The phone call came in the middle of the night, a function of different time zones and his associate being unable to make calls from his high-level job. The Doctor took the call and listened intently, not saying much.
‘The person of interest just returned from Pakistan and I understand he has briefed the CP office.’
‘CP?’ asked the Doctor.
‘Counter-Proliferation. Nukes and bioweapons. I haven’t seen the briefing reports but we can assume they’re looking at Scimitar.’ ‘They were in Islamabad?’ asked the Doctor.
‘Yes,’ said the voice. ‘When I have more details I’ll let you know.’
The Doctor thanked the caller and hung up. He walked into the kitchen and told his bodyguard they were going out. They drove to the MERC, where he let himself into the vast research facility that employed some of the smartest minds in Asia.
He descended to level B5, walked the long corridor and opened a door at the end of it. He hit the lights to reveal an enormous laboratory. It was equipped with the latest digital equipment from the US, Germany and Japan. Some of the autoclaves, centrifuges and particle accelerators had been sourced illegally and were so advanced that they were not yet used in this lab because they didn’t have the requisite computing power to run them.
During the day, a team of thirty-five scientists separated bacteria, grew it, enhanced it and then allowed it to reproduce under different scenarios and conditions. Over the past twenty years, the MERC had hosted experts from South Africa and Iran, North Korea and Russia. They had destroyed thousands of batches of bacterium culture that hadn’t made the grade, perfecting and pushing and then developing the strains to the point where they could both be stabilised—for certainty of transportation—and where, upon introduction to water, they would flourish, waiting for their introduction to the all-important receptor cells that just happened to reside on the intestinal walls of mammals such as goats, sheep, cattle … and humans.
The Clostridium perfringens bacterium produced a painful and deadly condition called ‘gas gangrene’, and it was one of the oldest bioweapons known to man. Gangrenous humans and livestock had been routinely thrown into rivals’ water supplies, usually a well or cistern.
The last known time it was used militarily was the US Civil War in the 1860s. It wasn’t a subtle or clever pathogen—when ingested it simply triggered a bacteriological war inside a digestive tract, attacking the vital organs and quickly leading to internal haemorrhaging, massive blood loss and a painful death. It didn’t kill everyone it touched—it didn’t have to. Even if it could render thousands of people incapacitated from one poisoned water supply, it destroyed morale, diverted resources to sick people and generated societal panic, whether an army camp or a city.
Yousef’s achievement was to isolate the strain that could be stabilised—as far as such an aggressive pathogen could be stabilised—and manipulate it so that when it met water it would thrive rather than degrade.
He walked the length of the underground lab, pondering his quest. His journey through high school in Pakistan and then university had led him to America, to Stanford, where he finished his PhD in bacterial engineering. His PhD was funded by the US Army, and he was offered a position in one of their labs. Little did they know that the gifted Pakistani was the son of a farming family from southern Iran. Yousef’s mother had been orphaned in the mid-1950s, when a French oil company had disposed of its drilling chemicals in a dry channel. That wadi was also a recharge for an ancient aquifer used by farming communities. His mother had watched her parents die in a crappy hospital, from internal injuries, because of French greed. His mother’s sister—the Doctor’s beloved Aunt Lavi—was brain-damaged from the poisoning and lived out her days in her sister’s house, singing childish ditties for her nephew and niece. His mother’s once-proud landowning family had been torn apart by the Westerners, their lives diminished, reduced to living in their adopted country of Pakistan. His immediate family wasn’t sold on vengeance. His sister was influenced by their kindly and entitled father—a man who had walked away from his Pakistani culture and thought nothing of adopting Western mannerisms. Yousef, meanwhile, had increasingly aligned himself with his Iranian mother and her rage towards the French. He had a good mind and a spectacular education, and he had vowed to humble the arrogant Franks with his greatest weapon—his superior intellect.
The day came when, as an associate professor at the National University in Islamabad, he’d returned to his office after teaching a class on bacterial toxins to find a suave but dangerous-looking man waiting. The man, whom Yousef would only ever know as ‘the Colonel’, offered him a job with his own lab and staff.
