Blood had seeped through his bandages. He looked down at his chest, not recognising the wound for a moment.
‘You need to see this, sir.’ Garner touched the screen to open a document. ‘This is a requisition form – twelve months ago, Neeson asked Sri Bodhi to provide the AILA Reina to Khan’s lab. Why would he do that? Are you okay, sir?’ Garner asked.
He didn’t answer for a moment. Traitors never looked like traitors.
Chapter 22
Noah sat down heavily on his bed, one arm against his blood-soaked bandages. He kicked off his boots without unlacing them. Lifting his shirt, he wiped the blood and sweat with a towel. He took out a bottle of water from the minibar and drank quickly, not stopping until he had drained it.
‘I need a shower and then we can talk – should I sweep the room?’
Sahara smiled and stepped out of the bathroom. ‘It’s all taken care of. I hope you don’t mind but even Garner and Crawford can’t hear us.’
‘That’s fine as long as you aren’t going to kill me.’
‘No, not yet.’ She smiled sweetly. She had a bag slung over her shoulder which she set down on the table. It was large enough for at least five weapons. ‘Let me help you.’ She followed him back into the bathroom.
They stood chest to chest, Noah poised for an assault. She peeled his shirt away from the wet bandages and pulled it over his head. For a moment he was blinded by the fabric, his abdomen tense, waiting for the cold insertion of metal. Nothing.
She surveyed his body critically, shaking her head at the wound. She took a small knife from her pocket and cut the bandages away, ripping the dressing from his skin. He cried out and reached for the wall. Sahara stepped closer and held him up.
‘Quiet, I wouldn’t want Garner to get the wrong idea about us. She’ll burst through that door, guns blazing.’
‘I don’t think she’s interested,’ he replied. She was close enough for him to lean down and touch her lips with his.
‘She’s not but she cares for you. They both do. They care for each other too,’ she mused, ‘although neither will admit it.’
‘I’m sure Crawford would admit it,’ he said, his lips barely parted. The side of his body felt scorched.
‘Crawford makes it sound like he’s attracted to her. He’d never admit that he’s actually in love with her. No place for love in our line of work. He probably learnt that from you.’
Noah swayed forward. She held him against her body, bearing his weight.
He bent his head and placed it on the top of her shoulder. They were the pieces of a puzzle. He had loved once. He kissed her. He never wanted to stop.
His mind flashed between images, present and remembered.
Her eyes closed, her skin wet and slippery as he pushed her gently against the shower wall, his arms on either side of her, one hand reaching up to turn the water away from them.
She laughed, pulling her lips away. ‘I’m cold now.’
He laughed back. ‘Let me warm you up.’
‘Predictable, but if you must.’
The curve of her scapula to her clavicle, her hammering heart, the strong ridges and plates of bone that protected her, the softness of flesh and tautness of muscle.
He followed his memory down.
To her pelvis, slender but strong enough to cradle their child. Her body changed in his hands and he traced the trail of darkened pigment and hair. He knelt and rested his head there, against the swell of her belly, shining and hard. Skin stretched to its limit. She put her arms around him and held him close. He wept.
A rush of cold water cut through the darkness.
Black sandalwood hair spilled over him.
‘Shower quickly and I’ll patch that up.’ Sahara turned and left him on his knees, half naked. He slumped against the shower wall and slid to the floor. He sat among his torn clothes and bandages, until the room stopped spinning and the water washed away his blood.
*
Sahara assembled the contents of her shoulder bag on the table. Noah sat on a stool opposite her as she methodically set to work with gloved hands. She dabbed the wound dry with sterile gauze and then poured hydrogen peroxide over it. He cried out.
She shook her head disdainfully. ‘What kind of pain training do they give you people these days? You ought to be able to sew this up yourself.’ She sprayed an anaesthetic over the open flesh and surrounding skin, muttering to herself. He caught the word ‘baby’.
