The Lazarus Strain

NINETEEN

Steven was aware that his breathing had become rapid and shallow and that cold sweat was forming on his brow. Not for the first time in his life real fear was coming to call and this time there could be only one outcome; he was going to die a painful death. If Timothy Devon’s demise was anything to go by, a scalpel blade would be used to transport him to the outer reaches of agony and humiliation in a slow symphony of mutilation while all the while taking care that he remained conscious. Only he would know the final irony that there was nothing he could tell them that they didn’t know already.

To all intents and purposes, al-Qaeda’s bluff had worked. Neither he nor anyone in the security services knew what they were really up to. John Macmillan’s faith in him had been misplaced: he had failed to come up with the truth in what must surely be his last mission and there was no comfort to be found in the knowledge that he wouldn’t be around to find out just what it was that al-Qaeda had planned.

Steven’s stomach cramped when he heard Ali start to come back downstairs. He was about to face hell on earth and he hoped that he could do it without letting his daughter Jenny down. He was a doctor but he had lived as a warrior and he wanted to die like one but the dice were stacked against him. Ali knew well enough how to turn any man into a mewling, puking, jibbering wreck of his former self, a pathetic figure pleading to be put out of his misery. All the training he’d had in the past to help him resist interrogation techniques would count for nothing in this situation. This was something you could not prepare for.

‘So tell me about Earlybird,’ said Ali. His voice seemed even and calm but there was no mistaking the cold menace in it.

‘It usually catches the worm,’ said Steven, thinking stupidly that he sounded like Roger Moore playing James Bond.

Ali looked at him, shook his head, gave a wry smile and selected the poker from a set of fireside tools that beside an old stove that appeared to have lain unused for many years. He affected an examination of it but Steven knew that he was just giving him time to think about what was to come. Physical pain was only part of the torturer’s art; the other element was psychological. Steven silently prayed that Ali would hit him over the head with it so hard that either death or loss of consciousness would intervene on his behalf but with a sudden swinging motion, Ali brought it low and horizontally into Steven’s right knee cap making him cry out in pain.

‘Want to try again?’

It was almost a minute before Steven was capable of speech but a movement of the poker in Ali’s hand helped return the power. ‘It’s a committee that assesses potential threats to national security,’ he gasped, fighting the waves of pain from his injured knee.

‘Of course it is,’ said Ali. ‘You know that; I know that. So what’s the latest threat to national security perceived as being?’

‘You are.’

‘I’m suitably flattered,’ replied Ali. ‘And just what am I going to do?’

‘You’re planning an attack on our cities using Cambodia 5 virus.’

‘All on my own?’ asked Ali.

‘Presumably not,’ said Steven. It made Ali raise the poker again and Steven gasp. ‘No!’

Ali lowered the poker and said, ‘How many people does Earlybird think we have?’

‘They don’t know.’

‘How many do they think we’ll need?’

‘They don’t know, quite a few, I suppose.’

‘What’s the estimate?’

‘There isn’t one.’

Ali came closer. ‘No estimate?… That suggests to me that someone isn’t taking us seriously,’ he said, watching for Steven’s reaction like a cat eyeing a cornered mouse.

‘Of course they’re taking you seriously,’ said Steven, knowing his last answer had been a bad mistake. ‘How could they not?’

‘But no estimates?’ Ali persisted. ‘No projections from Porton Down about how many people would be required for such an operation? How much virus would be needed, wind speed, the effect of rain…’

‘Of course they were done,’ said Steven, trying to rescue the situation.

‘One might almost think that you didn’t really believe it was going to happen?’ said Ali.

‘It was deemed too late to try and stop your attack,’ said Steven. ‘Our security people simply didn’t know enough so they adopted a different strategy and put all their efforts into producing a vaccine against Cambodia 5 and tough shit, it worked: they’ve done it. There was no point in killing Leila. The vaccine is already in production. You’ve lost. You’ve left it too late.’

‘That is a shame,’ said Ali with patronising slowness. ‘So how can I salvage something from the ashes? What am I going to do now that British Intelligence has out-thought me?’

Steven looked at him and saw that the question had not been rhetorical. Ali was expecting an answer. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Put yourself in my position. I need an alternative strategy to hit my enemy with. What am I to do?’

‘How the hell should I know? I’m the last person on earth to ask that question.’

