar – the world’s largest opium market – had traded the truck for the ponies. All of it was true, and he even had a cheap digital camera on which he could show photos of himself tending to the sick and inoculating kids at a dozen ruined villages.
That – combined with the fact that every time his caravan was searched they found a wide range of medical supplies – allayed both sides’ fears. The only items he carried that led to questions were a pane of thick, reinforced glass and several sacks of quicklime. He told anyone who asked that the glass was used as an easily sterilized platform on which to mix prescriptions. And the quicklime? How else was he to destroy the swabs and dressings he used to treat everything from gangrene to measles?
Nobody even bothered to reach deep into the small saddlebag which held his clothes and spare sandals. At the bottom of it was a collapsible ‘helmet’ with a clear plastic face plate, a box of R-700D disposable face masks, a black bio-hazard suit, rubber boots, Kevlar-lined gloves and rolls of special tape to seal every join from the helmet to the boots. If the equipment had been found he would have told them that anthrax occurs naturally among hoofed animals – including goats and camels – and that he had no intention of dying for his work. As further proof, he would have shown them vials of antibiotics he was carrying, stolen from the hospital he had been working at in Lebanon, which was the standard drug to treat the disease. But the men he ran into were soldiers – either guerillas or otherwise – and they were looking for weapons and explosives, and nobody asked.
The only time he straight-out lied was if they asked where he was heading next. He would shrug, point at his possessions and say he didn’t even have a map.
‘I go wherever God takes me.’ But he did have a map – it was inside his head and he knew exactly where he was going.
On three separate occasions, NATO troops, having searched him, helped load his supplies back on to the ponies. The hardest part was lifting and securing the pairs of heavy-duty truck batteries on to the four animals at the rear. The batteries were used to power small refriger
ated boxes, and the soldiers smiled at the doctor’s ingenuity. Inside were racks of tiny glass bottles which would help countless children: vaccines against polio, diphtheria and whooping cough. Hidden among them, indistinguishable except by an extra zero he had added to the batch number, were a pair of bottles which contained something vastly different.
At that time, only two examples of the smallpox virus were supposed to exist on the planet. Kept for research purposes, one was in a virtually impenetrable freezer at the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta and the other was at a secure Russian facility called Vector in Siberia. There was, however, a third example. Unknown to anyone in the world except the Saracen, it was in the two glass vials on the back of his wiry packhorse deep in the Hindu Kush.
He hadn’t stolen it, he hadn’t bought it from some disaffected Russian scientist, it hadn’t been given to him by a failed state like North Korea which had undertaken its own illegal research. No, the remarkable thing was that the Saracen had synthesized it himself.
In his garage.
Chapter Thirty
HE COULD NEVER have done it without the internet. As the search for him became increasingly desperate, I finally discovered that, several years after he had graduated in medicine, the Saracen took a job in El-Mina, an ancient town in the north of Lebanon.
He worked the night shift in ER at the local hospital – hard and exhausting work in a facility that was under-equipped and understaffed. Despite the constant fatigue, he used every spare moment to secretly pursue what he considered his life’s work – jihad against the far enemy.
While other soldiers-of-Allah were wasting their time at hidden boot camps in Pakistan or fantasizing about getting a US visa, he was reading everything he could find about weapons of mass destruction. And it was only the Internet that had given a doctor at an old hospital in a town nobody had heard of widespread access to the latest research into every major biological killer in the world.
In one of those unforeseen but deadly consequences – what the CIA would call blowback – the World Wide Web had opened up a Pandora’s box of terrible possibilities.
The Saracen hadn’t been raised like Western kids so he didn’t know much about computers, but he knew enough: by using a good proxy connection he managed to undertake his relentless search in complete anonymity.
For months, helped by his knowledge of medicine and biology, he concentrated on what he considered the most achievable bio-warfare candidates – ricin, anthrax, pneumonic plague, sarin, tabun and soman – all of which were capable of causing widespread death and even greater panic. But all of them came with enormous shortcomings – most of them either weren’t infectious or were most effective if used as part of an aerial bombing campaign.
Frustrated at his lack of progress, fighting waves of despair, he was in the middle of researching anthrax – at least the raw bacteria was obtainable; it was widespread in the Middle East, including Lebanon, but it would still have to be ‘weaponized’ – when he read something that changed the very nature of the world in which we live.
Nobody much noticed it.
In the online pages of The Annals of Virology – a monthly which doesn’t exactly fly off the shelves – was an account of an experiment conducted at a lab in upstate New York. For the first time in history, a life-form had been built entirely from off-the-shelf chemicals – all purchased for a few hundred dollars. It was late in the afternoon and for once the Saracen forgot to kneel for maghrib, the sunset prayer. With increasing wonder, he read that the scientists had successfully recreated the polio virus from scratch.
According to the article, the aim of the researchers was to warn the US government that terrorist groups could make biological weapons without ever obtaining the natural virus. Good idea – there was at least one terrorist who had never thought of it until he read their research. Even more alarming – or perhaps not, depending on your degree of cynicism – was the name of the organization which had funded the programme with a three hundred thousand dollar grant. The Pentagon.
