‘Rahim…Rahim.’ Rahim felt the hand shaking his shoulders and he opened his eyes. ‘You were tossing and turning and calling out. Are you all right?’
‘Yes, yes, I’m fine,’ he said, blinking. Such a rapid journey from the distant past to the present was disorienting. No, it was only a dream, fool. Yet the dream had become so vivid since his cancer had been diagnosed, he often wondered whether he really had been at the Mongol siege of Caffa in 1346, the first recorded instance of the use of biological weapons. He had studied it when the Saudi army appointed him to head up its defensive chemical/biological weapons program. Renamed Feodoysia, he had even visited the city in the Crimea and, frighteningly, parts of the old centre had been familiar to him. The infected corpses, riddled with the bacillus Yersinia pestis, and their clothes harbouring the most likely carrier, the rat flea, Xenopsylla cheopis, had had the desired effect. The plague raced through the town and Caffa was taken. But not before many townspeople had escaped and carried the Black Death to other population centres, bringing about the Great Plague of Europe in which millions perished.
Rahim knew that the notion of punishment for deeds in a previous life was against the teachings of Mohammed, may His name be praised, but he considered it anyway. He wondered whether the vivid dream was an actual moment from a life lived long ago. Perhaps his rapidly advancing cancer was God’s way of evening the score over past misdeeds. And yet here he was again, loading a modern trebuchet with a biological agent to spread death and destruction. Rahim lay quietly on his bed for a time and considered the parallels.
‘Etti,’ he called out. ‘Prepare my medicine.’ Why face the day without it? Rahim told himself.
A short time later and with Etti’s help, Abd’al Mohammed al Rahim climbed into the one-piece rubberised suit as the warmth of the medicine spread through his veins, wiping out the pain as effectively as rain extinguishing fire. Only the barest hint of the agony that had been his constant companion remained. He sat patiently while Etti packed away the quarter brick wrapped in its red wax paper, placing it in a strong box. Initially she had disapproved, but then she’d seen the change, the benefits it brought. The drug gave Rahim the strength to lift his limbs off the bed. Under its influence, he no longer seemed a walking cadaver.
Rahim had calculated his consumption of the White Stallion at present dosage levels and determined that he had enough to last a year. However, the dosage was increasing steadily, his body building its tolerance to the alkaloid’s invasion of his nervous system. Rahim had three, or perhaps four, months left to live before the cancer took him to his grave. How much he would need in that final month was anyone’s guess, but Rahim wanted to be sure there was more than enough. The pain was unendurable without the white powder now, and its ferocity would build in his last days, blotting out memory, invading his every cell with its malevolence. The pain would occasionally even spike through the drug’s protective blanket, a foretaste of what was in store for him. Rahim was terrified. The White Stallion would protect him and eventually carry him into the earth’s embrace. He would sit on its wide back, out of reach of the demons that clawed up from the blackness to take him to their breast. Enough. Rahim’s heart raced as his mind grappled momentarily with reality. He had considered killing himself after the news of Kadar Al-Jahani’s death, his one and only link with the Holy Land. But his increasing love of the drug kept him from taking his own life, fortifying him with stamina to go on. Rahim pressed the seal closed on the NBC suit. He had work to do, dosages of another kind to determine.
A knock on the door made him lift his bloodshot eyes. Rahim realised the sound had been increasing in volume for some time. How long had the man been standing in the doorway? ‘Yes, what is it?’ he asked dreamily.
‘Do you have it, doctor?’ asked the man wearing shorts and nothing else. His body, Rahim noted, was covered in crude tattoos, mostly aimless doodles of self-mutilation.
‘Yes, there on the bench.’
The man’s bare feet tracked dirt and sand across the clean, freshly swept floorboards as he made his way to the workbench. He picked up the brick and examined it closely. It was yellow, transparent and heavy, but buried deep within the transparent yellow casing was what appeared to be a white tile. ‘Doctor, you are a miracle man,’ he said as he tossed the brick spinning into the air above and caught it. ‘This is perfect.’
‘There are fifty more curing in moulds. You can have them this afternoon,’ said Rahim.
‘Now we can finish production. Emir will be pleased,’ said the man, spinning the brick again into the air, much to Rahim’s annoyance, as he ran out the door.
Rahim summoned the energy to stand. The effort made his head swim. ‘Help me with this, woman,’ he said. Etti quickly closed and locked the door and turned the air-conditioning to full. She then hurried to Rahim’s side.
‘You should be in bed,’ she said, lifting the hood of the rubber suit over his head.
‘Ah, woman. You are like a scratched record. There will be plenty of time for lying down. An eternity of it.’ Rahim was beginning to warm to his assistant despite himself. Her concern for him was genuine. And when the drug was coursing through his veins, he even had the strength to at least consider filling her with his seed but, unfortunately, that part of his body had long since ceased to function as God intended.
The suit smelled of rubber and bleach, its outer shiny brown skin still slick in parts from the dousing she’d given it the day before. Etti also checked that the filter canister through which Rahim’s air passed was properly sealed. Next the gloves and galoshes. Rahim was barely strong enough to stand unassisted in the weight of the protective suit, but there was no choice for him. He had to wear it. To say that the agent they worked with was lethal was an understatement, the tiniest quantity of it capable of killing and doing so horribly — the ghastly deaths it visited on the test animals had proved that. The assistant helped Rahim to his workbench, where he would sit until she too was suited up.
‘Have the antidote ready, woman,’ he said.
‘Yes, doctor,’ Etti said obediently. She was already in the process of doing just that, anyway.
Etti removed the syringes marked ‘Atropine’ from the locked refrigerator and placed them within easy reach on the workbench. It was hot inside the suit and even a healthy person could not wear it for long; but it provided the best possible protection, so it was worth the discomfort. The time spent in the suit was critical where Rahim was concerned. Just forty-five minutes was all he could endure. That meant they had to work fast. ‘Come, doctor.’
Etti again checked that the seams were interlocked properly.
Rahim had cleverly devised a canister for the agent of death moulded from epoxy resin. Once sealed inside, the nerve agent commonly called VX was held in two parts. Each part was still deadly, but nowhere near as dangerous as when combined in the right proportions. When the time came, the canisters would shatter under the implosive force of shaped charges, combining the two solutions to become one of the most lethal weapons ever devised. Rahim’s innovation had further improved the delivery. The molecules of the epoxy would fuse with those of the agent to create a sticky, deadly slag that caused a hotspot beneath the point of detonation, the heavier epoxy particles coated with VX falling more rapidly to earth. There were four canisters in all, each capable of holding a little under five litres.