‘You do yourself a disservice, Doctor and I am asking you the question,’ said Ali who had taken a velvet pouch from inside his jacket and was unrolling it to reveal three surgical scalpels, one with a curved blade and two with different sized straight ones. He slid the plastic guards off the ends, ‘Tell me, Doctor… what am I going to do now that my plans for a Cambodia 5 attack are in ruins?’

‘I have no fucking idea,’ exclaimed Steven, unable to take his eyes off the scalpels and feeling his imagination soar into overdrive.

‘Good to hear,’ said Ali. ‘But you will understand that I do have to be very sure of that…’

‘Why don’t you tell me?’ gasped Steven, mounting a last minute appeal to the man’s vanity. ‘Just what the fuck does al-Qaeda think it’s going to do now that we have the vaccine? Make a new video of Osama in his latest cave? Just how scary is that?’

Steven had been prepared for a sudden backlash of violence but none came. Instead, Ali smiled and said, ‘Very good, Dunbar. At this point I am supposed to lose my temper and tell you everything before I kill you just like the villains always do in movies. No, I prefer my way. You… tell… me… What am I going to do?’

There was a scraping noise from above that both Ali and Steven heard at the same time and looked up. For the first time, Ali looked less than supremely confident but he didn’t lose his nerve. He held a scalpel to Steven’s throat to ensure his silence and then forced the velvet that the scalpels had been wrapped in inside his mouth before taping it in place with the same tape that Steven had seen used on the body bag for Leila. Ali put out the lights and started to climb the stairs. He had put down the scalpels in favour of an automatic pistol.

Steven was beginning to think that there had been nothing to the noise — just another fact of life in the country when he heard a floorboard creak. There really was someone up there. Or something. But who? What? A burglar about to become fatally familiar with Ali’s notion of reasonable force in defending his property? A tramp looking for food and shelter. Maybe even a fox had gained access through the smashed window. Depressingly, he had to admit that that was more likely than the detachment of Royal Marines he would have preferred but at least it had taken Ali’s attention away from the scalpels for a few minutes.

Listening in the darkness, he sensed that Ali had reached the top of the stairs and had a hand on the cellar door handle. It gave out the tiniest of squeaks when he turned it. Almost immediately flood lighting silhouetted Ali at the head of the stairs and the air was filled with shouts of, ‘Armed Police! Lay down your weapon!

Ali only managed to get off one shot and had half turned away from the door when his body was riddled with bullets and he tumbled backwards downstairs like a rag doll to lie in a heap at the foot of the stairs in almost exactly the same spot where Leila’s body had been lying a short while before.

The lights came on and Steven saw Frank Giles coming downstairs. Giles looked up at the cable securing Steven’s wrists and said to his sergeant, ‘Wasn’t I just saying the other day, Morley, that the security services seemed to spend most of their time just hanging around while the police get left to do all the work…’

Morley released Steven and he slumped to the floor to lie there for a moment before looking up at Giles and saying, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever felt like kissing a man before. How on earth did you know I was here?’

‘Sheer bloody brilliance,’ said Giles.

Steven removed the last of the tape from his face and mouth and rolled up his trouser to examine his injured knee. ‘I’m still waiting,’ he said.

‘Shit, that looks nasty,’ said Giles, grimacing at the sight of Steven’s swollen and bloody knee. ‘It was your old soldier buddy, Stan Silver. He phoned to say that you hadn’t brought his Porsche back. As it was two in the morning I told him to go fuck himself but he insisted that you had both served with the SAS and you had made him a promise. The fact that you hadn’t kept it suggested that you were in real trouble.’

‘Bloody hell,’ said Steven. ‘That’s true, but how did you know where I was?’

‘Very nice cars like the Porsche 911s often have a satellite tracking system fitted as an anti-theft device. You got lucky. The silver Porsche told us where it was on the planet with an accuracy of plus or minus twelve feet.’

Steven felt himself go weak as all energy seemed to leave him. ‘I will never,’ he averred, ‘never ever complain about my luck again.’

‘That sounds just about right,’ agreed Giles. ‘I take it sonny Jim here is Ali?’

‘That’s your man,’ said Steven, looking at the crumpled body of his would-be tormentor.

‘Know anything about the woman’s body in the car outside?’

‘It’s Leila,’ said Steven, looking down at the floor to avoid Giles seeing what was in his eyes. ‘Dr Leila Martin. Ali killed her.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Giles. ‘I got the impression maybe you and she…’

Steven nodded and further examined his knee.

‘Does this mean that the al-Qaeda threat is over?’ asked Giles who had walked over to watch his colleagues deal with Ali’s body.

