First Horseman, The (15 page)

The serum’s primary effects were wearing off fast as Renton drove towards the M11. He was starting to panic. All the things that could go wrong were churning in his mind as it computed the infinite possibilities of disaster.

He had to go back to the lab, start with the first horseman he had and forget the rest. There was plenty of viable culture and the other strains would have to come from nature after the release. As long as the initial first horseman was successful, the rest wouldn’t matter. He had to forget the girl and the other cultures, work fast and prepare. He could be on his way within three days. He would go to Lagos or Egypt first and start there. Once the first horseman was established in Africa the situation would become uncontainable in any event. The cull might take two or three years longer to become established but it would happen.

He had to keep Cardini ignorant of the mess. He dreaded to think what his reaction would be if he discovered the truth.

The girl had been intended as a simple test of the vector, to see whether they had managed to improve its ability to carry into humans. Confirmation meant the unleashing of the horseman would be optimal.

Yet this step was unnecessary, as Cardini knew. Every laboratory animal tested had been infected by the re-engineered vector. It carried the horseman and spread it, then outbred the natural vector with its improved reproductive capacity. But Cardini wanted the tests to be completed on a human subject. Cardini was a methodical perfectionist.

Suddenly Renton was grinning again; the path ahead seemed wide and certain.

He’d been a student, he recalled, when he’d asked his then professor, an earnest but visionless academic, ‘Aren’t you worried you might accidentally make a bacterium or virus that could kill everyone?’

His professor had smiled patronisingly. ‘Actually,’ he had said, ‘nature is working full time on that right now. Billions of invisible life forms are trying to find a way into us to feed and reproduce. I’m more afraid they will find the answer to their challenge before we can understand a way of locking them out. Compared with the risks to humanity from nature, the risk of creating a monster ourselves is infinitely remote.’

What a fool that man was, Renton thought. Cardini’s vision dwarfed such a limited and arrogant mind. Man could and would out-engineer nature. Great men would wield the microscopic world, and in doing so control humanity’s numbers by cull.

His cull – or, rather, Cardini’s cull – would revolutionise the world, in the same way that the Black Death had torn down feudalism to replace it, eventually, with the Enlightenment. All he needed to do was infect the lab rat with the Ebola virus, feed it live to the modified mosquitoes, fly to Lagos or Cairo and release them. Then, one bite at a time, the world would begin to change. As the mosquitoes spread and bred, the blood-borne plague would be carried with them. Mosquitoes had been the vector for malaria since the beginning of history, spreading it with their salivary glands. Cardini had re-engineered them to regurgitate their stomach contents when they fed so they would infect their prey with the blood-borne disease of their previous hosts. Now Aids, hepatitis C, Ebola, West Nile virus, SARS and others would be transmitted from human to human and animal to human via an ever-present flying syringe. Humanity would become a giant and growing incubator of all the diseases that destroyed it.

Not in the north, though, not in the civilised lands, only in the hot, fetid countries that teemed with the ever-growing billions who doomed the world to environmental decay and destruction. Humanity would kill the seas, clear the forests and pick the planet clean of all resources. The world needed the Amazon rainforest to cleanse the air; it needed unplundered seas to support the environmental cycle. It needed six billion fewer of the humans who were driving the world to catastrophe.

He was about to set the spark that would give birth to the blaze that would turn the earth again into a paradise where a thousand million people could live and he, Renton, would enjoy immortality.

McCloud was sitting up in bed, glaring. He looked considerably different from the collapsed husk of three hours before. ‘What’s this kid doing here?’ he said, wagging a finger at Jim.

‘Dr Evans is assisting me,’ said Cardini, with the sort of authority that would have silenced most people.

‘You don’t need no goddamn assistance,’ said McCloud. ‘Who are you, son?’ he asked Jim.

‘I’m Jim Evans,’ he replied.

‘Check that out,’ said McCloud to Marius.

‘I already have,’ said Marius.

‘And what did you find?’

‘Britain’s most eligible bachelor under thirty,’ he said, as if that was a crime. ‘Banking. Net worth five billion dollars. Far East connections.’

‘Far East connections?’ queried Jim. ‘Your data’s dodgy.’

‘Japanese Order of the Chrysanthemum.’

‘What the hell is that? Some kind of flower-arranging medal?’ growled McCloud.

