It didn’t help her, though.
That afternoon, all the men’s symptoms, which had been steadily accruing, avalanched – the fever went suborbital, the blisters that had been forming on their limbs swept across their outer extremities and filled with pus, the nights became filled with hallucinatory dreams, their veins and capillaries started to burst, turning their skin black from haemorrhaging blood, forcing the flesh to split from their skeleton, their bodies expelling strange odours, and the pain got so bad that they screamed for two days until they probably died from exhaustion as much as anything else.
Every few hours, the Saracen’s face would appear at the window to check on the progress of his creation. What he saw, to his delight, was the results of a very hot virus indeed and, while he couldn’t be sure, it appeared to be a type of Variola major called haemorrhagic smallpox. Known among researchers as ‘Sledgehammer’, it causes catastrophic bleeding in the body’s largest organ – the skin – and is one hundred per cent fatal. One hundred per cent.
By the time the men had died, the woman herself was suffering from a rocketing temperature and horrifying night sweats and she knew that she was now rapidly circling the drain. Late one night the Saracen watched with satisfaction as she staggered to the basin to cool her burning face and found the first blisters on the back of her hand. In that moment, the Saracen knew that not only had he synthesized a red-hot virus which was highly infectious but the addition of the extra gene had also allowed it to crash through the best state-of-science vaccine. It was, without question or salvation, a terror weapon to end all terror weapons.
Because she had seen the future, both for herself and the unborn child with which she had already fallen in love, she took it even harder than the men, and the Saracen resorted to gazing at the spectacular view, stuffing his ears with cotton and reciting the Qur’an to drown out her cries.
When she finally bled out, he didn’t move. He wanted to savour the moment: the three bodies proved that he was now within reach of an event which terrorism experts have found so frightening they have given it a special name. They call it the ‘soft kill’ of America.
Chapter Thirty-seven
THIS IS THE unalloyed truth: without an effective vaccine, no country on earth could survive an orchestrated smallpox attack, not even a country of 310 million people which is responsible for over 50 per cent of the world’s wealth, which had enough nuclear armaments to destroy the planet a hundred times over and had produced more Nobel prizewinners in science and medicine than any other nation on earth. It would be as helpless in the face of Variola major as the three prisoners who were lying dead in their own fluids in the stone tomb.
But just one man, one virus – could it really be done? The Saracen knew it could and, surprisingly, so did Washington.
It was called Dark Winter.
That was the name of a bio-terror simulation conducted at Andrews Air Force Base in the spring of 2001. Years later, working in Lebanon, the Saracen had read a report into the exercise’s findings on the Internet. Even if he had never thought of weaponizing smallpox, the once-secret report would have certainly pointed him in the right direction.
Dark Winter postulated a smallpox attack on the United States in which one infected person entered a shopping mall in Oklahoma City. It then plotted the spread of the disease and projected the number of casualties. Thirteen days after the sole infectee entered the mall, the virus had spread to twenty-five states, infected hundreds of thousands of people, killed one third of them, overwhelmed the healthcare system, sent the economy into free fall and led to a more or less total collapse in social order. Naturally, the virus was indiscriminate in whom it attacked and cops, firefighters and health workers fell victim as fast as the population in general – probably faster – and looting and fires broke out unchecked. Hospitals were forced to lock and barricade their doors. The exercise was stopped early: nobody needed to learn any more.
All of those who read the report and participated in its production probably had the same thought – that was one infected person in a mall in Oklahoma City carrying a not particularly hot strain of the virus. Imagine the New York subway, Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade or the Superbowl.
And while the government eventually ordered the production and stockpiling of the vaccine, no real funding was given to finding a cure for the disease – the only certain way to consign smallpox to history and take it off the shelf of potential weapons. As many people have noted: generals are always fighting the last war, not the next one.
And what if there were twenty, a hundred, a thousand infected people? Although the Dark Winter report never made it specific, all the CIA analysts, bio-defence experts, epidemiologists and their endless computer simulations appeared to assume that the person in Oklahoma City was a suicide infectee – someone deliberately dosed with the virus and then let loose in America.