The Martyr’s Curse

Chapter Fifty-Nine

Many kilometres away, deep below the Swiss countryside, Udo Streicher walked down the white-tiled corridor and entered the laboratory. It consisted of an outer chamber, in which it was unnecessary to wear protective clothing, and a maximum-containment inner chamber from which it was securely sealed off by thick glass and an airlock chamber. The walls were bare except for a large clock. Down here where the generator-fed neon lights worked twenty-four-seven, you soon lost track of day and night.

On the other side of the glass, Anton Lindquist looked like a spaceman inside the same model of BSL-4 positive pressure protection suit he’d worn during his days as a lab technician at the European Centre for Disease Control in Stockholm, the job he’d been in when Streicher had first recruited him to the Parati. He was hooked up to his air supply via a curly plastic hose long enough to allow him to move freely about the room, and able to talk over the speaker system via the mic behind his PPPS suit visor. He had his back to the glass, intent on working at a massive stainless-steel bench that stretched from wall to wall and was covered in a range of equipment whose purpose Streicher could only guess at, even if he had paid for it all. There were incubators and vaccine baths, a huge vacuum pump, a centrifuge, a microscope wired up to a computer screen, racks of container jars and Petri dishes and all kinds of assorted tools and gadgets strewn everywhere. Streicher wasn’t too interested in knowing what any of it did. The end result was his only real concern, and that end result was taking far longer to achieve than he’d initially been given to understand.

Streicher rapped on the glass. Lindquist didn’t hear because the rush of his air supply tended to drown out most background sounds. Streicher rapped the glass harder, and the figure in the moon suit suddenly stiffened and spun around like a startled rabbit.

‘You frightened me,’ he said, his voice sounding scratchy and metallic through the speaker in the outer chamber. His glasses were steamed up behind the visor. He’d been expecting this visit from his boss, only not so soon.

‘What progress are we making?’ Streicher asked, laying emphasis on the we.

‘Oh, er, some. I mean, we are. It’s getting there.’

‘It’s been days,’ Streicher said. ‘You promised me this wouldn’t take long.’

‘I’m on my own here,’ Lindquist replied, careful not to let the irritation show in his voice. The fear he could do nothing to hide. Back in his ECDC days in Stockholm, the most dangerous thing he’d ever had to work with was smallpox, which was technically classed Biosafety Level 3 because treatments existed for it. By contrast, this was like scaling the north face of the Eiger with no safety rope. If even a small needle punctured his suit, he might as well put a pistol in his mouth there and then, because at that point he was condemned to a horrible and irreversible death. He was sweating, hot and itchy inside the protective material. He couldn’t scratch, couldn’t go to the bathroom without getting fully decontaminated first; he was feeling dehydrated and hadn’t eaten for many hours.

But when Udo Streicher was your boss, you didn’t whinge and you didn’t stop for tea. You just kept going, and prayed that he wouldn’t be displeased with your efforts.

‘How hard can it be?’ Streicher demanded. ‘The bulk of the work has already been done for you. Surely once you have the material—’

‘This isn’t exactly first-year science,’ Lindquist explained, trying to remain calm. ‘It’s taken me long enough to process the raw samples to extract the pure bacteria and convert them into an aerosolised form. That part’s finished.’ He pointed at a row of unmarked aluminium canisters lined up inside a thick glass cabinet in the corner. Twelve of them, as Streicher had specified, to correspond with his much-revised worldwide list of cities that now comprised two targets in the United Kingdom as well as major centres all across mainland Europe.

All he needed was to confirm the dates, work out the travel itinerary and put the plan into action. It was just days away.

Streicher had to smile. Eight inches high, plain brushed metal, each no larger than a cocktail shaker, the canisters looked innocuous. Even he found it hard to imagine the lethal power of what was inside them.

‘Easy to deploy,’ Lindquist said with a nervous twitch. ‘Just remove the retaining clip and depress the nozzle to release the contents under high pressure. Dropping the canister on its nose does the job just fine. It’ll fill a large room in seconds. Or a concert hall, a cinema, a train, a dirty great ocean liner.’

‘Does it work?’

‘That would be an understatement,’ Lindquist said. Before he’d started testing, the secondary lab next door had housed sixteen rhesus monkeys in cages and thirty white rats in glass tanks. Most were dead now, and the manner of their death hadn’t been a pleasant thing to witness. ‘The aerosolised strain seems to attack the monkeys’ systems even faster than it does the rats’. Initial symptoms are coming on within the first hour after exposure to the gas.’

‘Survival time?’

‘Shortest recorded so far is five hours and forty-seven minutes. Of course, it could take a little longer for humans. Maybe an extra hour.’

Streicher had read every scrap of research ever published on weaponised plague. Such efficiency was rarely heard of in the scientific literature. ‘It’s aggressive.’

‘Terrifyingly aggressive,’ Lindquist said, with absolute sincerity. Even thinking about it made him sweat harder inside the suit. He was standing only a metre from the glass but he felt as if he were stranded all alone in the infinity of space, naked and vulnerable and very, very mortal.

‘And the antitoxin? How soon will you have it?’ Streicher’s impatience was gnawing at him. To release the bacteria without self-protection would be worse than amateurish. It would be plain suicide.

Lindquist puffed out his cheeks behind the visor. His suit crinkled as he shrugged his shoulders. ‘I’m going as fast as I can, but it’s tough. The chromosome of Yersinia pestis carries about ten known toxin-antitoxin modules and two solitary antitoxins that belong to five different TA families, higBA, hicAB, RelEB, Phd/Doc and MqsRA—’

‘Yes, yes, yes. Talk in plain language, can’t you?’

‘In plain language, it’s a highly complex process. I’ve had to culture the organism in artificial media, inactivate it with formaldehyde and preserve it in nought point five per cent phenol. If I don’t get each step of the sequence exactly right, it won’t work. Or worse, we’ll end up injecting ourselves with the live disease, and it’s thank you and goodnight. The finished vaccine will also contain trace elements of beef-heart extract, yeast extract, agar, soya and casein.’

‘Why those?’

‘Do you really want to know?’

Streicher shrugged. ‘No, I don’t.’

‘The bad news is that it’s possible that not everyone will develop the passive haemagglutination antibody. Meaning I can’t guarantee that it’ll protect everyone who’s exposed to the actual toxin. There could be a five to seven per cent failure rate.’

‘It’s an acceptable risk,’ Streicher said with a dismissive gesture.

‘And everyone who’s injected with it will feel like shit afterwards,’ Lindquist said. ‘Headache, fever … nothing to worry about, but it won’t be an easy ride for a few hours.’

‘I think we can deal with that. When will it be ready?’

‘I’m tired. I really should sleep. I could have an accident in here.’

‘Sleep when you’re done,’ Streicher said.

‘Twelve more hours,’ Lindquist said wearily. ‘Then we can start testing how well it works on what’s left of the animals.’

Streicher shook his head, slowly. He had that burning light in his eye that Lindquist had seen before.

Lindquist swallowed. ‘Okay, give me six more hours.’

‘You have three,’ Streicher told him. ‘Get it done.’ He smiled. Raised his right hand, extended his index finger and tapped his fingertip against the centre of his brow.

‘Or I’ll put a bullet in your brain,’ he added casually, and left the outer chamber.