The Doctor’s innovation had obviated the need to make the ETX dose so strong at the source. Instead, he focused on building a strain of ETX that was ready to start acting internally as soon as it landed. His innovation was to isolate the sialidase enzymes—the presence of which allowed the ETX proteins to readily connect to cells in the intestine—and promote their production from the ETX itself, thereby ensuring that even with a lower quantum of ETX in the introduced load, infection rates were even higher because the ETX was optimised to work. As his younger scientists put it, with the ETX primed to produce sialidases, it was ‘locked and loaded’ and could succeed with relatively small concentrations. The most important aspect—the ETX would now hold its full lethality in water.

Yousef thought about the phone call he’d just received and considered his dilemma—to release the enhanced pathogen in Operation Scimitar, and avenge his mother’s family; or to keep testing it until it was perfect. He was a perfectionist but he had to listen to his source in Paris. If the French were closing in, it was time to act. Scimitar would have to begin.

He padded along beside the cages and some of the people stirred, sticking their heads up and looking through the bars. They were Communists and insurgents and some of them were Christians and Jews. Mostly they were university students seized from protests and illegal political meetings and sent to the Doctor to assist in the national effort. Their religious or political designation was irrelevant, thought Yousef. Science was agnostic.

Walking from his office into the main gallery of the lab, he turned on the lights and in front of him was a large window that looked into the test cell. It was painted white, and in a pile on the floor was a bloody mess of naked young people. No one moved. They were dead from a teaspoon each of ETX-infected water.

He walked back to his office, the eyes of the prisoners following him. He accessed the encrypted service run by the ISI and selected the ‘To’ tab that identified one of his project partners. From this console, his messages were sent to the ISI office in the MERC, and they would relay the email via their own secure systems.

He paused, thought of his mother and his aunt, and then typed: Activate Scimitar.

He hit send.

He was ready.

CHAPTER FORTY

CHAPTER

FORTY

The first thing de Payns noticed about Raven when she walked into the cafe was that she’d just had her hair and nails done. He could smell all the product from the salon, and her dark hair was big and piled up on top of her head, exposing her neck and giving him a look at the small silver hoops in her ears. She wasn’t his type, but she dressed for what she had.