The Lazarus Strain

TWENTY

It was raining on the drive over to the city mortuary and the two men sat in silence — apart from Giles’ occasional mutterings about roadworks and the state of the traffic. Steven sat as if mesmerised by the sweep of the wipers but he was deep in thought. He found it a perpetually annoying fact of life that it always seemed easier to predict other people’s reactions and responses to given situations than his own. Lisa, his wife, had put this down to him thinking about things on too many levels at once. ‘Not everyone’s playing chess with you,’ she had pointed out. ‘Not everyone in life has an ulterior motive.’

The trouble was that in his line of work they usually had and it was unavoidable that natural suspicion would spill over into his personal life, making him ‘think round all the angles’ as Macmillan put it. Sometimes it was a cross that was hard to bear. It would be so good, perhaps just on occasion, to be able to react spontaneously to events, to take things at face value, to give in and display natural emotion without going through some vetting process. Right now, he was going to say a final goodbye to Leila Martin, a woman he had had feelings for. He should feel sad… and he did. He needed to feel grief… and he did… but it was not unequivocal. A day’s driving around on his own, visiting all the old spots, had left him with lingering doubts and unanswered questions and he wished that this wasn’t the case.

Giles parked the car in the space marked for visitors outside the mortuary and they both went inside.

‘Hello, John boy,’ said Marjorie Ryman. ‘I see you haven’t found your way back to Waltons’ Mountain.’

‘Still looking, Elizabeth,’ said Steven. ‘Still looking.’

‘Dr Martin’s brother isn’t here yet. Would you like to take a dekko at the body first or will you wait?’

‘We’ll wait,’ said Giles quickly.

Fearing an uncomfortable silence about to develop, Steven told Giles that he’d go back out and wait in the car park. Giles nodded.

‘You could wait in my office,’ suggested Marjorie Ryman. ‘There’s a coffee machine…’

‘I’ll get some air,’ said Steven.

He had completed three slow laps of the car park with his hands deep in his pockets, seemingly having examined every cigarette butt lying there and flicked at every loose pebble with his toe, when he was joined by Marjorie Ryman at his elbow.

‘I’m sorry, John boy. Frank just told me that you and the deceased were friends. I didn’t know.’

‘Don’t worry about it,’ said Steven.

‘I naturally assumed your interest in the case was professional. I’m so sorry.’

‘That’s okay. Really,’ said Steven. ‘You weren’t to know.’

At that moment, a dark Rover drew up. It was unmarked but might well have had ‘Official Government Vehicle’ stamped all over it. A tall man wearing a dark overcoat over a light coloured suit got out from the back and thanked the driver before listening for a few moments to details about a later pick-up. He straightened up and looked at the building. It wasn’t difficult to imagine what he was thinking, thought Steven, but there was already too much going on inside his own head for him to dwell too long on the pain of others. Marjorie Ryman had gone inside as soon as the car arrived leaving Steven the only other person in the car park.

‘Mr Martin?’ he said, straightening up and walking towards him.

‘Yes. And you?’

‘Steven Dunbar. I was a close friend of your sister while she was working at the Crick Institute.’

They shook hands. ‘You’re a scientist too?’ he asked with the same pleasant French accent that Leila had had.

‘Actually, no… I’m a doctor.’

They went inside to where Martin was introduced to Giles and Marjorie Ryman who both shook hands and offered their condolences.

‘If you’d care to come this way, Mr Martin,’ said Marjorie in subdued tones. ‘We can carry out the formal identification and then you can have some time alone with your sister if you’d like before we discuss arrangements for repatriation.’

The four of them trooped along a narrow corridor in single file to where Marjorie stopped outside a door and turned to Martin to ask, ‘Ready?’

Martin nodded and she opened the door.

They entered a small, square room where some attempt had been made to soften the reality of the building with paintings on the walls depicting pastoral scenes and alluding to the possibility of an afterlife. A simple crucifix sat on a semi circular table between candlesticks and purple drapes — hung albeit on an interior wall because the room had no windows. All attention was focused on the trolley that sat in the middle of the floor with a plain white sheet draped over the body that lay on it.

