‘Beyond the shared aspiration of undermining public health and political stability,’ noted Crawford.
‘Yes, but that’s not something you put on a CV,’ said Garner.
‘Fridge magnet maybe?’ Crawford suggested.
Noah didn’t turn back to the group. His eyes focused on the biggest screen at the front of the room. He touched it and opened a folder. The four virologists appeared above them. Noah looked at the images as he spoke.
‘You’re actually not as charming as you think you are, Crawford. And you’ll never make it with Garner. Your obsession with personal hygiene is off-putting. Plus, she likes men who are at least as physically strong as her.
‘You’re bored with being everyone’s superior, aren’t you, Garner?’ He asked, still facing the screen.
‘Thank you, sir,’ Garner said, her tone steady.
He didn’t respond. He was staring at the virologists, memorising the detail of their faces. Traitors never looked like traitors.
*
Noah typed in the code to the R&R cubicle and pushed the door open with one hand, his laptop in the other. Patrice had insisted he take a break but he didn’t have time to return home.
‘Please don’t tuck me in,’ he said.
‘You wish, darling.’ She placed the files on the small desk reluctantly and shook her head as he unrolled his laptop.
‘I’ll sleep, I promise – I just want to look at one more thing.’
Once she had left, he began the biometric identification process. Then he requested the high-level data portal and punched in the passcodes Hackman had given him.
Icons filled his screen, arranging themselves in alphabetical order. A search box opened in the middle, awaiting his command.
His fingers hovered over the keyboard. He was supposed to type ‘ISB – Critical’. Usually, Immunity Shield breaches were organised by year of occurrence. They occurred so rarely.
He started typing: ‘ISB . . .’
And then he deleted the letters.
Instead, he typed: ‘Surveillance’.
The surveillance sub-portal opened, giving him another search box. He typed: ‘Cit: SMW02/18/2034_SNC03081974’.
Hundreds of folders appeared on the screen. He stared at them for several moments. His heart hammered in his chest. Each folder represented a date field – days, months and years of a person’s life – captured on the tens of thousands of cameras and micro-cameras embedded around every Western Alliance country.
He clenched and unclenched his hands, and began searching. Two years ago. He pulled up the month and then found the day they took Sera to the London Zoo for the first time. Ninth May 2038. She was only four.
The 3D recording was projected from his screen onto his keyboard; the holographic image blurred and then steadied itself into focus in front of him. He tried to touch it, his fingers falling through the mirage.
He watched his daughter pull at his hand, insistent and excited. She marched straight past the penguin-feeding. She only wanted to see the ‘baby dogs’. Little girls and puppies; it was a timeless connection. He stopped her and said, ‘Look, Sera, look – penguins.’ The caretaker, dressed in a full protective suit, was throwing synthetic fish protein pellets at the animals, who jostled each other, necks craned as they caught the pellets in their mouths. The mothers swallowed and then regurgitated the food into the mouths of their hungry babies.
She laughed at that. ‘Let’s try it, Daddy.’ She threw a sultana at him. He missed and she tried again. He caught it.
‘Now give it to me,’ she commanded. She opened her mouth. He laughed and swallowed it himself.
‘Sorry, all gone,’ he teased, shrugging his shoulders. She picked up the small box and was about to throw it at him when Maggie caught her hand.
‘You’re not a penguin, sweetie.’ She laughed, pressing a kiss to her daughter’s sticky palm. Maggie and Sera had dimples in the same places.
‘You try, Mummy.’ Sera extracted more sultanas from the box and threw them at Maggie. Noah watched himself intercept the flying fruit.
‘Hey! Naughty Daddy!’
Noah turned around and pulled Maggie close to him. He kissed her. He remembered how much he loved kissing her. She pulled back, her face flushed with surprise, and swallowed a sultana. He took the box from Sera, threw another into his mouth and winked at her.
They walked to the puppy exhibit. The Department of Animal Health, Husbandry and Sanitation had approved a three-month interactive display. Families that could afford the ticket had to apply and, even then, there were thousands of disappointed little girls and boys across the country. Hackman had given him the tickets.
