As word filtered back along the border that Dolinsky had been safely extracted, many more similar groups started to return to where they came from. Kadeer had no way of knowing which part of the border Curtis would use, but he knew that with over sixty small groups watching there had been a reasonable chance they would be ready to assist him.
‘I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, Curtis,’ Tom McNamara said, speaking to Curtis by satellite phone from Washington to the big US air base in Kyrgyzstan.
‘Kate’s in the intensive care isolation ward at CDC. A Gulf Five will arrive shortly to bring Einstein and yourself back to Washington and I’ll have a plane on standby for you to fly to Atlanta if you want.’
‘Thanks, Tom, I’d appreciate that.’ To lose a scientist at the start of this operation would raise some very awkward questions, but as Curtis struggled with the devastating news, he realised that the awkward questions were only part of it. He suddenly felt very alone, realising that maybe, just maybe, there was something really special about Kate that he didn’t want to lose just yet.
CHAPTER 51
HALLIWELL PHARMACEUTICALS, ATLANTA
T he lights on the thirty-seventh floor of Halliwell Pharmaceuticals pierced the pre-dawn darkness surrounding Stone Mountain and Dekalb County. Dr Richard Halliwell had spent the night in the private wing of his opulent office suite. Simone was used to his odd hours and she was asleep in the main bedroom. Her perfume and the faint smell of sex still hung in the air.
Halliwell had risen at 3 a.m. and his waking thoughts had turned to his first critical experiment in his plan to counter the rising threat of China. In a little under an hour he was expecting the first delivery from the pound man. The security command centre had been warned to expect a pre-dawn arrival of urgently required chemicals for experiments that were ‘in the national interest’.
He smiled a cold, humourless smile. The dossiers on his guards always made interesting reading, and Halliwell was intimately acquainted with the contents of each of them. The personnel in the Halliwell security command centre were well paid and bonuses were tailored to meet individual needs. Some of those needs were way outside the norm and Halliwell, a master at latent blackmail, was very happy to facilitate them. As a result, even mundane and routine events like delivery schedules at Halliwell were never discussed outside the compound and Richard Halliwell was very confident that his security was much tighter than Washington where the beltway leaked like a sieve. His small but ruthlessly efficient team of security guards boasted more than a few ex-special forces and FBI officers among their number, all of whom for one reason or another had fallen foul of their previous employer. In a final hiring interview applicants would be confronted with how much the company knew about them. An unwritten requirement for being offered a job in Halliwell Security was a personal history or lifestyle that no applicant would ever want made public.
Halliwell sat down at his desk, deep in thought, but a siren wailing in the distance prompted him to look at his watch. 3.45 a.m. He unlocked a desk drawer and retrieved a dun-coloured envelope. Meticulous in attending to any detail, he double-checked the total of US$10,000 inside the envelope in used, unsequential $100 bills. This morning there would be two deliveries. The low-life pound man had done well, he thought, as he shrugged on his black leather jacket. Halliwell put the envelope in an inside pocket, walked across to his personal lift and pressed the button. It was programmed to remain stationary at his office when it wasn’t being used; the doors opened immediately. He inserted a key and pressed another recently installed button. Simone knew that it took the lift to a tunnel and the Level 4 laboratories, but Halliwell had told her that it was an area he didn’t want her exposed to, nor did he want the entrance discussed with anyone. Like many other secrets that she was very good at keeping, this one was safe. In Simone Carstair’s world, knowledge was power.
The lift descended swiftly and silently. Halliwell had personally designed the Level 4 complex and the small laboratory to which he was now headed was almost completely isolated from the main hot zone. A steel door, hidden behind a large cabinet, connected Halliwell’s lab to the main complex, but the door was permanently locked, and Richard Halliwell was the only one who knew of its existence. Even the rear loading dock had been carefully designed to blend in, shrouded with thick vegetation and sealed off by a razor-wire fence that looked as if it was part of the main perimeter fence.
