I Am Pilgrim (27 page)

‘Who’s there? Somebody there?’ he called out in what he thought was a strong but friendly tone.

The only person present – sighting down the barrel of an Afghan-era pistol he had taken out of the

secret compartment in the bottom of the cool-box – heard him croak the question, the words badly slurred and barely audible, and ignored it. The Saracen was standing six feet away, just far enough, he estimated, not to be hit by bone and blood, aiming at the blindfold covering Tlass’s left eye.

Trying to hear, certain there was someone else in the cell, Tlass held himself perfectly still. The Saracen knew there would never be a better moment. Truly he was blessed. He squeezed the trigger.

Crack!
Tlass felt the pain of … and then felt nothing more. A spray of bright blood, bone chips and brain exited the back of his head just as the Saracen sensed a scurry of movement behind and wheeled fast. It was the wild dogs running for cover.

The Saracen turned back, aimed and fired again, this time hitting the dead man on the right side of

the blindfold, destroying – with luck – any evidence that the eyes had been surgically removed. His

hope was that the investigators would think Tlass himself, having forgotten something, had returned

to his office and was robbed and abducted only after he left the institute a second time. That way it wouldn’t even occur to them that anything had been stolen from inside the building.

Obviously, the less they knew the better and, to that end, he was pleased when he heard the dogs returning, loping through the darkness, anxious to eat their fill of the evidence. By then he had parked the Cadillac in the darkest corner at the back of the auto-repair yard, confident that any casual observer would think it was just another vehicle waiting to get chopped. From the back of the SUV,

still wearing the plastic gloves, he removed everything that might be of any interest to the forensic experts.

Carrying the cool-box and the rest of his possessions, he set off into the wasteland. He moved quickly and kept the pistol cocked in one hand – just in case some of the dogs decided they preferred their human on the hoof.

At the municipal dump he smashed the cool-box to pieces and scattered everything else from his camp among the piles of refuse. He knew that, two hours after dawn, they would have already been

retrieved by scavengers and recycled into the lawless refugee camps.

Apart from the syringe, a cardboard ticket and some loose change, all he had left in the world was

a pistol, his father ’s Qur ’an and the six glass vials. In his view, those tiny bottles made him the wealthiest person on earth.

Chapter Twenty-two

THE SARACEN WALKED for hours, guided only by the wan starlight. After leaving the dump, he cut across the scrub and followed the canal until he finally found a rickety wooden structure which passed as a bridge.

He crossed it and trudged for miles along the reeds before seeing what he needed: the rusting chassis of an old four-wheel drive half submerged in the rank and muddy water.

He filled the plastic containers with the syringe, Tlass’s wallet and other effects, weighed them down with pebbles and threw them into the middle of the canal.

It was with terrible regret that he raised the pistol and drew his arm back – the weapon had been with him longer than any of his other possessions except his father ’s Qur ’an, but it was the one thing that tied him inextricably to Tlass’s murder and he felt he had no other option. He threw the gun well and it landed in the water next to the rusting chassis. If they came down the canal, dragging a metal detector through the water, they would just think it was part of the vehicle.

Quickening his pace now, he turned towards the distant glow of lights that indicated Damascus.

Four hours later, footsore and filthy, he handed over the cardboard ticket at the luggage counter of the bus depot and retrieved his suitcase and medical bag. He undid the coded lock-strap securing the suitcase, took out a slim roll of bills, paid for the storage and gave an attendant one pound for the use of a small wash cubicle.

It was two hours until the first bus left for the Lebanese border and on from there to Beirut, and he used the time to trim his beard and to shower until his flesh was almost scrubbed raw. From out of the suitcase he put on his cheap Western suit, shirt and tie and placed two of the stolen glass vials, their identifying labels pulled off, in his medical bag, hidden in plain sight among other bottles and medicines. By the time he emerged carrying his passport and luggage, he looked exactly like what he

would claim to be if anyone questioned him: a devout Lebanese doctor who, having worked in the refugee camps, was now on his way home.

He had put the filthy clothes that had helped create his Palestinian legend into a plastic bag and, as he walked to the rattletrap bus, he threw it in a large charity bin. The only other stop he made was to drop the trash from a meal he had bought of pitta bread, fruit and tea into a garbage bucket and, though it would have seemed entirely innocuous to any onlooker, it was significant.

Shortly after 4 a.m. he took his seat at the back of the bus – almost exactly an hour before Tlass’s two sons, long delayed by having to search in ever-widening circles but attracted by the sound of wild dogs fighting, found the body of their father.

Despite the ungodly hour and the fact that it was one of Islam’s most important holidays, their membership of the secret police meant they knew exactly who to call. The news was conveyed to the

highest circles of government and very soon the airwaves were full of phone conversations and text

messages on supposedly secure communications networks.

Echelon sucked them all up.

Echelon never tires, never sleeps. It patrols the vast emptiness of space without needing air or food or comfort, it works as a silent thief at the world’s fibre-optic hubs and it commands countless radomes – the clusters of giant golf balls – on military bases across the globe. In total, it listens to every electronic communication on earth, a vast satellite and computer network so secret that its

existence has never been acknowledged by the five English-speaking nations which established it during the Cold War.

The billions of bytes of data it collects every nanosecond are downloaded to a collection of super-

computers at NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland, where highly classified software utilizes key words, patterns of phrases and even – by several secret accounts – speech recognition, to pull out any fragment worthy of further investigation.

