‘I couldn’t agree more. See you then – all the best for the season, sir.’
‘You too, Hackman, enjoy your movie.’
He put the phone down and completed the sequence on the bio-metric panel. He placed the files in the cupboard, and after he heard the satisfying click of its locking system, he joined his children in time for the opening credits.
Chapter 17
Noah spent a frustrating day with Khan. Every time he questioned the doctor about his new vaccine, he dismissed him with a ‘Later, later . . .’
Although Khan had welcomed him into his personal laboratory, he never left Noah alone for long enough to check samples, even if Garner could get him past the security panels on the refrigerators.
Noah returned to his hotel room, pushed the door open and took his gun from behind his back. He locked the door.
The room was exactly as he’d left it. And yet –
The bathroom door opened.
‘I could have killed you!’ he snapped.
‘Unlikely. You tend to look first. You trust your reflexes. Lesser agents shoot first and look later.’ Sahara pulled out a bundle of papers from her bag.
‘I thought these might help.’ She sat on the bed and began sorting through the documents: articles from Sri Lankan newspapers, patent applications and annual reports from a biotechnology company called Sri Bodhi that was pioneering medical technology in the Eastern Alliance.
Noah sat with her, not looking at the papers. He didn’t put his gun away. He studied her face. A stray curl fell forward across her cheek. She pushed it behind her ears and retied the loose bun.
‘This one is interesting.’ She handed him an article published six months ago.
Sri Bodhi levels the playing field
Executives from Sri Bodhi spoke passionately at today’s WHO conference in Mumbai. The conference marked the fifteenth anniversary of the Global Vaccination Programme, established in 2025.
Mr Prakash, CEO, argued for greater access to the medical technology of the West. He noted the increasing number of rumours and now allegations about disparities in the universal indicators of health between the countries of the West and the East. He noted that dropping mortality and morbidity rates and increased life expectancy should not be the privilege of only one part of the world. It should be the ‘right of all citizens’ he declared to the standing ovation of the audience.
‘World War Righteous is over. History has taught us that for peace to prevail, all countries must prosper, all countries must be healthy. Let us move on from history to a future where science and technology can be given to all, can be used by all, and can be benefitted by all.’
Mr Prakash declared that Sri Bodhi would not be held back by the Information Shield and the ‘draconian Western Alliance approvals process’. He said he understood why his company, like all companies and citizens of the Eastern Alliance were not allowed to cross the Information Shield. However, he stated that this geographical and digital information divide disadvantaged the Eastern Alliance.
The current policy implemented by the governments of the Western Alliance and the Eastern Alliance was mediated at the end of WWR by the United Nations (shortly thereafter re-constituted as the Central Western Alliance Government) with non-partisan support from the WHO. It was agreed and enshrined in the Armistice Accord that any technology (including but not limited to medical, military and information technology) developed by private sector companies in the Western Alliance must be approved for trade, sale and implementation in the Eastern Alliance by the Department for Biological Integrity.
At the end of the conference, Sri Bodhi declared it will conduct a review of disease control centres to ensure that their equipment is on par with the equipment of similarly densely populated cities in the Western Alliance.
Mr Prakash reiterated, ‘Although India is my home, we will begin our work in Sri Lanka. For too long it has been unfairly prejudiced by the stigma of history. And we will not stop at the boundaries of the South Asian Sector. We will assess all countries in the Eastern Alliance. This is a long-term plan for us – and we hope a long-term relationship with the people of the East – in which we will help build the infrastructure and our own capacity to create happy, healthy societies across both the East and the West.’
Mr Prakash’s speech was followed by another standing ovation.
‘Sri Bodhi, Sri Bodhi,’ Noah whispered, flicking through the other articles. There were more of the same: Sri Bodhi arguing for the technological rights of the East. Sri Bodhi meeting with Eastern leaders. Sri Bodhi giving grants and equipment to hospitals, labs and disease control centres.
‘The name means “respected tree”.’ Sahara explained. ‘It’s the tree Lord Buddha meditated under – where he achieved Enlightenment.’