Halliwell stepped out of the lift into a small basement. He deactivated the door alarm and punched in the combination to the lock that secured the steel entrance door to the tunnel. He flicked on the tunnel lights, locked the door behind him and strode toward the far end. The tunnel was nearly a kilometre long, and Halliwell’s footsteps echoed eerily on the polished concrete floor. Ten minutes later he punched another combination to unlock the access to the specially built receiving bay. A rush of cold air flooded in as he opened the loading dock. In the distance he could see the headlights of the city pound van as the driver picked his way over the dirt track that skirted the perimeter fence. Richard Halliwell picked up the red phone that connected directly to the security command centre.
‘Certainly, Mr Halliwell,’ was all the officer on duty said, and the heavy steel back gates moved silently and slowly.
CHAPTER 52
ISOLATION WARD, THE CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL, ATLANTA
I mran woke from his doze in the total isolation ward where they’d transferred Kate after the accident. The small hospital had been constructed in a separate building on the campus of the Centers for Disease Control. Accidents in Level 4 labs were very rare but they were almost always fatal, and this ward had the same level of protection as the laboratories. Imran, like the doctors and nurses, was in his spacesuit, his regulator connected to a coiled red air hose dangling from the ceiling of the ward. He looked across at Kate and mouthed a silent prayer to Allah. She was tossing and turning in her sleep, beads of perspiration covering her pale forehead.
The door opened and the duty sister shuffled in followed by Curtis O’Connor. Both were fully suited and Imran smiled to himself as he watched them both reach for an air hose. Curtis was holding a bunch of white roses with bare stems. He had personally removed every leaf and thorn. It would have taken some smooth talking to get the sister to agree to him bringing them in here, Imran thought. Like any of the waste from this ward, the flowers would eventually be incinerated at ultra high temperatures.
Kate groaned as the sister mopped her brow with a damp cloth, which she then disposed of in a bright yellow waste bin marked with the biohazard symbol. The monitor above the bed showed a heart rate of 120. Imran knew that despite Kate’s punishing schedule, she somehow managed to find time to work out in the gym or, when she could manage it, she went for jog at lunchtime. This was one very fit scientist and a resting heart rate of 120 was a bad sign. Her other vital signs were no more encouraging. Her temperature was now 103° F, and her blood pressure was 160 over 100. Imran glanced at Curtis O’Connor who was also staring at the monitor, watching Kate’s heart rate blips as they raced across the oscilloscope. Both men knew that Kate was still mercifully free of any of the deadly telltale haemorrhagic blood spots underneath the skin, and both men knew that a fever normally occurred after the appearance of either a rash or the blood spots. But if Kate had contracted the disease, they would lose her.
CHAPTER 53
HALLIWELL PHARMACEUTICALS, ATLANTA
D r Richard Halliwell wrinkled his nose in disgust as he curtained off the gurney that had a stinking, drunken vagrant strapped to the stainless steel surface. Still furious at the idiocy of the shifty little Mexican from the city pound, he returned to the second gurney. The young red-haired girl was about sixteen and the pale creamy skin on her arms was a mass of puncture wounds. She had been a very beautiful young woman but she’d succumbed to a heroin overdose. The pound man claimed she’d been breathing when he’d picked her up out of the alley, and he might have been right since the body was s
till warm, but Halliwell wasn’t about to pay anyone for dead bodies and the protesting Mexican had been reminded of the photos and told that if he didn’t deliver live flotsam next time, he’d have incineration costs docked from his $5000.
Halliwell ran his hand over the girl’s small breasts. He could feel his erection growing, amplified by a mixed surge of power and anger as his mind went back to his days at high school and his first sexual experience.
The gymnasium locker room smelt dank and musty, and the seventeen-year-old cheerleader, Cheryl Konopski, was high on speed. Halliwell was almost as high on bourbon and there was a sense of lustful urgency in Cheryl as she led him into a small storage room. It was a place with which Cheryl Konopski was more than a little familiar and she stepped out of her panties, hitched up her short dress and lay down on a pile of mats.
‘Come on,’ she urged, undoing her blouse and releasing her breasts from her bra. ‘I need to get off!’
Richard Halliwell had only just started to shave, and he felt gangly and awkward as he fumbled with his belt. Somehow he’d imagined he would be in control but it wasn’t turning out that way.
