I Am Pilgrim (38 page)

towers of Klieg lights would never have arrived in time.

As it was, their fleet of Chinook helicopters landed with less than an hour to spare – any delay would have meant the quicklime would have done its work and they would never have found the corner of one saddle blanket.

Chapter Forty-one

BY THE TIME the chinooks had landed, the saracen was already down the first of the precipitous slopes and crossing a narrow, windswept plateau. If the Western world had got lucky by having Keating take

command on the mountaintop, the Saracen had also encountered his own share of good fortune. He

was on horseback.

His climb down the slope had become increasingly difficult, thanks to his injured hip. His experience as a doctor told him it wasn’t broken but, whatever damage he had done, he was finding it increasingly difficult to walk.

Without a crutch or length of wood to take the weight, he knew that, pretty soon, he would have to

find a cave or a hole in the ground to lay up in for at least a few hours to try to rest it. That’s when, just as he started across the plateau, he saw the horse.

It was one of his pack ponies, looking lost and forlorn in the starlight, which had become separated from its brethren. It recognized his voice and, hoping as much for company as some treat, trotted towards him obediently. He grabbed the lead rope he had slashed earlier in the night, used it as a makeshift halter and scrambled on to its back.

He urged it into a canter and travelled fast across the plateau, found a path that the goat herders used in summer to access the high pasture and gave the pony its head. Mountain-bred and sure-footed, it carried him quickly down the crumbling path, instinctively avoiding the washaways of loose gravel and never losing its head, even when the drop below its hooves was a thousand feet or more.

By the time dawn came, US and UN helicopters were over the narrow plateau and searching hard,

but they thought they were looking for a man on foot and they predicated all their arcs and grids on that assumption. Given that the terrain was riddled with ravines and caves, both of the natural and man-made variety, it was a slow and laborious process for the pilots and their spotters.

The perimeter of the search was steadily expanded, but the horse kept the Saracen well beyond its

growing reach and, within two days, he had fallen in with a tribe of nomadic herders, riding with them during the day and sleeping between their tents at night.

Early one morning, travelling along a high ridge, he saw the old Trans-Afghan highway bisecting

the valley below. He took his leave of the nomads and turned towards it.

Two hours later he had joined a river of broken-down trucks, speeding Toyota pick-ups and overcrowded buses and vanished into the chaos of modern Afghanistan.

Chapter Forty-two

THE MEN IN the white NBC suits – nuclear, biological and Chemical – worked methodically inside their translucent silver dome. Mobile generators and sophisticated filters carried away the smell of dank earth and raw quicklime, replacing it with purified air kept at an unwavering sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit.

Despite their slow progress, it took the technicians and their supervisors only a few hours to decide there was no nuclear material on the mountaintop.

This discovery didn’t do much for Keating’s reputation – or his career prospects. ‘An alarmist’ was

about the kindest thing anyone in the chain of command had to say, before they pretty much lost interest in the entire exhumation. The general consensus among the hazchem crew was that some drug

courier had decided to bury a couple of horses – either his own or, more likely, those belonging to

some rival. When it came to feuds, everyone agreed, the Afghans were in a league of their own.

But there was one detail they couldn’t sneer away, and that was the quicklime. It was what sustained Keating throughout those hard days – that and his overwhelming belief there was something badly awry, something deeply sinister in the jumble of buildings. Adding that feeling to the village’s isolation and its spectacular view, he even gave it a name: the Overlook hotel, he called it.

Then the men inside the dome found the first charred body. Or at least what was left of it. They established that it was a woman and, though they had no evidence, they were certain that deeper down they would find two more dead – one Japanese and one Dutch. What sort of kidnapper dumped the uptake into a lime-filled pit without even making a ransom demand?

Beside the body, deep in a chemical sludge, they found what was left – barely two inches square –

of what looked like a saddle blanket. They didn’t know it, but on the last night of her life the woman had clutched it to her face and tried to asphyxiate herself to stop the relentless flood of pain. As a result it contained her saliva, blood, strands of tissue and a complete panel of genetic material from the blisters that had formed in her mouth and throat.

The blanket was still locked in her partly burnt hand, protecting it from the worst of the flames when the Saracen used the horses to drag her into the pit. Another hour and the quicklime would have destroyed it completely.

Worried now, and forced to acknowledge it might not be a kidnapping at all – instantly rehabilitating Keating’s reputation and career prospects – the NBC team and their supervisors greatly accelerated the workrate. Their first task was to discover exactly what they were dealing with, so they sealed the small square of blanket into an airtight bio-hazard container, secured it within another lead receptacle and sent it, first by helicopter and then on a special overnight jet, to Fort Detrick in Maryland.

Chapter Forty-three

FORT DETRICK, PART of the United States Army Medical Command, is made up of a collection of buildings and campuses set on twelve hundred high-security acres just outside the town of Frederick.

One of the largest of the campuses houses the nation’s leading biological-warfare agency – the Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, an organization so steeped in secrecy that a number of conspiracy theorists have claimed that it was the lab where the government created HIV.

If they were right, perhaps the long, low building not far from what used to be known as Anthrax

Tower was also where NASA staged the moon landing. Nobody knows, because very few people, not

even those with security clearances as high as mine, have ever been allowed on to the site.

It was at one of the facility’s bio-safety labs that the sealed box from Afghanistan arrived on a Sunday morning. Because nobody at the Overlook hotel knew what they were dealing with, it hadn’t

been marked as top priority.