And there were plenty of fragments in Damascus that night. Echelon listened as one of Tlass’s sons,

grief-stricken, phoned his sister and told her there would be the mother-of-all crackdowns on the dissidents and enemies-of-the-state likely to have been responsible. ‘Allah help them and their families,’ he said.

The US intelligence analysts, assessing the intercepts, came to a similar conclusion – Tlass was a

man with such a reputation for cruelty there must have been a long line of people only too happy to

have fed him to the dogs. A revenge killing in a failed Arab state is of little interest to US security, so the event was quickly dismissed.

That was a terrible mistake – and so was the fact that Syrian state security, contending with the early hour and the holiday weekend, didn’t close the border immediately.

Chapter Twenty-three

THE OLD BUS sputtered and belched through the night, crawling through the extensive roadworks on Syria Route One and – having negotiated them – was forced to stop only for
fajr
, the dawn prayer.

When it finally reached the border, surly immigration and customs officers examined the Saracen’s

documents, looked him up and down and only treated him with anything approaching respect when they realized he was a doctor. Had they bothered to search him, though, they certainly would not have found four of the glass vials – their contents were hidden in a place far beyond their reach. They were in his bloodstream.

The last thing he had done before leaving the wash cubicle in Damascus was to take a special two-

pronged needle from his medical bag, dip it into the contents of the vials and prick and scratch the solution into the skin of his upper arm until it was bleeding freely. He knew the dose was four times greater than normal, but he intended to do everything to give himself as wide a margin of safety as

possible. He bandaged his arm, put his shirt on and crushed the empty vials beyond recognition. That was what he had dropped in the garbage bucket along with the rubbish from his meal.

As he was being processed at the border, he was already, as he had anticipated, coming down with a

fever, prickling sweats and a searing headache. He just hoped he could make it to a cheap hotel in Beirut before it got too bad. The symptoms he was feeling were almost identical to those experienced by a young boy in the English village two hundred years ago, the first person to undergo a procedure thought up by a local doctor called Edward Jenner. He was the scientist who pioneered vaccination.

For that is exactly what the Saracen had done – he had risked his life, broken into a weapons lab

and killed a man he had never met in order to steal a vaccine. And here was the truly strange thing – in the washroom he had vaccinated himself against a disease which no longer existed, that presented a

threat to no one, which had been totally eradicated from the planet just over thirty years ago.

Prior to that, however, it was the most catastrophic disease known to man, responsible for more human death than any other cause including war, killing over two million people annually as late as

the 1960s – the equivalent of a new Holocaust every three years. The disease was known to science as
Variola vera
and to everyone else as smallpox.

The complete eradication of the virus was one of the reasons why so few places on earth even had

the vaccine – apart from research facilities and secret weapons labs, it was no longer needed. Not unless – of course – like the Saracen, you were planning to synthesize the virus and were worried that one tiny mistake in that almost-impossible process would infect and kill you. For that reason he had sought out a state-of-the-art vaccine, one which no doubt had been thoroughly tested and proven effective, and which would now allow him to make as many errors as he needed.

Not all vaccinations ‘take’, and not all vaccinations work the same way in different people. In order to try to compensate for that and – as I said – offer himself as much protection as humanly possible, he had quadrupled the dose. No wonder he was feeling sick but, for the Saracen, the fever was good

news: it meant that his body was being challenged and his immune system was mobilizing to fight the

invader. The vaccine had ‘taken’.

While an immigration officer was waiting for the computer screen in front of him to assess the Saracen’s passport, a phone in the nearby office started ringing. By the time someone had answered it and relayed the order to close the border, the officer had waved the Saracen through and into Lebanon

– a man with a false name, a real passport and a growing immunity against the world’s most deadly pathogen.

Chapter Twenty-four

I CAN’T DENY that the feeling had been growing on me for days. I am not in the bag for fate or destiny, but not long after I had left Battleboi and was walking home through Manhattan’s darkened streets, I had an overwhelming sense that some force of nature was coming to meet me.

I entered my small loft with its chronic undertow of loneliness and began to search through the bags that I had brought from Paris. No sooner had I said goodbye to Battleboi than I decided that the only way to deal with the hundreds of government announcements that were threatening my life was

to ask Ben and Marcie to hand over what they had found. Frankly, I didn’t think that either the hacker or myself would have the time or the skill to duplicate their work. At last I found what I was looking for: the jacket I had been wearing at the Plaza Athénée the night I met them. Inside the pocket was the business card Marcie had given me and which I had taken with such reluctance.

It was too late to phone them that night but early the following evening I put a call through. It was Marcie who picked up.

‘This is Peter Campbell,’ I said quietly. ‘We met in Paris.’

‘It didn’t take you long to call,’ she said, overcoming her surprise. ‘Nice to hear from you. Where

are you?’

‘In New York for a while,’ I told her, cautious as ever. ‘I was wondering if you and your husband

might be willing to let me have the research material on Scott Murdoch that he told me about.’

‘Ben’s not at home … but sure, I don’t see why not.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, relieved. ‘Can I come and get it?’

‘Not tonight – I’m meeting him for a movie, and tomorrow we have dinner with friends. What about Friday, around seven?’

A delay of two days was a lot longer than I wanted, but I wasn’t in a position to object. I thanked

her, made a note of the address and hung up. Being a highly experienced professional, a man skilled

in the tradecraft of the clandestine world, a person who – as I think I mentioned – had been trained to survive in situations where others might die, it would be reasonable to assume that I would see an ambush coming. But not me – the high-school teacher raised in Queens played me off a break and I