Wildcard

TWO

‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. As some of you will already be aware, we have a sick passenger on board and unfortunately for this reason none of us will be disembarking immediately. I know it’s inconvenient, but we have been asked to taxi to a position some distance from the terminal building and await further instructions. I will keep you informed. In the meantime, please be patient and bear with us.’

Judy felt as if a firework had just been lit and she was waiting for the explosion. It came soon enough. A general rumble of discontent was followed by an angry assertion of ‘I thought you said it was malaria’ from the man in the seat behind Barclay. ‘You were lying, weren’t you?’ he accused. ‘Just what the hell is going on? What’s wrong with him?’

‘We do have a very sick passenger, sir. More than that I can’t say right now, but please be patient.’

‘Patient be damned. There’s something going on here and we deserve to be told. Just what are you keeping from us? Tell us what’s wrong with him.’

‘I’m not a doctor, sir-’

‘But he is,’ said the man angrily, gesturing down the aisle with his thumb. ‘What did he say it was?’

‘Look, I’m sorry, I can’t really discuss-’

‘It all makes sense now,’ interrupted the man. ‘He wanted nothing to do with him, did he? He buggered off to his own seat pretty smartish, as I recall. Just what the hell’s wrong with this guy? Bugger this — I’m going to go back there and ask him myself.’

He started to undo his seatbelt but Judy was spared an argument to stop him by an exclamation from his wife, whose eye had been caught by flashing blue lights outside the window. ‘Oh my God, Frank,’ she exclaimed, ‘there are spacemen out there!’

The hubbub died as passengers looked out of the windows and saw that the plane had been surrounded by emergency vehicles, their lights blinking into the night sky. In front were a number of men standing on the tarmac: they wore orange suits, which covered them from head to foot. The flashing lights reflected off their visors.

‘Hello, everyone, this is the captain again,’ said the calm, friendly voice on the cabin intercom. ‘I understand that when the airport buses arrive we will all be taken to a reception centre, where we’ll be given more information about the situation and the opportunity to make contact with friends and family. Thank you for your patience. I hope it won’t be too long before we can all be with them. Please remain seated until the cabin crew instruct you otherwise.’

The captain’s voice was replaced by Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.

The sight of what was on the tarmac outside seemed to have a sobering effect on the passengers. The general air of belligerence was replaced by anxiety and an acceptance of the situation. Angry protests and muttered threats of compensation claims were supplanted by real fear of the unknown.

Barclay was the first to be taken from the aircraft. He was enveloped in a plastic bubble by two orange-suited men and carried down the steps to the tarmac, where he was loaded into a waiting ambulance. The passengers immediately behind Barclay for four rows and those in the rows in front were next to leave. They were directed down the front steps to an airport bus driven by another orange-suited man. The smell of disinfectant was everywhere; the floor of the bus was awash with it. There was a short hiatus while a decontamination crew boarded the aircraft and sealed off the newly evacuated area with plastic sheeting before spraying it all down thoroughly. The remaining passengers were then evacuated through the rear door on to more waiting buses. The flight crew were the last to leave the aircraft. They were ushered on to a separate bus to follow the others to the emergency reception centre. They looked back as the bus moved off, and saw that their aircraft was being sprayed down both outside and in.

‘Wonder what happens now?’ said the captain quietly.

‘The word “quarantine” springs to mind,’ said the first officer.

‘Shit.’

‘Can’t be too careful.’

‘Suppose not.’

‘Any idea how long?’ asked Judy.

The first officer shook his head. ‘Maybe they won’t keep everyone, just those who were closest to chummy or had contact with him.’

‘A comfort,’ said Judy ruefully.

‘Come on, Jude, won’t be so bad. Think of all that daytime television.’ The first officer smiled.

‘I think I’d rather have the disease,’ retorted Judy.

‘You two did well, handling that situation,’ the captain told Judy and Carol. ‘Couldn’t have been easy.’

‘I’d like to say it was nothing really,’ said Judy. ‘But I think it was one of the worst experiences of my life. He seemed to be bleeding everywhere.’

‘Ditto,’ said Carol. ‘I once considered nursing as a career and now I’m awfully glad I didn’t. Trolley-dollying isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, but having to deal with that sort of thing day in, day out? No thank you.’

