The Lazarus Strain

EIGHTEEN

Steven put the phone down feeling utterly bemused. Leila hadn’t turned up at either her apartment or the university. There had been no indication at the airport that she intended going anywhere else first so what the hell was going on? It made him wonder about her insistence that she should call him rather than the other way around. If it hadn’t been for the query over the animal order she’d placed, he wouldn’t even know that she wasn’t back in Washington. ‘Oh, Leila,’ he murmured softly. ‘Leila… Leila, my beautiful Leila, what are you playing at?’

Steven wondered whether Leila’s apparent lack of frankness was personal and had something to do with some other relationship she might be engaged in — but maybe this was personalising the problem too much. However difficult he found it, he must try to avoid that and make his head rule his heart. It was however, possible to reconcile both with his first decision. He had to find out where she’d gone. Although her work might be over for the moment, Leila was still a major figure in the fight against any attack involving the use of Cambodia 5 virus. He called the duty man at Sci-Med and asked him to get on to Heathrow and find out as quickly as possible which flight she had boarded and where she’d gone.

While he waited for a reply, Steven called John Macmillan and told him what had happened.

‘Maybe she decided to take a holiday first,’ suggested Macmillan. ‘She’s been working round the clock for the past few months.’

‘She didn’t say anything about taking a holiday to me,’ said Steven.

‘Should she have?’

‘We are friends… we had a relationship.’

‘I noticed,’ said Macmillan. ‘Maybe you imagined that it would be on-going and she didn’t?’

‘Nothing like that,’ Steven assured him. ‘If I’m honest, I hoped that might be the case but Leila made it quite clear that her career came first and that she was going back to the States to continue it. She couldn’t wait to get back to the university in Washington… she said.’

‘So why not be honest about what she was planning…’ mused Macmillan, as if trying to decide whether or not the deception was big enough to cause Sci-Med concern.

‘I’m trying to see things objectively,’ said Steven. ‘But emotional involvement is getting in the way. I find myself thinking she’s gone off to France or Spain to meet up with some secret lover.’

‘Which of course, would be of no concern to Sci-Med,’ said Macmillan.

‘Quite,’ agreed Steven. ‘But there may be another reason she’s gone missing and that’s why I need an objective view.’

Macmillan took a few moments to compose his thoughts before taking a deep breath and saying, ‘Dr Martin has been — is — more than a bit player in all of this. She is the designer of our main hope of defence against a potentially disastrous biological weapon. It is essential we know exactly where she is at all times — especially if it should be somewhere other than where she said she’d be.’

‘I suppose that was what I wanted to hear,’ said Steven. ‘I’ve put the wheels in motion to find out what flight she boarded and where she was going when I said goodbye to her on Tuesday.’

‘Good. I have to say in any other circumstances I’d replace you with one of the others because of your personal involvement but you’re in this too deep and you’ve already brought us a long way. You’re probably still our best chance of finding out what al-Qaeda are really up to. I won’t give you a lecture about steeling yourself to be objective but you must continue to think round all the angles, Steven — whoever it concerns. You’re good at it, maybe the best: continue to be.’

Macmillan had already hung up but Steven murmured, ‘Yes, Boss,’ before switching off his phone and slumping down into his chair by the window. The light was almost gone and the traffic on the river was lit up like pearls on velvet. He concentrated on the one star he could see in the sky as he forced himself to think round all the angles where Leila was concerned. The trouble was he knew so little about her. There just hadn’t been time to say much to each other about their past lives because of the demands and sense of urgency of the situation they’d found themselves in. It had been a bit like a wartime romance with no time for considerations past or future; only the ‘now’ had been important. This was a situation that had to be remedied. He called the duty man at Sci-Med and said, ‘I’ve got another job for you. I need you to find out everything there is to know about Dr Leila Martin and her career. Get on to her university in Washington and see if you can get them to send a full CV. If they prove difficult, get John Macmillan to put the request through the CIA chief of station in London. If the worst comes to the worst he’ll be at the meeting of the UK Joint Intelligence Committee tomorrow.’

