The boxes that contained the precious vials would be displaying genuine dispatch dockets from a Lebanese hospital, their destination well established as one of the largest producers of vaccines in the world, and all of them addressed to a man who was an authentic employee of the company’s warehouse department.
Chapter Sixty-three
THE BOXES ARRIVED five days later.
Their documentation showed that the courier had transported them to the port of Tripoli, where they had been loaded into a refrigerated container. A small Cedars-Line freighter had taken them across the Mediterranean and, several days later, they had encountered European customs in Naples, Italy.
How do I put this nicely? Italy, even at the best of times, isn’t renowned for its thoroughness or bureaucratic efficiency. When the boxes arrived, it happened to be the worst of times. Continual budget cuts had taken a huge toll on the customs service, and its resources had been further depleted by a flood of containers carrying illegal immigrants risking the short journey from North Africa.
Even though the boxes secretly contained a Biosafety Level Four hot agent, none of them were opened for inspection, let alone analysis. The overworked officers believed what the documentation and transit history attested to: they were expired vaccines being returned to the manufacturer in Germany.
In Naples, the boxes were loaded on to a truck, driven north without any further inspection, crossed the unpatrolled border into Austria and from there headed into Germany.
They arrived at the Chyron Chemicals security gate – just another shipment among the hundreds that went in and out every day – at 11.06 p.m., according to the guards’ computerized log. One of them saw the contact number on the documentation – a guy working in the warehouse – called him and said a delivery was on its way.
The boom gate lifted, the driver was waved through and three minutes later the Saracen took possession of his ten thousand vials of liquid Holocaust. The journey that had started so long ago with once-classified information haemorrhaging online was almost at an end.
The Saracen immediately stored the boxes in a rarely visited area of the warehouse reserved for discarded packaging and attached a sign in Turkish and German on the front of them: DO NOT MOVE. AWAITING FURTHER INSTRUCTION.
His original plan had been to sidetrack vials of a certain drug which was destined for the forty largest cities in the United States, empty them of their contents and replace with his own creation. It would have been a slow and dangerous process. On arrival at work on his first day, however, he had realized it wasn’t necessary. The glass vials he had used in Lebanon were so close in appearance to those used by Chyron that even an expert eye would have been hard pressed to tell the difference. All he needed to do was put labels on them.
Immediately, he had started experimenting with solvents which would lift the labels off the legitimate drugs without damaging them. He needed the labels intact, and he found what he was looking for in a large art-supply store – a common solution which neutralized most commercial glues.
Ten half-gallon containers of it were already stored in his locker and the only job that remained for him was to lift the labels off the genuine drugs and re-glue them to the tiny bottles of smallpox virus. They would then be shipped to America in perfect disguise, distributed to the forty cities and, he was confident, the US healthcare system would do the rest.
He was aware that changing the labels would be a long and laborious process but, fortunately, he worked alone on the graveyard shift and there was little real work to distract him. He had run it through in his head so many times – even spending one night timing himself – that he knew he would hit his deadline.
There were nine days to go.
Chapter Sixty-four
AFTER DRIVING THE seven hundred miles back I arrived in Bodrum in the early afternoon, still trying to reconcile what I knew of Leyla Cumali’s life with her role in the imminent conflagration.
I had stopped twice on the way for gas and coffee and, each time, I had checked my phone and laptop, hoping for news from Battleboi. But there was nothing, and the only email was two spam messages which had been filtered and gone straight to the junk folder. I was getting increasingly frustrated and worried – maybe the Samurai hacker wasn’t going to be any better than the CIA – so when I saw the manager hurrying across the foyer towards me, I figured another disaster must have come down the pike.
It turned out I was so tired I had misread the cues: he was hurrying because he couldn’t believe I was back. I quickly realized that he had thought my story about visiting Bulgaria was bullshit and that, having killed SpongeBob, I was gone for good.