The Beijing conspiracy

CHAPTER 82

A s the full impact of the worst attacks on the West since September 11 became clear, for those in the United States, Britain and Australia the ‘Year of the Chinese Olympics and the Greatest Games Ever’ had opened in an atmosphere of fear and apprehension, and that apprehension was not confined to the West. The messages of Khalid Kadeer and the attacks on the Chinese embassies and consulates around the world had not gone unnoticed in Beijing.

The central business districts of London, San Francisco and Brisbane were still largely deserted as the authorities struggled to decontaminate tens of thousands of square metres of office space, rail and bus stations, parks, hotels, swimming pools and public buildings. Thousands of people still didn’t trust the water supplies, tourism was non-existent and thousands more people had lost their jobs. Losses on the stock market threatened a recession and economic confidence was at its lowest since 1929.

In Sydney, the burned-out hulk of the Ocean Venturer grounded under the Harbour Bridge was a grisly reminder of Kadeer’s first warning. The state government had wisely abandoned the initial spin of ‘it could have been much worse, had it not been for the bravery of the Commandos’ in favour of concentrating on getting the stricken city back on its feet. In the months since the attack, progress had been painfully slow. The intense heat from the burning tanker in the harbour had caused severe structural damage to the bridge and the engineers were unwilling to give an exact date for the re-opening. The news on the tunnels was a little better, with engineers confident they could replace the damaged sections, but that was going to take time and both the harbour tunnels remained closed, as did the M5 at the Cooks River. The trains were running, but only on either side of the harbour and the government had hired as many additional ferries as the harbour could accommodate. Hundreds of businesses had gone under and thousands of people were out of work as well. Worse was to come with the American President’s State of the Union Address that would send shockwaves through Arab, Muslim and western communities alike. Evangelicals like the Reverend Jerry Buffett and other Christian leaders were warning millions of their followers of the approaching Armageddon, an Armageddon that was being quietly orchestrated right under their noses.

Dr Eduard Dolinsky inserted first one key and then the other into the specially designed locks on the Halliwell vault. It was a breach of procedure that would never have been tolerated at CDC. The reasoning was to guard against a rogue scientist having access to pathogens for which there was no cure, so access to the CDC smallpox vault always required two scientists.

Imran and Kate helped Dolinsky with the stainless steel trolleys. Kate put an insulated mitten over her spacesuit glove, opened the freezer and stepped back as a cloud of liquid nitrogen vapour poured over the sides of the portable freezer, swirling around her boots and the trolley wheels. At Halliwell, the filo virus Ebola was stored in the same trolley as smallpox. At CDC there had been a strict protocol to keep the two viruses separate for safety.

Kate could see the look of concern on Imran’s face as they watched the Georgian virologist. There was no doubt that Eduard Dolinsky had already done a considerable amount of work towards combining the harder to catch but more deadly single-stranded RNA Ebola virus with the much more easily transmittable but not quite so deadly smallpox. With India-1 smallpox, only 90 per cent of those who contracted it were likely to die.

On Dolinsky’s left, Imran had placed the seed vials of smallpox into a specially designed water bath that was kept at a constant temperature of 37°C, the same temperature as the human body. Dolinsky carefully took out one of the vials and held it against a bench light, checking to see that the frozen liquid had completely melted. Kate shivered involuntarily. No matter how often she looked at prepared slides of the crinkly bullet-shaped pox viruses under an electron microscope, or handled the live viruses in their shimmering pale pink soup, Kate couldn’t help thinking that one vial was enough to wipe out the whole of New York City. On Dolinsky’s left, another 37°C water bath had melted the even more lethal contents of vials containing millions of the spaghetti-like strands of Ebola. In the centre of the bench Kate had set up rows of plastic well plates and beside them were the small dark bottles that had come from one of several ordinary domestic refrigerators. Inside the bottles were the microscopic enzymes that were used to splice sequences of the double-stranded DNA of smallpox and reverse-transcriptase enzymes that could synthesise DNA from the single-stranded Ebola. Kate shivered again. It was a complex process that could not be seen by the human eye but over the past months, Dolinsky had produced vial upon vial of Ebolapox, a man-made virus far more deadly than any of the pathogens found in nature. Here, in the Halliwell laboratories, paid for by the taxes of the American people, the single strand had met its double. al-Falid and Eduard Dolinsky both knew that the FBI had assigned close surveillance to the Georgian scientist from the day he’d arrived in the country. Surveillance was manpower intensive and as Dolinsky never went out, that surveillance had been dispensed with in favour of bugging his apartment, although al-Falid was not taking any chances. The one place Dolinsky was free to move around was the Halliwell Laboratories, and once he had gained a clearance to be in the building al-Falid met with Dolinsky in a quiet, unoccupied office.

‘The program is on track, Amon,’ Dolinsky assured al-Falid. ‘The laboratory resources have been first class and I’ve overcome the final technical hurdles to combining smallpox with Ebola. Several chimpanzees have been tested and the results have been, how do you say it, impressive,’ Dolinsky said with a slow smile. ‘More importantly I have made progress on the vaccine and several more chimpanzees are showing immunity, but this virus is far more deadly than smallpox or Ebola on their own. Once it gets loose, unless it’s in a small area that can be contained, it will kill hundreds of millions.’

Dolinsky had no way of knowing that the Olympics were the target, and once he realised the sinister purposes his research could be put to, it would be too late.