Resurrection

TWELVE

‘So what do you want to do?’ asked Grant.

‘I want to check out the round tower,’ said Dewar. ‘Just in case.’

Grant grimaced and said, ‘You’re certainly one for playing your hunches. I’m prepared to bet you that the door to the tower is locked. The place’s not been used for years.’

‘I wouldn’t bet against you,’ said Dewar. ‘But I’d be happier in my mind just giving it the once over.’

‘Suit yourself,’ said Grant with a shrug that said, ‘waste of time’ ‘I’ll check out the rooms in this corridor one floor down. I’ll meet you on the stairs when you’re through.’

Dewar nodded his agreement.

‘And before we start let’s agree on something,’ added Grant. ‘No heroics. We call for back-up before we do anything.’

‘Agreed,’ said Dewar.

Dewar climbed back up to the corridor where he’d last seen Le Grice disappear from view, jacket flying open as he made a bid for freedom. He followed in his footsteps to the turn where, just as the plans promised, he found a choice. There was a double door to the left leading to the main staircase; there was also a door to

the right. His first thought on looking at it was that Grant had been right. There was something about the door that suggested that it had not been in use for many a long year. It had a glass panel but it had been boarded over on the inside. The handle seemed dirty and unused. He tried it and found it locked.

Conceding wryly to Grant, he turned to go downstairs when something made him stop. The resistance he’d felt in the door when he’d turned the handle had been lower down than it should have been. It had not quite been behind where the handle was. He went back and tried it again. This time he was sure. He looked up and saw the door move slightly inwards at the top. The door wasn’t locked; it was being held shut by something placed behind it on the floor. This didn’t automatically mean that someone had recently blocked it; entrance to the tower at this level could have been closed off at sometime in the past by someone coming down or up from another level inside the tower. On the other hand, it was worth checking out.

He turned the handle and held it while he put his shoulder to the door frame to apply mounting pressure. The door started to edge open as a large cardboard box was inched back out of the way. The opening was now big enough to allow Dewar to squeeze through. He closed the door behind him softly and took a look at the box that had been blocking entry; it was full of heavy rubber sheeting. The cracks on the visible folds told him that the rubber had perished a long time ago.

The air around him smelt stale and musty; there was obviously no ventilation in the tower. A thick layer of dust covered all the flat surfaces he could see and there was junk everywhere; there was a premature-baby incubator lying on the floor, one of its glass panels broken and paint peeling off its other surfaces. Dewar guessed that it had been dumped in the tower when the glass had broken and it had been deemed to have come to the end of its useful life. There were plastic chairs in various states of disrepair stacked one on top of the other in threes, planks of wood propped up against one wall, several red metal pails with the word, Fire, faded but still visible on their sides, relics of the days when pails of water were placed at intervals along corridors as the sole method of fire fighting should the need arise.

The tower room itself was half tiled, the tiles crazed and cracked so they resembled unlettered road maps. They were clearly from another age, an age that might have known gas light and the sluice of carbolic as Lister and his colleagues introduced the then new concept of antisepsis to this very hospital. An old operating table was propped on its side under the window, its pedestal nowhere to be seen. This and various other bits and pieces led Dewar to conclude that the room had once been an operating theatre for minor surgery, perhaps the draining of wounds, the lancing of septic cysts and the like but that had all been a very long time ago. It had clearly been a junk store for many years.

What was more important was that there was no sign of Le Grice having been in the room, no tell-tale foot or hand prints in the dirt and dust. Dewar came out on to the landing and started to climb up to the next level, the spiral stone steps inducing vague feelings of claustrophobia as he lost the daylight of one level and entered almost complete darkness before emerging into the light of the next. There were no working lights on the stair walls or in the ceiling; the electricity to this part of the building had been cut off when occupancy ceased.

Dewar stood for a moment at the head of the stairs, just listening. There was no sound save for the distant background rumble of the traffic outside the hospital gates. Standing perfectly still and listening however, had heightened his other senses. The air still smelt musty and unpleasant but there was something else in it, a vague suggestion of cologne. He recognised it. Le Grice was somewhere up here.

