The Martyr's Curse (41 page)

‘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.

Chapter Sixty

‘I’m the only one,’ Silvie said as he drove. ‘I’ll bet I am.’

‘The only what?’

‘The only woman who ever drummed any sense into that thick skull of yours.’

Ben looked at her. She was giving him that knowing smile again, the one she’d been giving him ever since she’d won the argument back at the railway station. ‘Don’t get all smug on me, just because I let you tag along,’ he said.

She cocked an eyebrow. ‘Tag along?’

‘I could have insisted,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want you here. Now you are. So keep your eye on the map and don’t distract me.’

‘Yessir,’ she grunted, smiling even more.

It had been a long, fast drive. Donath’s directions had taken them west, back past Geneva and into picture-perfect rolling green hills to the north. The Hummer was a useful motorway tool and its intimidating size and looks were the best thing for bludgeoning through city traffic, but it was at the limits of its handling abilities as Ben gunned it mercilessly along the narrow country lanes.

It was after five by now. The late-afternoon sun glittered over the ever-present mountain backdrop and shone golden light across undulating pastureland that was broken here and there by patches of serrated dark green pine forest. Cattle grazed peacefully in fields bordered by neat white picket fences, cowbells dangling from their necks. Isolated farmhouses appeared in the distance. Nothing that looked remotely like the hideout of a terrorist group intent on destroying civilisation. Ben ground his teeth and kept driving, trying to block out the nagging thought that Donath could have tricked them.

‘We’re close,’ Silvie said, bent over the map she had opened out over the centre console and tracing a route along it with her finger. ‘Should be coming up on the place any moment now.’

Two kilometres on, the entrance to the organic dairy farm was pretty much as Donath had described it. The Hummer rattled over a cattle grid and bumped along a track that carried them perpendicular to the road until they glimpsed the farmhouse and the cluster of neat wooden outbuildings that circled the yard. Well-tended farmland stretched out beyond, overlooked by the sunlit mountains. A bright red tractor was ambling over the fields, tiny in the distance, like a ladybird crawling across a giant rippled sheet of green felt.

Silvie shook her head, bemused. ‘Some terrorist stronghold. It’s like a scene from a calendar.’

‘Would you have preferred fortified defences, razor wire and men with machine guns?’

‘At least we’d know for sure, then.’

‘He’s here,’ Ben said.

‘You don’t sound convinced.’

‘I have to believe it,’ he said.

A little further up the track, they came to a side gate that opened on to a field of tall grass bordered along its western edge by a strip of woodland. Taking a chance that nobody was watching from the farmhouse, they passed through the gate and crossed the field, the Hummer bumping and lurching over the rough ground and leaving wide flattened tracks in its wake. They reached the trees, and Ben rolled it as deep under cover as he could and then shut off the engine. ‘This is it.’

‘If Donath was jerking our chain, I’m going back there to kill him,’ Silvie said.

‘One way or the other, we’ll soon find out,’ Ben replied. ‘Grab your stuff. We walk from here.’

Neither of them spoke as they equipped themselves from the kitbags in the back of the Hummer. Ben slipped three of the fully loaded FAMAS magazines into his pockets and clicked a fourth into the rifle’s receiver. Worked the bolt and felt the well-oiled action carry the top round snugly into the chamber. He set the three-way fire selector to single shots. Forget full-automatic. Even three-shot bursts would chew through ammo too quickly, and he worried about things like running out of bullets. Especially when he had no idea how many opponents he was going up against. If Streicher had called in extra muscle, it could be fifty. If Donath had played Ben and Silvie for fools, it could be none. Then they’d have all kinds of other problems, not least of which would be knowing where to pick up the thread again.

Ben checked his pistol and loaded a couple of spare mags into his pockets for that too, then fitted the SOG knife in its sheath to his belt. Took one of the radios and handed the other to Silvie. He gave the handcuffs a miss. Whatever might happen today, one thing was for certain: Streicher wouldn’t be needing them.

‘Ready?’ he asked her.

‘Ready.’ Silvie slung her loaded rifle over her shoulder, then quickly stepped close and put her hand against his cheek. She kissed him once, briefly but warmly, on the lips.

‘For luck,’ she said.

They slipped through the trees and emerged on the other side of the strip of woodland. The sun was still bright but a fresh breeze coming down from the mountains felt cool on their faces. Ahead of them was a wide expanse of fields dotted with grazing cattle. Beyond it, right off in the distance, due west across the gently waving grass, a larger, thicker section of forest stood fenced off from the pasture. It looked just the way Miki Donath had described it. If he’d told them everything he knew, then the ten-acre compound the other side of those pines was where Streicher had his hideout.

It was a quarter-hour hike across the fields. They walked in silence, single-file. A couple of big, placid-looking cows with swaying haunches and clunking bells around their necks wandered across to check them out, then quickly lost interest and moved off again.

Ben reached the wooded perimeter and turned round to scan the horizon. The farmhouse and buildings were well out of sight and a long way off. Silvie joined him. Up close, the forest looked like an enormous green fortress wall, curving round in a lazy circle to surround whatever lay behind the trees. ‘This has got to be it,’ Silvie said.

They padded single-file through the shadowy thicket, like a two-man jungle patrol. The ground was spongy with moss. The tall trunks creaked and swayed gently in the breeze.

They didn’t have far to walk. After fifty metres, Ben held up a closed fist and whispered, ‘Stop.’ Up ahead, the dense screen of foliage ended abruptly at a high wire-mesh fence suspended from metal posts concreted into the ground. Ben moved cautiously to the fence and peered through the mesh. From where he stood, he could see the barrier stretched for about half a mile, with galvanised steel-framed mesh gates set into it at intervals of every four posts, padlocked shut. On the other side of the fence, the forest had been completely levelled and cleared in a circular plot about ten acres in size. But it wasn’t the huge clearing that interested him. It was what stood at its centre.

He drew the SOG knife and, clutching it by its rubber handle, touched the blade against the wire. No flash, no spark. He brushed his fingers against it. It wasn’t electrified. One less obstacle to worry about. He slipped the knife back in its sheath and whistled softly for Silvie to join him.

‘Shit,’ she breathed as she peered through the fence and saw what he’d seen. A straight concrete road marked the radius of the circle from a main gateway thirty degrees anticlockwise around the inside perimeter from where they stood. The road led to the single building inside the vast clearing. It was the size of a large square house, clad in dark wood, with white windows and a pitched roof and a huge steel shutter door, standing on a concrete apron roughly as large as a football field.

Streicher’s hangar.

‘Exactly as Donath described it,’ Silvie whispered. She turned to Ben, her face full of expectation, as if to say,
Let’s go for it
.

Ben gazed up at the fence, then around him at the trees, then back at the building. His instinct and training both told him to hang back and wait for nightfall before climbing the wire. If Streicher made a move before then, they’d be ready to make theirs.

‘Not now,’ he whispered. ‘Better under cover of darkness.’

‘How do we find a way in?’ she breathed.

His smile was dry and without any trace of humour. ‘There’s always a way in.’

They backed away from the fence and settled in the shadows of the trees, and waited, and watched.

Without knowing that, from almost the moment they’d got here, they themselves were being observed.

Chapter Sixty-One

‘Lindquist!’ Streicher yelled as he flung open the laboratory door. In his hand was the nine-millimetre Beretta he’d personally used to execute the suspected spy in their midst, Dexter Nicholls. He fully intended to do the same to Anton Lindquist, if the man let him down. He could be replaced. Anyone could be, except Udo Streicher.