Outbreak

Halima nodded mutely.

Ben's edginess increased. 'We should go over there and move him out of the rain,' he said.

'And what would that do, Ben?' Halima asked, giving him a piercing look.

Ben shrugged. 'I don't know. I just thought…'

But he stopped talking and looked down to his side, where Halima had taken his hand.

'You are scared to go in to see your father because you fear what you will find there,' she observed.

Ben winced slightly, and nodded his head. 'What if he's dead?' he asked plaintively.

Halima gave him a sympathetic look. 'I understand,' she said. 'If you would rather I stayed out here…?'

Ben thought about it for a second. 'No,' he said finally. They had been through a lot together, and for some reason he now drew a kind of comfort from her presence. 'No, come in. If you want to,' he added.

He took a deep breath and led the way.

From the doorway, he could see that his father had not moved in the time Ben had been away. He was still lying on the bed, deathly still. Ben felt suddenly sick; from here his father did not seem to be breathing. He exchanged a worried glance with Halima.

And then there was a sound: a long, drawn-out breath that seemed to last longer than any breath Ben had ever heard. It did not sound good, but at least it was a sign of life. He rushed to his father's bedside.

'Dad?' Ben said tentatively, not wanting to shout but struggling to be heard above the sound of the rain. 'Dad, can you hear me?'

For a few seconds there was no response, but then Russell's eyes flickered open. He almost seemed to recognize his son, but just when Ben was about to speak again, his father's eyes fell shut once more.

Ben put his face in his hands. He couldn't bear to see his father this way.

'Ben?'

He looked up sharply. Russell's eyes were open again.

'Ben,' he whispered hoarsely. 'Is that you?'

Ben nodded.

'Oh, thank God,' Russell murmured. 'Abele said you had disappeared.'

There was no point, Ben thought, explaining where he had been. 'I'm here now. You need water,' he told his dad, looking around and seeing his bottle of water where he had left it. He held it to his dad's lips, and his father seemed to derive some relief from the liquid, though he appeared to have lost the ability to swallow and the water did little more than sluice out from around the side of his parched and bleeding lips.

'Did you call Sam?' Russell asked.

'I tried to, Dad. I spoke to him, but I'm not sure the message got through. The line was bad – I'm going to have to try again, but Suliman is in his office now and I'll have to think of a way to lure him out.'

Russell coughed weakly. 'Never mind that now,' he said. 'Where's Abele?'

'I don't know. I haven't seen him.'

'He was here,' Russell breathed. 'I don't know when – maybe yesterday. He told me that…' Again he dissolved into a fit of coughing before he could continue speaking. 'He told me that they are bringing workers in from the nearest village.'

Ben blinked as the implications of that news hit home. This was exactly what they wanted to avoid.

'It's starting, Ben.' His father seemed to echo his thoughts. 'It will only take one of those people to return to their home carrying the virus, and nobody will be able to stop it spreading. You have to make sure it doesn't happen.'

'How am I supposed to-?' Ben started to ask, but he cut himself short as his father emitted another of those deathly rattles from his lungs. 'Dad, are you OK?' he asked urgently.

But there was no reply. Russell Tracey had slipped once more into unconsciousness.

Ben bit his lip. All he wanted to do was to stay here, to look after his father. But that was not what his father had urged him to do. Gradually he became aware that the noise of the rain hammering on the roof had stopped, and Halima had approached and was standing just behind him. 'What should we do?' she asked.

Ben closed his eyes and breathed deeply and slowly in an attempt to regain his composure. 'Where is the next village?' he asked quietly.

'West of here,' Halima said. 'On the road Suliman took with us.'

'Is that the only road in?'

Halima nodded.

'And how far away is it?'

'Half a day's drive. Maybe a day because of the rains.'

'OK. There might still be time.' He chewed thoughtfully on the nail of his right thumb. 'I've got an idea,' he said. 'This is what we're going to do…'

Four thousand miles away, the same sun that was once more emerging over the rainforests of the Democratic Republic of the Congo was also beating down on the city of Macclesfield in Cheshire. Sam Garner, a bearded, bespectacled man in his mid-forties wearing a rather unfashionable short-sleeved shirt and a tie with soup stains down it, was glad of the air conditioning in his offices; but he was deeply concerned by the phone call he had just received. He had never met Russell Tracey's son, and didn't know if he was the sort of kid to pull practical jokes. But if his father was anything to go by, somehow he doubted it.

Sam had called the operator to try and trace where the call had come from, but there was nothing she could do to help. The more he thought about it, the more firmly he decided he had to take it seriously. It was too outlandish for a kid to make up, surely, and Ben had sounded genuinely fearful. But who should he call and who would listen and, even more importantly, be able to act on such meagre information? He twiddled with his pencil and tried to think things through calmly and logically. Sam Garner had seen the effects of the Ebola virus firsthand. He'd researched a small outbreak in the Central African Republic about three years ago, and he remembered thinking how much worse these diseases were in real life than in academic study. The people he had seen dying of the virus had ended their lives in terrible pain. At the time he remembered being thankful that you could only catch Ebola if you came into contact with the bodily fluids of infected sufferers. Humans had never caught it through airborne transmission, though monkeys possibly had. A slight mutation, and Ebola could turn into a health threat the like of which the world had never seen.

It had become something of an obsession of Sam's. There was no doubting that there were millions of organisms out there unknown to modern science, microscopic bacteria and viruses living in tiny undiscovered colonies with their own quirks and characteristics. You didn't need to be an amazing scientist to work out that with so many millions of possibilities, it was not only likely that someone someday would stumble across a new virus as invasive as Ebola but much more contagious. It was inevitable. Sam had even developed his own system of grading virus threats.

Code Green: no threat.

Code Amber: discovery of reservoir and suspected threat to human life.

Code Red: widespread infection and threat of major epidemic.

Sometimes Sam's colleagues made fun of him and the way he had taken to lobbying governments and NGOs, getting up on his soapbox and arguing the need for more funding in this arena; but Sam didn't care. He knew what he thought, and he knew one day he would be vindicated in some horrific way.

Perhaps that day had come. Or perhaps Russell Tracey and the villagers of this unheard-of place in the DRC had succumbed to something totally different. All Sam knew was that what Ben had described was perfectly possible, if unthinkable, and that Russell Tracey was not the sort of man to overstate his case. If Russell thought this was a Code Red situation, it probably was.

But his thought processes simply led him back to square one: who would be the best person to notify? Who might act promptly based on no real data? But if this really was a Code Red…