‘A CIA man at the JIIC meeting?’ exclaimed the duty man.

‘That’s normal protocol,’ said Steven. ‘He leaves when domestic matters are discussed. This is top priority,’ he insisted. ‘I need this information.’

‘Understood.’

‘Anything back from Heathrow yet?’

‘Nothing. I’ll get on to them again.’

Another hour was to pass before the duty man called back. ‘Heathrow says that no one named Leila Martin left through the airport on Tuesday on any of their flights.’

‘They’re sure?’ exclaimed Steven.

‘They’re positive.’

‘You’re telling me she never left the country?’

‘No, they’re telling you she never left the country and, like I say, they’re quite sure. If you turn on your laptop, I’ll forward some stuff to you that’s just come in from Washington on Dr Martin. I told them we needed the CV for an article The Times was doing about American academics working in the UK and they sent it without question.’

‘Well done,’ said Steven. ‘”A” for initiative.’

‘Mum will be pleased… Use decoder l54.’

Curiouser and curiouser, thought Steven. If Leila hadn’t left the country… this could put a whole new complexion on things. He knew he shouldn’t read too much into it but his spirits rose when the thought occurred to him that there was just a chance that the whole thing might be some kind of misunderstanding. Leila might have forgotten something and gone back to the cottage to get it. It had taken longer than she’d anticipated and she’d simply missed her flight! Rather than bother calling anyone, she had stayed over, made new arrangements and flew out next day or whenever they could get her on another flight! It was only a working hypothesis but he liked it. He called the duty man at Sci-Med once more and asked him to check again with the airport — this time against all departures on Wednesday or even Thursday.

‘Will do. Get the CV okay?’ asked the duty man.

‘I’m just about to download it,’ said Steven. He set up his laptop to receive and decode Leila Martin’s CV and spent the next fifteen minutes going through it. He didn’t feel comfortable doing it because it seemed underhand, disloyal, almost the action of a secret policeman investigating his own family but he knew it had to be done.

He read that Leila Martin was the daughter of a French father and Moroccan mother. Her late father had been a distinguished neurologist who had written several books on the subject, one of them now a widely recognised university text book, her mother a concert pianist who had been establishing herself as a particularly brilliant interpreter of the works of Liszt had had her career cut tragically short by arthritis in her thirties. Leila had been brought up in Paris and educated both there and at a finishing school in Berne, in Switzerland. She had returned to study biological sciences at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and had gone on to obtain a doctorate in immunology from the Seventh University of Paris before heading off to the USA to take up successive post doctoral fellowships at the University of California at Los Angeles and at Harvard Medical School in Boston. She had then moved to the World Health Organisation in Geneva to work on vaccine design for third world immunisation programmes before returning to the States to become associate professor of immunology at the university in Washington where she was currently employed.

It was clear to Steven, and anyone who read her CV, that Leila Martin was a woman of impeccable background who, in her youth, had been an exemplary student and who was now regarded by the scientific community as a gifted immunologist. Steven noted that she had picked up several academic awards and prizes along the way and had built up a formidable publication list in prestigious scientific and medical journals. There was absolutely nothing to suggest that she could be anything other than the intelligent, beautiful woman he had fallen for… so where was she and what was she doing?

Twenty minutes later, the duty man at Sci-Med rang to say that Heathrow had drawn a blank on the other days too. They were adamant that Leila Martin had not left the country through their airport.

Steven rubbed his forehead nervously with the tips of his fingers as he tried to salvage a possible scenario from the wreckage of the old one to explain why Leila was still in the country. Okay, she forgot something… she went back to get it and missed her flight because… she fell ill… or had an accident! She could be lying unconscious in hospital somewhere! Worse still, she could be lying on the floor of the cottage! She could have gone back there, fallen and struck her head and no one would know she was even there!

‘It was after eleven in the evening and for once Frank Giles was not still at work when Steven called. He tried his mobile number instead and got a sleepy response.

‘Jesus, Dunbar, this is the first early night I’ve managed in yonks and you have to ruin it.’