Marjory Ryman went to the head of the trolley and gripped the top of the sheet with both hands. She paused to give Martin a questioning look. Martin nodded and she lowered the sheet to reveal the head and shoulders of the deceased.

‘Is this your sister, Dr Leila Martin, sir?’ asked Giles.

Martin took two steps forward and looked at the dead woman. He nodded slowly and with great sadness. ‘Yes, this is Leila,’ he replied, a sob catching in his throat. ‘This is my sister.’

Steven swallowed and felt a lump come to his own throat as he waited for Martin to step back before moving forward to say his own goodbye. He made eye contact with Marjorie Ryman who gave him a small smile of encouragement tinged with residual guilt from the earlier misunderstanding. He bowed his head and closed his eyes for a moment, steeling himself to see Leila in death rather than the vibrant image of her he’d kept alive in his mind. When he opened his eyes his heart missed a beat and his stomach turned over as his subconscious railed against this latest outrage of fate. His voice sounded foreign, even to him, when he said, ‘This is not Leila Martin.’

Steven was looking at the body of a woman who bore almost no resemblance to Leila at all. This woman was plain where Leila had been beautiful. This woman had a small thin mouth, a broad nose and a chin that was almost masculine and looked about ten years older than Leila.

‘But you told me it was…’ said Giles, obviously bemused and more than a little embarrassed. ‘At the cottage…’

‘Ali told me. I didn’t see the body,’ said Steven, still staring at the unknown woman.

Martin, looking at Steven as if in complete disbelief, spluttered out, ‘Of course it’s Leila, are you suggesting that I don’t know my own sister? What the hell are you talking about, man?’

Wheels were spinning inside Steven’s head like the machinery of a fairground ride picking up speed. He looked at Martin without really seeing him but recovered some sense of the moment and said, ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘There’s been some awful misunderstanding…’

‘The man’s crazy,’ murmured Martin.

Giles looked like a man wading in out of his depth. He said to Martin, ‘I’m sorry sir, I must ask you again; are you quite certain that this woman is your sister, Dr Leila Martin.’

‘Of course it’s Leila,’ snapped Martin, still angry at what Steven had said. ‘I don’t know what this idiot here is talking about.’

Giles made a gesture with his head to signify that Steven should leave the room and Steven complied.

‘What the hell’s going on?’ hissed Giles when he came out to join him.

‘That’s not the Leila Martin I knew,’ said Steven. ‘That is not the Leila Martin who worked at Crick.’

‘I just don’t get this,’ stormed Giles, still struggling to keep his voice down to avoid those inside hearing. ‘Then who the hell is the woman lying on the trolley in there?… the woman whose own brother has just identified as being Leila Martin?’

Steven now understood the look he’d seen in Ali’s eyes when he had told him whose body was in the plastic bag. He had been enjoying a joke of his own. ‘I think she’s Leila Martin,’ he replied without emotion.

‘Am I missing something here?’ asked Giles, now displaying serious exasperation. ‘Are you telling me there are two Leila Martins?’

Steven looked at him distantly and said, ‘No, I think not. There is only one real Dr Leila Martin and I think that’s her lying on the trolley in there… She must have been intercepted as soon as she entered the country… Leila took her place.’

Giles’ eyes opened wide. ‘An imposter?’

Steven nodded. ‘Yup.’

‘What the hell was she doing there?’

The awful answer to that question was becoming crystal clear to Steven as was so much else as he realised what a fool he’d been. Leila, his Leila, the beautiful woman at the Crick had encouraged their relationship just so that she could use him to keep tabs on what he and the Intelligence services were thinking so that she could report back to Ali Mansour.

When she thought she had no further use for him, it had been she who had set up the attack on his life. She had simply passed on the details of their dinner arrangements to Ali so that he could intercept him on the road to her cottage. Even the cottage now made sense where it hadn’t before. Leila hated the place but it was remote and that must have been its attraction. It was a convenient, safe base for Ali — and it had an ice-cold cellar. Steven could see that Giles was waiting for an answer.

