smiled to himself as he watched them both reach for an air hose. Curtis was holding a bunch of white roses with bare stems. He had personally removed every leaf and thorn. It would have taken some smooth talking to get the sister to agree to him bringing them in here, Imran thought. Like any of the waste from this ward, the flowers would eventually be incinerated at ultra high temperatures.

Kate groaned as the sister mopped her brow with a damp cloth, which she then disposed of in a bright yellow waste bin marked with the biohazard symbol. The monitor above the bed showed a heart rate of 120. Imran knew that despite Kate’s punishing schedule, she somehow managed to find time to work out in the gym or, when she could manage it, she went for jog at lunchtime. This was one very fit scientist and a resting heart rate of 120 was a bad sign. Her other vital signs were no more encouraging. Her temperature was now 103° F, and her blood pressure was 160 over 100. Imran glanced at Curtis O’Connor who was also staring at the monitor, watching Kate’s heart rate blips as they raced across the oscilloscope. Both men knew that Kate was still mercifully free of any of the deadly telltale haemorrhagic blood spots underneath the skin, and both men knew that a fever normally occurred after the appearance of either a rash or the blood spots. But if Kate had contracted the disease, they would lose her.

CHAPTER 53

HALLIWELL PHARMACEUTICALS, ATLANTA

D r Richard Halliwell wrinkled his nose in disgust as he curtained off the gurney that had a stinking, drunken vagrant strapped to the stainless steel surface. Still furious at the idiocy of the shifty little Mexican from the city pound, he returned to the second gurney. The young red-haired girl was about sixteen and the pale creamy skin on her arms was a mass of puncture wounds. She had been a very beautiful young woman but she’d succumbed to a heroin overdose. The pound man claimed she’d been breathing when he’d picked her up out of the alley, and he might have been right since the body was still warm, but Halliwell wasn’t about to pay anyone for dead bodies and the protesting Mexican had been reminded of the photos and told that if he didn’t deliver live flotsam next time, he’d have incineration costs docked from his $5000.

Halliwell ran his hand over the girl’s small breasts. He could feel his erection growing, amplified by a mixed surge of power and anger as his mind went back to his days at high school and his first sexual experience.

The gymnasium locker room smelt dank and musty, and the seventeen-year-old cheerleader, Cheryl Konopski, was high on speed. Halliwell was almost as high on bourbon and there was a sense of lustful urgency in Cheryl as she led him into a small storage room. It was a place with which Cheryl Konopski was more than a little familiar and she stepped out of her panties, hitched up her short dress and lay down on a pile of mats.

‘Come on,’ she urged, undoing her blouse and releasing her breasts from her bra. ‘I need to get off!’

Richard Halliwell had only just started to shave, and he felt gangly and awkward as he fumbled with his belt. Somehow he’d imagined he would be in control but it wasn’t turning out that way.

Cheryl Konopski stared at Halliwell’s penis, her disappointment all too visible to him. ‘Can’t you get that little wiener of yours any harder than that?’ she goaded when he’d finally managed to get out of his trousers. As he lay down beside her she reached for him and three seconds later he came in her hands, his small erection disappearing. The euphoria Cheryl had gained from the speed was also subsiding, replaced by a growing depression that was accompanied by a sudden onslaught of wild anger.

‘Jesus Christ! Did anyone ever tell you that you’re worse than fucking useless!’

Halliwell could still hear the voice of Cheryl Konopski screaming at him as she stormed out of the locker room. He walked over to the stereo system he’d had installed and turned on Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

‘Da da da da… Da da da da’ Halliwell hummed along with the famous opening stanza and as he turned up the volume, the music by the New York Philharmonic reverberated off the concrete walls of the Level 3 preparation area. The symphony always gave Halliwell a sense of his own power; it was one of his favourites. He ran his hands inside the top of the young woman’s stained and flimsy dress, his anger at Cheryl Konopski’s rejection slowly fading as the powerful music took over. This one, at least, wouldn’t be able to talk back. Her breasts were still warm but her body was stiffening as rigor mortis set in. Halliwell lifted the girl’s body off the gurney and placed it on the concrete floor. He calmly removed her panties and pushed her pale white legs apart.

