‘Aren’t you going to say anything?’ Luc Simon asked him.
Ben waited another full minute before replying. He wanted to be sure he understood this right. ‘The two of Streicher’s men we found at the safe house, Roth and Grubitz. Were they infected with what you’re talking about?’
‘And now both dead,’ Oppenheim said with a nod. ‘The entire area has been evacuated and sealed off by specialist biohazard teams. It’s a particularly virulent strain that attacks the system with extreme aggression.’
‘And if you’re not showing signs of infection within twenty-four hours, you never will,’ Ben said. ‘Hence the short quarantine period. Correct?’
‘Correct.’
Ben was silent a while longer. Thinking hard. Whichever way he came at it, the conclusion seemed inescapable. He could only pray he was wrong. ‘How long can something like this remain dormant and still survive?’ he asked Oppenheim.
‘Plague is a bacterial disease,’ Oppenheim said. ‘Its active agent is the bacterium Yersinia pestis, Y pestis for short. Unlike a virus, even without being kept sustained by a host, it can stay buried in the ground for centuries. Far from losing in virulence, it can actively evolve and mutate during that time, ready to spring back into action in strengthened form as and when the opportunity arises. Basically, it’s a survivor.’
Ben sucked in a deep breath. He hadn’t been wrong, and it wasn’t a good feeling. ‘The monastery,’ he said. ‘It was the source, wasn’t it?’
Luc Simon nodded gravely. ‘That’s what we believe, too.’
‘I lived there for seven months,’ Ben said. ‘There was nothing, no mention, no clue. Except for the walled-up crypt.’ He spent the next few minutes explaining to them what he’d found down there. Père Antoine’s reticence about discussing the monastery’s past. The dark secrets on which he wouldn’t be drawn. Then Ben told them about the errand that had taken him away from the monastery during the crucial hours of Streicher’s attack. He described what he’d found on his return. The slaughtered monks, the skeletal remains of the plague dead. And the gold bars.
‘We found one in your bag,’ Luc Simon said.
‘They were scattered about the place,’ Ben said. ‘The way they would be, if you were in a hurry to transfer a large haul of them from deep underground to a waiting truck, with the clock ticking. As if one accidentally dropped here or there didn’t really matter because there were so many of them.’ He shook his head. ‘I was so sure. And I was so wrong.’
‘Streicher is a man of many parts,’ Oppenheim said. ‘Not least of which are that he’s extremely wealthy and extremely cunning. Red herrings don’t come much more expensive than planting gold bars about your crime scene to create a false trail.’
‘But it worked,’ Ben said. ‘It worked very bloody well indeed. It stopped me from thinking about the reason for the second explosive charge. The one that sealed up the hole and nearly buried me. He didn’t want the cops to see what was down there. The bastard covered his tracks beautifully.’
And the cigarette too, Ben thought. The planted black Sobranie that had almost led him to declare war against every Russian mafioso from Nice to Marseille. Another piece of artful distraction dreamed up by a deviously calculating mind. Ben almost had to admire it.
‘Let me reveal some further information I don’t think you’ll be aware of,’ Oppenheim said. ‘Very few people are. It concerns a discovery made in 2012 by an ecological survey team in the mountains surrounding Chartreuse de la Sainte Vierge de Pelvoux, who were there to assess the increasing wolf population in the Hautes-Alpes area. Since it became illegal to hunt the damn things, they’ve turned into more and more of a problem for livestock farmers. Anyway, during an expedition on foot, the survey team came across the body of a strange creature. A rat, physically very deformed and apparently eyeless.’
‘I saw rats like that in the crypt before it blew up,’ Ben said. ‘They must have been breeding down there for a thousand generations.’
‘When the rodent’s body was taken for analysis, it was found to be harbouring a rare and aggressive strain of plague bacterium,’ Oppenheim said, ‘which in fact infected the survey team leader and two of his colleagues. None of them survived,’ he added dryly. ‘The incident was given only light coverage in a handful of scientific journals and wasn’t allowed to reach the mainstream media, for fear that it could affect the Alpine tourism industry.’
