I Am Pilgrim (25 page)

Nothing happened – his guess that Tlass had been the same weight as him was right. Now for the

last hurdle: a retina scanner. He put the ice containers on a ledge and took an eye in each hand, noting which was left and which was right. Holding a slippery ball in his thumb and forefinger, he jammed

them hard against his own eyelids, deep into the bony socket. Unable to see, with only hope and prayer to sustain him, he turned to face the scanner in the wall.

He knew his gloved hands were no problem – the system was designed to ignore plastic or wire-

framed glasses, contact lenses, make-up and anything else. It was interested in only one thing – the blood vessels in the membrane at the back of the eye, each pattern unique among the six billion individuals on earth, even those born as identical twins.

The manufacturer claimed the technology could not be beaten and, while it was true that the retinas

of dead people decayed very fast, the real question was whether eyes taken from a living person and

fewer than three minutes old would have enough blood left in them to convince the software that this was Bashar Tlass standing in front of it. The Saracen had no way of knowing the answer, and probably nobody else did either – it wasn’t as if someone had ever volunteered to find out.

As a result of his observations, the Saracen knew that most people faced the scanner for about two

seconds, so he forced himself to count to three and turned away. He dropped the eyes in the ice and

turned towards the metal door at the far end. Again he started counting – the longest he had seen anybody wait for it to open was to a count of four.

He reached a slow six and knew he would have to run. His abort strategy was to smash through the

plate-glass window on the assumption that the key card and doors would have been frozen by the system. Once outside, he would drive the SUV to an area near a garbage dump which he had already

reconnoitred, terminate Tlass and walk twenty miles to the bus station. He would then take the first bus to the border and hope he could get across before they closed it.

At the count of eight he was turning away, his planning curdling into self-loathing, fear hammering urgency into every movement, when the steel door slid open. He was in.

The reason for the delay would remain a mystery – perhaps subtle changes to the eyes had confused the system and forced it to use a more complex algorithm, or maybe it had to rouse itself

from a stand-by mode – but he didn’t care. He strode along the corridor, through the steel door and

into a large atrium, all the time anticipating a sense of elation at his achievement. Instead, his hopes plunged.

Because of high walls, razor wire and surveillance cameras, he had never seen anything of the institute except the front facade. Without thinking about it, he had predicated the size of the building on that information. As it turned out, that was a serious error – perhaps a fatal one. Now inside the atrium, he could see that the place was huge.

Only Allah knew how long it would take him to find what he was looking for in a place so large,

while out in the world, at some stage, probably very soon, Tlass would be missed. When his friends

or family couldn’t reach him in the office or on his cellphone, somebody undoubtedly would drive

into the parking lot to look for him.

How long that gave him, the Saracen couldn’t tell – maybe they were already on their way – but he

knew now that time was short and the job was huge. As a Turkish proverb says, it was going to be like digging a well with a needle.

Unarmed, totally at the non-existent mercy of anybody who came, he sprinted down the first of five

broad corridors and jagged right when he reached an intersection. He stopped in mid-stride: armoured glass and an unmanned security desk blocked the way.

Two guards, sharing a weekend tea with him just after he had arrived, had mentioned a special security measure somewhere deep in the building which, based on their description of it, told him that it included a backscatter X-ray. Impossible to smuggle anything past because it rendered you as good as naked, the X-ray could also check a huge range of body measurements – the length of the right femur, the distance between the nose and an ear lobe. Unlike with a retina scanner, you had to be who you claimed you were.

No advanced medical facility in the world boasted armoured glass and backscatter X-rays, and the

Saracen knew that behind them undoubtedly lay all the most horrific things which were really being

researched at the institute. He never thought he would be able to access the inner bastion, and he didn’t care. If he was right, he didn’t need to.

He turned and returned fast to the intersection – a foreign man in a foreign land, desperately trying to find something rare but, strangely, completely
harmless
– just a box of small bottles used to protect the people who worked there.

As he plunged into the next maze of corridors and offices, through pools of deep shadow, past looming shapes that could have concealed any manner of threat, lights along the baseboards and in

the hallways suddenly burst to life. He stopped and wheeled on the spot.

Somebody had entered the building and activated the lights! He listened with every cell of his being for a clue to their position. From far away he heard a phone ring, a tap dripping, an exterior shutter banging in the wind. Its beat was almost identical to the rhythm of his pounding heart. He listened for footsteps, the squeak of clothing, the clink of an unholstered weapon. Nothing.

Then he realized, and fear went back into its cave – the lights were on a timer and night must have

fallen outside.

Chapter Eighteen

ALL ACROSS THE institute’s deserted parking lot, sodium street lights hissed to life. Tlass couldn’t see their yellow glow, he would never see anything again, but he heard them and his heart soared: the arrival of night meant the clock was running out for the filthy Palestinian.

A monstrous red pain had been spearing deeper into his forehead, and he could still feel blood weeping from his eye sockets, but the sedative was wearing off and although the pain increased exponentially so did Tlass’s energy.

He was a strong man, a fit man, but what was that worth if the spirit was broken? The thing which

was parachuting him down, the secret knowledge sustaining him, was the fact that he had already been running late when he left the building. Now night had come, he knew the alarm would be raised in earnest.

His wife and four adult children, waiting impatiently at his eldest daughter ’s house for a poolside gathering, would have already tried phoning all the numbers they could think of. One of his two barrel-chested sons – both making a name for themselves in their father ’s old outfit – would even have slipped inside and made a call to their father ’s mistress, ready to berate her for keeping him from his family obligations.