Marius shook his head. ‘I have no idea.’ He turned to Jim. ‘There sure isn’t much about you for a man with your kind of money.’

‘I’m a trader, not a pop star,’ said Jim.

‘You must be a mighty big trader, son,’ said McCloud.

‘I was,’ said Jim, ‘once.’

McCloud coughed.

‘That’s enough for now,’ said Cardini.

McCloud continued to cough. Eventually the spluttering subsided. ‘So what are you here for, son?’ he said, a gasp still in his voice.

‘I don’t know. I think Chris wanted to introduce me to you.’

McCloud turned his glare on Cardini. ‘Think I’m going to croak?’ he snapped.

‘Due to your recent pattern of unpredictable behaviour,’ said Cardini, sternly, ‘that is becoming increasingly likely.’

McCloud put the oxygen mask over his face. He drew some breaths, then removed it. ‘You underestimate me,’ he said, trying to sound strong.

‘Perhaps,’ boomed Cardini, ‘you overestimate yourself, Howard.’

‘I told you Cardini, long ago, that I always get my way.’

Jim wasn’t sure whether he sounded pathetic or threatening.

The sun was going down behind the mountains and there was a fiery orange sunset. At the back of the mansion, a long veranda swung in an arch across the centre of the building.

‘This whole place is like some huge deserted hotel,’ said Jim. ‘A holiday resort without any guests.’

A waiter came out on to the terrace and walked over to them. ‘What can I get you, gentlemen?’

‘A gin and tonic,’ said Cardini, in a voice so deep it made Jim hanker for one too.

‘Coke,’ said Jim, asserting his independence to himself.

‘I’ll be right back,’ said the waiter.

‘I thought you didn’t like to put poisons in your body,’ said Jim.

‘Under certain circumstances I make exceptions,’ replied Cardini. ‘And this is one of them.’

‘I’m not too sure why you brought me here,’ he said. ‘Let’s say I don’t feel very welcome.’

‘I wanted you to see TRT in action on a real person, one at the very edge of his natural lifespan, and understand the importance of what I’ve invented, the potential, the power. It’s all well and good talking about it, showing slides, but nothing is more potent than seeing the effects with your own eyes.’

‘OK,’ said Jim, ‘but I saw what it did to my eye. I believe you.’

‘Today you saw what it can do in a few short hours to a whole organism. Tomorrow you will see yet more improvement. I want you to understand in your soul how TRT has the power to change everything, humanity, its future and more.’ Cardini gazed over the mountain tops to the dying sun.

‘I’m not about changing the world,’ said Jim. ‘Changing the world is strictly for the nerds of Silicon Valley.’

‘Yes,’ said Cardini, ‘and it is hard to find the right person to help me take the final steps.’ He looked seriously at Jim. ‘We are all doomed, of course.’

‘You mean me and you are doomed to die eventually?’ said Jim.

‘No,’ said Cardini. ‘Humanity is doomed. So is the planet.’

‘Really?’ said Jim. ‘I don’t agree.’ He blinked as a memory of the nuclear showdown he had helped avert flooded his mind. ‘We might have been scuppered a couple of years ago but that’s all fixed. I can’t see any problems as far as I can draw a stock chart and that’s decades.’

Cardini was staring at him with an expression that Jim had seen directed at him before. It said, ‘Who is this idiot and what is he talking about?’

The professor looked away and sighed. ‘How do you think the world will continue with eight, nine, fifteen, twenty billion people living on it? What do you think will happen?’

‘We’ll muddle through.’

‘Muddle through? Even now the planet is dying.’

‘Is it?’

‘Don’t you read the newspapers?’

‘No,’ said Jim, ‘not as a rule. When I read something in them I know a little about, they’re always dead wrong. When you read about stuff in the papers that you know about, do they get it right?’

Cardini’s silence was telling.

‘Common sense should tell you that the world can’t continue to support ever-increasing numbers.’

‘When I look at Google Earth, Chris, I can hardly find anyone. I just see miles and miles of empty spaces.’

Cardini gave a deep cough. ‘I believe the point has been reached at which human numbers are killing our planet and that soon powerful forces will destroy not only the environment we know but also the atmosphere, which will be stripped from the planet by new and devastating processes. Environment feedback loops will start to create a series of vicious circles that, once uncontrollable, will leave the earth like Mars, lifeless.’