Sera entered the tent, with her parents on either side. They were dressed in protective suits and light face masks. The caretaker was holding a squirming mass of black and white hair.
‘He’s called a border collie,’ Noah whispered. ‘They used to work on farms, chasing sheep and cows, telling the other animals what to do. They’re bossy and clever – like you.’
She laughed at that, the chime of it muffled by her mask. The caretaker placed the dog on her lap. Her eyes widened in amazement. He thought she’d be afraid. Puppies in books and dreams were different from the real thing. She put her arms around the animal and held it close, nuzzling her face against the top of its head. The caretaker tried to separate her from the puppy.
‘She’s fine,’ Noah stopped him. Sera stroked the dog’s soft coat with her gloved hand.
‘Here, give his belly a rub,’ Noah said. ‘He’ll love that.’
She tried it and the dog whimpered happily against her, positioning himself for a full-belly rub. ‘How did you know, Daddy?’
‘It’s just something I remember from a long time ago.’ He looked from his daughter to his wife and saw the tears in her eyes. She pulled her mask down.
‘What’s wrong, Mummy?’ Sera asked.
He saw himself lean in towards Maggie and obscure the camera’s line of sight for a moment. He remembered he had pulled his mask down too and held her face to his own. He whispered in her ear and kissed her lightly. She had smiled at him.
‘Move back, move back,’ he whispered, watching his family.
He moved. He saw them again and exhaled.
‘Nothing, sweetheart. I’m fine,’ Maggie replied.
‘Then why are you crying?’ Sera wiped Maggie’s tears. ‘Would you like the puppy?’ She tried to offer the dog to her mother.
‘No, thank you. You hold him. I’m not sad, I’m just very happy.’ Maggie bent down and buried her face in the puppy’s mane.
‘Me too, Mummy.’ And then Sera said her favourite phrase at the time. She’d heard it on a television show. She looked up from the dog and said, ‘Thank you, Daddy, this is the best day of my life.’
Noah pressed stop and closed the folder. A month earlier, Sera had started getting headaches. Their family doctor thought it was her eyesight or perhaps the sanitisers in the food. Too much television, not enough water, not enough sleep, not enough Vitamin D. Perhaps the preservatives in the vaccines; there were so many of them, Maggie always said. Maybe the anti-vaxxers were right.
Eventually, they were referred to a specialist.
Noah closed the portals and turned off the laptop. He went to the bed and lay down, his gun by his side. He closed his eyes and slept.
*
After four days of analysis by the team and the mainframe, they were no closer to finding the nexus between the vaxxers who had committed the breaches. Noah stretched back in his chair and then put his arms down, rotating his shoulders. The analysts were starting to look defeated.
They had narrowed Neeson’s four suspected virologists down to two: Dr Amir Khan from the Department of Immunology, Colombo General Hospital, Sri Lanka; and Dr Muthu Sagadewa, Head of the Infectious Diseases Department, Benazir Bhutto Memorial Hospital, Pakistan.
The data could not eliminate either man.
Noah opened a subfolder on the screen
at the front of the room, and pulled out their surveillance photos. In the Western Alliance, Bio could tap into the network of millions of existing cameras, in addition to the ones it had installed itself.
It was harder to access information about people in the Eastern Alliance. The Information Shield stopped the flow of information between the two sides. The firewall erected in 2025 was policed every minute of every day by Bio’s Cyber Intelligence and Protection Division. Its key priority was to ensure that information about the Sixth Virus Eradication Policy was never revealed to citizens on either side of the shield.
The firewall was so effective that Bio technicians needed to be in-country, standing on Eastern Alliance soil, to access the camera and computer networks there. The surveillance of Noah’s suspects was therefore quite limited.
He pulled the photographs of the first suspect up on the screen and clicked through them slowly. Some of the analysts sat up straighter in their seats.
