He placed his hands on the table in front of him, as if to draw their attention to the dry, cracked skin and red, flaking knuckles. ‘Over the years,’ he said, ‘I have been vaccinated against almost everything you can imagine, from anthrax to plague. Many, many times over.’ He paused for effect. ‘You see the result before you. A man whose immune system has been shot to hell.’ A bitter laugh turned into a cough, and phlegm rattled in his throat. ‘I have more allergies than you people can count. I have lost my sense of smell, my sense of taste. My skin falls off me in drifts. If I did not spend an hour rubbing moisturisers and oils into my hands and face and scalp each morning, I would be red raw.’
His eyes grew suddenly very intense and he leaned forward on his elbows. ‘And you people thought that smallpox was dead! That there were only two remaining repositories in the world — one here in America, and the other at the Ivanovsky Institute of Virology in Moscow.’ A momentary silence, then, ‘Hah!’ he shouted and slapped his palms on the table and sat back. ‘We developed a weapons-grade variety of it at a secret laboratory at Zagorsk and were producing a hundred tons a year of the stuff at Koltsovo.’ He shrugged, as if in apology. ‘Okay, so mortality rate is low — only 50 percent. But morbidity is excellent. Up to 90 percent of unvaccinated people exposed to the virus will contract it.’ He seemed to be enjoying himself now.
‘Then there is anthrax. Wonderful mortality rate. Up to 90 percent if untreated in the first two days. Horrible way to die. The bacteria takes over your lymphatic system before entering the blood and producing toxins that attack your organs. Your skin turns blue and your lungs fill with fluid and you drown. We knew just how effective it was when we had our own little biological Chernobyl at Sverdlosk. Spores were released accidentally from our plant there and killed most of the night shift at a ceramics factory across the road. Given the right atmospheric conditions, the release of a hundred kilos of spores in any big US city would kill around three million people. We were developing a strain of anthrax that could be deployed in an SS-18 missile. A single one of which would have wiped out the population of New York City. At Stepnogorsk, we were producing two tons of anthrax a day.’
Some of those around the table had undoubtedly heard this before. But it was news to Margaret. She sat in stunned and horrified silence as Markin continued to catalogue the monstrous affront to civilised behaviour that had been perpetrated by the former Soviet Union with its hugely funded biowarfare programme. He appeared to draw succour from their disapproval.
‘Of course, smallpox and anthrax were not the only concoctions we were preparing for the arming of the SS-18s. There was plague, the bubonic variety of which killed a quarter of the population of Europe in the Middle Ages. And then there was Marburg, a rare filovirus that acts in much the same way as Ebola. And all that,’ he added, ‘when you Americans were hailing Mikhail Gorbachev as the great reformer, the man who would draw the world back from the brink of super-power confrontation. Well, I’ll let you into a little secret. In terms of biowarfare, there was only one super power. And that was the Soviet Union.’ He grinned, the whole superiority of his tone condensed in his next words. ‘And you know what? You people didn’t even know it.’
He stood up, as if his seat had suddenly become very hot. ‘I’m telling you this because you need to know that we knew what we were doing. We spent billions on research, built massive plants capable of bacterial and viral weapons production on the grand scale. We had thousands of scientists and researchers working full-time on ways to destroy the population of the West with infective agents.’ He took his time looking around the table, meeting the eyes that were all turned toward him. ‘And then suddenly it was over. The Soviet Union was no more. The money stopped, the programme was pulled, weapons stocks destroyed.’ He shrugged extravagantly. ‘They have a limited life anyway. A use-by date, just like you’d find in the supermarket.’ He drew a deep crackling breath. ‘But the know-how didn’t go away. What do you think happened to all these thousands of scientists when the government stopped paying them?’ He stabbed a finger into his own chest. ‘Like me, they went to work for the highest bidder.’ His eyes were alight now. ‘But unlike me, they didn’t all go to work for the good guys.’ And he sat down again just as suddenly.
‘My friends, we have scattered the seeds of our own destruction to the four corners of the earth. Many of my former colleagues, I believe, now work for the new republics. Others are in the employ of the Russian Mafia. Yet more went abroad. To Iraq — Saddam paid well — and to other Arab countries. To India and Pakistan. Some are working for multinationals, others for entrepreneurs. I have heard that Arab terrorists would pay handsomely for some of that know-how. And who knows who else is out there itching to spend money on killing Americans with the superbugs we created.’
‘Jesus Christ!’ Hrycyk muttered under his breath. ‘Jesus fucking Christ!’
Margaret looked at her hands. They were trembling. The picture Markin was painting of a world filled with abominable viral and bacterial creations, and a whole community of educated and intelligent people only too happy to unleash them, was as grotesque as he was himself.
Markin knew very well the effect he was having. A slow grin spread itself across his face as he took in their expressions.
The same question Margaret had asked earlier occurred to her again. ‘Why?’ she said.
Markin looked at her, perplexed. ‘Why what?’
‘Why did you do it? Break the Convention? Spend all those billions on creating biological weapons of mass destruction?’
Markin held out his hands, palms up, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. ‘Because we thought you were doing it, too,’ he said.
‘And we weren’t?’ Hrycyk asked.
Markin sighed. ‘Apparently not.’ He smiled. ‘I know — difficult to believe, isn’t it? We thought so, too.’ He shrugged again. ‘Although I doubt, as you people would claim, that it had anything to do with your moral superiority. More likely the fact that it would have been impossible for your government to spend the billions of dollars required without anyone knowing about it. The difference, I suppose, between democracy and totalitarianism. We could get away with it, you couldn’t. But I digress.’ And he leaned forward, tightly focused now. ‘The point is that the kind of gene technology that was employed on these Chinese immigrants is not the preserve of a handful of scientists at the cutting edge of their discipline. Any number of my former colleagues would have been capable of performing the kind of manipulation required. But not all of them would have been smart enough. Because make no mistake, what we are looking at here is a very clever piece of work. This has not been cobbled together by some half-baked terrorist. It is the work of a polished professional employing the kind of perverse logic we can only stand back and admire.’