Passengers who had had no contact with Barclay before or during the flight were allowed to leave the reception centre after giving their home addresses and being instructed to contact their GP should they feel at all unwell. Passengers sitting closer to Barclay were subjected to hospital quarantine as what the authorities called ‘a sensible precaution’. To this group were added the two stewardesses and Dr Geoffrey Palmer, twenty-six people in all.

Humphrey Barclay died four days later. His fever did not abate, so he was never conscious of the plastic-bubble world he inhabited in the special unit of the hospital or of the nurses in spacesuits who did their best to make him comfortable through his last hours on earth. He did not see his wife, his two daughters, his parents or his dreaded in-laws before he died, due to the strict no-visitors rule in the special unit. He never got the chance to file his report on Ndanga to his superiors at the Foreign Office, but his death spoke volumes.

Senior Stewardess Judith Mills died eight days after Barclay, one day before Mrs Sally Morton, the passenger who had been sitting next to Barclay, and two days before Dr Geoffrey Palmer. There was a scare over Carol Bain when she became unwell after five days, but it proved to be just a cold. Geoffrey Palmer was the last of the people from the aircraft to die, but he was not the last to succumb to the virus. One of the nurses looking after Barclay became infected, despite the protective clothing, and she also died.

‘African Killer Virus Contained’ announced The Times. No further cases had been reported or were expected, according to health officials, it said; the situation was under control. The papers had kept up a daily assault on their readers, some of the tabloids initially predicting a plague that would sweep through the capital just as the bubonic plague had done in the seventeenth century. The more thoughtful articles concentrated on just how easy it was these days for viruses lurking in the heart of the African jungle one day to be transported to the West the next, courtesy of high-speed air travel.

The relatively low death toll and the quick containment of the virus left the papers that had predicted a more extreme scenario looking rather silly, although one of them expertly diverted attention by going on the offensive and demanding to know exactly what the virus was. Its readers, it maintained, had ‘the right to know’. It was a line of attack that the others had missed because it was in fact true that there had been no official statement about the identity of the virus. It was also true that there had been no clamour to know. The ‘new African diseases’, as many of the papers had called them, were generally thought to be just that, and therefore of no real great concern to readers in Chingford or Surbiton.

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office, London

‘They’re right, you know,’ said Sir Bruce Collins, putting down the paper. ‘We still don’t know the identity of the virus that did for poor old Barclay and the others.’

‘I thought they were pretty sure it was Ebola fever, sir,’ said one of the other eight people seated round the table.

‘That was and is an assumption,’ said Collins. ‘It’s probably the correct one, I grant you, considering all the symptoms, but we don’t have the official lab report yet.’

‘They’re taking their time, aren’t they?’

‘Apparently the scientists can only work on such viruses under what they call BL4 conditions. All the samples had to be taken to the government defence establishment at Porton Down for analysis. Anyway, what we have to decide now is whether or not the Foreign Secretary’s trip to Ndanga can go ahead.’

‘I don’t see how it can in the circumstances,’ said one man, and there was a general murmur of agreement.

‘I must remind you that this trip is important to us and to Ndanga, gentlemen. They need the respectability it will afford them and we in turn need access to their airstrip in the south and what goes with it. If we call off the visit, they just might renege on the whole agreement.’

‘But surely they’ll understand that such a visit doesn’t make sense during an outbreak?’

‘And there’s the rub,’ said Collins. ‘According to them, there is no outbreak. The authorities in Ndanga maintain that there has been no case of Ebola or any other haemorrhagic fever in the country in the past two years.’

‘But there must have been, otherwise how could poor old Barclay have picked it up? You have to get it from an already infected person, don’t you?’

‘Or an infected monkey, I understand.’

‘I can’t see Barclay consorting with chimps during his visit, can you?’

‘So that leaves us with a bit of an impasse,’ said Collins.

‘The Ndangan authorities must be lying.’

‘I have to admit that that thought did occur,’ said Collins. ‘So I made some discreet enquiries of the World Health Organisation. They have no record of any case of haemorrhagic fever in Ndanga in the past year.’

‘Did Barclay perhaps travel around a bit while he was in Africa?’ suggested someone.

‘I considered that, too,’ said Collins, ‘but I’ve seen his diary. He didn’t have any time to play the tourist. Apart from that, there has been no Ebola in any of the countries bordering Ndanga during the last six months.’

‘How about contact with a carrier?’

