The Swarm (52 page)

‘For the sake of clarity we've split the phenomena into three different categories,' Peak said. ‘Behavioural changes, mutations and environmental disasters. They're all interlinked, of course. So far we've looked at abnormal behaviour, but in the case of the jellies, we're dealing mainly with mutations. Box jellyfish have always been capable of navigation, but now they're real experts. You get the sense that they're patrolling. It's as though they're trying to clear the area of any human presence, even though we could never really harm them. The diving industry is on its last legs, but the fishermen are the real victims.'

The screen filled with a picture of factory trawler, a colossal vessel with an on-board facility that processed the catch.

‘This is the
Anthanea
. A fortnight ago its crew caught a load of
Chironex fleckeri
. Box jellies, in other words. Or at least we
think
they're
Chironex
or something very similar. In any case, the fishermen made the mistake of not throwing them straight back into the water. Instead they opened the nets, and several tonnes of poison landed on the deck. Some fishermen were killed outright, others died later when the metre-long, practically invisible tentacles were scattered around the ship. It rained that day. The whole boat was awash with jellyfish remnants. No one knows how the toxin entered the drinking water, but the
Anthanea
became a ghost ship. Now people are warier, and the trawlers carry protective clothing, but the essential problem remains. Throughout much of the world, the fishing flotillas are catching poison, not fish.'

They're not catching fish because there aren't any left, thought
Johanson. Come on, Peak, a detail like that deserves to be mentioned, even if it's not the real cause.

Or was it?

Of course it was. It was one of countless causes.

His mind switched to the worms.

All those mutant organisms that suddenly seemed to know what they were doing. Didn't anyone see what was happening? They were experiencing the symptoms of a disease whose pathogens were everywhere, but always in hiding. It was an amazing piece of camouflage. Man had emptied the seas of fish, and now the few remaining shoals had learned to avoid the death traps, while armies of poison-toting soldiers took their place in the nets, holding the ailing fishing industry in a toxic embrace.

The sea was killing mankind.

And you killed Tina Lund, Johanson thought sombrely. You encouraged her not to give up on Kare Sverdrup. She listened to you, or she would never have driven to Sveggesundet.

Was it his fault?

How could he have known what would happen? Lund would probably have died in Stavanger too. What if he had told her to take the next plane to Hawaii or Florence? Would he be congratulating himself on having saved her?

They all had their personal demons to fight. Bohrmann was tormented by the notion that he should have warned the world earlier. Well, of course he should. But what would he have said? That he
thought
a catastrophe might happen? That one day, some time, disaster might strike? They'd pulled out all the stops to find a definitive answer. In the end they hadn't been fast enough, but at least they'd tried. Was Bohrmann at fault?

And what about Statoil? Finn Skaugen was dead. He'd been called to Stavanger docks just before the wave rolled in. Johanson was starting to see the oil boss in a different light. Skaugen had been a manipulator. All that guff about being the good conscience of an evil industry, but what had he done? Clifford Stone had also died in the catastrophe. Maybe he hadn't been the calculating monster that Skaugen had made him out to be.

Worms, jellies, whales, sharks.

Fish that could plan. Alliances. Strategies.

Johanson thought of his flattened house in Trondheim. It was odd, but he didn't feel too saddened by its loss. His real home was elsewhere, on the edge of a watery mirror that on clear nights contained the universe. He had caught sight of himself there, and created a haven for everything that was beautiful and true. The house was his creation, an embodiment of himself. It was a refuge, in the way that a rented town-house could never be a home.

He hadn't been there since the weekend with Tina.

Would it have changed too?

The water in the lake was safe, but the thought of it made him uneasy. At the first opportunity he'd drive there and check up on it, no matter how much work the future held in store.

 

Peak called up another image. The remains of a lobster.