For that reason, it was placed in a queue and wasn’t opened until just after 9 p.m. By then, the only microbiologist working was a guy in his forties called Walter Drax – a petty, resentful man who was

happy to work the graveyard shift because it meant he didn’t have to put up with what he called the

assholes and knuckle-draggers. In his mind, the A&Ks were a large cohort, one that included most of his co-workers and certainly everyone in management – the people who, he believed, had blocked every possibility of promotion and the higher pay it provided.

Working alone under what are called Biosafety Level Four conditions, in a lab kept at negative air

pressure, wearing a suit not dissimilar to the Saracen’s, his air regulator connected to an overhead supply, he unsealed the box in a special cabinet, removed the small piece of saddle cloth and prepared it for analysis.

Peering at the screen of his electron microscope, he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Heart racing, sweating hard inside the bio-safety suit, he checked it three times – even changing out the microscope and going back to his work station and consulting the relevant literature and the institute’s classified manuals – before he was convinced.

He was looking at
Variola major
. Instinctively, he knew that it was a very hot strain, but what really terrified him was what he saw when he looked deep into the knot of DNA at the centre of it: it had been genetically engineered. He had no doubt that it was a weaponized, military strain of the pathogen

– a no-holds-barred weapon of mass destruction.

By unpicking the DNA knot and comparing the images in the manuals with what he could see through the microscope, he quickly learned that somebody had inserted a specific gene into it. There was only one reason he could think of why somebody would do that: the virus had been constructed to

be vaccine-evasive.

If it worked – and Drax could see no reason why it wouldn’t – nobody in the world, not even the

Nazis with their cattle cars and canisters of Zyklon-B gas, would ever have been in possession of a

more efficient killer.

The normal procedure in such an event – if anything in such circumstances could ever be considered normal – was for Drax to phone his duty supervisor at home and inform him of what he

had found. But Drax didn’t want to do that. He was damned if he was going to give any of the A&Ks a place in the institute’s history – that
celebrityhood
– that he knew the discovery of weaponized smallpox would entail.

I mean, he told himself, the whole place still talks about the guys who found the Ebola virus in a damn monkey.

Instead, he decided to make an end-run around them all and speak to his cousin. He didn’t like her

much either, but she was married to a special assistant at the National Security Council – a man who Drax privately called Lip Gloss, given how smooth he was at sucking up to his superiors.

When he got him on the line, Drax – without explaining anything about the small square of saddle

blanket – said he needed to speak to the highest-ranking member of the US intelligence community he

could contact this late on a Sunday night. Lip Gloss laughed and said things didn’t work that way and he’d better tell him what it was all about and, anyway, what was wrong with his own superiors, and

surely they had a protocol in place—

Drax wasn’t in any mood for delay. ‘Oh, sorry,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you need some directions to Shut-Up Village. There’s a secure line directly into the lab. Now do it – get somebody to call me, it’s a national emergency.’

He hung up before Lip Gloss could reply and then sat down to wait. He hadn’t felt so good in years.

It was the phrase ‘national emergency’ and the fact that Drax worked for the pre-eminent bio-defence laboratory which convinced Lip Gloss to call the Deputy Director of National Intelligence, a man whom he knew well because their teenage sons played baseball on the same team.

As a result, it was the deputy director who called Drax and listened with avalanching dismay as the

technician told him about the piece of material that had arrived from Afghanistan and the different types of smallpox.

‘Given the panic something like this would cause, I wanted as few people as possible to know – I

thought it best to try and go straight to the top,’ Drax told him.

The deputy director congratulated him on his foresight, told him to speak to nobody and to sit tight until he called back. The deputy director, however, had one immediate and overwhelming problem: was Drax telling the truth? Hadn’t it been a scientist in the same unit at Fort Detrick who had been suspected of manufacturing anthrax and sending it through the post to several US senators? On the other hand, while the guy he had been speaking to on the secure line certainly sounded like a nightmare, that didn’t necessarily mean he was a Fort Detrick nut-job.

He called the head of the institute, a high-ranking military officer and a well-respected scientist in his own right, swore him to secrecy, explained what he had been told and asked him – no, ordered him – to get to the lab immediately to confirm the provenance of the sample and examine Drax’s findings.

Forty minutes later, sitting in front of Drax’s electron microscope, the head of the institute called back and gave the deputy director the news the guy had been dreading. Now the machinery of government, and the sense of panic, started to go into overdrive. All that occurred while only two people at the nation’s huge bio-defence facility – the organization that should have been at the epicentre of events – had any idea what was actually happening. As far as end-runs went, it was spectacular.

For the rest of us, it was fortuitous – it meant the government at least had a chance of keeping the situation secret. If the Saracen were to learn he was being hunted, he would either go to ground immediately or accelerate his plans. Maintaining secrecy was paramount and, in that regard, the next few hours would be critical …

Chapter Forty-four

THE SECRET HELD. By midnight on that sunday night only nine people in the world – apart from the Saracen – knew the truth. A short time later, even though I had long ago surrendered my badge, I became the tenth.

The first two initiates – Drax and his boss – were at the army’s Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. The third was the Deputy Director of National Intelligence. Once he had confirmed the truth of what he had been told, he made an urgent phone call and the head of his department – the Director of National Intelligence – became the fourth.

The director, no grey bureaucrat, was steeped in the history and practice of the sprawling intelligence community: he had started his career at the National Security Agency, analysing photos