Juggernaut

Gaunt jumped back. He dropped the jar in his hand. Glass smashed. Formaldehyde splashed his boots. The vertebrae lay on the plate floor and slowly curled.

More laptop interrogation footage.

Koell jolted Ignatiev awake with a second shot in the arm.

‘Just kill me.’

‘Earn it.’

‘I’ve told you everything.’

‘Tell me about the refinement process. You brought infected specimens to the necropsy room. You cut them up. What then? How did you amplify the virus?’

‘Naturally, the primary purpose of the human field trials was to assess the pathology of the parasitic illness, to chart speed of infection, latency period, resistance to antibiotics. The usual tests that would be performed on any emerging pathogen. We also wanted to refine the disease. We wanted to capture the strongest, most lethal concentration we could distil. The best way to achieve that goal was to incubate the virus in a living host.’

‘You’ve done this before?’

‘Yes. During my time at Vektor. We were working with Ebola. Our acquisition team had secured samples during a virulent outbreak in the Republic of Congo. They were nominally UNHCO personnel on site to coordinate emergency relief, but in reality they were senior members of Biopreperat.

‘Swabs were sent to Moscow in a diplomatic pouch and we began to culture the virus in our level-four lab in the basement of the Koltsovo Health Institute, Siberia. We conducted exposure trials on guinea pigs and rats.

‘One of our support technicians, a young man named Karpov, was accidentally exposed to the virus while fixing the air-filtration system. He was working on a wall vent in one of the containment labs. He was tired. He was careless. He punctured his glove with a screwdriver as he opened an exhaust filter and cut open his hand. He quickly fell ill. We did what we could. Made every effort to treat the man. We had antiserum flown from the Ministry of Defence in Zagorsk. We dosed him with ribavirin and interferon. But his condition deteriorated.

‘He lasted two weeks. The disease liquefied his internal organs. He bled from his eyes, nipples, anus. We gave him transfusions, tried to keep enough blood in his veins to maintain circulation.

‘Escalating brain damage. A PhD in virology reduced to an imbecile. We kept him in a chemically induced coma, partly for his comfort, but mostly to silence his idiot grunts and moans.

‘The moment he was dead, his body was transported to our necropsy room. We harvested as much as we could. The samples of virus we drew from his lungs and liver were far more virulent than the original Congo strain. The process of incubating the disease in a live human host had somehow refined the pathogen and made it more aggressive.

‘Karpov’s body was soaked in chloramine and sealed in a steel box. I attended the funeral. As soon as the priest had finished his oration, a truck reversed to the graveside and smothered the coffin in concrete.’

‘We stopped work on the Congo strain of the virus the next day. We immediately began to study and weaponise the samples taken from Karpov. The new strain was named Ebola-K, in honour of its host. It was one of the most lethal pathogens we had in our vault.

‘The samples should have been destroyed. If Vektor complied with subsequent arms limitation treaties, their vast bank of bio-weapons would have been consigned to the furnace. But somehow I doubt it. I suspect Ebola-K remains in deep storage, frozen in nitrogen, waiting for the day it becomes tactically advantageous to decimate an enemy population.

‘That is the process we set in motion in the Western Desert. Human amplification.

‘We requisitioned twenty prisoners and kept them penned in a couple of freight containers deep within the mine. We planned to infect each man and watch the virus progress to full term. Then, when their blood and internal organs were rich with the viral load, we would dissect their bodies in an attempt to isolate and refine the pathogen.

‘The second containment would act as our factory floor. The virus could be freeze dried and milled to a powder. Then each particle could be electrostatically coated with a polymer shell that would protect it from the degrading effects of sunlight and extreme temperature fluctuation.’

‘Can this parasite sustain life outside a human?’

‘No. It will always seek out a host.’

‘How does our man get inside Lab Three?’ asked Koell.

‘There’s no point trying to shoot your way through the door. It’s inch-thick steel and ballistic glass.’

‘Key code?’

‘Automatically locked out the moment the contamination alert was tripped. Your man will need to bypass the mechanism entirely.’

The third containment. A steel door with a porthole.

Gaunt took a Bosch drill from his backpack. Compact, like an electric toothbrush.

He drilled out the lock panel. He levered the keypad. He stripped wires and shorted the mechanism. Crack. Spark. Magnetic bolts disengaged. He cranked handles and pulled the door open.

Blast of hot, humid air.