I Am Pilgrim (35 page)

he had stolen from the facility in Syria.

During the day’s long ride he had decided that she would be the best candidate to test whether the

virus could break through the vaccine and, as a result, he had to immunize her as fast as possible. He had quickly dismissed the idea of vaccinating her in the arm – he didn’t want her to be able to see the site and start asking herself what it meant – and had concluded that the point where her buttocks met would be best. She wouldn’t be able to see it and she would almost certainly believe it was a saddle-sore.

Apart from his brief encounter with temptation, the vaccination went off without difficulty, and the following morning the woman woke with a fever, a searing headache and a swollen sore on her butt.

The Saracen listened as the men speculated that something might have bitten her in the night and then watched them turn and mime to him that the woman would have difficulty riding. The Saracen mimed

back that it was a saddle-sore, gave them full canteens of water and placed a blanket over the woman’s saddle to cushion it for her. He even helped boost her up into the seat.

For six more days, travelling both by day and night, stopping only when he was too exhausted to carry on, the Saracen rode behind them, using a knotted rope to keep the horses, and sometimes their passengers, awake and moving.

Within twenty-four hours of the inoculation, the woman’s fever had started to diminish and, though

he had no way of knowing – short of removing her jeans and seeing if there was a scar – he was confident that the vaccine had taken.

Climbing higher every hour, they took a long, looping route to avoid any human settlement and headed deep into the bleakest part of the Hindu Kush. Despite their overwhelming fatigue, the prisoners weren’t surprised at the pace the Saracen set: everybody in Afghanistan, on both sides of the kidnapping divide, knew that one of the rules of the business was that, immediately after the uptake, the merchandise had to be kept moving.

Nevertheless, understanding the reasons didn’t make the journey any easier, and by the time the Saracen arrived at his final destination, the prisoners were barely conscious from exhaustion. They raised their lolling heads – it was just after midnight – and looked at an abandoned village so remote and hidden that a mountain herdsman would have been hard pressed to find it.

Not the Saracen, though – he knew it as well as any place on earth.

Chapter Thirty-five

LEAVING THE PRISONERS handcuffed, he hobbled the horses at the entrance to the village, held his weapon at the ready and returned to the heady days of his youth.

Back in his laboratory in Lebanon, he had come to the conclusion that there was only one place remote enough to conduct his human trial – the ruined village where he had bivouacked for over a

year during the Soviet war.

Now, as he walked its broken streets – every building familiar, every blackened fire-pit full of memories – he sang out a greeting in Arabic. ‘
Allahu Akbar
,’ he called.

He had no way of knowing if the Taliban, a group of war refugees or one of the endless caravans

of drug couriers had colonized the place, and he had no intention of bringing his prisoners in until he knew that he was alone.

‘
Allahu Akbar
.’ God is great. And the only reply he received was the sound of the wind, the constant biting wind he remembered so well, the one that blew all the way to China. Confident he was alone, he turned past the old mosque and stepped into the kitchen where he had first shared a cigarette with Abdul Mohammad Khan.

The ghosts danced all around him – he could almost see the bearded faces of the other
muj
who had been sitting in a semicircle, making their final requests of the great warlord. They were all so young then, so alive. For the Saracen it was before he was married, before he had a child of his own, and for a moment he remembered what it was like to have so much road in front of you and barely any behind.

He pulled himself out of his reverie, lit a fire in the hearth for probably the first time since the
muj
had left and made a makeshift stable in the area where the grain had once been stored. Only then did he bring the prisoners in, chain them to the old sinks, refill their water bottles and give them each two of the hardtack biscuits which had sustained them since their capture and which they had now come to hate.

They ate them mechanically, too exhausted to care, and didn’t even bother spreading out their bedrolls, curling up instead on the old straw piled in a corner. For the two men, it was the last unfevered sleep they would ever have.

The three of them woke in the morning to the sound of hammering. The Saracen had been up for

hours, rebuilding one of the stone storehouses perched on the edge of a cliff, not far from the mosque. The three prisoners could see, by looking through chinks in the wall, that he had repaired one section which had collapsed and was now using one of the horses to haul in a hardwood door which would replace the flimsy one that had fallen from its hinges. It was clear this was going to be their cell.

Only once did the Saracen enter the kitchen, and that was to retrieve the pane of reinforced glass

from boxes containing what, to the prisoners, looked like medical supplies. They watched him return

to his building site and set the glass halfway up a wall and seal it into the stone with a mixture of mud and mortar. A window? That was strange, the prisoners thought. But it wasn’t a window at all – it was an observation panel.

Just after lunchtime, wordlessly he transferred them to what would become their stone tomb. Once

inside, they looked around and saw that he had thrown a pile of saddle blankets into a corner for bedding, dug a toilet pit behind a rough curtain and provided a box of hardtack, four large casks of

water and a wood stove with a good supply of fuel. Once again they tried to communicate with him, demanding to know how long they would be kept in the airless room, but he just checked the chains

that secured them to ringbolts in the wall and left.

A short time later they heard the sound of the horses’ hooves on the stone roadways and, by climbing up on one of the water casks to peer through the observation panel, they saw that he was riding out with his string of ponies. Where in God’s name could he be going? The nearest human habitation had to be at least several days’ travel away, even on a fast horse, and it was unlikely he would leave them unguarded for that length of time.

Even so, they set about trying to work the ringbolts free of the rock in which they were set. It was an agonizingly slow and thankless task – the only implements were shards of wood from their fuel

pile – and after four hours they had made hardly any impression on the granite and mortar, when they heard the horses returning.

