The Lazarus Strain

FIFTEEN

‘I thought we might have a beer?’ said Frank Giles when Steven picked up the phone. He had been going through his notes with a view to having to write up a full report on what had gone on at the Crick Institute and the events of the aftermath. ‘Anything that gets me out of doing this for a while,’ he replied, telling Giles what he was up to.

‘Paperwork,’ intoned Giles, ‘the scourge of our times and never to be done on a Saturday night. The Green Man in half an hour?’

Giles expanded on the theme when Steven met him and they sat down with their drinks. ‘You know what really gets me,’ he said. ‘Written reports of events rarely describe what actually happened. They list what should have happened if everything had followed a logical course.’

Steven smiled indulgently.

‘It’s true,’ Giles asserted, ‘There’s no place in a report written after the event for the role of instinct, intuition or even actions based on common sense — the things that really shape an investigation. You have to pretend. You have to alter things to make it appear as if you followed a logical series of actions, so what good is that, eh? What does anyone learn from that? What’s the point of it?’

‘I hope you’re not looking to me to defend the filling of forms,’ said Steven.

‘No, I just like having a rant from time to time — I like a good rant.’

‘So, how are things with Norfolk’s finest when they’re not ranting?’ asked Steven.

‘They’ve quietened down a lot,’ said Giles. ‘Finding Ali has been taken out of our hands by Her Majesty’s public schoolboys and what happened at the Crick is now yesterday’s news. The attention of the great British public has moved on: the Chief Super can sleep easy and I can get a night off. Dare I ask if the spooks have had any success?’

Steven shook his head.

‘So we’re still in trouble?’

‘Could be,’ agreed Steven. ‘But Dr Martin at the Crick has succeeded in coming up with a vaccine strain that should protect against Cambodia 5. Her strain is due to be delivered to the pharmaceutical company tomorrow. They’ll put it into production right away.’

‘What does that involve?’ asked Giles.

‘Full scale growth of the vaccine virus in fertile hens’ eggs in Auroragen’s virus culture suite.’

‘Sounds like what they were attempting at the mill house,’ said Giles.

‘It’s the same technique only they were growing up the Cambodia 5 virus itself to be used as a weapon and thankfully, on a much smaller scale. Auroragen will get through 100,000 eggs a day with production at full swing and produce something over a hundred million doses of vaccine.’

‘Mind you, the opposition have had a head start. They may have caught up a bit by now,’ said Giles.

‘And I thought you were going to cheer me up,’ said Steven.

‘Look on the bright side,’ said Giles. ‘It gives us both an excuse to get pissed.’

‘Same again?’ asked Steven.

‘So what happens once the vaccine has grown up in the eggs?’ asked Giles when Steven returned with two more beers.

‘They harvest the amniotic fluid from the eggs — that’s the stuff which contains the virus — and then it’s put into injection vials which will be used to vaccinate people in Europe and the USA.’

‘So you’re injecting people with one virus to protect them against another?’

‘That’s exactly it,’ said Steven. ‘The body will produce antibodies against the first virus — the harmless one — which will also work against the killer because they are so similar — one is an attenuated form of the other. It’s called live-virus vaccination. They use the same technique for smallpox. They inject a virus similar to smallpox called Vaccinia into you and it stimulates antibodies which work against smallpox itself.’

‘How do you know the flu one will work?’

‘In this case we don’t,’ said Steven. ‘Normally it would be tested on animals first but there hasn’t been time. We’ll just have to hope.’

‘And if the worst comes to the worst and it doesn’t work?’

‘The public will be defenceless against a Cambodia 5 attack. If the intelligence services don’t find Ali and his pals in time and destroy the virus stocks they’ve been growing up, they’ll spray it around city centres up and down the country and we’ll have a major epidemic on our hands and by the end of the first month, probably a pandemic across the globe.’

‘But surely there must be drugs they can use?’ said Giles.

Steven shook his head. ‘There’s a common misconception that you can use antibiotics to treat virus infections — but you can’t. Antibiotics work against bacteria not viruses.’

‘They’re all the same to me,’ said Giles.

