CHAPTER 6
K ate Braithwaite tossed restlessly in her sleep in the small, one-bedroom apartment the government had provided for her in Atlanta. She’d drifted back to her boarding school days at St Catherine’s in Sydney and, as usual, her challenging mind had got her into trouble, this time with Sister Agnes, the history teacher. The lesson had been on wars and violence in the twentieth century. In 1987, Kate was in her third-last year at high school.
‘In summary,’ the stout and severe-looking Sister Agnes said, ‘Idi Amin was responsible for the murder of nearly a half a million of his countrymen; Pol Pot murdered three million people – a third of Cambodia’s population; Joseph Stalin was responsible for the deaths of twenty million, a million of whom were executed; Mao Tse-tung, somewhere between fifteen and twenty million; and Hitler, sixty million as a result of the Second World War, including six million Jews murdered in his Nazi gas chambers. In the twentieth century, somewhere between 170 and 200 million people have already been murdered or killed as a result of war and violence, and with Islamic fundamentalism on the rise, that number is likely to increase. On that rather depressing note, does anyone have any questions? Yes, Katherine.’
‘Sister, the one common denominator in all this carnage is that the perpetrators were all men, and in more recent wars, such as those in Northern Ireland and the Middle East, where religion is a major factor, once again those inciting the violence and bloodletting are men. It doesn’t seem to matter whether it’s Islam or Christianity. In our own church the leadership is always male. Don’t you think we females deserve a go, surely we couldn’t do any worse than the men?’
A titter rolled around the room.
‘I’m not sure what you mean by deserving a go, Katherine, but I will thank you not to cast any aspersions against the leadership of our Holy Church,’ Sister Agnes sniffed haughtily. ‘Now, for homework
…’
Kate was invariably at the top or second-top of her class in every subject except one. Every annual report had marked her down for religion.
Kate tossed onto her side as her dream changed tack.
‘What’s this “Religion – a disappointing attitude”?’ her staunchly Catholic father demanded after he had summoned Kate into his study on ‘Bulahdelah’, the family’s 30,000 acre sheep property on the New England Tablelands west of Armidale.
Kate shrugged, unable to tell her puritanical father that she’d lost the faith he’d instilled in her since as long ago as she could remember.
‘Well?’ her father demanded. Dalton McKenzie was a big man in every sense of the word. His square, weatherbeaten face was flushed, as it always was when he was angry. He’d been elected Mayor of the Armidale Dumaresq Council on no fewer than three occasions and was known throughout the district for his no-nonsense conservative National Party views. Once again, his disappointment with Kate surfaced. When Kate’s diminutive mother Muriel had produced a son and heir for her husband, the baby had been stillborn. Kate’s father had made no effort to hide his disappointment when the doctors told Muriel McKenzie she would not be able to have any more children.
‘I don’t see why we always have to agree with what the nuns teach us,’ Kate replied finally. ‘Why are the leaders of religions all men?’
‘There’s only one true religion, Katherine, and that’s the Catholic faith,’ her father replied angrily. ‘The leaders are men because the Bible says so, something you would obviously do well to read more often, young lady.’ Dalton McKenzie reached for the old family bible with its cracked and worn leather cover that held pride of place on his desk. Opening it at Saint Paul’s First Letter to Timothy, he began to read from Chapter Two. ‘Let a woman learn in silence with full submission. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet she will be saved through childbearing
…’
‘One day you will meet someone and be able to establish a home for him and provide him with a family. Until then, I suggest you guard that unruly tongue of yours. Now go to your room!’
Kate stormed out of her father’s study, angry that she was fighting back tears and determined he wouldn’t see them. She had long ago come to terms with having a father who hardly gave her the time of day, although if she was honest with herself, deep down she still craved his approval. Kate slammed the door to her room and, as she often did when she felt alone in the world, she sat down at her desk, took the cover off her most prized possession and switched on the Nikon microscope that had been a Christmas present. Her father had been puzzled by her request but in the end he’d agreed. Cookbooks would have been far more appropriate, but if his daughter wanted to muck about with bugs, maybe it would make her happy. Kate’s tomboyish qualities only made him feel more acutely the disappointing loss of a son.
Kate tossed again in her sleep as her dreams shifted to Tiananmen Square. Standing at the Tian’an Gate, which separated the square from the Forbidden City, Kate gazed south across the vast flat snow-covered expanse of the largest paved square in the world. It had been designed to hold a million people, yet today the square was eerily deserted. In the distance people were fleeing the city in their tens of thousands. A 38-metre high obelisk, the Monument to the Peoples’ Heroes, stood in the centre of the deserted square. Beyond it, on the southern edge, Kate could see Mao Zedong’s Mausoleum – a large, low building supported by pillars where the great tyrant’s embalmed body lay in state in a rose-coloured glass enclosure. To the west, the Great Hall of the People dominated while the eastern side of the square was flanked by the National Museum of China, the roof adorned with dozens of huge red national flags with the big yellow star and four smaller stars in one corner. The large paving stones seemed to be moving, and the reason for the people taking flight soon became clear. The snow on the great square was covered in millions of wriggling, deadly Ebola viruses. The long thin strands were curled at the end and Kate could see that the capsids – the protein covering that protected the virus’ nucleic acid – were finely textured, another characteristic of the filovirus with no known cure.
The images of Tiananmen Square faded to the Forbidden City and the huge pagodas of the old Imperial Palace. Knobbly, grenade-like smallpox viruses were bouncing down the steps of the Taihe Dian, the Hall of Supreme Harmony, and into the vast snow-covered courtyard. Thousands more people were fleeing in front of the smallpox and Ebola, their bodies covered in raised, bleeding pustules, blood streaming from every bodily orifice.
Kate sat up in bed, shocked by her dream and wondering what it meant. She looked at her watch to find that she’d been asleep for less than two hours. Had she known about a meeting that was about to take place between the Vice President of the United States and Richard Halliwell she would have realised that the cosmos was warning her of what was to come.
CHAPTER 7
T he report was entitled ‘The Chinese Threat: an Asian Tsunami’. Richard Halliwell pushed the analysis he’d commissioned on the Chinese to one side of his huge walnut desk and leaned back in his leather chair, the back of which was embossed with the Halliwell logo – a big gold ‘H’. Like the yellow ‘M’ of McDonald’s, it was a trademark that was recognisable anywhere in the world.