Fuller spoke for the first time. ‘I can’t say I find much to admire in it, Mr. Markin.’ Margaret glanced at him. He looked grim.
‘Ah, but you must always respect your enemy,’ Markin said. ‘Admire him, even. Never underestimate him. In this particular instance, we are dealing with a mind of great ingenuity. Even the use of the Spanish flu virus is ingenious. Because there is no vaccine against it.’
‘So how did these people manage to get hold of the virus,’ Margaret asked, ‘if there were never any preserved live cultures?’
Markin was dismissive. ‘Oh, there have been several attempts to recover soft tissue and culture the live virus. There was one expedition to dig a bunch of miners out of the permafrost in Norway. Soft tissue was also recovered from the crew of a submarine trapped under the Arctic ice pack during the pandemic in 1918.’ He nodded toward the AFIP contingent. ‘Yet more found in an Eskimo grave in Alaska.’ He rubbed his jaw, and skin showered on to the table like snowfall. ‘Of course, none of them was able to culture live virus.’
‘Why would they want to?’ This from Hrycyk.
‘You have to understand, sir,’ Markin said, ‘that we know virtually nothing about why the 1918 flu was so virulent and so deadly. And many doctors believe that it is only a matter of time before a similar pandemic strikes again, that we are in fact merely in an interpandemic period. For medical science to be able to study the Spanish flu virus and to know what made it such a killer would go a long way to enabling us to protect ourselves against a future attack.’
‘But you haven’t answered the question,’ Margaret persisted. ‘If no one has been able to culture the live virus, where did it come from?’
Markin waved his hand dismissively. ‘Easy,’ he said. ‘You don’t need live virus. If you can retrieve a reasonably intact sample of the viral RNA from soft tissue, you can transcribe it to DNA. Amplify the DNA by adding it to genes in a bacteria called plasmids, then inject the plasmids into human or monkey cell cultures and bingo, you produce live virus. Effectively, you have cloned an identical replica of the original.’
‘Just like that,’ Hrycyk muttered, and had the situation not been so grave, Margaret would have laughed.
Markin was oblivious. ‘The Spanish flu was a particularly good choice,’ he said gleefully. ‘Usually a flu will attack the weakest in a community. The very young and the elderly. But the Spanish flu, for some reason, went for the fittest and strongest. Usually in the fourteen to forty age group. And it acted with extraordinary speed. It could reduce a strong, vigorous adult to a quivering wreck in a matter of hours, completely overwhelming the body’s natural defences. There are many, many accounts of how people were affected by it.
‘Usually influenza victims die of a secondary infection. Pneumonia. Which nowadays is treatable with antibiotics. But the Spanish flu acted so fast it killed its victims even before pneumonia set in. The virus caused an uncontrollable haemorrhaging that filled the lungs, and victims drowned in their own blood. It swept across the United States in little over seven days, in the process killing more Americans than would later die in the whole of the Second World War. In three months, worldwide, it is estimated that it killed between 30 and 40 million people. Only 9 million died during the four years of World War One.’
Markin took a long pause to let his facts and figures sink in. He held his audience absolutely in his thrall, and he knew it. He went on, ‘The Spanish flu was incredibly infectious. In 1918 American people stopped going out of their homes. If they did, they wore face masks. Shops were shut, public meetings were cancelled, funerals were banned. Some more isolated communities put armed guards on the roads into their towns and villages and shot anyone who approached. Today, with modern travel, increased communications, increased populations, the death toll would be devastating. We could be talking about hundreds of millions of people. Hospitals and public health services simply couldn’t cope. They would quickly break down. No one would be immune. Soldiers, police officers, health workers. They would all be as vulnerable as anyone else. A complete breakdown of law and order would almost certainly follow. Believe me, I know. We did a lot of research into the effects of a full-scale biological attack.’
He reached for a glass, and filled it with water from a jug, and drank while everyone sat in silence watching him. They knew there was more to come.
When he had emptied his glass, he ran a tongue over cracked lips and said, ‘One of the problems we had in the Soviet Union in developing efficient biological weapons was finding an effective method of delivery. Most organisms are obliterated in the blast generated by a warhead on impact. Creating some kind of aerosol spray fine enough to carry the bacterium or virus and be delivered by air was next to impossible. I have often heard promulgated a scenario whereby a small private plane flies over Washington DC releasing anthrax spores in an aerosol spray, like a fine crop duster. In this scenario, no one even knows it has happened, and millions inhale the spores and die. In truth that would be almost impossible to achieve. So fine would be the spray required that any remotely adverse weather conditions would disperse it and destroy its efficacy. There would be only a handful of victims. On the other hand, mankind has, built-in, the most efficient aerosol spray in existence — human breath. And in close contact with other human beings it is extraordinarily efficient at passing on infectious diseases. Coughing, sneezing, even just breathing in a confined space, will fill the air around you with your invisible, contaminated spray. You cough into your hand and you have coated it with the virus. You shake hands with someone else, or they handle a sheet of paper that you have touched and then rub their eyes or eat a sandwich. They are now infected. Almost nothing else in nature is as efficient at passing on disease as human beings themselves. Which, of course, makes people the perfect delivery system for a biological attack. And the illegal Chinese immigrants in our midst, ideal unwitting carriers. Trojan horses awaiting activation.’ He paused momentarily before delivering his coup de grâce. ‘And when their disease becomes active,’ he said, ‘it will be apocalyptic.’
As the meeting broke up, Margaret saw that Li had been cornered by Colonel Zeiss and they were in a huddle with Fuller and Hrycyk. Dr. Ward was making a hurried exit with the Commander’s secretary. As she turned to go after him, Mendez caught her arm. ‘Margaret…’
But she said, ‘I’m sorry Felipe, I’ll catch up with you later.’ And she hastened after the Armed Forces medical examiner. She called to him and caught up with him at the end of the corridor as the commander’s secretary flashed an electronic ID at a reader on the wall and the double fire doors ahead of them opened. Ward seemed irritated by Margaret’s pursuit. ‘What is it, Doctor?’ he asked irritably.
‘Where’s Steve?’
Ward’s face darkened. ‘We have received confirmation that Major Cardiff has been infected with the flu virus,’ he said grimly. ‘He’s been confined to the isolation ward here on the base until further notice.’
II
A young female orderly in green camouflage fatigues led her through a maze of corridors, fluorescent ceiling lights set at regular intervals reflecting off a shiny white floor. Hessian-lined walls were pasted with notices and posters. Electronic doors opened ahead of them as the orderly waved her magnetic ID. And then Margaret could hear the hubbub of voices, and at the end of the corridor the two women turned into an open area with an L-shaped desk, like the admitting desk in any hospital. Except that all the staff wore army camouflage. On her left, a door stood open to a room where pale blue protective biosuits hung in rows from hooks on the wall. On her right, the door to the isolation ward was firmly shut. It had a window at eyelevel, and beneath it a secure hatch where foodstuffs and other items were fed into the ward via a chamber that bathed everything in ultraviolet light. To the right of it, a two-way autoclave was built into the wall for the retrieval of potentially infected material. On the left, there was a door into the changing area that led to the decontamination showers, providing a germ-free airlock for staff entering and leaving the ward.