‘I’d like to think so,’ said Steven.

‘But?’

Steven gave an uncertain shrug.

‘Maybe shooting him wasn’t such a good idea,’ said Giles.

‘Personally, I think it was a bloody excellent one,’ said Steven with some feeling.

‘Sounds like the ambulance,’ said Giles as a distant siren sounded. ‘You can’t drive with your leg like that. Is the knee broken?’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Steven. ‘But there’s too much swelling right now to be absolutely sure. I’ll need to have it X-rayed.’

‘I’ll have one of my guys take your pal’s Porsche back. I take it he should convey your thanks to Mr Silver?’

‘And then some. Tell Stan I owe him big time.’

Steven preferred to ‘walk’ out to the ambulance with the aid of Giles and Sergeant Morley. As he manoeuvred himself into the back and turned round to thank them he saw that Leila’s body was being transferred to a police vehicle. His first impulse was to get back out again and go over to her but Giles put a hand on his arm. ‘Maybe not,’ he said kindly. Steven thought about it before concurring with a nod.

Steven managed a couple of hours sleep after having been assured that his injuries — although painful — would not demand hospitalization. His face was swollen and discoloured but again nothing that wouldn’t subside and heal with time or as the houseman on duty had said, ‘Presumably that’s what you get for calling Mike Tyson a sissy.’

The first face Steven saw when he opened his eyes was John Macmillan.

‘I heard you had a pretty narrow escape. How are you feeling?’

‘They don’t come any narrower,’ agreed Steven. ‘But I’m fine.’

‘Ali’s dead?’

‘He’s dead. So is Leila.’

‘I’m sorry.’

Steven nodded but added. ‘You didn’t come here to be sorry.’

‘No, I didn’t,’ agreed Macmillan. ‘I have to know if you managed to get anything out of Ali to confirm your suspicions about the Cambodia 5 attack being another red herring?’

‘He was doing the interrogating,’ replied Steven.

‘Do you still think it was a false trail? I have to know. Pressure from above. HMG would like to be assured that the al-Qaeda operation has been thwarted.’

Steven put his head back on the pillow and closed his eyes. ‘I can’t give them that assurance,’ he said. ‘Ali was definitely trying to find out if I thought the Cambodia 5 attack on UK cities was a bluff and that to me suggests that it was. More than that, he was smug; smug as if something else was a done deal and there was nothing at all we could do about it.’

‘Damnation,’ said Macmillan. ‘That is exactly what HMG don’t want to hear with an election only weeks away.’

Steven swallowed the vitriolic comment that came to mind and instead said, ‘Of course not.’

‘You’ve absolutely no idea at all what he might have been planning?’

‘Only that it still involves Cambodia 5, I’m pretty sure of that. They wouldn’t have gone to all that trouble to get the virus just to use as a bluff.’

‘Then we’ve still got a chance,’ said Macmillan. ‘Auroragen say that the accelerated vaccine production process has been going well. They should be in a position to supply the first vials in about five days time.’

‘How did they manage that?’ asked Steven.

‘A top level decision,’ replied Macmillan.

‘Meaning?’

‘Although the company can’t have the vaccine ready for everyone, they are concentrating some of it by high speed centrifugation so that about twenty thousand doses will be ready for inoculation next week. They reckon about two million doses will follow in about three weeks time followed by up to forty million by the late summer.’

‘Who gets protection first?’ asked Steven.

‘The intelligence communities are still of a mind that the UK and the USA are the most likely targets for al-Qaeda so the first doses will go to all key personnel in both UK and American administrations and people vital to the infrastructure of both countries, police army, fire services, health personnel and so on down the line until all citizens can be offered protection.’

Steven nodded and said, ‘Leila said vaccination will be effective in two to three days so if Ali’s operation is not mounted some time in the next eight days, we should be out of the woods.’

‘That has a nice ring to it,’ said Macmillan. ‘So what do I tell our political masters meantime?

‘They should keep their fingers crossed for eight days.’

‘Seriously,’ prompted Macmillan.

‘Definitely no crowing to the Press about having smashed an al-Qaeda plot,’ said Steven. ‘We had enough of that rubbish last time and we haven’t. Vaccine distribution must remain our number one priority and every minute counts. And of course, that old favourite of ours…’

‘Heightened security measures,’ said Macmillan.

‘With special emphasis on confiscating nail clippers,’ added Steven tongue in cheek. ‘That should show al-Qaeda we mean business…’

‘Let’s not go there again,’ said Macmillan. ‘I know we’re of a mind about that but at least in this instance it should create an impression of alertness. You need sleep. I’ll talk to you later.’