‘The woman I knew as Leila Martin wasn’t working on a vaccine at all. Quite the opposite; she was growing up Cambodia 5 virus. That’s why we could find no trace of the eggs al-Qaeda needed for cultivation. She was growing up the virus at the Crick.’

‘What’s she done with it?’ asked Giles.

‘She gave it to Auroragen to grow up on an industrial scale. They’ve been filling injection vials with it for inoculation… with distribution due to start today.’

‘Christ! This is a bloody nightmare.’

‘If we can’t stop it,’ said Steven, frantically pulling his phone out, ‘something like fifty million people both here and the USA are going to be injected with Cambodia 5 virus instead of vaccine.’

‘Jesus!’

Steven called the duty officer at Sci-Med. ‘Listen and listen carefully. This is the biggest situation you are ever going to handle. We are talking a grade-one national emergency. All supplies of flu vaccine emanating from Auroragen in Liverpool must be recalled immediately. The vials do not contain vaccine, they contain a biological weapon. All government departments must be alerted to the danger and the police and army should make recovery of the vials a first priority. Auroragen can supply the distribution schedules including the arrangements for the US consignment. The company was not part of the conspiracy. Got that?’

‘Got it.’

‘When you’ve finished with the top level alerts, all major UK cities on the Auroragen supply list should be instructed to implement their biohazard emergency procedures just in case any of the distribution vehicles should be involved in an accident.’

‘Understood.’

‘Any consignments in the air should be recalled and diverted to military airports away from populated areas. If they’ve already gone beyond the point of no return, the same goes for the other side of the Atlantic.’

‘Understood.’

‘Good man. Put me through to Macmillan.’

Steven confined himself to telling Macmillan quickly that the Auroragen vials contained Cambodia 5 virus, not vaccine, knowing that his boss would appreciate the urgency of the situation and want to start making calls of his own. They agreed to speak later.

By four in the afternoon all ‘vaccine’ production had been closed down at Auroragen and stocks placed in quarantine, pending removal to Porton Down. All production workers had been placed under virtual house arrest until the incubation time for Cambodia 5 had passed — just in case they had infected themselves during the course of their everyday work. But the fact that they had been so well trained in safe microbiological techniques in an effort to avoid ‘contamination’ of the vaccine after last year’s fiasco worked both ways. Their skills had also protected them from infection when handling Cambodia 5. Fifteen outward bound trucks, laden with injection vials, had been intercepted and ordered to return to the pharmaceutical company under police escort and an RAF Hercules flight had been recalled when already two hours out over the Atlantic, bound for the USA, carrying emergency ‘vaccine’ for the Bush administration.

‘I think it fair to say that the Prime Minister and the entire cabinet were astounded at the audacity of the al-Qaeda operation,’ said Macmillan. ‘Another few hours and it would have been too late. The UK and US governments would have been crippled within weeks and it’s almost certain that a global pandemic would have ensued. They asked me to pass on their sincere thanks.’

Steven nodded. ‘So, what are they going to tell the electorate about the lack of flu vaccine this year when the papers have been doing their level best to cause panic over bird flu?’ he asked. ‘There’s no time left now to come up with a real vaccine.’

‘I understand they’re going to dress up the shortage as a change in strategy,’ said Macmillan. ‘The Health Secretary will announce that they’ve decided to go for stocks of an antiviral drug instead of a vaccine. Apparently a Swiss pharmaceutical company has come up with one they’ve had some success with.’

‘In getting politicians out of a tight corner,’ completed Steven.

‘That might well be its main asset,’ agreed Macmillan. ‘But I understand that it can be effective in preventing death if it’s taken quickly enough.’

‘And like all anti-virals, that means at the very first sign of symptoms,’ said Steven. ‘And we both know the chances of that are practically zero. By the time people have actually decided they’ve got flu and sought help it’ll be too late.’

Macmillan looked equally dubious. ‘Either that or there will be a panic and people will demand the drug and take it when they haven’t even got the disease, which will be no use at all in preventing it and just use up stocks.’