‘Dr Amir Khan’s life is not very interesting. He is sixty-three years old, and had a wife who was also a well-credentialed immunologist. She died during the Great Purge. Here he is giving training seminars to vaccinators and being honoured for his service to disease eradication. Here he is swimming.
‘Yes, swimming,’ he repeated.
According to the surveillance, Dr Khan swam at a quiet Colombo beach every morning. In the action shots, he emerged from the surf, his grey chest hair clinging to his body, his raised arms revealing sagging flesh and the lines of his rib cage.
Khan had lived in the same modest house for the last thirty years. He drove a twenty-year-old Peugeot to work but often caught a tuk-tuk, rather than use the car and driver his status afforded him. He spoke at conferences but didn’t participate in the junkets the way other scientists did. He seemed genuinely dedicated to disease eradication.
Noah shook his head and closed the folder. He opened the next one.
‘Dr Muthu Sagadewa, a child prodigy. He seems the stronger suspect. He has three fellowships from various prestigious Eastern Alliance university hospitals. He used to work for Abre de Libre.
‘Despite an impressive salary for helping ADL develop its commercially successful immunity-building vitamin range, Dr Sagadewa left the company to return to public health work. He also attended training seminars in the four cities where the known breaches occurred.’
Noah looked at the photographs of Dr Sagadewa on the big screen. In one, he was playing tennis at an ADL staff party. In another he was about to launch into a pool, his muscular body poised on a diving board. He was audaciously athletic.
Noah stopped for a moment. He moved the photographs over to the right side of the screen and pulled back Dr Khan’s folder. He clicked on the photographs icon and the photos flew onto the screen, arranging themselves in chronological order.
He touched one image, expanding it with his fingers. He reached for another photograph, taken several months later and enlarged it too; and then another.
‘What are you looking for?’ It was Hackman behind him. ‘Patrice says you’ve barely left the data room. I thought I’d check on you. What are you looking for?’ he repeated.
‘Attrition,’ Noah replied.
‘Attrition?’
‘Yes, the attrition of illness – look at this. Over the last two years, Dr Khan has aged ten years or more. Worse than aged – his skin is flaccid, his eyes are dry and red. He’s lost at least thirty-five pounds, and from this stoop here I’d say he’s lost significant core strength or bone density. He’s sick.
‘The tree of liberty, Hackman – the tree of liberty . . .’ Noah smiled for the first time in days.
‘The tree of liberty?’ Hackman touched the pin on his lapel, confused.
‘Yes, it “must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants”. Remember?’
‘Garner,’ he looked past Hackman at his colleague. She was already typing fast.
‘I’m checking their Haema Scans right now.’ Noah took a deep breath and ordered his thoughts. ‘Check if they’re sick – the scanners only sound the alarm when there are fluctuations in antibody levels or the presence of a virus. But they screen and record everything about a subject’s blood.’
‘Dr Khan’s Haema Scans – the results are up, sir,’ Garner said.
‘There . . .’ Noah read the numbers on the screen. ‘The good doctor’s blood shows a heightened level of carcinopetra antigens. What about the vaxxers?’ he asked impatiently.
‘Coming,’ Garner replied, unfazed.
Noah flicked through the photographs faster, creating a motion picture that showed the rapid decline of the human body.
‘You’re right, sir,’ Garner said, triumphant and awed. ‘There are twelve vaxxers involved across the four breaches. All of their scans show the same elevated levels of CPA. I think they’re all seriously ill. I’d have to check with medical to be sure.’
Noah turned to Hackman. ‘We’ve been looking for the wrong common thread. They haven’t connected through virology; virology is just the common tool they have at their disposal.’
‘How do you know?’ Hackman asked.
‘Those antigen levels –’ He had read scan results with those levels before. ‘They’re all dying.’
Chapter 8
Noah stood at the front of the data room. Most of the seats were empty.
‘The rest of the team should all be en route to the South Asian Sector by now,’ he told Garner and Crawford. ‘They’re working the four breach sites as WHO personnel, implementing the Global Vaccination Programme.’
‘And us?’ Crawford asked.
