Rabies
Borislav Pekić
 Set in early 1980s, during the height of Cold War, novel follows a series of parallel storylines. The situation on the Heathrow Airport is tense, due to the arrival of the Soviet delegation, led by the Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs Artamonov. Heathrow VIP loungue is where they and British Foreign Minister Sir Geoffrey Drummond, are to conclude the signing of the new Anglo-Soviet treaty with protocolar toasts. Whilst the tight security is being deployed by the head of the Aviation Security, Major Lawford, along with his colleagues: Colonels Donovan of the MI6 and Rasimov of the KGB, medical service, headed by Dr. Luke Komarovsky, gets informed that a nun from a convent near Lagos Nigeria, who was travelling on the Alitalia Boeing 747 en route to New York City via Heathrow, has gotten ill. Her symptoms are first diagnosed as those of hysteria caused by fear of flying, then to an epileptic seisure. Plane is given a priority landing. Dr. Komarowsky, who in past has been a scientist, was working, along with three other doctors, each of whom will make an appearance further in the book: Dr. John Hamilton, Dr. Matthew Laverick, and Dr. Coro Deveroux, in a team of the world renowned microbiologist, Dr. Frederick Lieberman. Their work, in a somewhat laboratory at Wolfenden House was and remains weiled in mystery, but their goal (four of them were called either the nucleus or evangelists of Messiah Lieberman) was the 'holy grail' of microbiology - creation, through genetical reorganisation, of general immunity to bacterial, viral and oncological diseases, which would, being based on the modifications of the very human DNA, thus also be hereditary. But the last batch of experiments, a vaccine based on a recombined Rabies virus, was done on humans who were exposed to the rabies virus in a quarantine in Britain. To be continued...