Chapter Thirty-one
THE FIRST THING he did was set about sealing the garage under his small apartment and turning it into a makeshift bio-containment laboratory.
He had one advantage in performing the work – there was a good example close at hand. While everything else at the El-Mina hospital was falling apart, it had a two-bed isolation ward and an attached lab. Because anthrax was endemic to the region, the hospital had been able to take advantage of a World Health Organization programme to help developing nations combat the disease. Forget that the hospital didn’t have some of the most rudimentary equipment necessary for saving lives, the Geneva organization had provided a small fortune to build a first-rate facility.
As far as the Saracen knew, it had only been used once in ten years and had become little more than a temporary storage shed. Nevertheless, it was an excellent blueprint for his own lab, and it also ended up providing half the practical equipment he needed – incubators, a microscope, culture dishes, pipettes, sterilizing cabinets and a host of other items. They were never even reported missing.
Over the following week, using a computer and an Internet connection he had set up in the lab, he assembled a list of over sixty bio-tech companies worldwide which would provide DNA material of fewer than seventy letters without asking for name verification or any further information.
A long time later, on first hearing this, I didn’t believe it. To my despair, I went online and did it myself.
But before the Saracen could order DNA he had to locate two crucial pieces of equipment: gene synthesizers – machines about the size of a decent computer printer. It took him an hour. The dizzying progress in the bio-tech industry meant the market was awash with equipment at hugely discounted prices which was no longer the fastest or the best.
He found two synthesizers in excellent condition, one on eBay, the other on usedlabequipment.com. Combined, they cost under five thousand dollars and the Saracen was thankful that doctors were well paid and he had always lived such a frugal life. He could well afford them from his savings and what was even more important to him was that the sellers also had no interest in who the purchaser was – all they wanted was a valid credit-card number. An anonymous Western union money transfer was just as good.
He started work the day the second machine arrived and, that evening, he was surfing the Web, adding to his already vast library about viruses and biology, when he glanced through the latest online edition of the prestigious periodical Science. One of its lead stories was about a researcher who had just synthesized an organism with 300,000 letters. In the short time since he had decided on his course of action, 185,000 letters had already faded into history. That was the pace at which genetic engineering was advancing.
After he finished the article he knew that smallpox was within his grasp and his date with destiny confirmed. He prayed late into the night – it was a huge responsibility and he asked Allah to make sure he used it well.
Six months later, having glued and re-glued, backtracked, researched and re-learned – using not only his knowledge but the vast array of cheap equipment that was rapidly becoming available – he completed the task.
To the best of his ability, one molecule at a time, he had re-created smallpox. According to every test he could run, it was identical to its naturally occurring equivalent.
In the thousands of years since the virus had made the jump from some other life form into humans, there have been two different types of smallpox – Variola minor, often called cottonpox, which was rarely fatal, and its bigger brother, Variola major, the disease which had proved devastating to human populations ever since mankind had started to congregate in large tribes. It was that virus – with a death rate of about 30 per cent – which the Saracen had synthesized. However, within Variola major there were a host of different strains, some far more lethal than others.
Knowing that, he began to refine and challenge his virus, a well-established method of forcing it to mutate time after time, attempting, in the slang of some microbiologists, to KFC or deep-fry it, trying to turn it into a red-hot strain of what was already the hottest agent on earth.
Satisfied that it was as lethal as he could make it, he set out to modify its genetic structure. That was the simplest, but also the most dangerous, part of the entire exercise. It was also the most necessary …
Once the naturally occurring form of smallpox had been eradicated from the planet, the World Health Organization found itself holding a huge stockpile of vaccine doses. After several years, when everyone was convinced that the virus would not re-emerge, that protective reservoir was destroyed. Similarly, although a vast number of people had been routinely vaccinated against smallpox – primarily children in the Western world – the Saracen also knew that the vaccine started to wear off after five years and, as a result, virtually nobody on earth had any immunity.