‘As I understand it, the medical profession is a bit vague about carrier status where these diseases are concerned. Some don’t think a true carrier state exists,’ said Collins, ‘but there is agreement about transfer of the virus through body fluids from a person who is recovering from the disease.’

‘So if old Humphrey had slept with a lady of the night who’d recently had the disease, that could have been it?’

‘Barclay was more a National Geographic and mug-of-Horlicks man, in my estimation,’ said Collins. ‘But even if what you suggest were true, what happened to her other customers? They should all be dead by now.’

‘Well, even if that was how Barclay picked it up, I don’t see anything there to prevent the Foreign Secretary’s visit going ahead.’

‘No,’ agreed Collins. ‘Just as long as we’re satisfied that there really is no outbreak in Ndanga.’

‘If I might make a suggestion, sir?’

‘Go ahead,’ said Collins.

‘You could have a word with the Sci-Med people in the Home Office. They’re sort of medical detectives, aren’t they?’

‘They are indeed,’ said Collins, ‘and that is a very good idea. I’ll have Jane make me an appointment to see the head of that outfit… What’s his name?’

‘Macmillan, sir. John Macmillan.’

The Sci-Med Inspectorate was a small independent body operating from within the Home Office under the directorship of John Macmillan. It comprised a number of investigators, well qualified in either science or medicine, whose job it was to take a look at problems, with or without possible criminal involvement, occurring in the hi-tech areas of modern life, areas where the police had little or no expertise.

This was no reflection on the police. They could not be expected to notice when, for instance, the surgical success record of one hospital fell well below others carrying out almost identical procedures, nor were they in a position to investigate the possible causes even if they did. Likewise, they were unlikely to notice that certain chemicals being ordered by the staff of a university chemistry department were in fact being used to manufacture hallucinogenic drugs. Both of these scenarios had been encountered in the past by Sci-Med and resolved, through enforced resignation of an ageing surgeon in the first case and criminal prosecution of a number of lab technicians in the other.

After Sir Bruce Collins’s visit, Macmillan asked his secretary to call in Dr Steven Dunbar. Dunbar had been a Sci-Med investigator for something over five years, and was currently on leave after his last assignment.

‘He’s only had a week of his leave,’ said Rose Roberts.

‘I’m aware of that, thank you,’ snapped Macmillan, ‘and of the tough time he had with his last job. But this won’t take him more than a couple of days, so please just make the call.’

Steven Dunbar took the call as he was packing. ‘I was just about to head north to see my daughter,’ he told Miss Roberts.

‘I’m sorry. I did point out that you’d only had a week and post-operational leave is always a month, but he asked for you anyway. If it’s any help, he said it wouldn’t take long.’

‘All right.’ Steven grinned. ‘See you at three.’

Steven had a lot of respect for John Macmillan, not least because of his unswerving loyalty to his staff and his constant battle to preserve Sci-Med’s independence and freedom of action. It had been his brainchild from the outset and had shown its worth many times over, uncovering crimes that otherwise might never have come to light. Sci-Med might be small but it was an object lesson in how a government department should be run. Against the modern trend, its administration had been kept to a minimum and existed first and foremost to serve front-line staff and smooth the way for them, rather than the other way round as was sadly the case in modern Britain. According to some of Steven’s medical friends, NHS staff now spent more time filling in forms and undergoing audits, assessments and appraisals than they did treating the sick.

No one came directly to Sci-Med. It was one of its great strengths that its investigators, when appointed, brought with them a wide range of abilities and experience. Dunbar, as a medical investigator, was of course medically qualified, but he had chosen not to pursue a conventional career in medicine. After two hospital residencies following medical school, he had found that he simply did not have the heart for it. A strong, athletic young man, brought up amid the mountains of Cumbria, he had felt the need for more of a physical challenge.

After some heart-searching he had joined the army at the end of his clinical year and had been assigned to the Parachute Regiment, where he had found all the physical challenge he could ever have hoped for, and more besides. He had thrived in this environment and had been trained as an expert in field medicine, an expertise he had been called upon to use on several occasions during his subsequent secondment to Special Forces. He had served all over the world and had been called upon to use not only his medical skills but often his powers of innovation and initiative. He would have liked nothing better than to stay with the SAS, but the nature of the job dictated that it be the province of young men and the time inevitably came when he had to step down, an ‘old’ man at the age of thirty-three.

