He said he had sent his supplies by boat from Beirut to Karachi, flown to join them, bought a truck, driven through Pakistan into Afghanistan and, at the Shaddle Bazaar – the world’s largest opium market – had traded the truck for the ponies. All of it was true, and he even had a cheap digital camera on which he could show photos of himself tending to the sick and inoculating kids at a dozen ruined villages.
That – combined with the fact that every time his caravan was searched they found a wide range of medical supplies – allayed both sides’ fears. The only items he carried that led to questions were a pane of thick, reinforced glass and several sacks of quicklime. He told anyone who asked that the glass was used as an easily sterilized platform on which to mix prescriptions. And the quicklime? How else was he to destroy the swabs and dressings he used to treat everything from gangrene to measles?
Nobody even bothered to reach deep into the small saddlebag which held his clothes and spare sandals. At the bottom of it was a collapsible ‘helmet’ with a clear plastic face plate, a box of R-700D disposable face masks, a black bio-hazard suit, rubber boots, Kevlar-lined gloves and rolls of special tape to seal every join from the helmet to the boots. If the equipment had been found he would have told them that anthrax occurs naturally among hoofed animals – including goats and camels – and that he had no intention of dying for his work. As further proof, he would have shown them vials of antibiotics he was carrying, stolen from the hospital he had been working at in Lebanon, which was the standard drug to treat the disease. But the men he ran into were soldiers – either guerillas or otherwise – and they were looking for weapons and explosives, and nobody asked.
The only time he straight-out lied was if they asked where he was heading next. He would shrug, point at his possessions and say he didn’t even have a map.
‘I go wherever God takes me.’ But he did have a map – it was inside his head and he knew exactly where he was going.
On three separate occasions, NATO troops, having searched him, helped load his supplies back on to the ponies. The hardest part was lifting and securing the pairs of heavy-duty truck batteries on to the four animals at the rear. The batteries were used to power small refrigerated boxes, and the soldiers smiled at the doctor’s ingenuity. Inside were racks of tiny glass bottles which would help countless children: vaccines against polio, diphtheria and whooping cough. Hidden among them, indistinguishable except by an extra zero he had added to the batch number, were a pair of bottles which contained something vastly different.
At that time, only two examples of the smallpox virus were supposed to exist on the planet. Kept for research purposes, one was in a virtually impenetrable freezer at the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta and the other was at a secure Russian facility called Vector in Siberia. There was, however, a third example. Unknown to anyone in the world except the Saracen, it was in the two glass vials on the back of his wiry packhorse deep in the Hindu Kush.
He hadn’t stolen it, he hadn’t bought it from some disaffected Russian scientist, it hadn’t been given to him by a failed state like North Korea which had undertaken its own illegal research. No, the remarkable thing was that the Saracen had synthesized it himself.
In his garage.
Chapter Thirty
HE COULD NEVER have done it without the internet. As the search for him became increasingly desperate, I finally discovered that, several years after he had graduated in medicine, the Saracen took a job in El-Mina, an ancient town in the north of Lebanon.
He worked the night shift in ER at the local hospital – hard and exhausting work in a facility that was under-equipped and understaffed. Despite the constant fatigue, he used every spare moment to secretly pursue what he considered his life’s work – jihad against the far enemy.
While other soldiers-of-Allah were wasting their time at hidden boot camps in Pakistan or fantasizing about getting a US visa, he was reading everything he could find about weapons of mass destruction. And it was only the Internet that had given a doctor at an old hospital in a town nobody had heard of widespread access to the latest research into every major biological killer in the world.
In one of those unforeseen but deadly consequences – what the CIA would call blowback – the World Wide Web had opened up a Pandora’s box of terrible possibilities.
The Saracen hadn’t been raised like Western kids so he didn’t know much about computers, but he knew enough: by using a good proxy connection he managed to undertake his relentless search in complete anonymity.
For months, helped by his knowledge of medicine and biology, he concentrated on what he considered the most achievable bio-warfare candidates – ricin, anthrax, pneumonic plague, sarin, tabun and soman – all of which were capable of causing widespread death and even greater panic. But all of them came with enormous shortcomings – most of them either weren’t infectious or were most effective if used as part of an aerial bombing campaign.