Kneeling beside him, she threaded the curved suture needle and held the shaft with the forceps. He knew the drill: needle straight down into the tissue, curve the wrist, get the right depth, take the needle across and pull – tight but gentle traction, join the edges of the skin together, not too tight or you buckle it. The first tie is always a double. Suture knotted. And then again and again and again: needle down, curve and pull.
‘You’re fast.’ He winced. The anaesthetic could have been stronger.
‘I don’t usually have much time when I’m doing this.’
‘Do this a lot, do you?’
She laughed, not breaking the rhythm of her needle.
‘Done.’ She inspected her work and then covered it with a new dressing. She wrapped a fresh thick bandage around his waist, reaching behind him to take the roll around his back, and then in front of him, across his stomach. With each turn of the bandage, her hair brushed against his chest, her breath against his arm.
If he dropped his arms he could touch her. He could place his hands around her waist and pull her into him. He could hold her; and be held.
‘Finished.’ She pinned the bandage tightly. ‘Ask Garner to change the dressing in four hours. You’ll have three lines of a scar.’
‘I’ve got worse. You heard the conversation with Khan?’
‘Of course, I tapped in through your handheld.’
‘Who else heard it?’
‘Does it matter? They’ll hear it eventually.’
‘I just want to know how quickly you report these things back to Hackman.’
‘I want to know why you didn’t tell him the entire conversation.’
‘I didn’t think it was relevant.’
‘Really. Paritranaya sadhunam, vinasaya ca duskrtam,’ she quoted the verse from the scripture that Khan had recited at Anuradhapura. She knew it in Sanskrit and English.
‘Dharma-samsthapanarthaya, sambhavami yuge yuge,’ Noah finished for her.
‘Very good, you do know your Hinduism. I find that attractive in a man.’
‘My father taught me.’
‘To answer your question, I can’t report in real time. I call him or I wait for him to call me on a sat phone, like the one you have. The Information Shield works for us and against us. It’s not easy for me – or you – to get information out. Sometimes I just take the intel and make a decision myself.’
‘And what decision would you make in this situation?’ Noah asked.
‘I would wait until Hackman called me. I would watch each of the players in this long, twisted game and I would wait.’ She stood up and ran her fingers through his wet hair. Leaning forward, she kissed him slowly. He lifted a hand but she shoved it back down to his side. She touched his face and studied his injuries and scars, tracing them with her fingertips and then her mouth. Their lips connected and disconnected – parting to parry and chase each other. And connect again.
Yearning rushed through him. Too much adrenaline in his body. Not enough blood in his brain.
He held her back and pushed the hair from her face.
‘Let me look at you.’
‘Not too closely, Noah. You won’t like what you see. Keep moving, stay in the shadows. Isn’t that what they say?’
‘I prefer the sunlight.’
‘We don’t deserve the sunlight,’ she said, sudden tears in her eyes.
‘Everyone deserves the sunlight,’ he replied.
She kissed him again. ‘I’ve wanted to do that for a while.’
‘You’re attracted to
damage?’
‘I am damaged.’ She smiled a crooked, wistful smile. ‘Sleep. I’ll watch over you.’ She helped him up and led him to his bed.
Chapter 23
Hackman surveyed the group gathered around the polished oak table: Neeson from Bio on one side, and the contingent from Abre de Libre on the other.
Alec Sutherland had brought his inner circle: the chief financial officer – a fearsome woman, ironically called Angela Rose; Adrian Reid, the head of research and development, who jumped every time Sutherland questioned him and looked like he preferred the laboratory to the boardroom; and Christopher Tolley, the head of strategy, a man who may have been born in a boardroom.
Hackman had toyed with the idea of bringing more staff but Sutherland didn’t need to be patronised with window dressing – he knew the right people were in the room or listening to the room.
Neeson touched the large screen at the front and pulled up a map.
‘As you know, we haven’t had a naturally occurring Ebola outbreak in thirteen years. The last was a brief resurgence in Syria shortly after the end of World War R. It wasn’t even a resurgence – we hadn’t fully eradicated the virus in the Middle Eastern Section.’