Cheryl Konopski stared at Halliwell’s penis, her disappointment all too visible to him. ‘Can’t you get that little wiener of yours any harder than that?’ she goaded when he’d finally managed to get out of his trousers. As he lay down beside her she reached for him and three seconds later he came in her hands, his small erection disappearing. The euphoria Cheryl had gained from the speed was also subsiding, replaced by a growing depression that was accompanied by a sudden onslaught of wild anger.
‘Jesus Christ! Did anyone ever tell you that you’re worse than fucking useless!’
Halliwell could still hear the voice of Cheryl Konopski screaming at him as she stormed out of the locker room. He walked over to the stereo system he’d had installed and turned on Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.
‘Da da da da… Da da da da’ Halliwell hummed along with the famous opening stanza and as he turned up the volume, the music by the New York Philharmonic reverberated off the concrete walls of the Level 3 preparation area. The symphony always gave Halliwell a sense of his own power; it was one of his favourites. He ran his hands inside the top of the young woman’s stained and flimsy dress, his anger at Cheryl Konopski’s rejection slowly fading as the powerful music took over. This one, at least, wouldn’t be able to talk back. Her breasts were still warm but her body was stiffening as rigor mortis set in. Halliwell lifted the girl’s body off the gurney and placed it on the concrete floor. He calmly removed her panties and pushed her pale white legs apart.
Dr Halliwell pulled on his protective boots, stood up, snapped the seal on his face plate shut and reached for an air regulator. Satisfied, he returned to retrieve the vagrant on the other gurney. The stench was indelibly imprinted in Halliwell’s nostrils. As Halliwell stood over him, the man stirred. He blinked, his eyes bleary and bloodshot, then he coughed and gurgled and his eyes widened in horror. He began to struggle violently but realised he was held at his ankles, waist, wrists and neck by heavy nylon straps. His frantic cries were muffled by a heavy surgical bandage taped over his mouth.
Richard Halliwell shook his head in disgust. The man’s hair and beard were heavily matted with dirt and lice, and his face was pockmarked and scarred. His bulbous nose had the purplish-blue tinge of a heavy spirits drinker. You disgusting excuse for a human being, Halliwell thought. Giving your filthy, revolting body to science will be the only decent thing you’ve achieved in your entire miserable existence, he mused, as he wheeled the gurney through the specially designed air lock that connected the Level 3 preparation room with the lethal hot laboratory beyond. Halliwell pushed the gurney into an area of the hot lab that resembled the ward of a hospital. As he passed a freezer, he allowed himself a thin smile. Halliwell knew that bear bile soup was the favourite dish of General Ho Feng. General Ho was yet to accept his invitation to visit, but he’d arranged for the illegal frozen bear bile to be stored, just in case. Some might have thought the security storage arrangements were excessive, but Richard Halliwell never left anything to chance.
There were two tiled bays, each equipped with intravenous drip stands, heart rate and blood pressure monitors and a range of other medical equipment that Halliwell would need for his experiments. The gurneys were equipped with disposal systems for human waste that would wash it into a state of the art drainage system.
His subject was struggling feebly and beginning to sweat. Halliwell disconnected his air hose, shuffled away to the far end of the hot lab where the viruses were stored and reached for another hose dangling from the roof. Even without the Vice President’s imprimatur, he had obtained some of the most toxic viruses and bacteria known to man. In Halliwell’s world money always talked, and his virus stocks included Ebola and Marburg and his bacteria stock list boasted anthrax, botulinum toxin, and Yersinia pestis or plague. Soon, with the transfer of the experiments on the chimpanzees and the addition of Variola major, he would have the complete suite.
Halliwell punched the dual combination into the vault, turned the stainless steel wheel and swung open the heavy door. He shuffled towards the trolley marked ‘Ebola’, wheeled it over to a work bench and extracted a set of plastic well plates from the depths of the stainless steel storage vessel. The Ebola virus was clearly identifiable, a pale red liquid so clear it sparkled under the laboratory lights. He shuffled over to the incubator which held the culture medium he’d inoculated with the virus the previous week. Culturing stocks of the Ebola virus was child’s play for someone of Halliwell’s skills and resources and he was confident that millions of microscopic strings of the virus would have budded out of the culture cells and into the surrounding soup.