Both men remained silent for a moment before Macmillan shook his head and changed the subject. He asked, ‘Any thoughts on who the false Leila Martin really was?’

‘I’m still thinking about it,’ replied Steven. ‘And before you remind me, I am aware that she’s still out there.’

The sun had come out and Steven walked by the Thames Embankment while he considered ‘Leila’s deception. She’d obviously had enough training in microbiology for her to be able to culture the virus safely and pass herself off as a visiting research fellow at the Crick Institute although, through pressure of work, she had had the perfect excuse to avoid too much contact with fellow scientists. The deadline for the vaccine had also helped her avoid facing any questions about its design where any shortcomings about her knowledge might have been exposed. He himself, to his embarrassment, had helped her negotiate her way through the safety screens of Auroragen.

The real Leila Martin had had a French father and a Moroccan mother and had been educated in France. His Leila had the right looks for such a mix and also the right accent… It was also similar to Ali Mansour’s background, thought Steven. Mansour was the son of an Iraqi father and a French mother… He was also a graduate in microbiology…

Steven pulled out his phone and called Mac Davidson at the Sci-Med lab.

‘Do you remember the DNA fingerprint tests I requested a while back on the staff of the Crick Institute?’ he asked.

‘Of course.’

‘Do you still have them?’

‘I don’t think we’ve got round to destroying them yet,’ said Davidson. ‘Why? There were no matches as I remember.’

‘I know but I’d like you to look at them again, particularly a comparison of the woman we believed to be Leila Martin and the DNA profile taken from the safe handle — the one that was subsequently shown to be Ali Mansour’s.’

‘I’ll get back to you.’

Two hours later an embarrassed Mac Davidson got back to Steven. ‘I’m not sure how we missed this,’ he said. ‘Perhaps it was because we were just looking for exact matches at the time but… there are certain corresponding features about the two profiles you asked to be re-examined.’

‘Let me guess,’ said Steven. ‘The two subjects concerned could be brother and sister.’

‘That’s about it,’ conceded Davidson. ‘Sorry.’

‘Thanks, Mac,’ said Steven. When it came to missing things, he didn’t feel up to calling the kettle black. He called Macmillan. ‘Leila was Ali Mansour’s sister,’ he said. ‘I take it you have details of Mansour’s family there?’

‘I’ll email them to you. Well done again!’

Fifteen minutes later, Steven was gazing at a photograph of his Leila on the screen of his laptop only she was in reality, Zainab Aline Mansour. She was eight years younger than the real Leila Martin but she had a degree in microbiology like her brother and had actually worked in the real Leila Martin’s lab in Washington at one time as a graduate student.

Steven called Macmillan back and gave him the details. ‘If she didn’t leave the country as Leila Martin,’ he said. ‘There’s a good chance she travelled under her own name of Zainab Aline Mansour. She may still be waiting for her brother to join her somewhere.’

‘I’ll let loose the dogs,’ said Macmillan.

‘Quite a family affair,’ murmured Steven. He wondered how many more Mansour families were out there with scores to settle.

Macmillan called just after seven in the evening to say that ‘Leila’ had been traced and detained by the French Police. She had been living in an apartment in Montrouge in Paris, having flown there directly from Heathrow on the day Steven had seen her off — travelling under her own name.

‘It seems you’ve worked out everything,’ said Macmillan.

‘They damned nearly worked out everything,’ said Steven. ‘We came that close to disaster.’

‘What was it my old Scots granny used to say?’ mused Macmillan. ‘Nearly never killed a man.’

‘A comfort,’ said Steven.

‘So what d’you think they’ll do next?’

‘Crystal ball time,’ sighed Steven. ‘One thing’s for sure: it’ll take time to set up another “spectacular”… On the other hand, they won’t want to lose face in the short term… They could go for a direct strike.’

‘A bomb?’

‘Probably. They might well sacrifice a few foot soldiers… mount a suicide attack on some building in the city… or the transport system…’