‘Do we know who Ali was yet?’ asked Steven as Macmillan rose to leave.

‘They’re still working on it.’

‘His mother, father and a sister died in an American air attack — collateral damage,’ said Steven. ‘He told me.’

‘I’ll pass that on.’

Steven drifted off into a fitful sleep for another few hours, a sleep which was permeated by bad dreams but above all, by feelings of great unease. Ali had sensed that he hadn’t swallowed the city centre attacks story and yet he had still seemed unperturbed. He also knew that a vaccine against Cambodia 5 was entering the final stages of production and still… he exuded the air of a winner, not of someone who was still running the race. At one point, thoughts of what Ali must have done to Leila to make sure she was telling the truth started to intrude and he woke to sit bolt upright in bed, sweat running down his face, before sinking back down again and imagining Macmillan saying, ‘All the angles, Steven, all the angles.’

Three days later, Steven’s knee swelling had died down enough to let him drive back to London. His face still looked as if he had collided with a door at speed but in general he was feeling much better and he limped into the Home Office to see John Macmillan.

‘Ali was Mahmoud Ali Mansour,’ said Macmillan. ‘Iraqi father, French mother. She and his father and one of his sisters were killed in an American air attack on Baghdad — mistaken coordinates apparently. He was educated at a public school in Britain before going home to study at Baghdad University where his father was a professor of mathematics. He himself studied microbiology and got a post graduate degree fromomeHH

Lund University in Sweden before seeing the light — or is it the darkness in this case — and joining up with Osama in Afghanistan. He spoke four languages fluently and had been used primarily in liaison between al-Qaeda and other terrorist organisations.’

‘Until this time,’ said Steven.

‘Until this time,’ agreed Macmillan. ‘He comes from a very bright family apparently.’

‘So maybe this was all his idea, his big chance to impress.’

‘Could well be. I take it you’ve had no further thoughts on the subject?’

‘’Fraid not.’

‘Then it’s still fingers crossed time. The first batch of vaccine will leave the factory in three days for distribution to key personnel. You and I are considered to fit into that category.’

‘Nice to feel appreciated,’ said Steven dryly.

‘An RAF Hercules aircraft will leave from RAF Lineham at noon on that day bound for Washington carrying vaccine for key US administration personnel.’

‘I also thought you might like to know that, on the same day, Dr Martin’s brother is due in from the USA to carry out formal identification of her body and make arrangements for her return to the United States.’

‘How… traumatic is that going to be for him?’

‘The Pathologist’s report said that she hadn’t been tortured or disfigured in any way. Death was by strangulation.’

‘Strangulation,’ repeated Steven, finding that the news that Leila had not been tortured was not so much a cause for relief as for puzzlement. He had been wrong again.

‘You look surprised,’ said Macmillan.

‘Ali was the kind of person who would have to make sure that what he was hearing was the truth. If he went to the trouble of seeking out Leila, he must have wanted to know something and he wouldn’t just have accepted what she told him.’

‘Unless he already knew from another source,’ said Macmillan.

‘In which case why seek her out?’

‘Good question.’

‘There’s something wrong here,’ said Steven.

‘About what?’

‘Everything,’ said Steven. ‘I’m going back to Norfolk.’

‘To do what?’

‘I’m not sure,’ Steven confessed. ‘But I need to be there. I need to walk around the scene of the crime if you like. Drive around the area. Hope something comes to mind that I’ve missed before. I’ll also be there to meet Leila’s brother when he arrives.’

‘Whatever you say,’ conceded Macmillan.

‘He’s due at the mortuary at twelve noon,’ said Frank Giles when Steven arrived in his office. ‘I’ll run you over.’

‘Thanks,’ said Steven. ‘I’ve been feeling guilty about not saying good bye to her properly.’

Giles nodded. ‘How’s the war against al-Qaeda going?’

‘We’re sitting with our fingers crossed,’ said Steven.

‘A comfort,’ said Giles. ‘A good time for me and the missus to take a holiday in Barbados then?’

‘We don’t think they’re going for a city centre attack any more but we’re still gambling on them using Cambodia 5 virus in some way. The good news is that the vaccine starts going out today. Of course, if it should turn out not to be a Cambodia 5 attack… we’ll all be left sitting in that well known creek without a paddle.’

‘And on that happy note,’ said Giles. ‘Maybe we should start out for the mortuary.’