I Am Pilgrim (32 page)

The only time he straight-out lied was if they asked where he was heading next. He would shrug,

point at his possessions and say he didn’t even have a map.

‘I go wherever God takes me.’ But he did have a map – it was inside his head and he knew exactly

where he was going.

On three separate occasions, NATO troops, having searched him, helped load his supplies back on

to the ponies. The hardest part was lifting and securing the pairs of heavy-duty truck batteries on to the four animals at the rear. The batteries were used to power small refrigerated boxes, and the soldiers smiled at the doctor ’s ingenuity. Inside were racks of tiny glass bottles which would help countless children: vaccines against polio, diphtheria and whooping cough. Hidden among them, indistinguishable except by an extra zero he had added to the batch number, were a pair of bottles which contained something vastly different.

At that time, only two examples of the smallpox virus were supposed to exist on the planet. Kept for research purposes, one was in a virtually impenetrable freezer at the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta and the other was at a secure Russian facility called Vector in Siberia. There was, however, a third example. Unknown to anyone in the world except the Saracen, it was in the two glass vials on the back of his wiry packhorse deep in the Hindu Kush.

He hadn’t stolen it, he hadn’t bought it from some disaffected Russian scientist, it hadn’t been given to him by a failed state like North Korea which had undertaken its own illegal research. No, the remarkable thing was that the Saracen had synthesized it himself.

In his garage.

Chapter Thirty

HE COULD NEVER have done it without the internet. As the search for him became increasingly desperate, I finally discovered that, several years after he had graduated in medicine, the Saracen took a job in El-Mina, an ancient town in the north of Lebanon.

He worked the night shift in ER at the local hospital – hard and exhausting work in a facility that

was under-equipped and understaffed. Despite the constant fatigue, he used every spare moment to secretly pursue what he considered his life’s work – jihad against the far enemy.

While other soldiers-of-Allah were wasting their time at hidden boot camps in Pakistan or fantasizing about getting a US visa, he was reading everything he could find about weapons of mass

destruction. And it was only the Internet that had given a doctor at an old hospital in a town nobody had heard of widespread access to the latest research into every major biological killer in the world.

In one of those unforeseen but deadly consequences – what the CIA would call blowback – the World Wide Web had opened up a Pandora’s box of terrible possibilities.

The Saracen hadn’t been raised like Western kids so he didn’t know much about computers, but he

knew enough: by using a good proxy connection he managed to undertake his relentless search in complete anonymity.

For months, helped by his knowledge of medicine and biology, he concentrated on what he considered the most achievable bio-warfare candidates – ricin, anthrax, pneumonic plague, sarin, tabun and soman – all of which were capable of causing widespread death and even greater panic. But

all of them came with enormous shortcomings – most of them either weren’t infectious or were most

effective if used as part of an aerial bombing campaign.

Frustrated at his lack of progress, fighting waves of despair, he was in the middle of researching

anthrax – at least the raw bacteria was obtainable; it was widespread in the Middle East, including Lebanon, but it would still have to be ‘weaponized’ – when he read something that changed the very

nature of the world in which we live.

Nobody much noticed it.

In the online pages of
The Annals of Virology
– a monthly which doesn’t exactly fly off the shelves

– was an account of an experiment conducted at a lab in upstate New York. For the first time in history, a life-form had been built entirely from off-the-shelf chemicals – all purchased for a few hundred dollars. It was late in the afternoon and for once the Saracen forgot to kneel for maghrib, the sunset prayer. With increasing wonder, he read that the scientists had successfully recreated the polio virus from scratch.

According to the article, the aim of the researchers was to warn the US government that terrorist

groups could make biological weapons without ever obtaining the natural virus. Good idea – there was at least one terrorist who had never thought of it until he read their research. Even more alarming

– or perhaps not, depending on your degree of cynicism – was the name of the organization which

had funded the programme with a three hundred thousand dollar grant. The Pentagon.

The Saracen, however, was certain that the startling development had nothing to do with the Defense Department or scientists in New York – they were merely the instruments. This was Allah’s

work: somebody had now synthesized a virus and opened the door for him. On the other side was the

Holy Grail of all bio-terror weapons, a wildly infectious agent transmitted by the simple act of breathing, the most potent killer in the history of the planet – smallpox.

In the weeks which followed, the Saracen learned that the researchers, using polio’s publicly available genome – its genetic map – had purchased what are called ‘nucleic acid base pairs’ from one of the scores of companies that sell material to the bio-tech industry. Those base pairs cost the princely sum of ten cents a piece and, according to an account on an Internet discussion forum for biology geeks, were ordered by email. Because the sales company’s online system was fully automated, the report on the forum said, there was no name verification and nobody asked why the

material was being purchased.

Once the New York lab had acquired the microscopic building blocks, the scientists spent a year arranging them in the correct order and then – in a skilful but publicly known process – gluing them together. The Saracen, being a doctor and with a dozen manuals on molecular biology at hand, soon

understood enough of the process to suspect that what could be done at a lab in upstate New York could be duplicated in a garage in El-Mina – if he could locate one thing.

