‘Exactly. That’s what most analysts believe. But we’re into a new era now: bioterrorism, and those restraints no longer apply.’
Aleksey leaned back in his chair considering this. ‘No care for collateral damage to the enemy or to themselves.’
‘Yes, but not only that, it sort of links in with the whole point of terrorism in the first place.’
‘To force your enemy to bring in measures to contain you that restrict their citizens’ freedoms more than your actions could ever do.’
‘Oh, yes, that’s right. You do know a bit about this.’
‘I may have read a book about it once.’
‘Have you seen that filmWar of the Worldswith Tom Cruise? About a Martian invasion of Earth?’
‘Does it feature major unlikely head trauma and excessive explosions?’
‘Well, one or two. It’s pretty gory.’
‘Ah, well then, yes. I will probably have seen it.’
‘Wells wrote that book in 1897, but when they first broadcast a dramatised version of it on the radio in the 1930s people believed it was real. That the Martians were actually invading—and they fled their homes in panic. There was utter pandemonium. Mass hysteria. A wave of terror and panic swept the entire continent. But nothing had actually happened. Just words spoken on a radio.’
She helped herself to some more wine, but once more he refused a top up. It wasn’t the hardest thing he’d ever done, but it ranked up there along with them. But as he’d already discovered, although there was no observable monitoring occurring, it actually would be. Promises made. Promises kept. Although he couldn’t swear to it, he had a feeling his loquacious companion was being very closely observed by her sibling too, although Maxwell couldn’t, apparently, hear what she was saying. Perhaps she was just known in the family as the one who always talked about the plague.
‘What was I saying? Oh, yes, the food. This is lovely wine, by the way. I’m probably talking too much. Am I talking too much? But see, you’d want our wee beastie to jump species into the food chain, particularly the meat and dairy industry—cows, sheep, goats, camels, buffalo, pigs—and then be endemic and permanent. The easiest functional gain therefore would be our primary pneumonic plague spliced with something that already has that level of lethality to ungulates—that’s hoofed animals. Apicornaviruslike foot and mouth disease, or perhaps something likebacillus anthracis—anthrax.’
Aleksey sincerely wished he’d followed Ben’s imperatives now and not spoken to anyone. He and Radulf could have sat in the corner and talked to each other. Fortunately, Rachel got distracted by the man next to her once more who was offering her the choice from a platter of cheese, so he was able to scrutinise the Ben-and-another-man situation once more. Ben was now listening intently to something Maxwell was saying. Aleksey tried to stretch out his leg and connect, but all he managed to do was kick Radulf who was curled up by his feet. He took some cheese when it was offered to him and passed it down under the table in surreptitious apology. He wanted to know what the conversation across the table was about. Ben was now showing the man something on his phone.
Aleksey hoped it was directions back to Exeter.
* * *
Chapter Four
‘Have you heard of Gruinard Island?’
Aleksey reluctantly brought his thoughts back from Benjamin Rider-Mikkelsen and onto Rachel’s question and was tempted to tell her that he’d not but that hehadheard of a very nice one called Light Island, and that he wished he was currently there.
‘It’s in Scotland? Anthrax Island as it’s better known? It was used by the army in 1942 to engineer enhanced anthrax, and those seeds are still deadly now eighty years later. No one can step foot there.’
‘Ah, yes, I have heard of this place, although I did not know its name.’
‘Soil was illegally collected there forty years later in the ’80s and dumped at a military lab by terrorists, and it was still lethal!’
‘So, you would have this primary-pneumonic-anthrax plague in the food chain, but as you have already said, easily contained by antibiotics?’Please say yes.
‘Ah, well, no, that’s the second of the gains you’d give it—splice that new hybrid, our chimera, with a CRE—that’s a strain of bacteria totally resistant to antibiotics—and we have a depressingly increasing catalogue of those available. Human-to-human transmission, one hundred percent lethal, no cure, all the food chain permanently infected.’
‘Uh huh. Plague and famine?’
‘Well, yes, although it’s referred to as pandemic and food shortages now.’
‘Ah, someone else corrected me about that only recently. I believe it’s also called food insecurity. You said second gain? There is another?’
‘Absolutely. The actual power of a virus doesn’t lie in its virulence—how quickly it can kill its host—but in the longevity of its asymptomatic incubation period—how long the host unwittingly carries it around infecting others before they succumb themselves. Have you ever heard of that puzzle about a chessboard and a grain of rice? If you put one grain on the first square and doubled it for the next square to two grains, and kept doing that for all sixty-four squares, how much rice would you have, do you think? A kilogramme? Maybe a bit more?’
‘I usually consult my resident genius on such issues, but, please, do enlighten me. I suspect more than a kilogramme though.’
‘Yes, just a bit. You’d have enough rice to cover the whole of the UK a mile deep.’
