Peter May - Snakehead

He moved around the foot of the bed to her left side, and the moonlight lay over her, unbroken, like a shroud. She tilted her head with difficulty so that she could follow him. He sat down on the edge of the bed and ran his fingers lightly over her forehead, and then with his forefinger traced the line of her nose and lips and chin. ‘When I first came to the States, I had no reason to conceal the fact that I was a Colombian. I never have. But people always made assumptions. My Latin looks, my accent, my name. A spic. A Mexican. Only when all this blew up did it become convenient for me to go along with it. To put as much distance between myself and my roots as possible. I am, after all, a naturalised American citizen now. So no one who did not know that I still retain my Colombian citizenship would be any the wiser. No one would have any reason to make the connection.’

He slowly drew back the sheet to look at Margaret’s naked form in the bed and trail the back of his hand down from her neck and between her breasts. He sighed. ‘Such beauty,’ he said. ‘Such a shame to waste it.’

Margaret could only watch, and feel very distantly beneath the surface calm, a rising panic. Her breathing came a little faster. She made a small grunting noise. He said, ‘Margaret, Margaret. I told you not to fight it.’ He cupped one of her breasts in his hand and grazed the nipple with his thumb. He leaned over and kissed her softly on the lips, and then sat looking at her for a very long time before covering her with the sheet once more. ‘Such a waste,’ he said again.

He stood up and crossed to the dressing table. She could hear him opening something, laying things out on the polished surface. Hard things. Metal and glass. But she could not see. He said, ‘A name like Mendez. An accent I could never quite get rid of, no matter how hard I tried. You cannot know what a handicap they have been in this great country of ours. Always a Hispanic. Always a foreigner. Never an American. Even when I got a passport. Everything I have achieved was in spite of my background, Margaret, in spite of the prejudice I encountered with every job application I made, with each board I faced. And then, of course, finally, they got their revenge. Some piddling bureaucratic oversight — not even mine — and I am forced into early retirement. Forced to abandon my career at the peak of my powers.’ He turned around, and she could see the lights in his eyes, fuelled by anger and hatred. ‘And then what do they do? This government of yours, this great country with its precious ideals of liberty and equality. They start dumping poison on my people. Spraying disease and genetic disorder on innocent women and children, poor Colombian peasants scratching to make a living. And why? In a futile attempt to stop the trade in a designer drug that your own President has confessed to taking.’

Even through her confusion, Margaret was aware that Mendez’s ‘we’ had become a reference to himself and the Colombian people, and that his ‘you’ now applied to Margaret and the Americans, among whose number he apparently no longer counted himself.

Again, she heard him speaking and had to force herself to concentrate. ‘No longer could I just stand by doing nothing,’ he was saying. ‘It was time to do something. Time to teach America a lesson. Time to show its politicians that they could not just stomp around the world trampling over other people’s rights and sovereignty. Time to teach white Anglo-Saxon Americans that they could die just as easily as the rest of us.’

From somewhere Margaret found the strength to speak. The words bubbled out of her throat. ‘You…’ she said. And with another great effort. ‘…you engineered the virus.’

He smiled. ‘Of course. And don’t you just love the irony? Spanish flu. A Colombian revenge. Oh, I’m sorry, I forgot. Americans don’t understand irony.’ Slowly, very slowly, the fog was lifting from Margaret’s brain. Mendez said, ‘When one of my students came to me with soft tissue, it was as if he had been sent by God. He was a volunteer with the expedition to recover the Seadragon from the Arctic. It was about eighteen months ago. You probably read about it. The submarine crew who died from the Spanish flu in 1918. Their vessel became trapped under the ice pack, eventually coming to rest on the polar continental shelf. The boat was never holed. A couple of divers looking for another wreck found it, and some scientists figured that the crew had probably been preserved inside by the cold, and that if they could raise the sub they might be able to recover soft tissue and culture live virus. They failed, of course. Sure, they got the soft tissue, but they couldn’t culture live virus. Wasn’t cold enough, even down there.’

He turned back to whatever he was doing on the dressing table. ‘My student managed to secrete a little of it away. He thought I might succeed where others had failed. I was flattered by his faith in me and sad to disappoint him. I told him it was a waste of time. It couldn’t be done. Which was true. What I did not tell him was that I could clone the virus from the viral RNA in the tissue he had given me. It was almost intact. As near to perfect as you could hope for. And then, of course, it was easy for me to engineer it to my own particular specifications.’

Margaret fought for breath to speak. ‘You’re…insane.’

He swung around. One eyebrow cocked. ‘No, Margaret. Just smarter than the rest of you.’

‘You won’t…just kill white…Anglo-Saxon Americans.’ The very effort of forcing herself to speak was clearing her mind. ‘You’ll kill Americans…of every race…every colour. And people…all over the world. Even…Colombians.’

He shook his head and smiled, as if saddened by her wretched stupidity. ‘You don’t really think I would create a virus without also producing the vaccine?’ he said. ‘After all, that’s what made me able to sell the idea to the Colombians who’ve been bringing in the Chinese. Once the flu is out there, they can sell the vaccine to the highest bidder. Lot of money to be made. And, of course, the people of Colombia might just get preferential treatment. Naturally, I have already vaccinated myself.’

Margaret coughed the phlegm out of her throat. Her tongue was so dry it was sticking to the roof of her mouth. ‘Can’t work,’ she gasped. ‘You know it. No one…could produce enough vaccine…in time. Once the flu is…rampant…it will be…too late.’

He shrugged and turned away again, and when he turned back a few moments later, he had a syringe in his hand, needle pointed at the ceiling. He squeezed it gently until a spurt of clear liquid shot into the air, flashing in the moonlight, then he approached Margaret around the bed. Panic was feeding strength to her lungs and heart, and her breathing became rapid and erratic. She found movement in her arms and legs, but not enough to resist. She heard her own voice scratching in her throat with each breath, whimpering like a dog.

‘Just relax, Margaret,’ Mendez told her softly. ‘I want you to know how it feels. To live with death hanging over you. To wonder when and where it will come from.’

She felt the cold dab of disinfectant on her arm, and the sharp bite of the needle. There was nothing she could do to stop him squeezing the syringe, forcing the virus through the needle and into her bloodstream. And with a start she realised that her baby, too, would be infected. An icy despair broke over her, like a wave in a frozen sea.

‘Unless, of course,’ she heard Mendez saying, ‘you’re smart enough to figure out what it is I programmed to trigger the virus.’

He withdrew the needle, dabbed her arm again and stood up. He returned to the dressing table and started clearing away his things. She lay, under sentence of death, and saw poor Steve’s haunted face in that moment when his resistance finally ended. And in her mind’s eye she saw also the faceless faces of all those who would die just like him, just like her. Hundreds of millions of them. A tear forced its way out of the corner of her eye and ran down on to the pillow.