The Break Line

by James Brabazon

  “Let’s just use the old language now, shall we? Loose lips sink ships and all that. We wouldn’t want to drown before we’ve left the harbor, would we? I never was much of a swimmer.”

  “Mamaí ach oiread,” I replied in Irish. Neither was Mum. His face was colored red in the gloom of the passageway, his expression hard to read.

  When I was a child, I’d spoken in the melting pot of Russian, English and Irish that the three of us stirred at home. We were entirely unintelligible to outsiders and quite often stopped gabbling to one another in the mad patois we’d cooked up only when we realized everyone else around us was looking on in awkward, ignorant silence.

  He leaned on me, and we wound our way quietly around the warren of caves that fed into the wards and labs. We passed orderlies and doctors, soldiers and nurses—all of whom saluted my father, all of whom ignored me. Whether it was because I was with him or because I looked unremarkably like one of their fighters, I didn’t know.

  “I need my hand,” he said in Irish as we stopped in front of a gray metal door that had been roughly cemented into a natural opening in the rock. He paused for a moment and rasped breath into his good lung. The valve was working well—a simple piece of kit that stopped the chest cavity around the collapsed lung from filling with air. Most likely Juliet was attached to one as we spoke. “You even missed my rib, you brilliant boy. All this wheezing is just an old man’s fondness for strong cigarettes.”

  I hovered next to him in case he toppled, but he regained his composure and stretched out his right hand onto the touch pad. It scanned his fingertips, and the backlight on the panel blinked from red to green. He nodded to the door, and I pushed it open to reveal an improvised but well-appointed laboratory staffed by half a dozen men and women in lab coats and hairnets. They were all armed. They all ignored us. The smell of peppermint was pervasive. Our Spetsnaz chaperones stayed outside, and the door swung shut behind us.

  “This doesn’t look like the way out,” I said, continuing in Irish, “or a good place to surrender.”

  “Ah,” he replied. “That’s because you don’t know what’s in here.” He cleared his throat and addressed in Russian the officer I took to be the senior technician. “Captain Berezina. Coffee break, please.” She nodded curtly and trooped out the door we’d entered by, followed by the others, staring resolutely at the floor. As she left, I caught a glimpse of the hard cases at the ready outside. I wasn’t exactly at the top of my game. But I was pretty sure that with the help of one of their AKs I could make it to ground level in one piece. But outrunning a platoon of the crazies across open ground? No way. I had to find a way of shutting them down before I made a break for it. What to do with any fighters already aboveground was another issue entirely.

  I looked at my father and did a double take. For a moment it was incredible to me again. Yes, it was him. Really him. My father. Twenty-six years of playing the orphan, and now here I was standing next to him. I’d imagined meeting him many times—but none of those fantasies unfolded in a bunker in West Africa. Anger ebbed and flowed. I had no script to follow. But the weirdest thing was that after the shock subsided, it felt not only inevitable but normal. Of course we were here. Of course he hadn’t died when his plane was shot down. Obviously he was a Russian military medical mastermind. Why wouldn’t he be? That’s what he’d been for the British for years. I went to speak, but no words came. I had no idea where to start and even less of an idea where it would end.

  At the far end of the room, he unlocked a stainless-steel medicine cabinet and removed from it a transparent Perspex cube the size of my fist. Without thinking, I extended my hand, and he laid the block carefully on my palm. I held it up to the light and squinted at it. Suspended inside was what looked like a tiny cream-colored brain, cleaved perfectly in half. Attached and integral to it was a rear, third lobe—shiny black on the outside, pure white inside. It was about an inch by two inches, its weight impossible to gauge in the heavy casing.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “It’s how this all began, Max.” I lowered the specimen and turned my attention back to my father. “The reason I am here. The reason you are here.”

  “It’s a brain. It looks like one, at least. A diseased brain.” I turned it around in my hands. “Of what? A monkey? It’s weird. It looks almost human.”

  I’d failed science at school. It was a permanent source of amusement and irritation for my mother and father, both of whom were leaders in their field—my mother publicly at Trinity, my father secretly for the Ministry of Defense.