‘You can’t blame yourself for that, Dr Neeson – after what those people did to the Holy Land, they had it coming to them. ISIS were a bunch of savages and if millions of Muslims had to die with them so the world could be free of that tyranny, then so be it. “The Lord will make pestilence cling to you until He has consumed you from the land where you are entering to possess it.”’
‘Deuteronomy? Old school. A lot of smiting, blighting and perishing in that book,’ Hackman remarked, his face unreadable.
‘You know your Bible and yet you don’t believe it.’ Sutherland shook his head.
‘It’s not my Bible – but I do respect it, sir. Dr Neeson, you were saying?’
Neeson was staring at Sutherland, distracted. ‘Um, yes – the Middle East, no,’ he picked up his papers and then put them down, turning back to the map.
‘No naturally occurring outbreaks in thirteen years,’ Hackman prompted. ‘We’ve had a clean bill of health since the end of the war.’
‘Yes, thank you. Ebola is no longer a threat. The virus has not mutated or naturally resurged. Our monthly Haema Scan results and quarterly spot checks have been consistent. Herd immunity is stronger than it’s ever been, I’m pleased and relieved.’
‘Thank you, Dr Neeson,’ Hackman said. ‘I think I speak for all of us when I say I am extremely relieved when you are relieved.’
‘That’s right,’ Sutherland laughed. ‘When you’re worried, Doctor, I start stocking up on antivirals, broad-spectrum antibiotics and bottled water. How did you go with the false positives?’ Sutherland always made it sound like a pregnancy test.
‘We feigned an Ebola 47 outbreak in Ciudad la Paz, Mexico. It was completely plausible that this remote village had missed vaccination boosters. The local herbalist was doling out traditional medicines too, which was helpful. We framed it as local complacency. The body count was low – five families, heading for the nearest hospital in the back of a truck. We picked them up three miles from home. We could show they’d been isolated en route and hadn’t infected others.’
‘Yes, you don’t want to start a panic. I saw the photos – what did you give them?’
‘Just a mild haemorrhagic fever, not Ebola-related at all, but identical symptoms.’ Neeson replied.
‘“Just a mild haemorrhagic fever”? I didn’t know there were degrees.’
‘There are degrees of everything,’ Hackman said. Like degrees of market capitalisation.
‘It was a waterborne bacteria,’ Neeson explained. ‘We inserted a Catholic priest into the village and one Sunday, at the end of mass, he gave the selected families a special communion. We were able to localise the infection that way. The village had recently experienced the flu so we used that in our messaging too.’
‘What was the message?’ Sutherland asked.
‘The usual – Ebola still exists and it follows its own life cycle that we can’t predict. Hence vaccination and the three-year boosters are our best line of defence. The flu can undermine the body’s ability to fight Ebola, etc., etc.’
‘So make sure you take your Ebola booster and your flu vaccination on time? Genius. You should work in marketing, Doctor, not science.’
Neeson smiled weakly. Sutherland didn’t notice.
ADL prescribed an aggressive programme of regular booster shots that protected herd immunity, and generated an eternal pipeline of revenue in a world terrified of disease. It worked well for them, Hackman thought. Sutherland was a genius, of sorts.
‘The second outbreak – in India – that was good work, both of you.’ Sutherland flicked through the file.
‘Thank you. We thought it was the . . .’ Neeson swallowed hard.
‘Smart thing to do, wasn’t it, Dr Neeson?’ Hackman jumped in. ‘Once we had interrogated Hassan Ali and his colleagues, we returned the vaxxers to their lab. Then we infected it with the Ebola Strain 50 we developed with you. We’d been looking for a safe test site. The laboratory in India was perfect. Lockdown was instantaneous and impenetrable.’
‘Excellent. Ebola 50’s military application is promising, once we have a vaccine of course,’ Sutherland added quickly.
‘The president will approve the virus when we are certain we can protect our own people from it,’ Hackman repeated the words of the Secretary of Defence.
‘Yes, yes,’ Sutherland dismissed him. ‘Ebola 50 is a breakthrough in engineering. I feel quite fatherly about it.’