Again using the observation window, they saw that the Saracen immediately disappeared into the maze of crumbling streets and houses, digging and hammering, then periodically returned to the packhorses and unloaded several grey metal boxes and at least a dozen wooden barrels. Where he had

found them, they had no idea.

That night, for the first time since he had entombed them, the cell door opened. The Saracen entered and wordlessly laid down three plates of what looked like a vegetarian curry accompanied by

a pile of the circular flat bread the Afghans call naan. It was the first hot food the prisoners had seen in almost two weeks, and they fell upon it ravenously. As plain as the food was, the Dutch engineer

said laughingly it was the finest meal he had ever eaten.

Within an hour they were in a strange, dreamless sleep. No wonder – both the naan and the curry

were laced with a barbiturate called pentobarbital, a drug so powerful as a sleeping aid that it is recommended by most groups which advocate euthanasia.

Just before 2 a.m., the Saracen, carrying a small surgical kit and an oil-filled hurricane lamp, re-

entered the cell. He looked terrifying, dressed in his full black bio-hazard suit, Kevlar-lined gloves and helmet with its clear plastic face plate. On his back was an oxygen tank feeding air through a regulator into his taped and sealed lifeboat.

Working quickly, trying to preserve as much of the oxygen as possible, he knelt beside the woman,

removed her jeans, pulled aside her smelly underwear and checked the site of the vaccination. With

quiet satisfaction, he saw the flat scar and knew that the vaccine had taken perfectly. She was as well protected as modern science could make her.

He replaced her clothing and started working on the sound-recordist first. He rolled up the sleeve

of the man’s T-shirt and looked at the barbed-wire tattoo. The Saracen hated tattoos and chose that as his spot.

He took out a syringe and checked its plunger through the clear plastic of his face plate. Satisfied, he reached over to the kit and removed one of the two glass vials with the extra zero added to its batch number. It was sealed with a special rubber top and the Saracen, holding the syringe in his Kevlar-gloved hand, pushed the needle through the rubber and into the bottle.

With the sound of his rapid breathing rattling through the oxygen regulator, he pushed air into the

vial then pulled on the plunger and filled the syringe with what could be the most lethal pathogen on the planet. Time would tell.

By the dim light of the hurricane lamp – definitely a scene from the inner circle of hell – the man in the black bio-hazard suit bent over the prisoner and, with a final prayer to Allah, slowly slipped the needle into the barbed wire.

The Saracen was a good doctor, long experienced in administering intravenous medications, and the young Japanese hipster barely stirred in his drugged sleep as the needle went deeper and found the vein. Gradually the Saracen pressed down on the plunger and watched the level of clear fluid drop as it poured into the victim’s bloodstream. After ten seconds it was done and the young man sighed quietly and rolled over in his sleep.

The Saracen immediately put the glass vial and syringe into a special red bio-hazard container which he had filled earlier with industrial-strength Lysol disinfectant.

Next, he turned his attention to the Dutch engineer, repeating the procedure on the man’s thigh and

only stopping when – for a moment – he thought the initial needle prick had woken him. He was mistaken and, gripping the syringe firmly, he pushed down and attempted to separate the man from

his wife and three kids, as surely as if he were holding the barrel of the AK-47 to his temple.

With his experiment complete, he picked up his surgical kit, the bio-hazard container and the hurricane lamp.

In silence – even the sound of the air regulator seemed to have stilled – he headed for the door, praying hard that his virus was deep fried and that the extra gene had made it a weapons-grade vaccine buster.

Chapter Thirty-six

I DON’T SUPPOSE there are many good ways to die, but I know one of the worst: far from home and family, chained like a dog in an abandoned village, your body collapsing under the onslaught of smallpox and only a bearded face at a sealed glass window to hear your screams for help.

All the prisoners had woken late the following morning with a headache hammering at the base of

their skull. They wondered if it was a reaction to the food but not for a minute did they think they might have been drugged. Why would anyone do that? It wasn’t as if they might escape – they were

chained to ringbolts in a stone cell.

When the two men finally dragged themselves up to wash at a small basin, they both found what appeared to be a small bite mark: a reddened area on one man’s tattooed bicep, the other guy with one on his thigh. Their immediate thought was scorpions or spiders, and they set about using an oil lamp to search every inch of the cell, to no avail.

As the day wore on, and through the next twelve days, the fevers and night sweats got steadily worse. It fell to the woman to try to tend to them in the stifling cell. She changed their blankets, brought them food, mopped their burning bodies and washed their soiled clothes. All the time she was surrounded by their sweat, their breath and their spittle – she didn’t realize it, but she was swimming in an unseen ocean, surrounded by billions of molecules of infection, a place white-hot with the pathogen.

On one occasion, desperate to get fresh air into the cell, she stood on one of the water casks and

looked out of the window to try to attract the Saracen’s attention. What she saw scared her more than any other thing during their long ordeal, and she couldn’t say why. He was standing thirty yards away and was talking animatedly on a satellite phone. Up until then, she had assumed he was just a labourer in their particular enterprise but now she thought he might not be the monkey after all – perhaps he was the organ grinder. Due to the way he was holding the phone, she could see his face clearly and

she thought from the movement of his lips and the few words which she could decode that he was speaking in English. He rang off, turned and saw her at the glass. A look of dismay, followed by wild anger, crossed his face and she knew in that instant she had witnessed something she was never meant to see.

It didn’t help her, though.

That afternoon, all the men’s symptoms, which had been steadily accruing, avalanched – the fever