‘It can’t be allowed to happen, Christopher,’ came a voice behind them.

Jim turned. McCloud was walking slowly towards them supported by a Zimmer frame. He stopped. ‘Forgive my slow progress,’ he said, smiling wryly. ‘I’m starting to feel better and thought I should get up to be with my guests.’

He resumed walking towards them. ‘Don’t come to meet me,’ he said. ‘I need to use my legs. The more I walk now, the stronger they’ll get over the next few days.’

‘You should have remained in bed,’ said Cardini.

‘Damn it, Chris,’ said McCloud, cheerily, ‘you don’t know everything. I’m telling you, the more you use your body during the first hours, the better it recovers.’

‘A likely story,’ grumbled Cardini.

McCloud came to a halt in front of Jim and Cardini. He took his right hand off the Zimmer frame. ‘I was very rude to you earlier and I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It can be hard to come back from the dead – when I start coming round it makes me as cranky as hell.’ He shook Jim’s hand.

‘No problem, Mr McCloud,’ said Jim.

‘I appreciate that,’ said McCloud. ‘Please call me Howard – or Howie, even.’

‘Thanks, Howard,’ said Jim.

McCloud laughed. ‘Why does no one ever want to call me Howie?’

‘You’re not a Howie,’ said Cardini, dismissively.

‘There you are,’ said McCloud to Jim. ‘Apparently I’m no Howie.’

The waiter appeared with the Coke, the gin and tonic and a whisky with ice.

McCloud was hardly leaning on the frame now. He took his glass and raised it. ‘To a sustainable future,’ he said, clinking Jim’s glass and then Cardini’s. ‘So what do you say, Jim, about the world population crisis?’

Jim sipped his Coke. ‘I don’t see one,’ he said.

‘You don’t see any problems with seven billion people on this earth?’

‘No,’ said Jim. ‘There they are, here I am.’

‘And you think there is enough of everything to go around?’

‘Sure,’ said Jim. ‘Energy prices are below food prices.’

Cardini looked at McCloud as if McCloud might understand what Jim was saying.

‘What do you mean?’ asked McCloud.

‘Well, if you can economically turn energy into food – you know, use petrol to plough fields, make fertilisers, that kind of thing – you have more food and you have progress.’ He shrugged. ‘That means more people.’

‘Is that it?’ said McCloud.

Cardini was looking at Jim in the way that ‘word people’ always looked at him when he talked numbers.

‘Yes,’ Jim continued. ‘The day you have to make food into fuel, corn into ethanol, for example, because it’s more economical to do that than the other way around, that’s when progress stops. That’s when progress goes into reverse. Then people die of hunger. When the cost of energy means that food isn’t going to the hungry, but into creating energy, that’s what limits population. Obvious, right?’

Cardini was looking at him now as if he had said something utterly unintelligible.

‘That’s not going to happen, not soon anyway,’ Jim went on. ‘Technology keeps coming up with the goods, just like it always has. You should look at the ancient stuff I collect. In those days there were three hundred million people on the planet and most of them were diseased and starving but, boy, they had plenty of great natural environments to live in.’

McCloud was gazing at the flame-red sky. ‘Hope you’re right, son,’ he said, ‘but I fear you’re just a young optimist. I was once, but there was less than half the world’s current population then.’ He took a sip of his whisky. ‘You could catch thousand-pound marlins off Florida in those days, two, sometimes three fish in a day. Now they’re all gone. Life was fat back then, wasn’t it, Cardini?’

‘Didn’t you die of blood poisoning if you got a septic finger?’ said Jim.

‘I’m not talking about what we’ve gained, Jim,’ said McCloud. ‘I’m talking about what we’ve lost. Whole ecosystems simply wiped out, natural environments stripped bare, the deserts of the world slowly but surely creeping over the face of the earth. Dead earth, soils without life, a dying planet, Mother Nature on the edge of extinction.’

‘Commodity prices aren’t going anywhere in the next twenty years,’ said Jim. ‘Well, not inflation-adjusted. That suggests you might be wrong.’

‘How can you know?’ said Cardini.

‘It’s my speciality,’ said Jim.

‘Maybe you should check out cocoa,’ said McCloud, laughing.

‘Why cocoa?’

‘Hell, it’s been going through the roof!’

Kate and Stafford watched the ambulance turn in front of the house and trundle away.