‘It is a breakthrough – it works quickly,’ Hackman agreed. ‘We placed Hassan and his colleagues in the lab, infected all three and withdrew. They made contact with staff by 8.17 am; they were symptomatic twenty-eight minutes later and three minutes after that the place was locked down. They died by lunchtime – the entire lab. The Indian government was so terrified of the fallout, they asked us to handle the clean-up – alone. No questions asked about the source.’
‘Excellent. The test is very promising. Ebola 50 is a fine example of what can happen when government and science come together to protect the people.’ Sutherland raised his hands as if to applaud Neeson, and then locked his fingers together in a gesture of half-prayer.
‘You all deserve to be congratulated.’ He looked at Neeson and his own head, Adrian Reid. Neither looked like they wanted to be congratulated.
‘I know it’s hard to focus on the bigger picture here – the vision that Hackman and I have for a safe society. But I want you to keep reminding yourselves: society needs to be ever-alert to the risks that surround us. People are too easily strayed, too easily relaxed. We now find ourselves dealing with petitions and protests. These groups – Concerned Mothers Against Vaccination, Stop the Corporate Injection, the Anti-Vaxxer Network or Forum or whatever it is –’ he disconnected his hands and unfurled his fingers as he listed the groups, his hand shaped like a gun pointed accusingly at Hackman.
‘They’re lobbying to repeal compulsory vaccination. They want exemption clauses – exemption clauses! On the basis of philosophy, conscience and religion, of all things. Where in the Bible does it say you should deny your children life-saving immunisations? Those vaccination exemptions were abolished twenty years ago for a reason – because all of those conscientious objectors gave kids measles in Disneyland, years after it should have been eradicated.
‘And where were those conscientious objectors when Ebola was ripping through their town?’ Sutherland vented. ‘They were stepping over the bodies of the dead, and pushing their loved ones out of the way to get in line for the trial jabs.
‘If people can’t be trusted to act for the greater good, then they must be forced to act for the greater good. They should wear their vaccination welts with pride – with pride not self-righteous indignation. I told you, Hackman, when they started all this “right to choose” bullshit – I told you to
shut them down!’
‘The government can’t storm the offices of community groups on behalf of biotech companies. That’s just not how a democracy works,’ Hackman answered wearily.
‘Don’t tell me how democracy works,’ Sutherland slapped his hands down on the oak, sending a ripple through the meniscus of its red surface. ‘It’s my money and my company that’s invested in ensuring the safety of this democracy.’
‘It’s my agents on the frontline,’ Hackman replied.
‘Don’t forget who invented the vaccine. Five years of war and disease – the world was dying and I stepped in with a solution. I gave them back their lives, their wellbeing. Now I have to listen to those bleeding hearts at the WHO, with all of their rhetoric about public health and responsibility. Don’t you forget who started this,’ he said menacingly.
Hackman was well-practised at dissembling. He nodded agreeably but he was certain none of them would ever forget.
‘No, sir,’ Neeson spoke slowly and clearly, diffusing the diatribe. ‘As a scientist, I am indebted to you. I will never forget your contribution to public health and safety.
‘As a Christian, I am inspired by you,’ Neeson continued. ‘You’re doing God’s work and we should all be grateful. “I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book. If any man shall add unto them, God shall add unto him the plagues which are written in this book.”’
Hackman saw the muscles in Sutherland’s jaw relax. The blotches of red on his neck remained but didn’t crawl further up. Hackman found himself surprised by Neeson, for the first time in a while.
‘Good man. Good man,’ Sutherland said. ‘We need more men like you.’
‘I trust you were pleased with the outbreaks,’ Neeson said. ‘They were controlled and completely untraceable. You need men like Hackman for that.’ He turned to Hackman who nodded.
‘Thank you, Dr Neeson – and you, Hackman,’ Sutherland replied. ‘I was pleased. We saw people heading back to the clinics to get their boosters on time. Mission accomplished. I’m sorry people had to die to achieve it – I pray for all those poor souls. They’re martyrs even if they don’t know it.’
The Barrier Page 18
