He unpacked and dressed for the beach. He wanted to wash out the airline travel from Islamabad and he needed some sunlight and sea air. The strain of the Scimitar program had been on his shoulders for eight years, and that didn’t count his scientific work leading up to the point where elements in the ISI decided to fund and green light the attack on Paris. The extended rounds of debriefings and report writing he’d had to go through after Paris had been exhausting. It had been made worse by the fact that the MERC and Bijar’s Clostridium perfringens program had been largely undeclared to the government and the generals. The Colonel was a ‘cut-out’—a middle man who enabled funding, resources and strategic planning, but always off the books. So there’d been two days of concern for Bijar, when he was interrogated directly by the upper levels of the ISI and the intelligence officers of the general staff. It wasn’t until the afternoon of the second day that he’d realised they were less concerned with the fate of millions of Parisians than they were with reputational damage to Pakistan, which took in billions of dollars in aid and defence technology transfers from the United States and Europe on the basis that Pakistan was a bulwark against terror. When Bijar made it clear that both Murad and Manerie were not in a position to cause further embarrassment, the ISI gave him the go-ahead to destroy the MERC and transfer his program to a new facility.

Bijar swam in the clear warm waters, watching large crude oil carriers gliding past on the horizon. He thought about how his sister, Anoush, and his father had enjoyed boating on this northern reach of the Indian Ocean, and how it enraged him to be excluded from his father’s approval. These two people he’d loved so much—and who had disappointed him so greatly—had met their demise at his hands. He was not proud of it, but he knew that love for one’s country, and faith, were things that not everyone understood.

Bijar dried off on the beach and nodded at his bodyguard, who stood in the shade of the palm trees that populated this coast. There were practical reasons to monitor a scientist such as himself, he thought as he showered in his villa. With the MERC destroyed, the research hard drives and the weaponised epsilon toxin cultures were secreted in a location known only to Bijar and the Colonel. And only one of them knew how to weaponise and optimise the clostridium strain that he’d isolated.