‘I know.’ Noah stopped at another article. It showed President Rajasuriya holding up a shovelful of red earth outside Colombo General Hospital. Three children stood beside him, holding trays with flowers, incense and fruit. The traditional offering to the gods.
In the next frame, the children poured the offering into the shallow hole made by Rajasuriya, patches of damp visible under his armpits. It was a consecration ceremony for a memorial to those killed at the hospital during the first pogrom. Standing behind Rajasuriya, in each photograph, was a much younger but unmistakable Prakash.
Sahara leaned over. ‘It’s dated 13 May 2030. Ten years ago. That’s the holy day of Buddha Vesak.’
‘Rajasuriya still secretly plans his personal calendar using the ancient dates.’ Noah said. ‘He’s hedging his bets between God and Bio. Sensible. Do you have a hard line from Sri Bodhi to Khan’s lab? More than corporate boasting?’
‘Corporate accounts, publicly filed at the Mumbai Stock Exchange.’ Sahara pulled out a heavy document from the pile and opened it. Noah read the balance sheets.
‘If Sri Bodhi funded Khan’s lab – do they own him? And who owns Sri Bodhi?’
Sahara shrugged. ‘Wear the blue shirt for dinner tonight. The yellow one makes you look old.’
*
Noah stepped out of the car and onto the broken pavement. Khan’s tired house was sandwiched between a block of apartments and a shiny convenience store. At the front door he felt a spear of heat strike his back. He reached for his weapon, ducked and turned.
A motorcyclist honked angrily and kept driving. He was wearing a helmet, jeans and a leather jacket. Not a sarong and singlet like most. Noah’s hand went to his back. It was wet.
Khan opened the door. ‘Welcome, Noah – you’re a mess. Chickpea curry I believe.’ The old man laughed. He led Noah through a narrow corridor.
‘The bathroom is there. I’ll be in the kitchen.’
Noah took his shirt off and looked at it. ‘Shit.’ He soaked the red stain in the sink, rubbing it hard with a cracked bar of soap.
He opened the bathroom cabinet. It was a small pharmacy: several powerful painkillers, anti-nausea medication and steroids. He closed the cabinet.
‘I don’t think I can save the shirt,’ he shouted down the corridor. ‘Do you mind if I grab one of yours?’
‘Yes, yes – just find something,’ Khan shouted back.
Garner directed him through his earpiece. ‘First door on the left, sir – his study.’
Noah opened the door gently, revealing a large table covered in papers. He checked the corridor and entered.
‘What am I looking for?’ he whispered.
‘I don’t know, sir. Blink twice to activate your lenses and I might be able to help you.’
‘Sorry.’
‘No problem.’ He waited while Garner scanned the room. ‘There is audio but no visual surveillance. I didn’t know scientists were this messy.’
‘Maybe just the mad ones.’ He stepped over piles of lab reports, test results and patient files.
‘Secure cabinet, left corner.’ He followed her instructions and placed his handheld over the fingerprint panel. His copy of Khan’s print worked
.
‘There are hundreds of patient files in here.’ He lifted the first one. ‘Patient B276; Anuradhapura Clinic.’
He checked the second, third and fourth files. He skipped to the middle and then the back. The patients were all from the same clinic, and the files all contained brain scans. He heard footsteps and closed the cabinet.
Khan stood at the doorway with a shirt.
‘I was just looking at your wife. She was very beautiful.’
‘She was.’ Khan took the photograph from Noah, touching her face. ‘This one was taken at the Great Wall of China. I remember thinking: how audacious – to build such a wall.’ He laughed. ‘Human beings like walls, yes?’
‘Sir,’ Garner spoke in his earpiece again. ‘The photograph of the wife – I’ve expanded it. Her pendant is that shape – the mandala that Dr Neeson showed you . . . it must be Khan – he must be the ghost.’
Noah looked around the room. ‘Doesn’t it hurt? To have all these reminders of her – she’s everywhere.’
‘Yes it hurts, but the mind heals, Noah – science has taught me that. It is an extraordinary thing. We are designed to regenerate and to fight to live.’
