THE horror was the thing Sucamari had brought back with him from the Orient, smuggled in his diplomatic bag. A simple thing on the face of it, an inlaid box of ivory and mother of pearl containing a statue of Buddha nested on protective floss. Even had it been inspected at the customs it was innocent enough, the sort of thing that any traveller from the East might purchase as a curiosity or, as in the case of Sucamari, as an item to add to his collection. For the horror wasn’t the box, nor the floss, nor the statue itself. It was in the substance that coated it.
Well over a century ago men had first toyed with the concept of using the smallest allies. Of turning from the big to the almost invisible, the tiny bacteria instead of the tearing destruction of explosives. In itself the concept