  “Ha! No. Not a brain.” He was excited, his voice lifting above the pain in his chest. “But incredible you should think so, Max. Incredible! You’re spot-on, see. No, it’s not a brain, but it is diseased—not that you can see it without a very powerful microscope.” I stared at it harder anyway—as if, by my concentrating, what was wrong with it might become clear after all. “It’s a seed, Max. A very uncommon seed. It’s from a fruit tree we thought was long extinct, from the Simaroubaceae family.”

  “That sounds . . . prehistoric?” Suddenly I was doing my homework again. All statements were also questions, all questions guarded to hide the ignorance that spawned them.

  “Yes! Actually there are plenty of prehistoric plants that survived in Africa, most of them living quiet lives in the equatorial forests, or what’s left of them. But this one is the great-great-grandfather—and then some—of the common old ackee. That’s probably why it was missed for so long. You see it looks common, but it’s unique because this is a seed that grows brains, Max. Can you imagine! This diseased little germ has the power to remake the human brain. And because it can remake the human brain, it can remake the human. It’s”—he drew himself up and reached toward the cube with outstretched fingers—“miraculous.”

  “Got it,” I said. Although I hadn’t. “And this is what makes the men that have been trying to kill me, and everyone else they meet, almost invincible?” Involuntarily I touched the ragged edge of my torn ear. “That’s not miraculous,” I corrected him. “It’s monstrous.”

  “No!” he shouted, and then winced. He withdrew his hand and guarded his chest. Tears welled in his eyes. “No,” he said again quietly. “It’s not monstrous. We are.” He hesitated. “I am.” He wiped his eyes with his palms and composed himself. “Listen to me, Max. Listen and learn. Not everything is as it seems.” I returned the seed to him. It already felt like a burden.

  “OK,” I said. My shoulders slumped. The fentanyl was wearing off, and a deep, tearing pain began to spread across my side. “We’re going to have to do this in English, though. My science is shaky enough as it is.”

  “Right, yes. English it is, then.” He switched languages. “I take it you’ve heard of Ebola?”

  I clenched my jaw and tried not to sound sarcastic.

  “Yeah. I’ve heard of Ebola.”

  It was as if we were both carrying on from where we left off two and a half decades before. The bunker was as much a time machine as it was a military base. But if it was a portal, I had no idea where it was taking us next.

  “Jolly good.” He smiled weakly. “Of course you know about Ebola. But do you really? Or rather, did we? Scientists, I mean. Virologists. No, Max, we didn’t.”

  “I’m glad I’m not the only one in the dark.”

  “You see,” he continued, “everyone knew all about Ebola except for one crucial fact.” He looked at me expectantly. I didn’t disappoint.

  “And what’s that?”

  “Where it comes from,” he said in Russian. He paused then and permitted himself another little smile before continuing in English. “The Americans searched for the source after the Kikwit outbreak in Congo back in ’ninety-five. Spiders, ants, birds, beetles—the US military swept up every living thing they could find within miles of the epicenter. They strapped face masks to monkeys, and perfectly healthy people to beds next to th
e dying, to see if—how—they’d contract it. And all they confirmed is what we knew anyway: that apes and duiker deer contract the virus from fruit bats, and that humans contract the virus from them. So bats are the reservoir—the pool, if you like—that infects the things that infect us. But where do the fruit bats get it from, eh?” I shrugged my shoulders. “You can’t tell me, because no one can. No one knows. Or rather, no one knew.”

  “And now you do?”

  “Yes, Max, I do. All the clever clogs at the WHO and CDC will tell you that although we don’t know for sure, bats are not just the reservoir but most likely the originating vector, too. But it’s not true.” He straightened his back and held up the seed between us. “This is! Bats contract Ebola from this seed. Actually this specific diseased seed . . . and presumably others like it, not that we’ve found any others, mind you. No one thought it was possible.”

  “What, that bats could catch Ebola from seeds?”