And to live to fight. Khan said designed. Not: we have evolved to regenerate. There was a difference.
‘I think if someone I loved died, I couldn’t bear seeing her photos,’ Noah said. ‘I would try to make myself forget. I would purge my home of every reminder.’
‘You could do that?’ Khan asked.
‘I could. I did.’ He remembered the little bear she slept with at night, her thumb in her mouth, her fingers tight around its dangling leg. Maggie had wanted to keep it all – she took most of it with her when she left.
He had thrown the rest and then crumbled, weeping onto the filthy ground next to the bin, oblivious to the passers-by who walked around him.
‘What happened?’ Khan reached out. ‘Tell me, son . . .’
Noah shook his head and backed away, as though reluctant to speak, overcome with grief.
‘Come then – help me cook,’ Khan said. ‘That usually makes me feel a little better.’
In the kitchen, Khan measured the mustard and cumin seeds with a spoon from the lab set. He poured them into the pan and stepped back when they spat and sizzled.
‘Aisha used to laugh at me. She said cooking is not a science – it is an instinct. She would take a pinch of this and a handful of that. Her food was wonderful. Science is my instinct. I prefer to titrate my curries.’
Noah reached for the peeled onions and garlic. ‘Shall I?’ he asked. Khan nodded. He chopped them finely the way Maggie had taught him. She was also an excellent chef.‘Tell me when you’re ready.’ He lifted up the cutting board.
‘One minute,’ Khan swirled the spices around. ‘Now, thank you.’
Noah scraped the food into the pan, inhaling the familiar fragrance.
‘You cut well. Can you cook?’ Khan asked.
‘Yes, but I don’t do it much. I drink a lot of shakes now – nutrition boosters. The flavours are okay.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s only me at home and I’m rarely there. Work.’
‘Yes, work – you work too much. I can tell. Your mind is always working through something. You should let your mind rest sometimes. Be still.’
Stillness eluded Noah as much as sleep.
‘Pass me the prawns.’ Khan motioned to a bowl of cleaned prawns in the sink. They were the size of fat figs. ‘Shakes, genetically enhanced, tasteless food, chee chee.’ He shook his head. ‘You’ll love these, Sri Lanka’s finest.’
He threw the prawns into the hot pan and tossed them, coating them in the spice mix, smiling as the grey flesh curled and turned bright orange. He turned off the cooker.
Noah leaned over the pan. ‘Looks great, let me help you.’ He took the plates and steaming rice to the table. Khan followed him with the prawns and a dhal curry.
They sat together, silent before Khan spoke.
‘You know, even when you purge a place of all things connected to that person, even when you remove all trace of their existence and their past, you cannot truly eradicate the memory any more than you can truly eradicate a virus. The memory remains like a sensation, imprinted on the gene, destined to emerge again.
‘When my wife died, I looked to science and I searched for a reason. Why this disease, why my wife – why not another disease, or another man’s wife, another man’s best friend. Why mine?’
‘And what did you find?’ Noah whispered.
‘I found that all life seeks life. The virus seeks a host so it can live.’ Khan reached over and heaped rice onto the middle of Noah’s plate. A small mound, capped with dhal on top, its saffron-coloured gravy trickled into the prawns on the side. ‘Nature has allowed all of us a place here on this planet. We can either seek to eradicate each other or we can find a way to live together.’
‘No – we can eradicate or be eradicated.’ Noah shook his head. ‘How do you live with a disease that destroys you slowly but surely?’ Or in the case of his daughter, quickly and ever so painfully. ‘You are a virologist. Your job is to eradicate viruses.’
‘So you keep telling me,’ Khan replied. ‘I do look for more robust vaccines and better cures.’
‘Like your new vaccine – the one you’re trialling . . .’ Noah prompted.
‘Yes, my new vaccine. But the why of my work has changed for me. I don’t do it to kill the virus but to find a way to co-exist with it. Animals that feel they are in danger fight back hard. Their response is always disproportionate.’ Khan served himself a much smaller portion of food and then put the ladle down.