‘The bugs know the difference,’ said Steven. ‘There are a few anti-viral drugs coming on to the market but they tend to be of limited use. Prevention is still better than a cure when it comes to virus infection.’

Acting on the spur of the moment, Steven drove up to Norfolk’s north coast next morning and went for a walk along the beach. He felt decidedly rough after the night before but the cool breeze coming in off the North Sea soon cleared his head and he took pleasure from being outdoors on a day when gulls were wheeling above the waves and the sun was sparkling on the water. He’d always liked beach walking, particularly on wide expanses of hard packed sand where the horizons seemed infinite and the sky fell into the ocean. Today was a special day: it was the day Leila’s vaccine strain would be handed over to the drug company. He glanced at his watch and saw that it would already be on its way — she had opted to travel up to Liverpool with it and supervise the handover personally. After that, she would get her life back — a life he very much hoped to be part of in the coming weeks. He would call her this evening when he got home.

It had been a long time since he had felt so interested in a woman and despite the fact that he knew so little about her, he had even started considering how Jenny might take to there being a new woman in his life and when might be the right time to tell her. Of course, this might be a two-way problem, he recognised. There had been times in the past when the revelation that he had a daughter had cooled a relationship. Many intelligent career women did not automatically warm to the prospect of playing mother to a ready-made family. He picked up a pebble and threw it out into the sea, berating himself for even thinking about such things when he hardly even knew Leila Martin.

Normally he would have sought out a pub to have lunch after such a walk but the excesses of the previous night steered him instead to a harbour-side coffee shop where he ordered scrambled eggs on toast and a mug of black coffee. He examined water colours of local scenes, painted by local artists while he waited but he’d never been a big fan of water colour; he found it too insipid for landscapes or seascapes. He ate his meal and had a second mug of coffee before heading back to his hotel to continue what he had been about to start last night. Once the report was done he reckoned he might be able to take some time off. With a bit of luck Leila might even be persuaded to do the same.

‘You smell of fresh air,’ said the receptionist at the hotel when he asked for his key.

Steven smiled. It was something his mother used to say to him as a child when he came back from a day in the hills in his native Cumbria. ‘I’ve been for a walk on the beach,’ he explained.

‘Lucky you,’ said the girl. ‘I’ve been stuck here all day,’

Starting to note down the various steps he’d taken during the investigation made him think about what Giles had said the night before about writing up reports. He found himself trying to order events in a logical way rather than in the sequence they’d actually happened. Giles was right; official reports were no place for recording gut instinct — the real reason he’d gone to Nick Cleary’s house after feeling that the man was holding something back after he’d first interviewed him. Reports were written after the event, when hindsight was on tap.

He could see now that some of the tests he had asked for were redundant almost before the results had come back from the lab. The DNA profiles he’d asked for at the Crick to eliminate the possibility of a member of staff having touched the key on the secret safe had failed to reveal a match because there really had been a third man involved in the attack on the institute — the Ali character who seemed to have cropped up so often without being identified. DIS had found his DNA in the flat where the three dead men had been found, adding more fuel to the suspicion that he had killed two of them. They couldn’t identify him from any data file but they had confirmed that his DNA was a match for the profile that had been found on the safe key in the Crick.

‘He certainly gets around,’ murmured Steven. It was a thought that made him wonder why? If al-Qaeda was engaged in a big operation, why should one man crop up so often? True, Ali was probably the leader but it tended to imply that the team he led was small. There again, a small team would be more secure than a large one where the risk of capture or failure increased with the appointing of every additional member, but there were certain things that a small team could not achieve and cultivating a lethal virus and using it to carry out a major biological attack on several cities simultaneously across the UK was one of them.

Ali seemed to have been involved in everything from hunt sabotage to recruiting animal rights activists for the raid on the Crick. Ali had organised the raid. Ali had tortured the information he needed out of Professor Devon. Ali had murdered Devon and facilitated the theft of the infected monkey. Ali had been at the flat where the dead men were discovered — he had almost certainly murdered two of them… so how much manpower was Ali left with?

Had Ali been at the mill house too? Steven wondered. Maybe the forensics people had the answer to that and perhaps to how many other people had been present at the mill. He phoned Frank Giles.

