I Am Pilgrim(88)

That was ideal for his purposes – except for one problem. The United States, the target of his assault, had become increasingly concerned about a bio-terror attack and in the wake of 9/11 had decided to produce and warehouse over three hundred million doses of vaccine, one for every person in the country. When the Saracen had first read about it, the information had cast him into despair. Sitting up for an entire night researching vaccination, he learned that anything up to 20 per cent of a population would remain unprotected: the vaccine didn’t take in a significant number of people and it can’t be given to pregnant women, newborn babies, elderly citizens or anyone with a damaged immune system.

Even so, the existence of the vaccine stockpile shook him badly and, just before dawn on that long night, he had considered abandoning his plan and looking for a different weapon. But, once again, the ongoing explosion of scientific knowledge – or Allah – came to his rescue.

Delving deeper into the literature, he found a research report from a group of Australian scientists. Working at a facility in Canberra, the nation’s capital, the scientists had been trying to find a way to control the breeding cycle of mice. Working with mousepox, a disease closely related to smallpox, they had spliced a gene from the immune system known as IL-4 into the virus. What they found was startling: the virus crashed through any vaccine that had been given to the mice and wiped them out.

The addition of one gene – just one gene – had made the virus into a vaccine-buster.

The Saracen, with hope renewed, started following the obscure research trail. In rarely visited corners of the Web – frequently following nothing more than casual leads mentioned in scientific forums – he found that a number of researchers throughout the world had tried, with varying degrees of success, to duplicate the Australians’ result.

With daylight flooding into the world outside his cocoon, he worked on and stumbled across a newly posted report from several Dutch agricultural scientists working with cowpox. They had decided to splice a slightly different gene into the virus and had not only succeeded in evading the vaccine but had managed to repeat the process every time.

The Saracen knew that the gene in question was readily available from the same companies that had supplied him with the nucleic acid base pairs. He ordered it immediately, opened the tiny package two days later and took science into uncharted waters.

He knew that the massive dose of vaccine that he had used on himself would provide no protection if he was successful in constructing a weapons-grade smallpox virus: he would be as good as naked in the hot zone. As a result, he stole a complete bio-hazard suit from the hospital to protect himself against infection and then drove to the coast. He travelled slowly along the road that ran parallel to the sea until he found a diving shop. Inside, he paid cash for four scuba tanks of oxygen and an air regulator, loaded them into the back of his car and returned to his cocoon.

Every time he worked on his vaccine-resistant virus it took him twenty minutes to put on the pilfered bio-hazard suit and attach his specially modified breathing apparatus, but the scientific work was easy. Partly as a result of the expertise he had gained and partly because the new gene contained only three hundred or so letters, he finished splicing it into the virus less than a month later.

It was this potential cataclysm that was contained in the two glass vials with the extra zero, and there was a simple reason why the Saracen had brought them to Afghanistan: all his remarkable work would have been for nothing if he had made a mistake and the virus didn’t work. He was well aware that smallpox occurred only in humans – not even our closest relatives, chimpanzees and monkeys, were capable of catching it. That meant the only way for him to be certain it was as deadly as the original and to discover if it could crash through the vaccine was to conduct a human trial.

It was deep in the mountains of the Hindu Kush that he planned to find the three subjects necessary for his dark experiment.

Leaving Kunar Province and its US patrols far behind, he found a dry riverbed which, due to the decay of the country’s infrastructure, now served as a road. For days on end he walked along it, sprayed with dust by passing trucks and the ubiquitous Toyota 4-WDs, but, finally, on a blazingly hot morning, he realized he was getting close to his destination: ahead, silhouetted against the sky, he saw four men on horseback with AK-47s, standing guard.

The Saracen led his small caravan forward, turned a bend in the river and saw, some distance ahead, a town of mud and stone that appeared little changed since the Middle Ages. On the opposite bank, commanding a pass deeper into the mountains, stood a heavily fortified group of buildings built into a cliff face.