Dewar’s heart rate rose until he was physically aware of it beating in his chest. He supposed he should start back down the stairs and tell Grant so that they could summon assistance but, if at all possible, he would prefer to speak to Le Grice alone about the smallpox virus and how far he’d gone with it so far. Once the police were involved with handcuffs and the attendant trauma of arrest he feared that Le Grice might just clam up and say nothing. If he could persuade him to talk before officialdom stepped in he might just have a better chance of getting at the truth. He’d have to be careful but if the worst came to the worst he was as big and as strong as the Frenchman. If he kept his wits about him and didn’t walk into any kind of trap or ambush, he should be all right.

He took a step towards the tower room on this level; the door was almost closed but not quite. He looked above it to see if anything had been mounted there to fall on unwary heads; there was nothing. There was of course, the possibility that Le Grice could be waiting just inside, his body pressed to the wall ready to jump him as he walked through. He pushed the door open gently but didn’t enter. The door hinges creaked in protest at having their slumber disturbed.

To his surprise, Dewar found Le Grice sitting there facing him. He was directly opposite the door and sitting on the floor with his legs stretched out in front of him, his back propped up against the circular wall. It was as if he’d been waiting for him to arrive. Although Le Grice could hardly have been deemed to have adopted an aggressive stance, Dewar was still wary of the man. He wasn’t dealing with an idiot.

‘Hello Pierre,’ he said quietly.

Le Grice nodded. ‘I ‘ad a feeling it might be you,’ he said, his accent seemingly more pronounced than on past occasions. ‘I misjudged you.’

‘I hoped you might tell me all about it before the police join us.’

Le Grice shrugged. ‘What’s to tell? If it hadn’t been for that stupid, interfering girl everything would ‘ave been all right. She just didn’t understand. She would have benefited too from access to more fragments, so would Peter but no, the silly bitch decided to — ow you say? Cut off her nose to spite her face.’

‘Sandra?’

‘Bloody Sandra.’

Not exactly filled with remorse, thought Dewar, steeling himself to keep his cool in the interests of learning as much as possible. ‘How much did they pay you to do it?’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘The Iraqis.’

‘What Iraqis?’

Dewar sighed and said, ‘What’s the point of denying it now?’ he said. ‘If you’ve any decency in you at all you’d make a clean breast of things and tell me everything. We’ve got to make a start on minimising the damage. Christ man, don’t you care at all? Don’t you realise what you’ve done?’

‘I broke the rules, the holy rules, the sacred bloody rules and that little bitch decided to ruin my career. ’Ow long will I get?’

‘If Sandra dies, thirty years. If she doesn’t maybe a bit less. But if you’ve reconstructed that virus and handed it over they’re going to bring back hanging specially for you and I’ll be cheering in the front row so tell me, how far did you get?’

‘I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,’ said Le Grice.

Dewar shrugged and said, ‘If you really want to play it that way it’s time we were going.’

Le Grice shook his head slowly. ‘I think not,’ he said.

Dewar felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise; he became very wary. Although Le Grice was still sitting on the floor and there was no way he could mount an attack, the words made him feel uneasy. The feeling heightened when he saw Le Grice take out a surgical scalpel from his inside pocket and take off the blade protector.

‘That’s what you cut the ventilator with,’ he said, remembering the clean, sharp incisions in the plastic tubing.

Le Grice smiled and moved to bring his legs round. ‘I really did underestimate you,’ he said.

‘Don’t do anything stupid,’ cautioned Dewar, as Le Grice started to move into a kneeling position. ‘You’re not going anywhere. You must see that. There’s no way out. The police are downstairs.’

Le Grice nodded slowly and said, ‘Oui, all over. My hopes for the vaccine … my career … my ambitions … my freedom … all over. You don’t ‘ave to tell me that. I know.’ He smiled wanly and with a sudden darting movement of his hand he brought the scalpel blade cleanly and deeply across his own throat.

Dewar stepped back as a fountain of crimson splashed into the dust at his feet. Le Grice tipped over on to his face and lay in a crumpled heap.

‘Oh, my God,’ whispered Dewar.

‘Hello! Anyone up there?’ came Grant’s voice from the stairs.

‘Here,’ answered Dewar. He waited, motionless until Grant joined him.

‘Christ almighty,’ said Grant. ‘I hope you didn’t do that.’

Dewar shook his head.

‘Bloody considerate of him, I’d say,’ said Grant. ‘Saves us a great deal of time and trouble, not to mention the cost of a trial and legal aid to fund some smart-arsed lawyer to claim he was actually half way up the bloody Eiffel Tower at the time of the incident. Why’d he do it?’

