‘Can you crack it?’
‘I can try. It’s hardly my area of expertise. Shit, I can barely finish a crossword. Haven’t got the mindset. Sudoku give me a nose bleed. But if this is a classic substitution code we should be able to discern some obvious patterns. ‘E’ is the most frequently used letter in the English language. ‘O’ runs pretty close. Single-letter words will be either ‘A’ or ‘I’. Regular groupings might imply sound-clusters like ‘TH’ or ‘ING’. Nail those recurring symbols, and you could start to turn this gibberish back to actual words.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Guess I could take a section of text and work out the placement. But Ekks is a smart guy. I doubt he would create such a simple code, something so easy to decipher. It’ll be more complicated than that. There will be an additional step. Maybe some kind of weird algorithm. A shifting transposition. A key, that only he can provide.’
‘So he’s the only one who knows what this shit means?’
‘If we had a big-ass computer and the right software we could probably crack the code without his help. Get a couple of chess grandmasters on the case. But we don’t have those kind of resources any more. If we can’t figure out the code with pen and paper, his research will die with him.’
‘But why would he do that?’ asked Lupe. ‘Encrypt his notes? What was he afraid of?’
Cloke shrugged.
‘Maybe he didn’t want to be abandoned down here in the tunnels. He wanted to be indispensable. He made sure the documentation was unreadable without his help. A way of ensuring his ass got flown out of here in one piece.’
‘The man is a fraud. Hundred bucks says there is no code. Those letters? Those symbols? A sick joke. Page after page of bullshit.’
‘We can’t be sure.’
‘That book is pure voodoo. A prop. An illusion. Might as well be a book of spells and incantations. He has no secret knowledge. He doesn’t know anything about this virus. Doctor of Lies. Doctor of Nothing. Happily knife the fucker.’
‘The man is an accomplished neurosurgeon. When he turned up at medical conferences he got mobbed like a rock star.’
‘Doesn’t mean a damn thing.’
‘A Saudi prince had a stroke a couple of years back. A young guy. Champion polo player. A maid found him face down on the marble floor of his penthouse bathroom. They summoned Ekks, sent a private jet to ferry him to the Emirates. Ekks declined to leave New York, said he had too many patients in need of care. They offered him millions. The State Department pressured the hospital board. But he still said no. So they loaded that prince on a Gulfstream in Dubai and flew him to Manhattan. They took over an entire floor of Bellevue. Wouldn’t trust anyone else to work on their boy.’
‘Like I said. The guy’s a control freak.’
‘You’ve barely spoken to the man.’
‘I’ve looked into his eyes. One glance. That’s all it took. He knew me, and I knew him. I’m a connoisseur of evil. On the streets, in the yard. I’ve met monsters, and this guy is off the scale. All kinds of horrors crowding his brain. Sure he never acted on his fantasies. Always kept a perfect facade. Smiled and laughed at cocktail parties, turned up at every charity fundraiser with a speech and a big-ass cheque. All round nice guy. But at night, when the lights are out, you can bet demons dance behind his eyes. You think Sicknote is trouble? You think those fucks massing outside the door are a problem? This guy is a hundred times worse.’
44
Lupe sat with her back to the wall. She closed her eyes and leaned her head against the brickwork. Faint snore.
Cloke watched her sleep. A subtle transformation. Her jaw-jutting aggression slowly softened. Hard years melted away and she was a girl once more.
He tore tape and flapped open the plastic bag. Jumbled documents. Photographs, data, suicide notes blotted with tears.
He pulled out a handwritten sheet of paper and started to read.
Harold Donner
Bellevue Dept of Neurosurgery
I killed a man. I, along with my colleagues, participated in murder. We took a healthy person. We infected him, watched him suffer and succumb, then dissected his body. It was an extrajudicial killing. Those of us involved took refuge in circumlocutory language. We called it ‘extreme therapeutic measures’. We discussed ‘the procedure’. But it was murder, plain and simple. I’m not proud of what I did. I have no doubt it was an absolute betrayal of the Hippocratic Oath.
It had to be done.
We were desperate to find an antidote to this terrible disease. But to fully understand the pathology of the virus, we would need to study its progress from the moment of infection, examine samples of bone marrow and cerebrospinal fluid, watch replicating cells populate a bloodstream and fuse with a central nervous system.
It would cost a life.
A terrible choice. Ekks was adamant each member of our team should play a role. Three doctors, three nurses. We would share responsibility. None of us would shoulder the burden alone.
We could have refused, kept our integrity, gone to our graves morally intact. But that would have been an indulgence.
It was my job to select the test subject.
The day we fled Bellevue hospital, we were accompanied by four prisoners from the Special Management Control Unit. I suspect the orderlies charged with keeping them secure would have happily left them to starve in their cells or get ripped apart by prowlers. But Ekks insisted they travel with us.
Looking back, he already had a plan.
We ran to the 23rd Street Station. We seized a train and rode south to Fenwick Street. We pitched camp.
Ekks outlined his proposal. He wanted to observe the moment of infection, second by second.
Weeks earlier, the Centre for Disease Control had supplied our team with a sample of the virus in its purest form. It arrived under military escort. A white biocontainment box with a strange half-skull symbol on the lid, as if someone hurriedly tried to scribble a warning glyph:
Inside the box was a gloved hand. The glove looked like it had been cut from a cosmonaut pressure suit. White canvas, cooling capillaries, dimpled rubber palm-grip. Splintered bone and dried flesh protruded from the gauntlet. There was a blue anodised lock-ring at the wrist. Cyrillic lettering and part numbers etched into the titanium.
Each outbreak of this disease had been associated with Russian space debris. Months ago, a fuel tank re-entered the atmosphere and crashed to earth in forest north of Spokane. The following weeks saw further starfalls over northern Europe and the Arctic Circle. Each impact was followed by the outbreak of a lethal haemorrhagic pathogen designated Mystery Pathogen 01, aka EmPath.
I asked Ekks about the glove. Was it part of some secret military space programme? Had a Soyuz capsule fallen to earth?
He smiled. He said the gloved hand represented the original, most lethal strain of the virus.
He wanted to observe the virus colonise a human body. He wanted to see it pervade the blood stream, infiltrate tissue, bore into the spinal column and brain stem. Could the initial colonisation be blocked by antineoplastic agents? If it were treated like any other malignancy, attacked in the early stages using anti-cancer drugs such as Thioguanine or Methotrexate, could it be stopped?
It was a problem that dogged us during our time sequestered in Bellevue. We had unlimited access to infected subjects snatched off the street. But they were too far gone. Advanced cases. The process of infection, the manner in which the virus first fused with its host, remained a mystery.
Ekks put it to a vote. He wouldn’t undertake the procedure unless we gave unanimous consent.