‘But the information is out there nonetheless,’ Luc Simon said. ‘And we think that it was while he was holed up in hiding after the crushing defeat of his failed Korean mission that Streicher must have come across it, and it pricked his interest.’
If Streicher makes it his business to find out about something, believe me, he does. Silvie’s words echoed in Ben’s mind.
And: Ancient secrets. Ones that had been almost completely forgotten over the course of centuries. Only he had been able to connect the facts. How he was going to make history. How he was going to be remembered.
‘Streicher’s a researcher,’ Ben said. ‘He must have devoured everything he could find about the area, to figure out where that rat had come from. Starting with internet searches using obvious keywords like “rat” or “plague”. That’s how he eventually worked out that the source of the infection was right underneath the monastery, that the rat must have crawled through a crack in the mountain and died out there in the open. It was the connection with the old forgotten story of the martyr’s curse.’
‘The what?’ Luc Simon said. Oppenheim was quiet, listening.
‘The prophecy of a dying man as he burned at the stake,’ Ben said. ‘That a thousand years of pestilence would descend upon the land and bring his revenge on the descendants of the people who’d betrayed him. It was only six hundred odd years ago. Maybe Salvator’s timing wasn’t so wrong, after all.’
‘What are you talking about, Ben?’ Luc Simon said.
‘The reason the contamination was down there in the first place,’ Ben said, ‘is that within just a few months, in 1348, the curse appeared to come true. It was a Plague year. The dead and the dying alike were walled up in the crypt underneath Sainte Vierge de Pelvoux. Sealed off from the outside world and left there for their bones to be gnawed by a thousand generations of rats. One of which happened to escape centuries later, giving Streicher the tip he’d been waiting for. It was an easy target. All he needed were the right people for the job, which he already had. Plus the right equipment.’
Now Ben realised what had been haunting him. Roby’s last words as he’d lain bleeding to death from the gunshot wound in his belly. He’d said, I saw ghosts. All white.
Not strictly white. More silvery-white. Streicher’s team members in hazmat suits, foraging deep under the monastery to gather all the toxic samples of dead and decomposed rat tissue they could pack into the white cases Silvie had later seen inside the assault vehicle. Containers for the transportation of biohazard materials. Meanwhile, the hazmat suits, masks, footwear and gauntlets had been in the bags that she had been tasked to burn after the raid.
‘So now you understand what we’re dealing with,’ Luc Simon said. ‘A lethal infectious pathogen in the hands of a maniac who wants to rule the world.’
‘It was a devastatingly simple plan,’ Oppenheim said. ‘If you can’t get hold of modern biological warfare agents, you source some ancient ones of your own. We can only assume that Streicher must have on his payroll at least one expert capable of processing the material. A chemist, or a biologist, or both. We can further speculate that he may have these people at work, even as we speak, on a vaccine or serum that he intends to use to protect himself and his fellow Parati members before unleashing this thing.’
‘Which potentially buys us time,’ Ben said.
‘Potentially, yes. How much time is an open question. If our speculations are correct, Streicher must have access to some kind of private laboratory facilities. We don’t know what, or where.’
‘But you do know that what he’s got is
the same pathogen as the medieval Black Death,’ Ben said. ‘Bubonic plague. Which is presumably a disease well known to medical science, and highly treatable.’
Luc Simon looked down at his feet.
Oppenheim pursed his lips.
‘What?’ Ben said.
‘Mr Hope,’ Oppenheim said. ‘I wish it were bubonic plague.’
Chapter Fifty-One
‘Then what the hell is it?’ Ben asked, staring from Oppenheim to Luc Simon and back again.
‘You need to understand that there are various forms of plague,’ Oppenheim said. ‘The so-called bubonic variety, named after the “buboes” or black lumpy spots that are a characteristic symptom of that particular strain of the disease, is spread by fleas infected with the Y pestis bacterium. It can’t be contracted directly from a victim, which significantly reduces the rate and efficiency of the contamination. In effect, the disease is hamstrung by its own infection mechanism. It’s just not enough of a killer to fully account for the appalling virulence of the medieval Black Death, which spread like a bush fire through Europe and beyond and claimed some two hundred million lives during its short but nefarious history. Many scientists now think that the Black Death is more likely to have been a form of pneumonic plague.’
