He laughed – that dry, rasping laugh some old people have when there’s not much life left. ‘After the virus was eradicated, science lost interest – all the money and research went into AIDS, that’s where the glory was.
‘There were no prizes awarded because there was no pressing need, and no cure because there was no research,’ he said.
‘So all we need is half a dozen suicide infectees and we’ve got a full-on catastrophe,’ I replied.
He looked at me like I was crazy. ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.
‘Human vectors?’ he said. ‘Is that what you’re saying? And tell me, how will these suicide infectees get here – in carts with stone wheels?’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
‘Four thousand years ago the Hittites sent people infected with plague into the cities of their enemies. As far as I know, that was the last time anyone used human vectors in biological warfare.’
He might have won a Nobel Prize, but his history didn’t sound right to me. ‘No, all the government studies have been based on people being sent into the country—’
His skull-like head started wagging in anger. ‘That’s because governments don’t know shit,’ he said. ‘Even British soldiers – who weren’t exactly scientific geniuses – came up with the idea of using contaminated goods to wipe out Native Americans.’
‘Blankets you mean—?’
‘Of course I mean blankets – fresh from their smallpox ward. That was almost three hundred years ago, and things have come a long way since then. You read the news? Every week there’s some story about poisonous pet food from China being recalled, adulterated toothpaste turning up on the docks, imported baby food contaminated with melamine. And these are accidents. Imagine how easy it would be to do it deliberately.’
He looked up to see if I was following him. I got the feeling he had been beating the drum for years but nobody had started marching.
‘Go on,’ I said.
His voice was quieter, but it wasn’t due to fatigue or old age: it was resignation. ‘You know, we’ve outsourced everything in this country. Do we actually make anything any more? When you rely on imports for so much, there’s no security. Not real security. Who the hell would bother with vectors?
‘I’m not an alarmist, I’m a scientist, and I’m saying you can forget them. It’s contamination that is the risk. Find something ordinary and send your pathogen in from overseas – the new version of the blanket. That’s how a modern, intelligent enemy would do it.’
He ran his hand through where his hair once would have been. ‘I’m old and I’m tired, but it will happen, and it’ll happen in the way I’ve explained. A writer called Robert Louis Stevenson once said that “sooner or later we all sit down to a banquet of consequences”.
‘He was right – so I say pull up a chair and pick up your fork, the time is coming when we’ll all be chowing down.’
Chapter Eleven
WHEN I ARRIVED at the horse farm, I had faith. I believed in rock ’n’ roll, the Western dream and the equality of man. But most of all I believed in a worldwide dragnet for an Arab fugitive and that temperature checks at every border would keep the pin in the grenade.
By the time I left, I still had faith in rock ’n’ roll, but little else. The old man with the translucent skin and impatient manner had convinced me that what he termed a ‘modern, intelligent enemy’ would never be caught by rounding up the usual suspects. Nor would there be any suicide vectors.
As I left his tree-lined drive and headed towards National airport, I realized that we were chasing a new kind of terrorist. I saw the future and I knew that the day of the fundamentalist and fanatic had passed. In their wake, a new generation was emerging and the man with the smallpox – highly educated and adept with technology – was probably the first. The cave-dwellers with their bomb belts and passenger planes converted into missiles looked like dial-up. This man was broadband. And say he was flying solo? If he had done it by himself, then that was an even more astonishing achievement.
Nobody likes to think they might have met their match, especially not an intelligence agent selected and trained to be the best on the battlefield, but that was my deeply held fear as I arrived at the airport. And I have to say, as the Saracen and I circled closer to one another in the weeks which lay ahead, I saw nothing to put that feeling back in its box. He would have been brilliant in any area he had chosen to pursue.
So it was in a sombre frame of mind that I dropped the rent-a-car, headed through security and boarded the plane to La Guardia in New York. From there I took a cab to JFK – I was a live agent now, arriving exactly like any genuine Manhattan-based federal agent – and made the flight to Istanbul with barely twenty minutes to spare.