Unable to locate him and with darkness falling, the two boys, he was certain, were getting into one

of their cars to trace his route, worried he had been involved in a wreck. As members of the secret

police, both of them were always armed, and now all Tlass had to do was stay alive and help them find him as fast as possible. Despite his injuries, despite the pain and nausea, he knew how to do it.

Working his face from side to side, loosening the bands of electrical tape binding his head, he gradually ripped his hair, flesh and beard free of it. It was an agonizing task but if he could get his head loose he could use his teeth to rip at the tape around his chest and liberate his arms.

Earlier, he had felt the fanatic pull the cellphone from his pocket and then seen him grab the car handset out of its cradle. Moments later he had heard both phones being smashed to pieces on the asphalt. But the idiot had left the engine running in case he needed a fast exit and, knowing nothing about luxury cars, didn’t realize it meant the hands-free phone system was working. If Tlass could get his arms loose and lunge forward to the driver ’s seat he didn’t need his eyes to find the button on the steering wheel which activated the car phone. And he certainly didn’t need the handset.

The last call he’d made had been to his eldest son’s cellphone that morning, and hitting the steering wheel button would redial it automatically. All Tlass had to do was speak loud enough for the microphone above his head to pick it up. ‘Office. Car park,’ he whispered, practising.

His son would recognize his voice, and Allah help the Palestinian when the two boys arrived. The

woman’s cries for mercy just before he first entered her – and then her pleas for a quick death many hours later – would sound like soft poetry compared with the song his sons and their colleagues would make the fucker sing. He was still repeating the two words – louder, stronger – when he finally tore his head and chin free of the tape. He gasped with the pain and would have cried for real if he’d had any tear ducts left.

He sat for a moment to recover from the agony, and anybody cupping their hands against the glass

and looking through the Cadillac’s smoked windows at that moment would have seen a man with empty eye sockets, clumps of hair missing from his head and strips of flesh ripped from his face.

Had they continued to watch, they would have seen him lean forward to tear at the tape around his chest with his teeth and – given his wild determination – they would have said it would be only a matter of minutes before he was free.

Chapter Nineteen

A TINY SALVAGE diver worked tirelessly on the wreck of a Spanish galleon as five beautiful clownfish swam through the bubbles pouring from his helmet.

The wall-sized aquarium’s eerie glow lit the waiting room of the institute’s lavish executive wing,

casting a shimmering shadow of the Saracen across the opposite wall. As he moved through the silent

space – close to despair, not sure which corridor or alcove to explore next – he hesitated at the sight of the brilliantly coloured fish.

He hadn’t seen them for twenty years or more, but he knew what they were. ‘
Amphiprion ocellaris
,’

he said, surprised he could remember their biological name after so much time. Of all tropical fish, they had been his father ’s favourites and, often, when he worked at the weekend, he had taken his young son into his sea-front office and planted him among the huge research tanks. The largest was

filled with sea anemones, the beautiful but treacherous flowers of the marine world.

‘Look at the clownfish,’ his father would say. ‘They’re the only fish in the world which the anemone’s tentacles don’t poison and kill. Why? That’s what I’m trying to find out.’

Now, so many years later, alone in a secret weapons establishment, the irony of it wasn’t lost on the Saracen. Just like his father, he too was consumed by the search for something which gave protection against a deadly pathogen.

He would have liked to linger with the fish a moment longer, try to remember more of what innocence was like, but there was no time. He started to turn away – and stared straight down a dark passage that he hadn’t even noticed. At the far end was a door, and somehow he knew it was the room

he was searching for, even before he saw the Red Crescent fixed to the wall.

The sign, the Islamic version of the Red Cross, indicated it was the building’s first-aid and medical centre. He had been told of its existence by a former employee – a nurse he had worked with at the

hospital in Lebanon – but it was his father ’s clownfish which had guided him to it and he took that as a sign from Allah.

The door into the first-aid clinic wasn’t locked, and he moved inside fast, heading through the treatment areas until he found the supply rooms at the back. The purpose of the centre was to handle any on-site illness and to conduct physicals for new employees – hence it had ECGs, treadmills, defibrillators, respirators and enough other equipment to make any hospital proud.

In the centre of it all was a drug dispensary, and the Saracen entered it with the easy familiarity of someone with years of experience in hospitals. The wall behind a counter was taken up with boxes of

pharmaceuticals and racks of surgical supplies. Another wall housed locked cabinets faced with steel grilles which the Saracen knew contained the Class A drugs: narcotics, hallucinogens, amphetamines

and various opiates used as anaesthetics.

He ignored everything – at the back was a smaller room, and in it he saw the row of refrigerated

cabinets which had brought him to this godforsaken country and forced him to live like a dog in a parking lot.

In a surge of hope and anxiety, he moved along the glass-fronted refrigerators. His expert eye registered pouches of blood products, vials of temperature-sensitive drugs and, as in hospitals everywhere, the food and drink of the staff. But nothing of what he needed. With each step his desperation grew – maybe every scrap of gossip he had heard, every assumption he had made, had

added up to nothing more than a grand delusion. Like a fool, he had believed what he wanted to believe …

Then he looked in the last cabinet and bowed his head in a silent prayer. On a rack were eight cardboard containers holding rows of tiny glass bottles, and printed across the front of them was a

complex technical description that told the Saracen they were exactly what he was looking for.