‘Like we said, he was a very bright man. He saw the future and it didn’t work for him.’

‘Did he tell you what you wanted to know?’

Dewar shook his head. ‘Not a thing.’

‘So where does that leave us?’

‘With something unpleasant to do. I’m going to close down Steven Malloy’s lab and have everything in it taken away.’

‘Christ, he’ll love that.’

‘There’s no alternative. The place is full of bottles and tubes with labels that mean nothing to anyone except their originator. Trying to pick out Le Grice’s stuff from the rest in the absence of Ali Hammadi and now Sandra Macandrew is a non-starter. The only way we can be sure we’ve destroyed whatever Le Grice was working on is to put the whole damned lot into the steriliser. We’ll analyse what we can but the main priority is safety.’

‘I’m glad you’re the one going to be telling Malloy,’ said Grant. ‘This is going to put an end to his research career.’

‘It might also destroy two Ph.D. theses and what’s left of a technician’s working life.’

Dewar waited until Le Grice’s body had been bagged and taken away before driving over to the Institute of Molecular Sciences. He showed his ID to the two uniformed policemen on the door but didn’t tell them that Le Grice wouldn’t be coming after all. He found Steven Malloy going through racks of tubes that he’d removed from a lab fridge. George Ferguson and Peter Moore were removing the contents of a chest freezer and stacking them on an adjacent bench. There was a large wire basket sitting on a table in the centre of the room. Dewar guessed that this was for Le Grice’s stuff.

‘Have they caught him?’ asked Malloy as soon as he saw Dewar.

‘In a manner of speaking.’

‘Something’s happened,’ said Malloy, reading Dewar’s expression.

‘Pierre Le Grice is dead. He took his own life when he saw there was no way out.’

‘My God,’ whispered Malloy. Ferguson and Peter Moore exchanged shocked glances.

Dewar gave them a moment to come to terms with the news then Malloy asked, ‘Did you get a chance to speak to him before he did it?’

Dewar nodded. ‘He wouldn’t tell me anything. He didn’t deny trying to kill Sandra but he wouldn’t admit to anything else.’

‘I still can’t believe he did it,’ said Malloy. ‘Christ! What’s happened to us all. A few short weeks ago we were on the verge of making the biggest breakthrough in years and suddenly all this happens. Ali dead, Pierre dead. Sandra lying at death’s door.’

‘I’m afraid there’s more,’ said Dewar.

Malloy looked unwilling to believe that there could possibly be any more bad news.

‘I’m going to have to seal off this lab. A special team will be brought in to remove everything from it.’

‘Pierre’s stuff, yes, we’re getting it together now.’

‘Everyone’s stuff,’ said Dewar.

Malloy’s face registered disbelief but he saw that Dewar was serious. He sank down on a stool and stared down at the floor, shaking his head.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Dewar. ‘But it’s the only way to be sure that there’s no possibility of live smallpox virus being left around.’

‘This is crazy,’ said Malloy. ‘I just don’t believe for a moment that Pierre Le Grice tried to reconstruct live smallpox virus in the open lab. That would have been just plain crazy.’

‘I agree. But you wouldn’t have believed he would have tried to kill Sandra Macandrew either.’

Malloy couldn’t argue.

‘This means my PhD goes down the tubes,’ said Peter Moore, suddenly seeing the implications for himself. ‘Sandra’s too.’

‘I’m sorry, there’s no other way.’

‘Christ,’ muttered Peter Moore. ‘Talk about shit happening!’

‘It means the end of the lab, doesn’t it?’ said George Ferguson. ‘No grant-funding body is going to come up with money to support a line of research that no longer exists.’

‘It means starting over again,’ agreed Dewar. ‘But you’ll have all your experimental notes to work from.’

‘Forget it,’ said Malloy. By the time we got back up to speed, the opposition would be out of sight.’ ‘It’s not feasible. It’s all over. When d’you want us out?’

‘I’d like you to leave the lab now. The sooner I seal it off the better.’

Malloy smiled without humour. ‘Don’t trust us eh?’

‘Nothing like that,’ said Dewar. ‘Just procedure.’

‘And these Iraqi fuckers, the ones behind it all, the movers and shakers, they’ll get away I take it?’

‘There’s no evidence against them as yet.’