The Saracen, however, was certain that the startling development had nothing to do with the Defense Department or scientists in New York – they were merely the instruments. This was Allah’s work: somebody had now synthesized a virus and opened the door for him. On the other side was the Holy Grail of all bio-terror weapons, a wildly infectious agent transmitted by the simple act of breathing, the most potent killer in the history of the planet – smallpox.
In the weeks which followed, the Saracen learned that the researchers, using polio’s publicly available genome – its genetic map – had purchased what are called ‘nucleic acid base pairs’ from one of the scores of companies that sell material to the bio-tech industry. Those base pairs cost the princely sum of ten cents a piece and, according to an account on an Internet discussion forum for biology geeks, were ordered by email. Because the sales company’s online system was fully automated, the report on the forum said, there was no name verification and nobody asked why the material was being purchased.
Once the New York lab had acquired the microscopic building blocks, the scientists spent a year arranging them in the correct order and then – in a skilful but publicly known process – gluing them together. The Saracen, being a doctor and with a dozen manuals on molecular biology at hand, soon understood enough of the process to suspect that what could be done at a lab in upstate New York could be duplicated in a garage in El-Mina – if he could locate one thing.
He had read about it somewhere, and he started searching. After two hours online he found it – the smallpox genome. Once one of the world’s most closely guarded secrets, the virus’s complete chemical and genetic map had fallen victim to the explosion of knowledge about biology and the worldwide dissemination of complex scientific papers over the Internet. There were no gatekeepers any more, and potentially lethal information was haemorrhaging all the time – while it had taken the Saracen two hours to locate the genome, had he been more experienced at searching the Web he would have found it on a dozen biology or research sites in less than half the time. I know because I did.
From the article in The Annals of Virology the Saracen knew that polio had 7,741 base pairs, or letters, in its genome. Now he saw that smallpox had 185,578 letters, greatly enhancing the difficulty of re-creating it, but he was riding a wave of knowledge and optimism and he wasn’t going to let a small thing like an extra 178,000 letters deter him.
He quickly decided his first objective was to protect himself: smallpox is a merciless pathogen and it was almost certain that somewhere in the complicated and unstable process of trying to synthesize it he would make a mistake. Many mistakes, probably, and the first he would know of his exposure would be when the fever hit and, a short time later, a rash of fluid-filled blisters appeared. By then it would be over: no cure for smallpox has ever been found.
He had to locate a vaccine, and it was the pursuit of that goal that made him take a six-week vacation. Instead of heading to Beirut and flying to Cairo to visit friends, as he had told the medical director of the hospital, he had boarded an early-morning bus for Damascus. There he killed Tlass, stole the vaccine, used the double-pronged needle on himself and crossed the border back into Lebanon.
He spent five days locked in a hotel room fighting the terrible fever which had accompanied the huge dose of vaccine he had taken. Once that had passed and the telltale scab and scar had formed on his arm, he returned to El-Mina. Though, outwardly, nothing had changed, his life had entered an entirely new phase: he was ready to start on his history-making journey.
Chapter Thirty-one
THE FIRST THING he did was set about sealing the garage under his small apartment and turning it into a makeshift bio-containment laboratory.
He had one advantage in performing the work – there was a good example close at hand. While everything else at the El-Mina hospital was falling apart, it had a two-bed isolation ward and an attached lab. Because anthrax was endemic to the region, the hospi
tal had been able to take advantage of a World Health Organization programme to help developing nations combat the disease. Forget that the hospital didn’t have some of the most rudimentary equipment necessary for saving lives, the Geneva organization had provided a small fortune to build a first-rate facility.
As far as the Saracen knew, it had only been used once in ten years and had become little more than a temporary storage shed. Nevertheless, it was an excellent blueprint for his own lab, and it also ended up providing half the practical equipment he needed – incubators, a microscope, culture dishes, pipettes, sterilizing cabinets and a host of other items. They were never even reported missing.
Over the following week, using a computer and an Internet connection he had set up in the lab, he assembled a list of over sixty bio-tech companies worldwide which would provide DNA material of fewer than seventy letters without asking for name verification or any further information.
A long time later, on first hearing this, I didn’t believe it. To my despair, I went online and did it myself.
But before the Saracen could order DNA he had to locate two crucial pieces of equipment: gene synthesizers – machines about the size of a decent computer printer. It took him an hour. The dizzying progress in the bio-tech industry meant the market was awash with equipment at hugely discounted prices which was no longer the fastest or the best.
He found two synthesizers in excellent condition, one on eBay, the other on usedlabequipment.com. Combined, they cost under five thousand dollars and the Saracen was thankful that doctors were well paid and he had always lived such a frugal life. He could well afford them from his savings and what was even more important to him was that the sellers also had no interest in who the purchaser was – all they wanted was a valid credit-card number. An anonymous Western Union money transfer was just as good.
He started work the day the second machine arrived and, that evening, he was surfing the Web, adding to his already vast library about viruses and biology, when he glanced through the latest online edition of the prestigious periodical Science. One of its lead stories was about a researcher who had just synthesized an organism with 300,000 letters. In the short time since he had decided on his course of action, 185,000 letters had already faded into history. That was the pace at which genetic engineering was advancing.