‘God, I hope you’re not going to suggest going out for a beer,’ said Giles when he heard Steven’s voice. ‘I’ve had a head full of broken glass all day.’

Steven told him what he wanted to know.

‘Just the four,’ said Giles. ‘The three dead men and the one unidentified male who was also at the flat in town.’

‘Thanks,’ said Steven and put the phone down. He was feeling nervous. There was something not quite right about all this and the questions were coming thick and fast. Why had the operation at the mill been so small when the amount of virus required for a Cambodia 5 virus attack would be much greater? Four people involved and three were dead. The working hypothesis had been that they had other facilities somewhere in the UK — maybe even up and running as Leila had proposed — but they would need skilled technicians and a supply of fertile hens’ eggs — lots of them. The security people who had been monitoring the egg suppliers had reported no unusual orders being placed so where were they getting them from? Steven phoned Colonel Rose at DIS.

After an exchange of pleasantries, Steven told him what was on his mind. ‘There is no alternative to fertile hens’ eggs,’ he said, ‘and they need thousands of them. Can you check again with the suppliers and make absolutely sure that none were left off the list?’

‘Will do,’ said Rose. ‘But I’m pretty sure none has.’

Steven noted the slight rebuke but this was no time to tip-toe around other people’s sensibilities. He added, ‘And maybe they could examine orders from all their usual customers to see if there has been any abnormal increase being ordered. It’s absolutely vital. The eggs are their Achilles heel. We know their intent and we know their targets but they can’t hit them if they don’t have enough virus and for that they need lots of eggs.’

‘I suppose ordering them through an accepted source like a large research institute would be the thing to do if they could manage it,’ said Rose.

‘Cutting out the lab supplier altogether would be even better if they were to come to an arrangement with one of the large poultry concerns,’ said Steven.

‘We’ll check that too,’ said Rose. ‘I’ll let you know as soon as I hear.’

Steven didn’t like it when things didn’t make sense and he had just started thinking about another puzzle from the mill — the way the monkey had been opened up. There had been little or no surgical expertise involved and that was probably why the three men had contracted the disease. They had known nothing about aseptic technique or what safety measures to adopt when dealing with dangerous biological material. Someone had instructed them to remove the lungs and windpipe from the animal — and then what? Unskilled workers would be incapable of extracting virus and setting up egg cultures so who had done this? Ali? The ubiquitous Ali? Something wasn’t quite making sense. Al-Qaeda needed a large team but he kept seeing a small one.

Steven was wrestling with this when Leila called.

‘I’m back,’ she said. ‘God, I’m so relieved.’

‘Well done,’ said Steven. ‘Did everything go all right?’

‘Like clockwork. The technicians were standing by and the initial egg cultures had all been prepared: I was most impressed. They have wonderful facilities.’

‘The very best,’ agreed Steven.

‘I went there to impress upon them the need for great care — any bacterial contamination of the virus cultures and there won’t be time to start over again. But there was no need; they are already taking every conceivable precaution.’

‘Good,’ said Steven. ‘I think they’re hypersensitive to bacterial contamination problems. So now you are a free woman?’

‘I suppose I am,’ agreed Leila.

‘Dinner?’

‘That would be lovely.’

The Bella Napoli Italian restaurant in Norwich was quiet on a Sunday evening — there was only one other couple there and they seemed to have fallen out with each other as they sat in silence, examining their place mats. Steven was glad when one of the staff put on some music in an attempt to create atmosphere, although Dean Martin singing Volare failed to conjure up images of warm Italian nights when Norfolk rain was battering noisily on all the windows.

‘Sorry,’ said Steven.

Leila reached across the table and put her hand on his. ‘It’s fine,’ she said. ‘I’m just so relieved that I got the strain to the company on time that tonight nothing else matters.’

‘You did incredibly well,’ said Steven.

‘And now I am going to sleep for a week,’ said Leila. ‘How about you? Is Sci-Med still involved in the investigation?’

Steven shook his head. ‘Our interest is officially over. The security services have taken over.’

‘But?’ prompted Leila, noting some reservation in his voice.

‘I just have a bad feeling about the whole thing…’

‘You think al-Qaeda will make their attack before the vaccine’s ready?’