‘Christ! Half my group are dead or dying. My entire research programme is going down the swannee and there’s no evidence against them as yet,’ mimicked Malloy.

‘I can understand your bitterness,’ said Dewar.

‘Jesus! Dewar. You sound like a Californian, — “thank you for sharing your anger with me”.’ With that Malloy stormed out of the room.

‘Well, I suppose I’d better think about getting my arse down the job centre,’ said Peter Moore. ‘See if they need any double glazing salesmen. The Medical Research Council aren’t going to give me another grant to start over again.’ He too, left the room with a black look in Dewar’s direction.

‘Your turn,’ said Dewar to George Ferguson, the only one left. ‘I feel like the grim reaper.’

Ferguson gave a half-hearted smile. ‘You’re only doing your job,’ he said ‘But you must see how these guys feel.’

Dewar nodded. ‘Of course.’

‘This lab is Steve Malloy’s life. ‘His research is the only thing he cares about unlike half the wankers in this place who spend most of their time sitting on their arse talking about research rather than doing it. It takes more than knowledge to be a researcher,’ Ferguson continued. ‘You can know every fact in the damned world and still not know what to do next. Steve’s different. He’s a natural. He knows the questions, the experiments to do, the paths to follow. It’s a bloody shame.’

Dewar nodded sympathetically. ‘And you? What’ll you do now?’ he asked.’

Ferguson shrugged. ‘I’ll survive.’

‘You’re married?’

Ferguson nodded. ‘Yes, we’ve got one boy.’

‘Still living at home?’

‘A veil came over Ferguson’s eyes. ‘He’s not right,’ he said. ‘Brain damage when he was a kid.’

‘Bad luck. I’m sorry.’

Ferguson shrugged. ‘That’s the way it goes. Anyway, I think I’ll go find the others, leave you to your business.’

‘I really am sorry,’ said Dewar.

‘Yeah.’

Dewar called Macmillan at Sci-Med from Malloy’s office and told him what had happened.

‘Did this man, Le Grice admit it before he took his life?’ asked Macmillan.

‘He didn’t deny the attempt on Sandra Macandrew’s life and he mentioned extra smallpox fragments but he didn’t actually acknowledge any dealings with the Iraqis.’

‘Damn,’ said Macmillan. ‘But there seems little doubt?’

‘He had extra smallpox fragments and he tried to kill Sandra.’ replied Dewar. ‘It sounded to me like he’d tried to convince Sandra that the extra fragments would have helped with her research but she decided to blow the whistle on him anyway.’

‘That still leaves us with nothing against these damned people. ‘You don’t think he actually managed to supply them with the virus do you?’ asked Macmillan.

‘I don’t think so. I don’t think there was time and the Iraqis haven’t looked like they’re ready to leave according to the secret service.’

‘What are you doing about the lab where Le Grice worked?’

‘I’ve just told the research group leader that everything in his lab will have to be removed. I’d like a team from Porton Down called in to take it away. We can’t afford to take chances. They can analyse anything they think looks promising under conditions of maximum containment and destroy everything when they’re finished.’

‘You’re right, the last thing we need is someone contracting smallpox because it was left lying around and nobody knew about it.’

‘I’m going to lock and seal the lab. Would you arrange for the Porton team to be called in to do their stuff? I’ll tell the head of institute here to expect them.’

‘Are you planning to come back to London?’

‘I’ll hang on for a couple of days if that’s all right. I’ll brief the Porton team when they arrive and I’d also like to see the back of Siddiqui and his pal before I return. Presumably they’ll leave when word about Le Grice gets out.’

‘I’ve done what you requested about arranging to have them stopped and searched on the way out.’

‘Good, the more thorough and unpleasantly the better. Siddiqui can’t play the diplomatic card because he entered the country as an academic not a diplomat. God knows what Abbas’s status is but I’m sure a “misunderstanding” could arise.’

‘I think the immigration people have got the message,’ said Macmillan. ‘They’re still smarting from having let Siddiqui in unnoticed.’

‘Good.’

‘I’ll get on to Porton. I’ll give them your number to contact when they get there.’

‘Any idea how long?’

‘I’m going to make this top priority. They have a rapid response squad. With the help of the military I should think four to five hours.’

‘I’ll be waiting.’

Dewar found that Hutton, the head of institute already knew what was happening by the time he got to his office.