‘Hollywood would call it a messenger of doom or something,' said Peak, with a wry grin. ‘And, in this case, the hype would be justified. Central Europe has been seized by an epidemic whose pathogens are hidden in creatures like these. Thanks to Dr Roche, we've now got the lowdown on the microscopic stowaways. The nearest taxonomical match is
Pfiesteria piscicida
, a single-cell alga. It's one of around sixty species of dinoflagellate that are known to be toxic. Of all the killer algae,
Pfiesteria
is the worst. Some years ago we had a nasty brush with it along the east coast of America, mainly in North Carolina.
Pfiesteria
was responsible for killing billions of fish. For the local fishermen it was an economic disaster, but it also affected their health. Many developed lesions on their arms and legs, suffered memory loss and eventually had to give up their jobs. Scientists researching
Pfiesteria
also experienced long-term health problems.' He paused. ‘In 1990 one of the scientists investigating the algae, Howard Glasgow, was cleaning a glass tank in a specially designed lab at the University of North Carolina, when he noticed something was wrong. His mind was whirring, but his body seemed to move in slow motion. His limbs refused to keep up. Glasgow's illness was the first sign that the
Pfiesteria
toxins could get into the air, so the organisms were moved to a more secure facility. Unfortunately the building contractor had messed up, and the air vent pumped the toxins directly into Glasgow's office. No one noticed the mistake, so for the next six months he breathed toxic air. His headaches got so bad that he could barely work. He lost his balance. His liver and kidneys were
poisoned. He'd speak on the phone and five minutes later all memory of the conversation would be gone. He wandered around town and lost his way home. He forgot his phone number and even his name. Most people were convinced that he had a brain tumour or was suffering from Alzheimer's, but Glasgow wouldn't listen. In the end he agreed to undergo a series of tests at Duke University, which showed that the problem was of a different nature. Other researchers who had come into contact with
Pfiesteria
later succumbed to lung infections and chronic bronchitis. And, slowly but surely, they lost their memory to an organism that defies our understanding.'

Peak displayed a series of slides from an electron microscope. They showed different types of microbe. Some looked like star-shaped amoebas, others resembled scaly or bristly spheres, while the rest were hamburger-shaped, with twisted tentacles extending from between the two halves of the bun.

‘These are all pictures of
Pfiesteria
,' said Peak. ‘It can change its appearance within minutes, growing to ten times its former size, encasing itself in a cyst or mutating from a harmless single-cell organism to a highly toxic zoospore. There are twenty-four different shapes that
Pfiesteria
can assume, and with each different shape comes different characteristics. We've now succeeded in isolating the toxin it produces, and Dr Roche and his team have been working flat out to pinpoint its chemical structure, but they face even greater difficulties than the scientists in the States. The organism contaminating Central Europe's water supply isn't
Pfiesteria piscicida
, but another, far more toxic strain.
Pfiesteria piscicida
means “fish-eating
Pfiesteria
.” Dr Roche has christened the new species
Pfiesteria homicida
. “Man-eating
Pfiesteria
”.'

Peak summarised the factors that made tackling the algae so difficult. The new organism seemed programmed to reproduce in cycles of explosive growth. Once it had entered the water supply, it was impossible to get rid of. It seeped into the soil and deposited its toxins, which resisted all efforts to filter them out. And that was the problem. It was bad enough that many of the algae's victims were literally covered with
Pfiesteria
cells, which were eating them alive. Angry sores opened on their bodies, becoming infected, gangrenous and refusing to heal. But the poison given off by the algae was even more of a threat. No matter how determinedly the authorities tried to clean water-pipes and tanks, the organisms turned up elsewhere and spread their toxin. They had
tried fighting them with heat and acid, clubbing them to death with chemical cudgels, but they had to be careful not to substitute one evil for another.

Pfiesteria homicida
seemed unconcerned.
Pfiesteria piscicida
affected the nervous system, but the new strain attacked it with such aggression that it was paralysed within hours. The victims fell into a coma, then died. Only a few people seemed immune to it. Since Roche had been unable to unravel the structure of the toxin, he was hoping to decode the genetic basis for immunity, but time was running out. The epidemic had spread so fast it seemed impossible to stem.