Steven apologised but said it was important. ‘Leila Martin has gone missing,’ he said. ‘She was supposed to get on a flight to Washington on Tuesday but it never happened. She’s still in the country somewhere.’

‘You mean she’s been kidnapped?’

‘I don’t know what I mean,’ confessed Steven. ‘I saw her as far as the airport so I’ve been thinking that she may have had to go back for something and been involved in an accident but we can’t rule out anything. Could you run a check on the hospitals? I’m going to drive up to her cottage.’

‘I’ll mobilise the troops,’ said Giles. ‘Just in case Ali and his pals are involved.’

Steven rushed down to the basement garage, pausing briefly when he realised that he had promised to return the Porsche to Stan Silver by the end of the day. He hated breaking a promise but this was an emergency and it was too late to arrange another car. He would call Stan from Norfolk to explain. There was still a chance he could have it back by morning.

The wheels on the 911 squealed on the compound floor of the garage as he rounded the final pillar and accelerated up the ramp where he paused briefly to look to the right before roaring off into the night.

There were moments on the journey when Steven questioned his own actions: he recognised that his emotional involvement with Leila was definitely playing a part. One moment it seemed like exactly the right action to be taking, the next an absolutely ridiculous thing to be doing when the Norfolk police could have checked out the cottage for him and probably a lot quicker. But there was no turning back now and he had cause to be grateful that the temperature was above freezing as he challenged the grip of the Porsche’s fat tyres on every tight bend. At least the lateness of the hour meant that traffic was light.

The growl of the engine died away to an uneven burble as he slowed right down to turn into the lane leading to Leila’s cottage, wondering why she had chosen to live here in the first place. There was no doubt that it had rural charm but in retrospect, Leila had never even mentioned this, only the lack of heating and the jumble sale furniture. She would have been happier with a flat in the city. His heart skipped a beat when he saw that there was a car parked outside the cottage; it wasn’t Leila’s: this one was a dark Vauxhall Vectra estate. Surely the property couldn’t have been re-let so quickly? He would have given odds against there being a queue lining up for it in winter.

The fact that there were no lights on left him with a dilemma. Should he turn around and drive off, accepting that new tenants had moved in or should he wake the household and say who he was and why he was there? He decided he had to be sure about things. He’d knock, ask and apologise if necessary.

There was no answer to either his first or second louder knock and it made him curse under his breath but he couldn’t really blame whoever was inside for not answering the door at three in the morning in the middle of nowhere. He supposed the main thing had been established and that was that Leila could not be there, lying alone and injured on the floor. He got back into the Porsche and started the engine.

When he came to do a three point turn to get back to the road his headlights swept the length of the Vectra and briefly illuminated a jacket that had been draped untidily over the back of the front passenger seat. It made him hit the brakes. It was Leila’s. It was the leather blouson she’d worn over her little black number the first time they went out to dinner together. It had a distinctive, patterned collar on it. But it wasn’t Leila’s car… Well, it wouldn’t be you idiot, would it?… his subconscious accused. Leila would have returned her car to the rental company before going to the airport on Tuesday. When she realised she’d have to come back for something she would have rented another at the airport. Vectras were among the most common hire cars around. Leila could be lying injured inside after all.

Steven cursed the fact that he wasn’t driving his own car with all his bits and pieces in the boot. The Porsche didn’t have a torch in it. He angled the 911 so that the headlights lit up as much of the cottage as possible and started looking for the easiest way to gain access. The front door was solid oak and had been bolted from inside — he remembered Leila doing that at night. It would have to be a window. He moved down the left side of the building, testing each of the two windows on that side but both were tightly shut and snibbed — Leila did that too in an effort to keep out the cold. He rounded the corner at the back of the house, losing any help the Porsche lights could provide and stopped for a moment to allow his eyes to become accustomed to the inky blackness. He thought at first it was his imagination when he started to see two pencil-thin parallel lines of light in the ground but they persisted. They were very faint but definitely there. The bungalow had a cellar with a light on in it.