Steven shook his head. ‘No, it’s not that… It’s hard to explain. There’s something not quite right about the whole thing…’

‘Tell me,’ said Leila. ‘Get it off your chest as you English say.’

‘The operation at the mill house where we found an incubator room and egg boxes… I can’t help feeling there was something wrong with that,’ said Steven. ‘It smacked of a very small operation when they would need a much bigger one for what they’re planning.’

‘But isn’t that the way terrorists work,’ said Leila.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I don’t know too much about such things but I do seem to remember reading that they like to operate in small independent cells rather than large units. I think it’s a security thing. If one member gets caught the damage will be limited to one cell rather than the whole organisation. Each cell operates on… oh, I can’t remember what they called it…’

‘A need to know basis,’ said Steven.

‘That’s it,’ agreed Leila.

‘Maybe you’re right,’ said Steven. ‘I suppose the operation at the mill house could have been just one small stage in the process. It was their job to raid the institute and obtain the virus. They would then pass it on to the next cell who would grow it up. They in turn would pass it on to another cell who would distribute it to yet more cells who would make the attacks. Yes, that makes a lot of sense.’

‘But obviously doesn’t provide much comfort!’ said Leila with a smile, noting Steven’s lack of enthusiasm for the idea.

‘True,’ agreed Steven. ‘I hate it when things don’t make sense.’

‘I suppose you’ll be going back to London soon,’ said Leila.

‘It’s not that far,’ smiled Steven. ‘And I’d like to see a lot more of you.’

‘I’d like that too,’ said Leila. ‘But…’

‘But what?’

‘I think it only fair to warn you that I am thinking about going back to the States.’

‘Ah,’ sighed Steven. ‘Your career…’

‘It’s important to me and with Professor Devon dead the reason for my being here has gone.’

Steven took her hands and said, ‘Then I think my mission in life over the next few weeks will be to persuade you otherwise.’

Leila smiled and raised her glass. ‘Here’s to an interesting few weeks.’

‘How’s your spaghetti?’

‘Terrible.’

‘Mine too. Let’s go home.’

It rained all night and all through the next day. Steven had returned to his hotel and was making yet another attempt at writing up his report when Colonel Rose rang.

‘No joy, I’m afraid. No abnormally large orders have been placed with egg suppliers from their regular customers and no consignments have gone out to private individuals. We’ve checked all the large poultry firms and none of them has been approached directly to make supplies available.’

‘Shit,’ said Steven. ‘What the hell are they using?’

‘You don’t think they could have brought them in from abroad?’ asked Rose.

‘The logistics would be all wrong.’

‘Then I don’t know what to suggest.’

‘The only other alternative is that they managed to get the virus out of the country and are growing it up abroad.’

‘We’ve already alerted all our allies,’ said Rose, ‘as well as being extra vigilant at ports and airports.’

‘Have you had any luck with the people you arrested?’

‘We’ve come up with various links to small people involved in the red herring alert over an attack on Canary Wharf but no one we’ve picked up knows anything at all about a virus operation. There are a few more we’d like to pick up and hold but we’ve been told to cool it. The judiciary are on their high horse over the use of prevention of terrorism legislation.’

‘I saw that coming,’ said Steven. ‘How about the relatives of the three dead men, in Leicester?’

‘Usual story in all three cases. Disaffected Muslim youths feeling the world’s against them get sucked in to fundamentalism in their late teens and begin to see freedom fighting as a better alternative to the dole office as they get older. A couple of weeks at training camp under the guise of a holiday in the ‘old country’ — which they’d never actually seen in their lives before — and they’re ready to do whatever they’re told. Their families were kept in the dark or maybe it just suited them to maintain that.’

‘I suppose.’

‘I hear the vaccine has entered production?’

‘At least something’s going right,’ said Steven. ‘Let’s just hope it’ll be ready in time.’

‘Amen to that.’

Steven put down the phone and felt thoroughly depressed. It was just so easy to imagine large modern lab facilities somewhere abroad swinging into full Cambodia 5 production and being ready before the vaccine thanks to the head start they’d had. His mind however, kept straying back to the mill house. Why bother to set up a small operation up if the intention had always been to set up full scale production abroad? He was staring out of the window at the rain when Leila phoned. ‘What time will you be round tonight?’ she asked.