‘I’m not a doctor,’ Ben said impatiently. ‘These terms mean little to me.’
‘The diseases have plenty in common,’ Oppenheim explained. ‘Both have been used in biological warfare. In the fourteenth century, the Tartars catapulted corpses of bubonic plague victims over the city walls during the Siege of Kaffa. In World War Two, the Japanese packed infected fleas into bombs with the aim of spreading the disease among allied troops. Suitably callous tactics, but crude and limited due to their reliance on parasitic organisms to carry the contagion. By contrast, when the Soviets experimented with aerosolised Y pestis during the Cold War, they discovered they’d created a weapon of a whole other magnitude of lethality.’
‘Pneumonic plague?’
Oppenheim nodded. ‘Same active bacterial agent, our old friend Yersinia pestis. But what makes all the difference is that in the pneumonic variety, it’s airborne. You don’t need to be bitten by an infected flea to contract it. This thing is directly communicable from one living being to another, humans and animals alike. Proximity is all it takes. It can spread with incredible speed over a large area, the rate of infection continually multiplying as it takes hold. In short, pneumonic plague is to its bubonic sibling what a nuclear missile is to a handgun.’
Ben stared at him. ‘And this is what we’re dealing with here?’
‘Going by the pathology we’ve seen in both victims, Roth and Grubitz, then I’m very much afraid that that’s exactly what we’re dealing with,’ Oppenheim said. ‘It enters the lungs and swiftly takes over the entire system. Coughing and sneezing tend to be the first symptoms, quickly followed by violent fever and nausea, then uncontrollable bouts of seizures and bloody vomiting. Soon afterwards the system collapses into septic shock. Tissues break down and become necrotic and gangrenous. A horrible and agonising death ensues within hours.’
‘If that’s what happened to Roth and Grubitz, they had it coming,’ Ben said.
‘So does half of Europe, if we don’t do something to stop it,’ Oppenheim said. ‘Consider the mortality rates. Bubonic plague kills between one to fifteen per cent of victims if treated, and between forty to sixty per cent in untreated cases. In other words, even without medical aid, your chances can be better than fifty-fifty. Contrast that to pneumonic plague, which has a one hundred per cent fatality rate if the patient isn’t treated within the first twenty-four hours.’
‘Maybe it’s not as infectious as you think it is,’ Ben said, shaking his head. ‘I’m living proof of that. I wasn’t just exposed for those few moments at the safe house. I was down there in that hole, knee-deep in infected rat shit and breathing in God knows what kind of dust and spores and bacteria. So why didn’t I get it?’
Oppenheim spread his hands, as if to say good question. ‘Studies have been done that suggest some Europeans have a genetic immunity to plague bacteria, going back to medieval times. That’s one possible explanation. Another is the medication you were taking.’
Ben frowned. ‘What medication?’
‘Whatever the substance is inside the small brown glass dropper bottle that the arresting officers found on you at the safe house,’ Luc Simon said.
‘What, that? It’s just some kind of traditional tonic that Père Antoine gave me,’ Ben said. ‘I never really thought of it as medication.’
‘How much of it were you taking?’
‘Just a few drops every day,’ Ben said. ‘I gave some to Silvie Valois, too.’
‘Why?’
‘I like to keep my hostages in tip-top condition.’
‘What’s in it?’
‘I never asked.’
‘We’re having it analysed anyway,’ Luc Simon said. ‘I’m expecting a full chemical breakdown in the next few hours. It could be critical data for us.’
Ben was baffled by their interest in it. ‘Wait a minute. Are you trying to say there’s no modern drug treatment lined up to fight this disease?’
Oppenheim said nothing.
‘It is treatable?’ Ben repeated.