Luckily, the position at Sci-Med had arisen at exactly the right time. The job had seemed perfect in that, although he’d still require his medical qualifications, he was not going to end up in some bleak surgery, freezing warts off feet and dishing out antidepressant pills. Instead, he would be involved in Sci-Med’s day-to-day investigations. He would be given assignments judged suitable to his expertise and allowed to pursue them in his own way. Sci-Med would provide all the back-up he needed, ranging from expert advice to weapons if need be.

From the Inspectorate’s point of view, Steven had appeared from the outset to be well suited to their requirements. He was a doctor with proven ability to survive and succeed in extremely demanding situations. Real situations, a far cry from the ‘How would you cross this imaginary river?’ problems of office team-building exercises. And so it had proved to be. Steven had progressed over the years to become a much-valued member of the Sci-Med team, and the admiration was mutual.

Steven left his fifth-floor apartment in Docklands and took a taxi to the Home Office. He wore a dark-blue suit, light-blue shirt and Parachute Regiment tie, and cut an imposing figure as he entered the building and showed his ID. No less imposing was John Macmillan, who in many ways could have been an older version of Steven, tall, slim and erect but with swept-back silver hair instead of Steven’s dark mane.

‘Good to see you, Dunbar. Take a seat.’

Steven sat and listened to Macmillan’s apology for bringing him back early from leave. ‘Jamieson and Dewar are both out on assignment right now so I was faced with asking one of the scientific chaps to take this on or recalling you. I decided on you.’

‘I’m flattered,’ said Steven with only the merest suggestion of a smile.

Macmillan looked at him for a moment, searching for signs of sarcasm, but didn’t find any. ‘Anyway, you must be aware of this Ebola thing on the African flight?’

‘I read about it in the papers,’ replied Steven. ‘Nasty.’

‘It could have been much worse but the emergency procedures for just such an eventuality worked well, and the problem was contained with only five dead — not that that’s much comfort to them or their families.’

‘So what concerns us?’ asked Steven.

‘The aircraft had come from Ndanga and the passenger who fell ill and infected the others was a Foreign Office official. He had been in Africa, making arrangements for a visit by the Foreign Secretary. The Foreign Office is worried.’

‘It would be crazy to go ahead with the visit until any outbreak is over,’ said Steven.

‘The Ndangan authorities say there is no outbreak.’

‘So how did our man get the disease?’

‘Precisely.’

‘God, you’re not going to send me to Ndanga, are you?’ exclaimed Steven.

‘Nothing like that.’ Macmillan smiled. ‘The Foreign Office would simply like to be assured that the relevant authorities aren’t lying. I’ve already been on to the WHO in Geneva. They’ve heard nothing about an outbreak, but I thought you might get in touch with some of your friends and acquaintances in the medical charities and see what you can come up with?’

‘Will do,’ said Steven. ‘Are they sure it’s Ebola?’

‘There’s been nothing back from Porton yet, but from all accounts it has to be one of the haemorrhagic fevers.’

‘But it could be something other than Ebola, like Lassa or Marburg disease. Not that it makes much difference: there’s not a damned thing anyone can do about any of them, anyway.’

Macmillan nodded and said, ‘I understand that there’s going to be a briefing for officials tonight at the Foreign Office. Maybe they’ll have some news. I think you should go along.’

Steven agreed.

‘Miss Roberts will give you details.’

Steven spent the remainder of the afternoon telephoning friends and colleagues to find out which medical missions and charities were currently operating in Ndanga. He established that three were, including the large French organisation, Medecins sans Frontieres. He had a friend who worked as a co-ordinator at their Paris office. He called her.

‘Simone? It’s Steven Dunbar in London.’

‘Steven! How nice. It’s been ages. How are you?’

After an exchange of pleasantries Steven asked about haemorrhagic fever in Ndanga.

‘No, I don’t think so,’ replied Simone. ‘Give me a moment…’

Steven looked out of the window of his apartment while he waited. It was sunny but there were black clouds coming in from the west.

Simone came back on the line. ‘No, no reports at all of haemorrhagic fever in Ndanga or the countries surrounding it at the moment.’

Steven liked hearing the word ‘haemorrhagic’ spoken with a French accent. It made him smile. ‘Thanks, Simone,’ he said. ‘I’m obliged.’

‘So when will we see you in Paris?’

‘Soon, I hope. We’ll have dinner.’