At the rear of the long lab, he unlocked a heavy, soundproof security door and locked it behind him. He descended two flights of stairs and came out in a large room filled with cages. The soft glow of red stand-by lights cast an eerie pall over an enclosed area that he knew held around a hundred and thirty people.
He walked past them to his office, turned on his desk lamp and sat at his secured computer. The computer had no connection to a public or even a Pakistani government network. The B6 level of the secret facility held a server farm with a manually upgraded scientific research database uploaded by ISI cybersecurity officers once a week. In the encrypted section of the internal computer system lay the secret to Operation Scimitar—scientists knew that while Clostridium perfringens produced a dangerous bacterial toxin in its own right—more deadly than the Clostridium botulinum and tetani, and a hundred times more lethal than the Clostridium septicum toxin—that wasn’t the end of the story for this vicious bug. Working off stolen North Korean clinical papers from the 1960s, the Doctor had reassembled the experimentation on perfringens that had been abandoned decades ago, and identified where those earlier scientists had faltered. The North Koreans had isolated the most virulent strain—the epsilon toxin, or ETX—which, when injected into or fed to a goat or sheep, would kill the animal within one to three hours. Liver, kidney, heart, lungs and brain—as well as the central nervous systems—would collapse with a rolling thunder of oedema, lesions, loss of blood–brain barrier and cellular damage. It meant massive internal bleeding and the breakdown of bodily functions, and an agonising, thrashing death characterised by diarrhoea. There was no vaccine for ETX and no antibiotics strong enough to arrest it. If a strong enough dose was administered to a human, the victim would be dead inside three hours.
As soon as ETX had been isolated, and Western intelligence learned of its development, it immediately went onto the banned bioweapons list because of its specific danger to humans. Human-only cell lines such as G-402, HRTEC and ACHN were highly susceptible to the epsilon toxin and it was classified as a Category B Biological Agent by the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and also by the French government. But the original researchers, while impressed with the potential of ETX for a widespread biological attack, became—in the Doctor’s opinion—sidetracked on a quest to deliver it effectively. Those scientists had tried to deliver it via aerosol or bomb, but had faced the ever-increasing need to concentrate and potentise the epsilon toxin in order to make it effective over large areas and populations, an expensive and resource-consuming task if it was going to be properly weaponised.
The Doctor’s innovation had obviated the need to make the ETX dose so strong at the source. Instead, he focused on building a strain of ETX that was ready to start acting internally as soon as it landed. His innovation was to isolate the sialidase enzymes—the presence of which allowed the ETX proteins to readily connect to cells in the intestine—and promote their production from the ETX itself, thereby ensuring that even with a lower quantum of ETX in the introduced load, infection rates were even higher because the ETX was optimised to work. As his younger scientists put it, with the ETX primed to produce sialidases, it was ‘locked and loaded’ and could succeed with relatively small concentrations. The most important aspect—the ETX would now hold its full lethality in water.
Yousef thought about the phone call he’d just received and considered his dilemma—to release the enhanced pathogen in Operation Scimitar, and avenge his mother’s family; or to keep testing it until it was perfect. He was a perfectionist but he had to listen to his source in Paris. If the French were closing in, it was time to act. Scimitar would have to begin.
He padded along beside the cages and some of the people stirred, sticking their heads up and looking through the bars. They were Communists and insurgents and some of them were Christians and Jews. Mostly they were university students seized from protests and illegal political meetings and sent to the Doctor to assist in the national effort. Their religious or political designation was irrelevant, thought Yousef. Science was agnostic.
Walking from his office into the main gallery of the lab, he turned on the lights and in front of him was a large window that looked into the test cell. It was painted white, and in a pile on the floor was a bloody mess of naked young people. No one moved. They were dead from a teaspoon each of ETX-infected water.
He walked back to his office, the eyes of the prisoners following him. He accessed the encrypted service run by the ISI and selected the ‘To’ tab that identified one of his project partners. From this console, his messages were sent to the ISI office in the MERC, and they would relay the email via their own secure systems.
He paused, thought of his mother and his aunt, and then typed: Activate Scimitar.
He hit send.
He was ready.