His first task was to test the effects of his virus and compile a database of how it would affect humans in its current form. The subsequent experiments would show whether or not the genetically engineered forms could be made more virulent, and whether or not the RNA that Ebola employed for its genetic code could be engineered into the DNA that was characteristic of smallpox. Halliwell knew the engineering would require sophisticated research at a level above what he was capable of, but with Dolinsky, anything might be possible. The official research that would be done on the Great Apes in the main laboratory would provide no guarantee those results could be replicated in humans, something Halliwell needed to know if he was to put his Chinese plan into action; and Halliwell would ensure that any super virus was tested on the human refuse collected from the streets of Atlanta. He placed a capped needle and a vial of the virus on a steel delivery trolley and shuffled back to the bay where he’d left the subject for his experiment.
Dr Halliwell carefully and unhurriedly filled a syringe with the sparkling red liquid and leaned toward the vagrant. Holding the man’s arm in a vice-like grip, Halliwell injected millions of particles of a virus for which there was no known cure.
CHAPTER 54
ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN
B ack in his hotel room in Islamabad, al-Falid checked that the Egyptian passport he would use to depart Islamabad for the city he had chosen for the first warning attack was with his tickets. He packed his American passport into his hold luggage and looked at his watch. By now, if Allah was willing, the tug boats would have reached the Indonesian port of Surabaya. There was still another fifteen minutes before he was scheduled to connect to an internet chat room, so he began to flick through the cable channels on the television. His eyes hardened as a program showing the hated American evangelist came on the screen.
For over a month now, the Reverend Jerry Buffett had been delivering his ‘Wake Up America – A Call to Arms’ series of sermons on his weekly television show, and the Buffett Evangelical Center for Christ was bursting at the seams. More than 15,000 people had packed into the huge auditorium and hundreds more were standing against the tiered walls, while even more were seated in the aisles. The front two rows were reserved for major benefactors and Richard Halliwell an
d his wife had the best seats. Constance Halliwell was seated beside her husband, directly in front of the huge stage. She was short and prim-looking, with immaculately groomed auburn hair and she was dressed in a pink Valentino twin-set with beige Ferragamo shoes and matching leather handbag, and around her neck was a string of large, almost flawless pink pearls. As the great evangelist addressed the crowd, Constance Halliwell, like the rest of the adoring congregation, hung on Jerry Buffett’s every word, mesmerised by his charisma and the total wisdom of what he had to say. Constance thought that if anyone should run for President, it was definitely this man.
‘The Messiah can only return when the Palestinians are evicted and all of the Promised Land is back in the hands of God’s chosen people, the Israelis!’ the Reverend Buffett thundered, coming to the end of his address. ‘This road map to peace is a disaster and needs to be torn up.’
Constance Halliwell turned and whispered in her husband’s ear. ‘That’s so true, Richard. That is so true.’
‘We’ve already been given the map, and it’s right here in this book,’ Buffett said, his deep voice resonating around the auditorium as he opened his bible on the lectern at the mark for chapter 17 of Genesis. The Lord said to Abraham, ‘I will establish my covenant between me and you, and your offspring after you. And I will give to you, and to your offspring after you, the land where you are now an alien, all the land of Canaan, for a perpetual holding; and I will be their God.’
‘What God has promised to his chosen people my brothers and sisters, is the land of Canaan – all the land of Canaan, the land we now call Israel and the Palestinian Occupied Territories, and we defy God’s commands at our peril.’ Jerry Buffett was talking softly now, urgently and persuasively, and Constance Halliwell and thousands of others sat motionless, transfixed as he delivered a warning that was designed to go well beyond the auditorium in Atlanta. Jerry Buffett had no doubts as to what he was doing; he knew his remarks would be picked up and broadcast to the Arab world by television and radio. As well as delivering the word of the Lord to the faithful, Jerry Buffett was delivering a very blunt warning to the Arabs and the other unbelievers he so detested.
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