He had read about it somewhere, and he started searching. After two hours online he found it – the

smallpox genome. Once one of the world’s most closely guarded secrets, the virus’s complete chemical and genetic map had fallen victim to the explosion of knowledge about biology and the worldwide dissemination of complex scientific papers over the Internet. There were no gatekeepers

any more, and potentially lethal information was haemorrhaging all the time – while it had taken the Saracen two hours to locate the genome, had he been more experienced at searching the Web he would have found it on a dozen biology or research sites in less than half the time. I know because I did.

From the article in
The Annals of Virology
the Saracen knew that polio had 7,741 base pairs, or letters, in its genome. Now he saw that smallpox had 185,578 letters, greatly enhancing the difficulty of re-creating it, but he was riding a wave of knowledge and optimism and he wasn’t going to let a

small thing like an extra 178,000 letters deter him.

He quickly decided his first objective was to protect himself: smallpox is a merciless pathogen and

it was almost certain that somewhere in the complicated and unstable process of trying to synthesize it he would make a mistake. Many mistakes, probably, and the first he would know of his exposure would be when the fever hit and, a short time later, a rash of fluid-filled blisters appeared. By then it would be over: no cure for smallpox has ever been found.

He had to locate a vaccine, and it was the pursuit of that goal that made him take a six-week vacation. Instead of heading to Beirut and flying to Cairo to visit friends, as he had told the medical director of the hospital, he had boarded an early-morning bus for Damascus. There he killed Tlass,

stole the vaccine, used the double-pronged needle on himself and crossed the border back into Lebanon.

He spent five days locked in a hotel room fighting the terrible fever which had accompanied the huge dose of vaccine he had taken. Once that had passed and the telltale scab and scar had formed on his arm, he returned to El-Mina. Though, outwardly, nothing had changed, his life had entered an entirely new phase: he was ready to start on his history-making journey.

Chapter Thirty-one

THE FIRST THING he did was set about sealing the garage under his small apartment and turning it into a makeshift bio-containment laboratory.

He had one advantage in performing the work – there was a good example close at hand. While everything else at the El-Mina hospital was falling apart, it had a two-bed isolation ward and an attached lab. Because anthrax was endemic to the region, the hospital had been able to take advantage of a World Health Organization programme to help developing nations combat the disease. Forget that the hospital didn’t have some of the most rudimentary equipment necessary for saving lives, the Geneva organization had provided a small fortune to build a first-rate facility.

As far as the Saracen knew, it had only been used once in ten years and had become little more than

a temporary storage shed. Nevertheless, it was an excellent blueprint for his own lab, and it also ended up providing half the practical equipment he needed – incubators, a microscope, culture dishes, pipettes, sterilizing cabinets and a host of other items. They were never even reported missing.

Over the following week, using a computer and an Internet connection he had set up in the lab, he

assembled a list of over sixty bio-tech companies worldwide which would provide DNA material of

fewer than seventy letters without asking for name verification or any further information.

A long time later, on first hearing this, I didn’t believe it. To my despair, I went online and did it myself.

But before the Saracen could order DNA he had to locate two crucial pieces of equipment: gene synthesizers – machines about the size of a decent computer printer. It took him an hour. The dizzying progress in the bio-tech industry meant the market was awash with equipment at hugely discounted prices which was no longer the fastest or the best.

He found two synthesizers in excellent condition, one on eBay, the other on usedlabequipment.com.

Combined, they cost under five thousand dollars and the Saracen was thankful that doctors were well

paid and he had always lived such a frugal life. He could well afford them from his savings and what was even more important to him was that the sellers also had no interest in who the purchaser was –

all they wanted was a valid credit-card number. An anonymous Western Union money transfer was just as good.

He started work the day the second machine arrived and, that evening, he was surfing the Web, adding to his already vast library about viruses and biology, when he glanced through the latest online edition of the prestigious periodical
Science
. One of its lead stories was about a researcher who had just synthesized an organism with 300,000 letters. In the short time since he had decided on his course of action, 185,000 letters had already faded into history. That was the pace at which genetic engineering was advancing.

After he finished the article he knew that smallpox was within his grasp and his date with destiny

confirmed. He prayed late into the night – it was a huge responsibility and he asked Allah to make sure he used it well.

Six months later, having glued and re-glued, backtracked, researched and re-learned – using not only his knowledge but the vast array of cheap equipment that was rapidly becoming available – he

completed the task.

To the best of his ability, one molecule at a time, he had re-created smallpox. According to every

test he could run, it was identical to its naturally occurring equivalent.

In the thousands of years since the virus had made the jump from some other life form into humans, there have been two different types of smallpox –
Variola minor
, often called cottonpox, which was rarely fatal, and its bigger brother,
Variola major
, the disease which had proved devastating to human populations ever since mankind had started to congregate in large tribes. It was that virus – with a death rate of about 30 per cent – which the Saracen had synthesized. However, within
Variola major
there were a host of different strains, some far more lethal than others.

Knowing that, he began to refine and challenge his virus, a well-established method of forcing it to mutate time after time, attempting, in the slang of some microbiologists, to KFC or deep-fry it, trying to turn it into a red-hot strain of what was already the hottest agent on earth.

Satisfied that it was as lethal as he could make it, he set out to modify its genetic structure. That was the simplest, but also the most dangerous, part of the entire exercise. It was also the most necessary …

Once the naturally occurring form of smallpox had been eradicated from the planet, the World Health Organization found itself holding a huge stockpile of vaccine doses. After several years, when everyone was convinced that the virus would not re-emerge, that protective reservoir was destroyed.