Not for the first time in his life Steven had the strange mixed feeling of triumph and disappointment. He had worked something out — which was certainly progress — but only to see that he had proved himself wrong. Macmillan had been right, he had stopped himself going up the blind alley he himself had created. He needed a break from thinking about it; he bought some flowers and went to see Jane Sherman in hospital.
‘Looks like flowers are the last thing you need,’ he said on entering what appeared to be a miniature version of the Chelsea Flower Show.
‘People are very kind,’ said Jane.
‘How are you?’ Steven asked, not smiling and looking her straight in the eye.
‘Very tired of being brave,’ Jane replied.
‘I think it was Shakespeare who said, reality has a habit of kicking you up the arse when you least expect it.’
Jane broke into a smile and said, ‘You always did have a sense of the ridiculous.’
‘It’s what keeps me insane.’
‘Stop it. What’s been happening?’
‘I take it you know about Petrov’s flask containing nothing but salt water and about the outbreak of Marburg disease among the staff at Porton?’
Jane nodded then Steven told her what she didn’t know — that the intelligence services could be wrong about the flask having been switched. It all depended on the flask at Porton having the little flaw in its lip.
‘Would you like me to ask?’ said Jane.
‘If you feel up to it, it would save me tip-toeing around peoples’ egos and going through the Home Secretary every time I want to know something people consider to be their secret and nobody else’s.’
‘Rumour had it you had some special arrangement with the PM as her blue-eyed boy.’
‘It didn’t quite work out and in any case, it made me feel uncomfortable. I much prefer cooperation.’
‘Like we have?’
‘Like we have.’
‘Good, I’m looking forward to being useful again.’
‘I’ll keep you in the loop.’
As Steven got up to leave, he noticed Jane staring into the middle distance. ‘Something wrong?’ he asked.
She snapped out of it and said, ‘If you’re right and there was no switching of flasks, why on Earth was Petrov sending saline to Geneva? And why were our rich Russian friends so keen to stop us investigating a little jug of water?’
‘Very good thoughts.’
‘Just doing my job,’ said Jane with a genuine smile that made Steven feel a whole lot better.
‘We’re a team.’
Sixteen
‘I have a conundrum for you,’ said Tally.
‘Join the queue,’ Steven joked. ‘My world is full of questions with very few answers on the horizon.
‘Stop feeling sorry for yourself,’ said Tally, making him smile. ‘I went to see Monique and told her what we all thought about her friends and family incubating the disease when they were vaccinated and she tossed a grenade into the works. Now, I just don’t know what to think.’
‘Shoot.’
‘They developed Ebola three weeks after receiving the vaccine.’
‘Three weeks?’
‘And there’s more, they fell ill just after the WHO aid team came back to check that no one was suffering any ill effects from the vaccine they’d been given.’
‘Were they given a second dose?’
‘That’s what I asked; she’s absolutely adamant they were not.’
Steven thought for a moment before saying, ‘The only logical explanation is that they were exposed to Ebola a few days before the aid people came back. It was an unfortunate coincidence that the team returned just as Monique’s people were about to fall ill.’
‘An unfortunate coincidence...’ Tally repeated.
‘Unless you can think of something else?’ Steven asked.
‘No, dammit.’
‘Mind you, the coincidence theory doesn’t sound all that convincing when you start to consider how ten people managed to contract the disease at exactly the same time... You’re sure there was no second dose given?’
‘Monique was adamant. They just asked questions about their health, saying they were keeping a close watch on those getting the experimental vaccine for any problems arising. The village people were even grateful and thanked them for their concern.’
‘In which case, coincidence must stay in the reckoning.’
Steven was enjoying a beer in his seat by the window, feet up on the sill, looking up at the sky when John Macmillan called.
‘Steven, the Home Secretary has informed me that Porton have identified the Marburg strain that their people have gone down with.’
‘God, that was quick.’
‘They are good,’ Macmillan reminded him. It was something Macmillan did on a regular basis when the role of bacteria and viruses in weaponry came up in conversation. He knew that Steven had a particular loathing of it.
‘I’m told it’s the strain which caused an outbreak in Uganda in 2017. It only lasted a few months thanks to prompt action by WHO and other aid bodies.’
‘How in God’s name did it end up in Porton?’
‘That has not yet become apparent.’
‘It must mean that a sample of the virus must have been sent to Porton from Uganda and somehow... accidentally, several members of their staff were exposed to it and contaminated.’
‘Porton say definitely not. They do not have live Marburg virus anywhere on the campus.’
Steven closed his eyes and asked in carefully measured tones, ‘In which case, do they have any idea how four people got infected by Marburg in a place that doesn’t have any?’
Macmillan cleared his throat and said, ‘The Home Secretary did tell me that Porton admitted to having freeze-dried stocks of Marburg for their research, but no live virus in use and certainly not that strain.’
‘Right.’
‘Doesn’t get any easier, does it?’
Steven thought he might bite right through his tongue before answering, ‘Quite so, sir.’ He turned off the lights and flopped down in his chair again to resume looking up at what was now the night sky.
Cold beer and an appreciation of the vastness of what was out there bestowed a sense of calmness on him that allowed him to think more rationally. He had been allowing prejudice to interfere with judgement, something that Tally had warned him about many times and he had tried to take on board with limited success. The longest-held one was his loathing of politicians of all hues.
Tally’s assertion that they couldn’t all be bad had still not been accepted by him. He was convinced that any politician being asked what two plus two equalled would find a way of avoiding the word ‘four’, just in case they were in danger of giving too much away. A lesser prejudice involved establishments like Porton Down and the work they did there. It all fell under the mantle of defence, but so did teenage boys in down-at-heel council estates carrying knives. No one ever admitted to developing microbes or carrying knives to attack others.
This prejudice however, was not as cast in stone as his feelings about politicians. He had come to accept that it was necessary to be capable of doing what the enemy was capable of doing and it was well known that before the collapse of the USSR, microbes had been weaponised on a large scale. Smallpox had been genetically altered to be even more lethal than it already was. The World Health Organisation had succeeded in wiping out smallpox as a disease affecting human beings through their vaccination programmes, but in some lab somewhere... the virus waited.
Steven recognised that he had immediately become suspicious when he learned about Porton insisting that they did not have live stocks of the Uganda Marburg strain that had infected four of its staff members. That was unjustified. They were very secretive by nature, but they would not lie to government about something like that: he had to accept that the strain had come to a lab in Porton from an outside source. — four people had been infected from the same source in this lab and it had nothing to do with Petrov or his flask. Really?