The passport officials at the tiny airfield hurried them through, just as the Luxor Airport staff had similarly hurried them through, seeing Ryan’s condition. Everyone in Newquay appeared to know Herzog welclass="underline" they bought entirely his story that he had rescued Helen and Ryan from the troubles in Egypt. Ryan was, allegedly, suffering from CS-gas poisoning: ‘the terrible Egyptian police, you saw the riots in Cairo …’
Two of Herzog’s men assisted him into the car. Ryan thought, in his darkening, despairing hours, this was all pointless: he was probably going to die.
Let darkness and the shadow of death stain it; let a cloud dwell upon it; let the blackness of the day terrify it.
The car began its journey south through dark woods of wet pines and more vivid green fields. Or maybe the forests weren’t so dark, and Ryan’s blindness was colouring everything. He stared, desperately, out of the window. Helen clutched his hand.
Little granite cottages shivered next to little granite pubs. The old chimneys of mineheads pointed accusingly at God.
‘Moqqatam,’ said Helen.
Herzog turned. ‘What?’
‘The Zabaleen, in Moqqatam, they are your lab rats, yes? You have been testing all your stuff on them.’
For a few seconds Herzog seemed atypically thrown. He said nothing as the car burned along the damp black roads, but frowned blackly. At last he spoke. ‘You may as well know. Maybe you even deserve to know. Yes.’ He shrugged, staring ahead. ‘When I first became interested in parasites, I had no idea of the possibilities relating to monotheism. I was just interested in mind control, parasites that alter human behaviour. One such is Taenia solium — it causes bizarre behavioural changes that are just as subtle as those attributed to toxo: seizures, headaches, depression, but also psychoses.’ He gazed out of the car at a drizzly field. ‘Also restlessness, delusions of persecution, visions of divine fire and holy voices. Some versions of Taenia solium can give you hallucinations that are so bad and realistic you want to kill yourself. You see the worst things your mind can imagine.’
Helen insisted, ‘Moqqatam.’
‘I’m coming to that.’ The car accelerated onto a dual carriageway. ‘If you ever get the chance, Google the name Kevin Keogh. He was a nice ordinary salaryman, in Arizona, but he became subtly infected with Taenia solium. He went totally crazy, jumped to his death and—’
‘Moqqatam!’
‘Isn’t it obvious? All this evidence made me think. What if you could weaponize mind-altering parasites? Put them in aerosols you could broadcast from a crop-sprayer. Hell, put them in a fucking warhead. Israel’s ultimate defence. The Armageddon Bomb. So we started our initial experiments, in Israel, on animals. But we really needed human guinea pigs.’
‘The Zabaleen.’
‘Why not? Sassoon told me about them. They sounded ideal. Because those poor rag-picking schlubs are despised by everyone: even the beggars of Cairo’s cemeteries look down on the Zarraba, the pig people. The Zabaleen also needed a clinic in their City of Trash, and so we built them that clinic. And we also gave them real medicine: vaccinations, surgery, amputations.’
‘But not just that!’
‘What made the Zabaleen optimal for our purposes was that they do get a lot of strange diseases, from sorting through all that venomous trash.’
‘So no one would notice if you experimented on them as well?’
Herzog seemed to smile. Ryan could not really tell. He was losing the ability to focus his eyes.
‘The Zabaleen are therefore perfect cover. We look like charitable clinicians, yet in ten per cent of cases we give the Zabs a new and experimental injection, ostensibly for their hepatitis or their HIV. But really we’re testing synthesized or weaponized parasites. Then we sit back and see what happens. Usually it’s quite bad. But who cares? No one cares. Who would notice if another wretched Zabaleen went mad, or killed a priest, or turned out to be hosting a strange new screw worm? The Zabaleen get parasites and psychoses all the time, only my clinic assists them.’
Helen’s voice was angry. ‘This is just Nazi science. It is no better than Mengele.’
‘No, it’s better. So we turn a few into golems, sure. But we’re not trying to wipe out the Zabaleen. We just want to make sure the Jews are not wiped out ever again. Look —’ Herzog pointed — ‘we are nearly here.’
‘But the Zabaleen burned down your clinic, we heard on the boat.’
‘We had a few problems. They got violent. Maybe they suspected something. Anyway, we did our practical in-the-field experiments there, and we do our more intense research here, in Cornwall. We’re going to move the lab but at the moment this is the place where we analyse results, process the data, manufacture the first weaponized parasites. And now we are on to the God Parasite, trying to defeat the worst parasite of all.’
‘I could tell the world about this.’
‘Really? Yes, you could. I suppose. If this was Hollywood. But then I could get someone to infect you with espundia.’ The car turned onto a narrower road. ‘That’s an interesting organism. Eats away the flesh of the face, basically turns you into a living skull.’
Helen ignored this. ‘You’re moving the lab, why?’
Herzog gazed out of the window. The white spoil heaps dominated everything, it was an extra terrestrial landscape. Ryan could see whiteness ringed with black. And yet beyond it, something golden. Peace, at last; peace and reconciliation. He yearned for the quietness.
Herzog’s voice was a comforting drone. ‘Nearly there now. Yes, we’re moving the lab. And it’s not the first time. The Israeli government became hostile to my more interesting ideas vis-à-vis religion, and the abolition thereof. So, we decided to come to Britain, somewhere discreet, with access to English-speaking scientists. But now we’re going to move the lab to an even more friendly regime. Singapore perhaps. We’re working on it.’
Ryan spoke, for the first time in an hour. ‘Cats. We know they are fundamental, a crucial link. How?’
The Israeli stared at Ryan. ‘I was right to hire you.’ He sat forward. ‘Yes, there is a second Egyptian parasite which we have isolated. It also comes from Akhmim. We call it the Bastet Parasite.’
‘The god of cats.’
‘Because cats are the vector, as with toxoplasmosis. It’s rare but you can catch it from cats, and the Egyptians were the first to suffer from it. We think it explains the association of cats with evil, magic and the Devil throughout history, because, you see, some cats really do pass on a parasite which makes the human hosts believe they have charismatic powers, and in a sense, as I said, the hosts do. It seems that human hosts of Bastet can unwittingly hypnotize people, or bewitch them, convince others they are sorcerers, with special powers.’
The car turned onto an empty car park in the very middle of the spoil heaps. Several glass-and-black-steel buildings broke the monotony of white clayspoil and grey sky. Ryan was lifted from the car. He was in the last minutes of lucidity; he knew the cycle now, the symptoms. Death approached, smiling.
And still Herzog talked, as Ryan was laid on another stretcher, and wheeled towards the lab.
‘The Egyptians must have reacted, subliminally, to the Bastet Parasite: that’s probably why they revered cats so much, worshipped them for thousands of years. They sensed that cats had some strange potency to transmit to humankind. And this is why all occult and all hermetic magic is thought to derive from Egypt, because Egypt is the origin of the domestic cat. Neat, no? Of course, we’re not sure of the neurochemistry but then, we’re not quite sure why feline toxoplasmosis makes women more attractive to men.’