‘Leila!’ he cried, dropping to his knees, scraping at the dirt and trying to see down through one of the joints in what appeared to be an old glass brick skylight, which was largely overgrown with weeds and smeared with mud. ‘Leila, can you hear me?’

There was no answer.

Steven kept altering the angle of his position on the ground, trying desperately to find an area where the joint was wide enough for him to see through. He kept calling out Leila’s name but whenever he paused to listen there was just silence, apart from an owl screeching somewhere out in the surrounding forest. He was just about to give up when he found a place he could see through with one eye if he pressed his nose right up against the dirty glass. He could make out a black and white, tiled floor… and two legs lying on it… female legs. The upper part of the body was obscured. ‘Leila! Leila! Can you hear me?’

The legs didn’t move: there was no reply.

Filled with anguish, Steven pulled out his phone, finding that all his fingers were becoming thumbs in his hurry. ‘Jesus!’ he exploded when he saw that there was no signal. ‘Give me a break, will you!’

He ran back to the front of the house, this time along the right side of the cottage, again checking to see if any of the windows were open. None was. Without any further delay, he picked up a heavy edging stone from the garden and used it to smash the window of the room which had been Leila’s bedroom. He’d chosen that one because the car lights were shining on it.

Still calling out Leila’s name, he stumbled across the floor to switch on the lights and tripped over the old electric fire sitting in the middle of the floor. His head hit the bedroom door causing him to curse before he pulled himself to his feet and clicked the switch. Nothing happened.

‘What the f…’ He felt his way through to the living room and to the light switch there. Still no light. ‘How the f… could there be light in the cellar if the power was off?’ he thought as he bumped and cursed his way out into the hall and along to the cellar door. He had never been down in the cottage cellar. Apart from not having any reason for doing so, Leila had told him she didn’t use it and always kept the door locked. She had given him a one word reason: ‘Rats’.

He pulled at the cellar door and found it unlocked. The door creaked back and cold air filled his nostrils together with the competing smells of dampness and old wood. He felt for the light switch before realising that the light should be on; this was the reason he was here; he’d seen it from outside. Surely the power couldn’t have failed at the very moment he entered the cottage. Not even his luck could be that bad… the only other explanation was… that someone had turned the power off! At that moment, a blow to the back of Steven’s head ended all further speculation.

Steven came round to find himself suspended by his wrists with his toes barely touching the floor. Blood from a head wound had trickled down into his eyes and crusted over them making it difficult for him to see properly but he knew he was in the cellar because of the black and white tiles on the floor. He had a blinding headache and his arms felt as if they were being torn from their sockets by the cable that secured his wrists to a beam in the ceiling. He looked for the prostrate woman he’d seen from outside but she was no longer there. Instead, he saw a bundle in the shape of a body, wrapped in black plastic, huddled at the foot of the stairs.

‘Oh, please God, no,’ murmured Steven, closing his eyes and railing against the agonies of body and mind that were pushing him to the very brink of endurance.

‘You’re awake, Dunbar.’

The man who had come from behind him was in his mid thirties and Middle Eastern in appearance. He sounded well educated and spoke without an accent but when Steven looked into his eyes he saw a cocktail of loathing and contempt there. It was being suppressed in the cause of establishing credentials of intelligence and sophistication but it was definitely there. It was a look he’d come across before and he’d always found it chilling to be regarded as something less than nothing, be it by religious zealots in their contempt for the non-believer or even in the eyes of the poor in India who could look through you as if you didn’t exist. It was what the worm must see in the eye of the bird about to eat it. If it came to a choice between confronting a cold-blooded psychopath or a religious fanatic who believed that some unseen god was with him in his struggle against the infidel, it would be a close run thing.

‘How do you know me?’ Steven croaked.

With no change of expression, the man held up Steven’s Sci-Med ID, which he’d taken from his pocket. ‘A pity. Ten more minutes and I would have been gone,’ he said. ‘Still, as you are here, I thought I might as well make the most of it. Tell me all about Earlybird and what their current thinking is.’ He moved across to the body lying on the floor and started to manoeuvre it into position to be dragged upstairs.

Steven felt sick in his stomach. ‘Who?’ he asked, fearing the answer.