‘The limbic reflex – I’m familiar with it.’
‘Indeed. Then you know that behind your eyes is your amygdala. So small but so powerful. All your violence and fear is right there, Noah. Imagine if we didn’t feel endangered – if we felt safe. If the virus felt safe it might not strike out at us.’
‘You know as well as I do that the virus has no feelings, no consciousness,’ Noah retorted. ‘It follows its own genetic imperative to kill in order to live.’
‘But we have feelings and consciousness,’ Khan replied. ‘And it hasn’t helped us. As I said, the virus and humans are not so different from each other. We could learn from each other I think.’
‘All the virus would teach us is how to become more efficient killers,’ Noah replied, weary and confused. He looked at his untouched food, the melted ghee in the dhal coagulating on the steel plate.
‘No, son, we learned to do that all on our own. We don’t need to improve that particular skill.’
‘Could the doctors do anything to help your wife?’ Noah probed.
‘No, nothing – they said the sickness had taken hold too deeply. There was nothing I could do for her.’
‘Was she comfortable?’
What comfort was there for any of them? He preferred violence to God. It gave him no real comfort but it was something. The Khans had been denied blind faith in a faithless God. Had they known any comfort?
‘Yes. She was comfortable with her disease and her death as she was with her life.’
‘And you?’ Noah asked quietly, respectfully.
‘Eventually – yes. Come to my clinic in Anuradhapura and I’ll show you why.’
*
Neeson logged on to his computer with the same password he’d used for fifteen years.
Aisha:08122025
He pulled up Noah’s last briefing. He couldn’t believe it. How had Khan decoded his virus and engineered a vaccine so quickly? He felt the familiar surge of awe followed by the equally familiar aftertaste of envy.
He wanted Khan’s vaccine. He had always wanted what was Khan’s.
‘Lead us not into temptation,’ he whispered. ‘But deliver us from evil.’
Neeson picked up the lab phone and dialled Hackman’s number.
Chapter 18
Vijay drove them north from Colombo towards the city of Anuradhapura. Noah held onto his seatb
elt and braced himself against the dashboard. Vijay looked at him and laughed.
‘Eyes on the road, Vijay,’ Noah said tersely.
‘My eyes are always on the road, sir, even when they’re on your worry-worry face.’
He weaved the car between lorries brimming with vegetables, and open trucks with livestock penned inside. He nosed the car less than a metre away from a busload of school children and then hit his horn repeatedly.
Little girls in starched white uniforms, their plaited hair looped and tied with navy blue ribbons, laughed and waved at them. Noah waved back with one hand, his other ready at his hip.
‘Why are we slowing down?’ he asked.
Vijay jerked the car to the side of the road, narrowly missing a small teashop.
‘My cousin owns this shop. I like to help him, bring tourists and friends. You want tea?’ he asked. ‘Best in Sri Lanka. Best in the world.’
‘I suppose so – tea would be good,’ Noah replied.
‘What’s up?’ Crawford noted the dilapidated building from the back seat. ‘I’m sure Khan has tea sans typhoid – we’ve only been driving an hour.’
‘Sanitation is our salvation,’ Garner quoted the WHO Declaration and got out of the car.
‘I didn’t know you had family here, Vijay?’ Noah asked, his left hand reaching for the safety on his weapon. ‘You didn’t mention it in Colombo.’
Vijay led them inside. ‘I’m sorry, sir.’
‘Are you?’ Noah replied, not taking his eyes from General Rajasuriya, seated at the table. A pit fire in the corner provided the room’s only light. Soldiers emerged from the shadows. They took Noah and his team’s weapons from them.
‘Good afternoon, Dr Williams, have a seat.’
An old man scurried forward with four silver tumblers of tea. It smelled of cardamom and cloves. Maggie would like it. Noah sat opposite the general.
‘How was your dinner with Dr Khan?’
‘Delicious, thank you.’ Noah counted the soldiers. Eleven. ‘He’s a good cook.’
‘And a brilliant scientist. We’re very proud of him – and protective. You’ve been working hard together.’
The Barrier Page 14