‘We’re going to play a hunch,’ Noah said. ‘The common thread between all of the vaccinators and our prime suspect, Dr Khan, is that they are dying of cancer. We can’t access their full medical records from here, we need to be in the Eastern Alliance to do that. Garner, what else have you found?’
‘Nothing, sir – which is highly unusual. We haven’t picked up any levels of chemo toxins or radiation in their historic Haema Scans. None of them are undergoing treatment.’
‘The vaccinators found the ghost through virology chatrooms,’ Crawford added, ‘but it was their disease that must have opened the door to the higher level of mutual trust.’
‘I agree. We need to know more. We’re going to Colombo.’
‘We’re tracking the ghost?’ Crawford smiled.
Garner tried hard not to show it, but she looked concerned.
‘That’s the plan. Crawford, your security clearance is still good?’
‘Yes sir, no recent demotions.’
‘It’s only a matter of time,’ Garner replied.
Noah turned back to the photograph of Khan. Under the dark wells of the man’s eyes, the skin was raised in bagging pouches. Like sacks of tears, small reservoirs of grief. Amir Khan had sad eyes.
‘I’ve sent you all the intel we have on him. Study it. We’re going as employees of the WHO.’
Crawford sighed loudly but Noah ignored him.
‘Study your legends. It’s important you know your back story flawlessly. We’re doing more than just making routine checks on vaccine protocols and delivering public health education.’
‘Could we do stakeholder consultation, please, sir?’ Crawford interrupted. ‘You know how much I love that. I could take my weapon and my clipboard.’
Noah didn’t laugh. ‘This is a long game – we need a reason to build a relationship with Khan. We can’t just zero in on him, he’ll suspect us immediately.’
‘We’re usually in and out of the Eastern Alliance in a few weeks, as long as the WHO cover allows,’ Garner said.
‘This time, we are going in because five cases of Ebola will be identified. The Immunity Shield breach will trigger a lockdown of all zones within Sri Lanka. We’ll go in with a large WHO team to contain the outbreak. We can stay on to investigate the breach and trace contact. That could take months.’
‘How are you going to fake fi
ve cases of Ebola?’ Crawford asked. ‘There hasn’t been a reported incident in Sri Lanka since the GVP was implemented. Not even you and Hackman could create a small Ebola outbreak. You could infect a group with an old store of bubonic plague or something that prima facie presents as Ebola –’
‘Lassa or Marburg Fever,’ Garner interrupted.
‘What?’ Crawford turned to her.
‘Lassa or Marburg prima facie present as Ebola – not the bubonic plague. It’s completely different – they both cause necrosis but one’s a bacterial infection and the other’s a virus, with different symptoms.’
‘God, I can only imagine your flirting.’ Crawford turned back to Noah. ‘You could try using a lower-level contaminant but the scanners won’t be fooled by a disease just because it’s similarly symptomatic.’
Noah didn’t like this part of the plan, but it was the only way around the problem his team had identified.
He took a deep breath and explained what had to be done. Neither of them replied. He continued before he could read the judgement in their faces; the judgement he too was struggling with.
‘We leave in three days. Study your legends and, Crawford, make some time with Neeson to brush up on any immunology concepts you should be fluent in. You are WHO employees after all.’
He didn’t ask if there were any questions.
*
Noah sat down and rested his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands. Hackman’s office was cold but he felt the sweat slide down the inside of his shirt. He stood up restlessly and surveyed the maps on Hackman’s wall, his mind not absorbing the colour-coded regions.
He moved to the window, overlooking an almost aerial view of the post-war developments. From amongst the reinforced concrete tower blocks, Noah could still see flashes of medieval granite, marble and sandstone. The gothic spires of the Royal Courts of Justice refused to be cowed down, piercing through the newly ordered landscape.
‘They took it well?’ Hackman asked.
‘Of course, they’re professionals.’ He looked back. His agents always took these things too well.
‘Sri Lanka has changed since you were last there,’ Hackman said.
The Barrier Page 6