The man looked amused at the question. ‘Dr Leila Martin,’ he said.

‘You bastard! Why?’

The man stopped what he was doing and came towards Steven slowly. He didn’t stop until he was only inches from his face. ‘Call it collateral damage,’ he said icily. ‘That’s what your friends, the Americans, called it when they incinerated my mother, my father and my sister.’

‘There’s a difference between war and cold-blooded murder,’ gasped Steven.

‘The difference is hypocrisy,’ said the man. ‘And in the end that is why you will lose. All the pretence about ‘liberation’ of oppressed peoples when all you ever wanted was our oil will be difficult to keep up and it will weigh you down just like the constant calls for internal investigations every time your own newspapers prints pictures that the hypocrites don’t like. Pretty soon the moronic lard-arses of middle America will get it through their thick skulls that their kids’ ass-kicking adventure in a place they’d never even heard of is going to come to grief. Junior’s rights-of-passage romp is going to end with him coming home in a body bag with a note from Donald Rumsfeld attached.

‘While the peace-loving forces of Islam ride on to victory in the cause of truth and justice helped by ignorant kids with explosives strapped to them because they’ve been promised a free fuck in heaven. Do me a favour.’

The man brought the back of his hand across Steven’s face in a vicious swipe that left his right ear ringing and blood pouring from his nose. ‘I was beginning to think you had a point until you did that,’ Steven gasped, amazed at his own attempt to take the moral high ground.

‘Let’s get one thing clear,’ said the man as he returned to the stairs to start dragging Leila’s body up them. ‘I will most certainly not be doing you any favours.’

‘Go screw yourself.’

The man paused on the stairs but only to give Steven a pitying look. ‘Professor Devon was very ‘brave’ too,’ he said. ‘But in the end, he told me what I wanted to know… as will you. You might care to consider that while I put Dr Martin in the car.’

Waves of pain and anguish washed over Steven as he faced up to the fact that he was now in the hands of the ubiquitous ‘Ali’, leader of the al-Qaeda team who had tortured and murdered Timothy Devon, Robert Smith and now Leila, not to mention two of his own. He also remembered that what this man had done to Timothy Devon had turned the stomach of a hardened pathologist.

Steven tried to find rational thought through the mess of competing emotions inside his head. His chances of getting out of this were close to zero. He supposed there was a possibility that Frank Giles might turn up eventually if it was noticed that he had been missing for some time but that would probably mean many hours and by that time he would be dead. He had no doubt of that: in fact, he had already accepted this and was concentrating on what he might have to endure before he was allowed to die.

As if having the last straw torn from his grasp, Steven suddenly realised that Frank Giles didn’t even know where the cottage was! He had never had cause to tell him where Leila Martin lived and he in turn had never had reason to ask… But Ali had known and he had come calling. Why?

Poor Leila and what she must have suffered at the hands of this lunatic and after all the doubts he’d been harbouring about her. He felt guilty and ashamed. Ali must have wanted to know how far she’d progressed with the vaccine against Cambodia 5. That in itself suggested that the vaccine was still relevant to the al-Qaeda mission despite his own doubts about city centre attacks.

Leila would, of course, have told him the truth — that it was already in production, but he had probably tortured her to make sure that she wasn’t lying. But what did Ali want from him? He obviously knew about Earlybird and that was disturbing in itself — another reminder that global terrorism was not entirely an external enemy. It was already embedded in the society it sought to destroy. Ali couldn’t have anticipated his coming here tonight so it would be a case of him gleaning any extra information he could before killing him. Maybe he needed it confirmed that the trail he’d gone to so much trouble to lay had been followed by the government who had — as they were meant to do — concluded there were to be city centre attacks across the UK using Cambodia 5. The best he personally could hope to do was withstand pain long enough to make divulging this appear like a genuine admission. The only secret he must keep was the fact that he believed this to be another red herring, a view he had shared with others. But as to what the real al-Qaeda mission might be… he really had no idea. Nothing Ali could do to him could make him tell what he didn’t know. A comfort? Steven thought not.