Within an hour they were in a strange, dreamless sleep. No wonder – both the naan and the curry were laced with a barbiturate called pentobarbital, a drug so powerful as a sleeping aid that it is recommended by most groups which advocate euthanasia.
Just before 2 a.m., the Saracen, carrying a small surgical kit and an oil-filled hurricane lamp, re-entered the cell. He looked terrifying, dressed in his full black bio-hazard suit, Kevlar-lined gloves and helmet with its clear plastic face plate. On his back was an oxygen tank feeding air through a regulator into his taped and sealed lifeboat.
Working quickly, trying to preserve as much of the oxygen as possible, he knelt beside the woman, removed her jeans, pulled aside her smelly underwear and checked the site of the vaccination. With quiet satisfaction, he saw the flat scar and knew that the vaccine had taken perfectly. She was as well protected as modern science could make her.
He replaced her clothing and started working on the sound-recordist first. He rolled up the sleeve of the man’s T-shirt and looked at the barbed-wire tattoo. The Saracen hated tattoos and chose that as his spot.
He took out a syringe and checked its plunger through the clear plastic of his face plate. Satisfied, he reached over to the kit and removed one of the two glass vials with the extra zero added to its batch number. It was sealed with a special rubber top and the Saracen, holding the syringe in his Kevlar-gloved hand, pushed the needle through the rubber and into the bottle.
With the sound of his rapid breathing rattling through the oxygen regulator, he pushed air into the vial then pulled on the plunger and filled the syringe with what could be the most lethal pathogen on the planet. Time would tell.
By the dim light of the hurricane lamp – definitely a scene from the inner circle of hell – the man in the black bio-hazard suit bent over the prisoner and, with a final prayer to Allah, slowly slipped the needle into the barbed wire.
The Saracen was a good doctor, long experienced in administering intravenous medications, and the young Japanese hipster barely stirred in his drugged sleep as the needle went deeper and found the vein. Gradually the Saracen pressed down on the plunger and watched the level of clear fluid drop as it poured into the victim’s bloodstream. After ten seconds it was done and the young man sighed quietly and rolled over in his sleep.
The Saracen immediately put the glass vial and syringe into a special red bio-hazard container which he had filled earlier with industrial-strength Lysol disinfectant.
Next, he turned his attention to the Dutch engineer, repeating the procedure on the man’s thigh and only stopping when – for a moment – he thought the initial needle prick had woken him. He was mistaken and, gripping the syringe firmly, he pushed down and attempted to separate the man from his wife and three kids, as surely as if he were holding the barrel of the AK-47 to his temple.
With his experiment complete, he picked up his surgical kit, the bio-hazard container and the hurricane lamp.
In silence – even the sound of the air regulator seemed to have stilled – he headed for the door, praying hard that his virus was deep fried and that the extra gene had made it a weapons-grade vaccine buster.
Chapter Thirty-six
I DON’T SUPPOSE there are many good ways to die, but I know one of the worst: far from home and family, chained like a dog in an abandoned village, your body collapsing under the onslaught of smallpox and only a bearded face at a sealed glass window to hear your screams for help.
All the prisoners had woken late the following morning with a headache hammering at the base of their skull. They wondered if it was a reaction to the food but not for a minute did they think they might have been drugged. Why would anyone do that? It wasn’t as if they might escape – they were chained to ringbolts in a stone cell.
When the two men finally dragged themselves up to wash at a small basin, they both found what appeared to be a small bite mark: a reddened area on one man’s tattooed bicep, the other guy with one on his thigh. Their immediate thought was scorpions or spiders, and they set about using an oil lamp to search every inch of the cell, to no avail.
As the day wore on, and through the next twelve days, the fevers and night sweats got steadily worse. It fell to the woman to try to tend to them in the stifling cell. She changed their blankets, brought them food, mopped their burning bodies and washed their soiled clothes. All the time she was surrounded by their sweat, their breath and their spittle – she didn’t realize it, but she was swimming in an unseen ocean, surrounded by billions of molecules of infection, a place white-hot with the pathogen.
On one occasion, desperate to get fresh air into the cell, she stood on one of the water casks and looked out of the window to try to attract the Saracen’s attention. What she saw scared her more than any other thing during their long ordeal, and she couldn’t say why. He was standing thirty yards away and was talking animatedly on a satellite phone. Up until then, she had assumed he was just a labourer in their particular enterprise but now she thought he might not be the monkey after all – perhaps he was the organ grinder. Due to the way he was holding the phone, she could see his face clearly and she thought from the movement of his lips and the few words which she could decode that he was speaking in English. He rang off, turned and saw her at the glass. A look of dismay, followed by wild anger, crossed his face and she knew in that instant she had witnessed something she was never meant to see.