Oppenheim was quiet for a moment longer. ‘We’ve got a long history of combating plague, sure enough,’ he said. ‘And in recent times we learned to become more relaxed about what had long been a dreaded disease. As long as it was caught early, it was readily treatable with antibiotics. You’ll note my use of the past tense. Was. Because things are changing. In fact, they’ve already changed. We have a major problem. One that we were warned about, way back at the turn of the twentieth century, and happily ignored, when many doctors predicted that the antibiotic panacea wouldn’t last. In fact they warned that these sensational new wonder drugs could even do harm in the long run. Firstly, by causing people to become dependent on them for even the most minor infection, potentially compromising their natural immunity. The natural law of use it or lose it. Secondly, even back then they knew how fast microbes could mutate, adapt and evolve. The fear was that they could develop ways of resisting the drugs. But they were laughed at, and we went on to spend the entire twentieth century and the first decade of this century abusing the drugs wholesale. Now we know the doomsayers were absolutely right.’
Ben said nothing.
‘It’s happening right before our eyes,’ Oppenheim went on. ‘In the last fifteen years, we’ve seen a seventy per cent increase in deaths from antibiotic-resistant infection, and that figure is set to get much worse. Hospitals will soon become no-go areas due to the hazard of MRSA and other powerfully evolved micro-organisms. It’s a two-pronged problem. One, we’ve become weaker. Two, the enemy has become stronger. We underestimated the bugs, far more than we could have even imagined.’
‘I’m afraid it’s true,’ Luc Simon said. ‘I’ve read the reports myself.’
‘Microbes are incredibly adaptable things,’ Oppenheim said, almost glowing with admiration for the critters. ‘They’re smarter than us in a lot of ways. Some can even repair their own DNA, an incredible feat of bioengineering. Ultimately, they will be the downfall of humanity. In the short term, things aren’t looking so great either. The medical profession doesn’t want to admit it, but right now, we’re like deer in the headlights. In fact, there’s never been a worse time for a bacterial pandemic to happen. Our populations are at an all-time high, with unprecedented concentrations of people between whom disease can spread more efficiently than ever before. International travel makes our efforts to contain an outbreak practically impossible. Combine that with our lack of viable treatments and the majority of the population’s lowered immunity to infection …’ Oppenheim cracked a grim smile. ‘In short, we’re one small step away from being comprehensively screwed. My job is to stop us from taking that one small step.’
‘You said Streicher could be preparing a vaccine or a serum to pr
otect himself and his own people,’ Ben said. ‘Couldn’t we do the same from this end?’
‘It’s a possibility,’ Oppenheim said. ‘But not a promising one. As unbelievable as it may sound, plague vaccines are still in their infancy. Drugs prepared from attenuated live Y pestis samples have only ever been tested on mice, and even then with limited efficacy. There are no guarantees of their success on humans, which goes for Streicher and his gang too. They could very well be dead already. Which would account for their disappearance, wouldn’t it? As for us, even if we were able to develop a workable antiserum to protect the public, what are the chances we could produce enough, and fast enough, to control a major outbreak?’
‘There has to be something that works,’ Ben said. ‘Did Torben Roth receive treatment before he died?’
Oppenheim nodded gravely. ‘Every antibiotic drug that’s ever been used to combat plague. Gentamicin, Streptomycin, Chloromycetin, Doxycycline, Ciprofloxacin, Tetracycline, you name it. Zero effect. The bacteria just marched on through. Like trying to hold off a tank division with a child’s popgun.’
‘It could be that he was too far gone already,’ Luc Simon said. ‘Perhaps if we’d been able to intervene sooner, he’d have survived.’
‘Or perhaps not,’ Oppenheim said. ‘It could simply be that our last line of defence has failed before the war has even begun.’ It was the first sign of friction Ben had seen between the two.
‘We can contain it,’ Luc Simon said firmly.
‘I’d love to say I could believe that,’ Oppenheim sighed, closing his eyes and pinching the bony bridge of his nose.
‘Plus, there are all kinds of other possibilities,’ Luc Simon said. ‘Consider the fact that Roth and Grubitz managed to contract the infection in the first place. How did that happen? Was their protective clothing compromised in some way? Grubitz was the first to catch it, so maybe his hazmat suit was faulty or got damaged during the raid, exposing him, and then Roth caught it from him afterwards.’
‘Anything’s possible,’ Oppenheim said.
The Martyr’s Curse (Ben Hope, Book 11) Page 28