‘Dr Malloy told me,’ said Hutton. ‘He’s devastated. He sees it as the end of his career.’

‘He’s still a brilliant scientist,’ said Dewar. ‘Surely there will be a place for him somewhere.’

‘Unfortunately that’s not the way research works,’ said Hutton. ‘Research groups are a bit like Italian city states in the middle ages. There’s no question of the leader of one being able to join the forces of another. His rivals in the vaccine race will see his misfortune as one less runner in the race to worry about.’

‘Not exactly a Walt Disney world, is it,’ said Dewar.

‘What is these days?’ replied Hutton.

That old excuse, thought Dewar.

‘These people who’re coming,’ said Hutton. ‘What exactly are they going to do?’

‘They will take away absolutely everything from Steven Malloy’s lab in sealed containers and fumigate the lab itself when it’s empty. The contents of the containers will be subject to analysis under secure conditions when they get back to Porton then everything will be destroyed, just in case anything has been missed.’

Hutton nodded. ‘This all seems like a bad dream.’

‘For all of us,’ Dewar assured him.

‘Is there anything you’d like me to do?’

‘Just make sure that the Malloy lab is kept locked.’

‘I’ll put the whole corridor out of bounds until your people arrive. I’ll have one of the porters sit by the door.’

‘That might be best,’ agreed Dewar. He returned to his hotel and asked for beer and sandwiches. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast time and it was now four in the afternoon. He called Grant rather than the hospital to ask about Sandra Macandrew’s condition.

‘They say she’s improving,’ replied Grant. ‘Becoming stable, I think was the expression. Do you still want the guard left on her?’

‘Yes,’ replied Dewar after a moment’s thought. ‘It’s just possible that Le Grice admitted to her what he was doing for the Iraqis. Let’s keep her safe.’

‘You’re the man.’

Dewar wondered what film Grant had picked up that expression from. Next he called Simon Barron on his mobile number. ‘Anything happening?’ he asked.

‘Nothing but I hear you’ve been having a lot of fun and games?’ replied Barron.

Dewar filled him in on the details.

‘So panic over, we can expect our friends to pack their bags shortly?’

‘Let’s hope so.’

‘Can we be sure that this Le Grice character didn’t succeed in reconstructing the virus?’

‘All the signs are that he didn’t. Porton Down are going to investigate the entire contents of the lab he worked in to see if they can get an idea about what stage he was at and if Sandra Macandrew comes round she can probably tell us a good deal.’

‘Let’s hope she does,’ said Barron. ‘In the meantime we go on watching while you have all the fun.’

‘I think I’ve had quite enough “fun” as you put it. I just want to see the back of these two up in Forest Road.

* * * * *

Dewar received a call from the Porton team after they landed at Edinburgh Airport just after eight. He arranged to meet them outside the institute and found them already waiting when he got there. He had not taken into account a police escort which cut down their town travel time considerably. The small convoy comprised two police cars and an unlettered black Transit van. Dewar presumed that this also had been supplied by the local police.

He introduced himself to the leader of the team, Doctor Robert Smillie, and briefed him on events.

‘That’s more or less what we’ve been told,’ said Smillie when he’d finished. ‘If you’ll just show us to the lab in question we’ll take over from there. Any special problems? Do we need respirators?

‘No,’ Dewar assured him. ‘The man involved in this affair was a highly trained scientist. If there’s anything to be found it will be in an appropriate container. The question is, which one? There could be several; alternatively there may be none. This is a precaution but a very necessary one.’

The team of three changed into coverall suits and put on gloves before entering Malloy’s lab, carrying a number of sealable plastic containers. They took less than sixty minutes to remove every single tube and bottle in the place, even moving all the furniture to examine the floor underneath for anything that had fallen and rolled.

‘I’m impressed,’ said Dewar to Smillie when his team had finished and were setting the sterilising ‘bombs’ in place.

‘I think this is where I say, all in a day’s work,’ said Smillie.

Dewar grinned and said, ‘But I don’t envy you the next bit.’

Smillie nodded his agreement. ‘There’s no question of analysing the contents of every single container,’ he said. ‘But we’ll do a DNA scan and concentrate on those that come up positive. Can’t say how long it’s going to take. We’ll be using the high containment suite. That always slows things up. It’s like picking your nose with boxing gloves on.’