‘Any time you like.’

‘I’ll be at the lab until six thirty but I should still be home by seven. You can come and talk to me while I make dinner.’

Steven smiled as he switched off the phone. Leila’s plan to sleep for a week had been short-lived. She had taken only one day off before going back to work at the Crick. He was looking forward to seeing her but had to admit — as he saw the rain turn to sleet — that the prospect of an evening in a house heated by only a one bar electric fire was less than appealing let alone romantic. He resolved to do something about it. He would take along the makings of a fire. He would pick up logs and firelighters at one of the local filling stations where he’d seen them stacked by the door the last time he’d been in for petrol. Add a few rolled-up newspapers and some matches and they could have an evening in front of a roaring fire.

The sleet had stopped by the time Steven left to drive over to Leila’s place but the temperature had dropped sharply in the last hour and the roads had started to ice up. The attendant at the filling station told him that the authorities had been warned earlier about the likelihood of this but had been reluctant to send out grit spreaders, fearing that the rain would wash it all away and road grit cost money. Steven’s MGF might be a joy to drive on smooth, dry tarmac but could turn into a nightmare in adverse weather conditions. The fact that it sat so low on the road meant that the screen constantly had to be cleared of muck flung up by other vehicles and its quick response to brake and accelerator meant constant sideways twitching on slippery surfaces.

Steven was ultra cautious on the narrow roads leading over to Holt but it was still heart-in-mouth time on a number of occasions when black ice made its presence felt and a disagreement regarding direction of travel arose between driver and car. As he approached a narrow bridge spanning a river gorge, Steven slowed right down when he saw the flashing yellow lights of, presumably, a road gritting vehicle coming towards him. He pulled in to the side, as close to the verge as he dared, half tucked in behind the bridge parapet on his side of the road.

He was just beginning to take comfort from the fact that at least the road ahead would be freshly gritted when he saw that the snow-clearing blade on the front of the gritter had been lowered as it came on to the bridge: this made the vehicle so wide that it filled the entire width of the road: there wouldn’t be enough room for it to pass without scraping the side of his car. Fearing that the driver hadn’t seen him sitting there, Steven moved a little further over on to the verge, sounding his horn and flashing his lights. But to no avail. The vehicle kept coming.

Just as he made a fear-fuelled decision to get out of the car, the inside wheels of the MG slipped down into the unseen ditch they had been precariously perched over. The car pitched 45 degrees to the left and Steven fell back inside, his shoulders ending up on the passenger seat and his knees curled under the steering wheel. He had just started to elbow his way up into a position where he could see out again when the steel blade of the grit lorry hit the front of the MG, smashing its off-side headlight and scraping along the metal until it pushed the car completely over onto its side. The impact threw Steven violently back into the car.

Once again he fought in the confined space of the two-seater to get upright. The only way out of the car was through the driver’s door window which was now an escape hatch edged with broken glass above his head. When he finally managed to clear enough and poke his head out through it, he could see that the gritter had stopped some twenty metres away.

‘Stupid bastard!’ Steven yelled. ‘Are you blind?’

The gritter started to reverse slowly and Steven could see the driver looking back through the rear window of his cab. He was well wrapped up against the cold and was wearing noise-protector ear muffs. Steven continued to mutter abuse as he tried to clear the remainder of the broken glass away from the window frame before attempting to climb out. ‘Just what the fuck were you thinking of… The council’s insurance company is really going to love you…’

The words froze on Steven’s lips when he suddenly realised that the gritter was not going to stop. Fear gripped him and he stammered, ‘What the f…?’ as the grit hopper grew ever nearer until finally, its snow blade crunched into the MG. The impact appeared not to register with the JCB; it continued pushing the car backwards like a child’s toy with Steven inside, still struggling to push himself out through the driver’s window space but being thrown off balance at every attempt. He felt a sudden jerk as the car was forced up on to the bridge parapet. He had no idea what lay in the darkness below but he knew that he was just about to find out.