  “Yes. No! I mean no one thought an animal could contract a virus from a plant. Not just Ebola, but any virus. But it is possible, Max, it is. Dr. Raoult in Marseilles all but proved it in 2010 with his research on the pepper virus. That was an amazing breakthrough. . . .”

  The lab door opened, and a Russian officer put his head around the corner.

  “Vrach,” he asked, “how much longer?”

  “Calm, calm,” my father replied in Russian. “All is well. Tell your men to prepare the destination ward.”

  The officer looked at me and sniffed.

  “Da, very good.” He turned and left and the door clicked shut again behind him.

  “None of the, uh, warriors can be released without my order,” my father explained, and pointed to a fingerprint scanner on the desk. “My physical order. But I digress,” he said, sitting heavily at the nearest workbench. “Where were we?”

  “Marseilles,” I replied, trying hard not to sound exasperated. “But let’s jump to Sierra Leone, shall we?”

  “The vector. We were on to the vector. That’s right. Now, then.” He tapped the top of the Perspex with his index finger. “Fruit bats eat seeds. We’ve known that for years. But this seed is different, because it’s diseased with a filovirus. A very ancient and hitherto unknown filovirus.” He looked to me for affirmation. I nodded. “It’s the progenitor, Max, the daddy of that nasty little triumvirate family Filoviridae. Older than Ebola, older than Marburg, older than Lloviu. And do you know what that means?”

  “No, I have literally no idea what that means.”

  “Well, it means that with this, with the original, pure, first-generation vector, you can make a vaccine and a cure. And more than that, you can make it one hundred percent effective, and very, very cheaply. True, there are already vaccines. But they were synthesized from a strain of the virus that had already been transmitted and was, by its very nature, already dying. This, Max, this is pure, undiluted primeval dread. Simple, beautiful and powerful. It’s over twenty-five million years old! From the Oligocene period, at least. It might even antedate the Grande Coupure. Can you imagine that?”

  I told him I couldn’t.

  “And you can do something else with it, too.”

  His mood grew somber as the excitement of explaining the science of the vector fell from his voice. Finally we were back on to territory I understood.

  “You can make a weapon. A very powerful weapon. That’s it, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, Max. You could. One could. They wanted to.” He inclined his head toward the door. “Because the virus you can manufacture from this”—he tapped the plastic-encased seed again—“is infinitely more . . . virile than the Ebola virus we know. This is the ur-filovirus. We’ve done tests. The cure the Americans synthesized, the vaccine created after the Ebola epidemic here—they don’t work. Not on this. Not at all.”

  “So unless you have the seed, the vector, you can’t make a cure? And of course, if you don’t have a cure, then the weapon is worthless anyway?”

  “Not so bad at science after all, eh?” He reached out and patted my forearm. “That’s one reason Ebola was never used as a weapon before. We—I mean the Russians—synthesized plenty of it. Even crossed it with smallpox to make it spread faster. But . . . no cure, no weapon. Just like the Bomb, see? Power is nothing without control. Use it, and all you do is endanger your own side. Useless on the battlefield. Useless if you want to control territory. Useless if you want to control the number of people it affects.”

  “Kills,” I said. “Not ‘affects.’”

  “Yes, that’s true. Ebola is survivable. Ebola’s parent is not. Fatality is one hundred percent.” I chewed my cheeks and then chose my words carefully.

  “And you, you made it into a weapon?” I looked around, as though expecting to see something that actually looked like a bomb tucked away in the corner or displayed in one of the glass cabinets that lined the walls.

  “Yes. Yes, I did. At least, a weapon is what they got, but not in the way they expected. Not in the way any of us expected.” His face relaxed. The last of the excitement draining from his eyes painted him with a mask of detachment. He stood, and reached out for my arm to steady himself and then returned the seed to the cabinet he’d taken it from. “All will be revealed,” he said.

  We walked toward the door, and the guards outside.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “We are going,” he said, “to meet Dr. Mac Ghill’ean’s Monster.”

