Aleksey nodded thoughtfully.
‘Exactly. That’s called the seduction of the exponential curve.’ She had trouble saying this, and slurred a little. Another visit to the wine glass helped things along. ‘Picture our patient zero, our first person infected with the chimera. We don’t want him to die right away, do we? Oh, no. We want him infectious but utterly unaware of this—so he’s travelling around the place as much as possible. All of the countries that got the plague in the 1300s got it through ships bringing the rats and fleas with them. Even Iceland, of all places. They tried to keep the sailors offshore and didn’t let the boats dock, but the rats swam to land for the better food sources, and thus the plague came with them. But today, our patient zero could get infected then travel to Heathrow, take a plane to, say, Australia, transit through Singapore, land in Sydney, and behind him on the plane and at Changi airport he leaves hundreds, even thousands, of infected travellers and aircrew going to other countries. Exponential growth. It’s perfect. If you could splice that delay factor into the chimera it could spread to almost the entire world before people started getting sick. Then entire health systems would collapse simultaneously.
‘The best weapon of terror—it’s not the actual virus or bacteria necessarily, but the fear and instability you can create in the population. And as you said: the restrictive measures necessary to contain it are sometimes worse than the disease itself. You’d have to lock people in their homes, restrict their food, possibly put them in mandatory quarantine facilities. And who would enforce it all? The army would be decimated in the first wave. Think about America. They’ve got four hundred million guns. Who’s going to come and take any of them to a facility?’
‘Six hundred naked men in a line whipping themselves with scourges tipped with nails to cleanse the land of plague.’
‘Oh, my God, you’ve heard that story too! Isn’t it fantastic? Well, horrible, too, obviously. They marched right across Europe, swelling their ranks with survivors of the Black Death—traumatised, disfigured, raving. They marched two-by-two in a column through towns, singing hymns as they flagellated themselves. Pretty ghastly.’
She twirled her glass for a moment, staring into the liquid as it swirled around, perhaps picturing an apocalyptic landscape broken only by a chain of bloodied men marching. ‘Do you know, an American scientist once predicted that it would only take twenty years before gain of function genetic engineering would effectively make all our current antibiotics or other treatments completely ineffective against biological warfare attacks.’
‘When did he predict this?’
‘Twenty years ago.’
‘Ah.’
‘So, anyway, my brother is glaring at me that I’m talking too much. I can feel the waves of disapproval. Tell me about the stuff Tim does now for you with your charity. I’m fascinated to know.’
Aleksey supposed he would be, too, if he actually knew. ‘But this is all theoretical, yes? This super-plague. This chimera? This is just stuff you believe to be possible but would obviously never do.’
‘Tim didn’t tell you how we’d met then. I assumed he had.’
‘No, you said you were all in his little three musketeers’ outfit.’
‘No, I said we met because of them. He and his cell raided the lab I worked at. Fortunately, they only penetrated the Level 1 facility; although I’m not sure they entirely got that. I think they might have released a mouse with a sniffle, but that was it.’
‘You…are you telling me you’ve actually made this super-plague thing? I’m sorry, again, I struggle to translate sometimes. Please, don’t tell me you actually went ahead and made this thing?’
She thought about this for a moment and replied a little testily, ‘No, we were making avaccineforit.’
‘Oh, good.’ He pondered this for a moment, staring at Ben’s beautiful tousled hair, then asked, ‘Why would you need a vaccine for something that doesn’t exist?’
Testy turned to snippy. ‘Well, yes, obviously, you have to make the new pathogen first. Then you attempt to make a vaccine.’ Snippy turned to outright tetchy. ‘We believed we needed to have vaccines ready in case someoneelsemade it. Hello, remember? Bioterrorism? To make a vaccine you have to make the functionally improved virus or bacterium first. Your lot, the Russians, weaponised Marburg, so no one at this table has got any cause to be smug and censorious, have they? They made a vaccine-resistant strain of anthrax, too. The Americans tried to get a sample, but they couldn’t, so they had to make it then. I have these kinds of conversations a lot, by the way; nothing you’re saying surprises me. It’s very hard to explain the necessity for this research to laymen. Forty members of al-Qaida were found dumped on the roadside in Iraq in 2009, dead of bubonic plague—huh, I wonder how they just tripped over that.’ She hiccupped. ‘Excuse me. What do you think would happen if someone else made this gain of function chimera before we have a chance to make the vaccine?’ She drew a line across her throat in a rather un-microbiologist way, Aleksey thought, and murmured, ‘Seventy percent of the global population killed in the first wave through human-to-human transmission, then the remaining thirty percent facing a food chain permanently infected and lethal. Then that tiny, traumatised thirty percent would starve.’
‘Wait, did you sayhave a chance. You have not actually made a vaccine?’
She took a deep breath and then acknowledged, ‘Yes, well. We couldn’t. We tried for years. In the end, we destroyed our chimera and left that lab. We’d met Tim then, you see. The ethics of what we were doing seemed all wrong. We left and set up our own laboratory. Max and Austin run it. I’m just a majority shareholder. They’re working on a drug for tinnitus at the moment—that’s a dreadful condition that doesn’t get enough attention. But my investment in the company funds my projects a bit, although I still take the occasional contract work—like the syphilis study. Ironically, the lab we worked for in Middlesex closed not long after we left. But my whole experience there, and meeting Tim, is why I’m now doing what I’m doing.’
Aleksey was tempted to murmurwhat, scaring the fuck out of me?
‘Have you heard of the Order of the Light?’
‘No. Something to do with Florence Nightingale?’
She smiled. ‘No, she was the lady of the lamp, but I suppose there is a connection. Remember the six hundred flagellants? They tried to rid the land of death with what was nothing more than medieval barbarism and superstition. Well, there was another group travelling through Europe at the same time called The Order of the Light. They were thought to be a splinter group of a larger religious order, the Carthusians.’
‘Why do I have a feeling this is going to bring us back to Richard III?’
‘Monasteries, yes. Exactly. When they find monastery burial sites across Europe that date from 1345 to 1348—the second Black Death pandemic—all the skeletal remains show signs of death by plague—except for some. In every mass grave, they find one or two bodies that didn’t die in the pandemic, in fact appear to have no indication whatsoever of disease. They were entirely healthy.’
‘But…dead. So what did they die of?’
‘It appears in all cases they were tortured to death, hideously mutilated—some showed signs of trepanation—holes drilled into their skulls while they were alive—or they were broken on the wheel. And in every single case where these bodies have been found, if there are contemporary records available, the medieval scribes talk of the light—that men of light robed in white came to the village and lived and worked with the dying. That these men did not get sick at all, despite pulling the dead from houses, eating the infected animals as the villagers were doing, burning corpses, trying to tend and heal.’
‘Men of light robed in white? Please don’t tell me you think they were angels.’
She actually blushed. It was surprisingly attractive. She swirled her wine thoughtfully. ‘No, of course not. Gold-star atheist here. But I do have a religion of sorts, I suppose: science. And if you separate out all the myth and fear, you have a curious correlation between accounts of this plague-immune group and the discovery of the mutilated remains in the pits alongside the plague victims. And orders such as the Carthusians wore white.’ She chuckled. ‘I do call this my Holy Grail, so maybe I’m falling under a bit of a spell too.’
