It had been, by any standards, a long and complicated project.
When Saloun Talabani had been summoned to an unmarked building near the centre of Tehran four years earlier, a summons that was both peremptory and impossible to ignore, and the concept had been explained to him, he had sat in stunned silence in front of the three men who had been in the room on the top floor waiting for him. They had not introduced themselves, but Talabani had recognised one of them from his occasional appearances on Iranian television when taking part in religious discussions, and although he did not know the other two he realised they had to be very senior members of the government.
Talabani was a scientist, which is why he had been selected. He was also a man with something of a reputation for being able to devise unusual solutions to problems, and the three-man panel had begun by telling him that he would need to use both his scientific ability and his wits to bring the project to a successful conclusion. His immediate reaction had been a form of polite denial, though even as he mouthed the words he had known he was wasting his time. A decision had been taken far above his level and his role was simply to implement it, despite what he believed was the literal impossibility of doing so.
But then he had been presented with a fabric document case and told to open it and examine the contents immediately. When he did so he found himself looking at a mass of scientific papers, created in a country thousands of miles away. The documents covered a subject that he already knew quite a lot about, but which explored the topic in much greater depth than any of his own researches. The documents explained in considerable detail exactly how to overcome the principal and obvious problem with the job he had just been tasked with completing.
They had given him half an hour to skim through the information they had provided and then called him back into the same room again.
‘Does that information address the problem you identified?’ the unsmiling cleric had demanded, his unblinking gaze metaphorically pinning Talabani to his chair as effectively as a collector driving a pin through the body of a butterfly.
Talabani had nodded, because there was no other possible response. The papers now in his possession did explain in precise detail a technique that could be used to achieve the objective. He knew it would still require a lot of work because although the technique itself was then clear in his mind he would have to do a considerable amount of research in order to identify exactly how to do it.
‘And the other matter?’ the cleric had asked.
‘There are difficulties,’ Talabani had admitted, ‘about dispersal, particularly in view of the caveat you have specified. At the moment, I cannot see a way of achieving the result you desire without our involvement becoming clear, and I completely understand why that would be unacceptable. May I enquire what timescale you are permitting me, and the budget you have allocated?’
The cleric, who was clearly the spokesman of the triumvirate and very probably the driving force behind it, had replied immediately.
‘The maximum possible duration we can accept is five years, and we would ideally like to have it completed within four. You need not concern yourself about the budget. We will establish a line of communication between the location you choose for the work and Tehran, and all you will need to do is request whatever equipment and facilities you deem to be essential and they will be provided. You may select however many fellow scientists and other workers as you feel are necessary to complete the project, but you are not to divulge the precise objective of the work to anybody. The biochemical research and preparation are to be carried out in isolation from all other aspects of the project, and only when you have addressed the dispersal problem will you take the final steps required to marry together the two separate components of the system.’
Talabani cast his mind back to that initial interview as he walked down the empty and echoing corridor on the upper floor of the laboratory he had created on the southern outskirts of Zahedan. He had given everybody in the building not simply the weekend off, but also the whole of the following week as a reward for the work they had put in. In a manner somewhat reminiscent of a juggler keeping all the balls in the air at the same time, Talabani had spent most of the previous three weeks bringing everything to fruition in accordance with his personal timescale, a series of disparate actions including organising deck space on a freighter, booking a couple of heavy lorries, supervising the purchase, packing and sealing of the drums and even making a request to have an unusual form of transport organised for one part of the journey. Much of this he had done himself, but his staff had also been heavily involved with several aspects of the project, and he had been very happy indeed with their collective performance, hence the time off he had given them.
He was also pleased that he had beaten the deadline he had been given. It hadn’t taken him the five years that he had originally been allowed, and the last lorry had left the laboratory just over three years and eleven months after that initial interview. And he already knew that the powers that be in Tehran were both pleased and impressed with what he had done.
Talabani came to a stop at the end of the corridor, where his way forward was barred by a heavy steel door that required both a handprint and the input of a four-digit numerical code before it would open. On the other side of the door was the main laboratory, the construction of which had consumed nearly seventy per cent of the funds drawn from the effectively unlimited budget that he had been granted access to. For his own information, he had kept an accurate tally of the cost of everything he had ordered, purchased or requisitioned, just in case at some point he might have been required to answer some awkward questions about financing.
He had no need to enter the laboratory, but he did spend a few seconds looking at an instrument panel on the wall beside the door, a panel protected by a locked glass door through which he could see all the relevant information about the functional state and parameters of the laboratory and the storage facilities. He checked the pressure within the central core of the laboratory, the hot zone where the most dangerous substances were handled, making sure that it was still lower than atmospheric pressure to ensure that nothing could ever escape from the core. The reading from the pressure gauges was exactly where it should be, well within limits, which was only a confirmation of what he already knew, because any deviation would have both sounded an alarm audible throughout the building and also caused warning lights to be illuminated. He also noted the temperatures of the locked fridges and freezers where samples were stored. And, again, all the readings were absolutely normal.
He had expected nothing less. All the equipment had been purchased new and he employed two skilled technicians to make sure everything kept working the way it was supposed to. In fact, there was no reason for him to check it by physically walking the corridor: he could have seen exactly the same results on the slaved instrument panel in his office. He wasn’t really inspecting the building at all, just taking a final look around before he too went off on a week’s leave, after which he had no doubt he would be presented with another problem that he would be expected to solve using both his ingenuity and scientific skills.
The final readings he looked at were the fuel tank levels for the pair of ASDEGs – high-capacity auto-start diesel electric generators – that would automatically cut in if the main electrical supply to the building failed. With full tanks both generators would run continuously for up to two weeks, ensuring that the precious, volatile and lethal samples held in the fridges and freezers would not be allowed to degrade, and also ensure that the negative pressure in the central core would be maintained.
Talabani scanned the entire instrument panel, nodded his satisfaction and then turned to retrace his steps. Back in his office he checked that there were no messages on the telephone answering system, ensured that he had his mobile phone with him, just in case anyone in authority needed to contact him urgently, then switched off the lights, locked the door and walked away. The last thing he did was to increase the temperature of the automated air conditioning system slightly, which would reduce the workload of the system whilst the building was unoccupied. He knew from past experience that the temperature inside could be reduced to a comfortable working level within about half an hour after the first person – and that would most probably be Talabani himself – returned to the building in a week’s time.
Outside, he walked across the parking lot to where his car sat in the shadow at one end of a steel sunshade, opened the driver’s door, started the engine and waited for the air conditioner to haul down the temperature to a bearable level. Then he sat behind the wheel, pulled the door shut, reversed the car out of the bay and headed out of the parking lot. He used a remote control to open the compound gates, then turned north towards the centre of the town and the apartment he rented there.
Unknown to everyone apart from the senior cleric, the two government officials, Talabani himself and about six other people whose services and abilities had been essential to the completion of the project, the unnamed operation – unnamed because if it had been named a certain amount of paperwork would have been generated and paperwork was the very last thing anybody wanted in this case – was running.
The work had been completed and the product despatched. Unlike the overall project, the weapon they had created had been named. Talabani himself had suggested the name Shiva, meaning the Destroyer and one of the three components of Brahma, the Hindu trinity, and that name had stuck. Not that anyone outside the building would ever have any idea what the name referred to.
Now, the laboratory was deserted and would remain so for a further eight days.
Their job was done and the clock was already ticking.