  26

  The patient lay as still and as unresponsive as the man I’d not long before killed in the observation room. I say “patient”; human guinea pig would be more accurate. This time, though, it was an African. Shaved head, statuesque, stretched out like an exquisitely carved block of obsidian. The gentle rise and fall of his chest and the rapid fluttering of his eyes the only signs he was alive. He was separated from us by a glass screen.

  “I think I met his friends earlier on today,” I said, and felt a surge of dizziness. I realized I had no idea what time it was. I felt detached, almost disassociated from the reality of what was happening.

  “I’m so sorry about that. I hear it was quite the unhappy encounter.” He wrinkled his nose as the sharp, clean smell of peppermint was refreshed by a blast of air from the vents above. “You’re only the second person to have killed one of them in combat, by the way.”

  “Five of them,” I corrected him. “I killed five of them. I met one by the river, too. Who else has had the pleasure?”

  “You don’t know? It was one of your men. A warrior, for sure. Wild strong he was. I’ve never seen a man fight like that. Crushed its head with his hands. He was lucky to survive, not to be infected. Miraculous, actually.”

  I didn’t tell him that Sonny Boy hadn’t survived.

  “I’ve recalled the original troop. They are incredible,” he said, inspecting the cardiogram, “but not invincible. Not yet, anyway. But with every generation they grow stronger. Soon they will be indestructible.” He touched the glass with the fingers of his right hand and shook his head. “My gift to the world,” he said softly. “Good God.”

  I felt physically sick, as if my body was recoiling from the rising realization of what my father had done.

  “So, what are they?” I asked. “What’s he?” I nodded toward the body. My father sighed, but said nothing. We were not alone this time. Two of the Spetsnaz minders had entered with us, and a technician sat at a desk beside the screen, reviewing spreadsheets. My father turned to me. The hard white light from the bulbs that lit the room glared off his pate. The knot of scar tissue on his left temple looked almost blue. Liver spots spread across the backs of his hands. He looked old. But he blinked, and his eyes were bright. They flared and stared at me. Another wave of nausea hit me. I felt disoriented. Cramps began to gnaw at my stomach. How long had I felt like this? I took stock of myself. My heart rate was climbing. I was sweating. Pain, tired
ness, the drugs I’d taken in the cave . . . they’d all masked deeper discomfort. I’d been sliding into actual sickness for hours without seeing it for what it was.

  “You see, after my plane, uh, came down in Angola . . .”

  “Came down? You were shot down. By the Cubans.”

  “No, son,” he said kindly, “that was a lie.” He paused, weighing up what he felt he needed to tell me, and what, perhaps, he owed me, against the time that remained. “A lie you and I have both lived with. For better or worse, it was the kindest lie we could bear to tell you.”

  Kind? I thought. It was kind to tell me you were dead?

  “We?” I said. “Who was ‘we’?”

  “Your mother, Max. She was betrayed while I was in South Africa. There was no time for her to run. She took the only way out offered to her.”

  Betrayed? I let the question fall with the scales from my eyes. Stalingrad had cast a long shadow. But I had never realized just how profound it had been. Of the many things I had both imagined and known her to be, a Russian spy was not among them.

  “And you?”

  “Me? I became the last defector. I died and was disowned and was reborn in Moscow. After she went and you vanished, there was nothing to come back for, not that I could have come back. That above all was made clear by—”

  “Stop.” I cut him off hard. Everything was the opposite of what I thought, what I’d always thought. And now there was no time to think at all. “I don’t want to hear any more.” I winced and put my hand on my broken ribs. “Fuck it. You are what you are. And here we are. Who the fuck is this guy? That’s what I wanted to know.”

  While I reeled inside, my father composed himself and switched his attention back to the man behind the screen.

  “This guy,” he said, “is one of the greatest medical pioneers that’s ever lived. We found the vector. I found the vector. So naturally I tried to make a vaccine, a simple, infallible vaccine from it. And this man, this brave pioneer . . . this . . . Lazarus was meant to be the first person ever to be inoculated not only against the virus we found but also against Ebola and all filoviruses.”