‘The algae arrived in a Trojan horse,' said Peak, ‘tucked away in crustaceans. Trojan lobsters, if you like - or, at least, they looked like lobsters. The creatures were clearly alive when they were caught, but their flesh had been replaced with a jelly-like substance, inside which the colonies of
Pfiesteria
were hiding. The European Union has now outlawed the catching and exporting of lobsters. At present, only France, Spain, Belgium, Holland and Germany have reported instances of sickness and death. The latest available figures listed fourteen thousand fatalities. American lobsters still seem to be the real McCoy, but the authorities are contemplating a ban on the sale of crustaceans.'

‘Dreadful,' whispered Rubin. ‘Where did the algae come from?'

Roche turned round. ‘We created them,' he said. ‘Liquefied pig faeces are flushed into the sea by the east coast hog farm industry.
Pfiesteria
flourishes in fertile waters. The cells feed on phosphates and nitrates from the animal dung that washes off fields and into the rivers. They like industrial outlets too. It's obvious that they'll feel perfectly happy in city sewers where there's plenty of organic matter to go round. We're responsible for creating the
Pfiesteria
of this world. We don't invent them, but we allow them to turn into monsters.' Roche paused and turned to Peak. ‘Take the Baltic, for example. If things get much worse, the fish will be wiped out, and it's obvious who's to blame - the Danish pig-rearing industry. Liquid manure prompts algae to bloom exponentially. The oxygen level of the water is depleted, and fish start to die. But these toxic algae are going to do a damn sight more than kill fish, and nowhere seems safe from them. We've got the deadliest strain of all in our midst.'

‘But why didn't anyone do anything about it before?' asked Rubin.

‘Before?' Roche laughed. ‘Oh, they tried, my friend. They tried.
Where have you been all this time? No, instead of being encouraged to continue their research, the scientists were laughed at. Their lives were threatened. There was a scandal a few years back when it turned out that the environmental authorities in North Carolina hushed up the cases of
Pfiesteria
to appease various influential politicians who also happened to be pig farmers. Of course, there's always the question as to which lunatic is sending us
Pfiesteria
-contaminated lobsters in the first place, but the fact remains that we helped give birth to this catastrophe. Somewhere along the line, we're always to blame.'

 

‘These mussels have all the characteristics of a zebra mussel, but they can do something that ordinary zebra mussels can't. They navigate.'

Peak had progressed to shipping accidents. The delegates had only just ploughed their way through
Pfiesteria
growth curves, and now they were being presented with another set of devastating statistics. Coloured lines criss-crossed the world.

‘Shipping routes for merchant vessels,' Peak explained. ‘The key to the whole thing is the redistribution of transportable goods. As a rule, raw materials are shipped in a northerly direction. Bauxite is exported from Australia, oil from Kuwait, and iron ore from South America, travelling distances of up to eleven thousand nautical miles to either Europe, North America or Japan, where the raw material is taken inland to cities like Stuttgart, Detroit, Paris and Tokyo, and turned into cars, electrical equipment and machines. The commodities are then loaded into containers and shipped back to Australia, Kuwait and South America. Nearly a quarter of world trade passes through the Asian Pacific. That's a total value of five hundred billion. US dollars. A similar amount is shipped through the Atlantic. The busiest routes are marked here in bold: the east coast of America, including, most importantly, New York, then northern Europe - the English Channel, the North Sea, the Baltic Sea and the Baltic states - and finally the Mediterranean, in particular the Riviera. European waters play a pivotal role in world trade. Besides, the Med provides the passage from the east coast of North America through the Suez Canal to South Asia. Then there's Japan and the Persian Gulf, not to mention the China Seas, which rank just behind the North Sea as the busiest waters in the world. To get to grips with international seaborne trade, you have to understand the networks. You have to know what it'll mean for one side of the world if a container ship
sinks on the other - which production chains will be disrupted, whose jobs are at risk, whose livelihood, or maybe life, is endangered, and who, if anyone, might profit from the mess. Air travel brought an end to the age of passenger shipping, but world trade still relies on the seas. Our maritime routes are essential.'