Templar was divorced. Shrek was still married, but he didn’t have kids. There was only so much he could talk about with them. So his marriage had become an anchor, even as it had to sit like a psychological island, divorced from the mainland of his career. Romy was his rock, his trigonometry point for sanity. He was going to entrap the Pakistani woman they called Raven, but he wasn’t going to screw her.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

CHAPTER

THIRTY-NINE

The phone call came in the middle of the night, a function of different time zones and his associate being unable to make calls from his high-level job. The Doctor took the call and listened intently, not saying much.

‘The person of interest just returned from Pakistan and I understand he has briefed the CP office.’

‘CP?’ asked the Doctor.

‘Counter-Proliferation. Nukes and bioweapons. I haven’t seen the briefing reports but we can assume they’re looking at Scimitar.’ ‘They were in Islamabad?’ asked the Doctor.

‘Yes,’ said the voice. ‘When I have more details I’ll let you know.’

The Doctor thanked the caller and hung up. He walked into the kitchen and told his bodyguard they were going out. They drove to the MERC, where he let himself into the vast research facility that employed some of the smartest minds in Asia.

He descended to level B5, walked the long corridor and opened a door at the end of it. He hit the lights to reveal an enormous laboratory. It was equipped with the latest digital equipment from the US, Germany and Japan. Some of the autoclaves, centrifuges and particle accelerators had been sourced illegally and were so advanced that they were not yet used in this lab because they didn’t have the requisite computing power to run them.

During the day, a team of thirty-five scientists separated bacteria, grew it, enhanced it and then allowed it to reproduce under different scenarios and conditions. Over the past twenty years, the MERC had hosted experts from South Africa and Iran, North Korea and Russia. They had destroyed thousands of batches of bacterium culture that hadn’t made the grade, perfecting and pushing and then developing the strains to the point where they could both be stabilised—for certainty of transportation—and where, upon introduction to water, they would flourish, waiting for their introduction to the all-important receptor cells that just happened to reside on the intestinal walls of mammals such as goats, sheep, cattle … and humans.

The Clostridium perfringens bacterium produced a painful and deadly condition called ‘gas gangrene’, and it was one of the oldest bioweapons known to man. Gangrenous humans and livestock had been routinely thrown into rivals’ water supplies, usually a well or cistern.