Dr Halliwell pulled on his protective boots, stood up, snapped the seal on his face plate shut and reached for an air regulator. Satisfied, he returned to retrieve the vagrant on the other gurney. The stench was indelibly imprinted in Halliwell’s nostrils. As Halliwell stood over him, the man stirred. He blinked, his eyes bleary and bloodshot, then he coughed and gurgled and his eyes widened in horror. He began to struggle violently but realised he was held at his ankles, waist, wrists and neck by heavy nylon straps. His frantic cries were muffled by a heavy surgical bandage taped over his mouth.

Richard Halliwell shook his head in disgust. The man’s hair and beard were heavily matted with dirt and lice, and his face was pockmarked and scarred. His bulbous nose had the purplish-blue tinge of a heavy spirits drinker. You disgusting excuse for a human being, Halliwell thought. Giving your filthy, revolting body to science will be the only decent thing you’ve achieved in your entire miserable existence, he mused, as he wheeled the gurney through the specially designed air lock that connected the Level 3 preparation room with the lethal hot laboratory beyond. Halliwell pushed the gurney into an area of the hot lab that resembled the ward of a hospital. As he passed a freezer, he allowed himself a thin smile. Halliwell knew that bear bile soup was the favourite dish of General Ho Feng. General Ho was yet to accept his invitation to visit, but he’d arranged for the illegal frozen bear bile to be stored, just in case. Some might have thought the security storage arrangements were excessive, but Richard Halliwell never left anything to chance.

There were two tiled bays, each equipped with intravenous drip stands, heart rate and blood pressure monitors and a range of other medical equipment that Halliwell would need for his experiments. The gurneys were equipped with disposal systems for human waste that would wash it into a state of the art drainage system.

His subject was struggling feebly and beginning to sweat. Halliwell disconnected his air hose, shuffled away to the far end of the hot lab where the viruses were stored and reached for another hose dangling from the roof. Even without the Vice President’s imprimatur, he had obtained some of the most toxic viruses and bacteria known to man. In Halliwell’s world money always talked, and his virus stocks included Ebola and Marburg and his bacteria stock list boasted anthrax, botulinum toxin, and Yersinia pestis or plague. Soon, with the transfer of the experiments on the chimpanzees and the addition of Variola major, he would have the complete suite.

Halliwell punched the dual combination into the vault, turned the stainless steel wheel and swung open the heavy door. He shuffled towards the trolley marked ‘Ebola’, wheeled it over to a work bench and extracted a set of plastic well plates from the depths of the stainless steel storage vessel. The Ebola virus was clearly identifiable, a pale red liquid so clear it sparkled under the laboratory lights. He shuffled over to the incubator which held the culture medium he’d inoculated with the virus the previous week. Culturing stocks of the Ebola virus was child’s play for someone of Halliwell’s skills and resources and he was confident that millions of microscopic strings of the virus would have budded out of the culture cells and into the surrounding soup.

His first task was to test the effects of his virus and compile a database of how it would affect humans in its current form. The subsequent experiments would show whether or not the genetically engineered forms could be made more virulent, and whether or not the RNA that Ebola employed for its genetic code could be engineered into the DNA that was characteristic of smallpox. Halliwell knew the engineering would require sophisticated research at a level above what he was capable of, but with Dolinsky, anything might be possible. The official research that would be done on the Great Apes in the main laboratory would provide no guarantee those results could be replicated in humans, something Halliwell needed to know if he was to put his Chinese plan into action; and Halliwell would ensure that any super virus was tested on the human refuse collected from the streets of Atlanta. He placed a capped needle and a vial of the virus on a steel delivery trolley and shuffled back to the bay where he’d left the subject for his experiment.

Dr Halliwell carefully and unhurriedly filled a syringe with the sparkling red liquid and leaned toward the vagrant. Holding the man’s arm in a vice-like grip, Halliwell injected millions of particles of a virus for which there was no known cure.

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