‘How could that happen?’ asked Steven.
Rees leaned across his desk and said, ‘It could be a freak of nature but the simplest explanation is that someone engineered it that way. They altered it so it could not be treated with antibiotics.’
‘They genetically altered a harmless bacterium?’ said Steven. ‘Sounds like you’ve found the needle!’
‘Modesty prevents comment,’ said Rees with a mischievous grin that made Steven warm to the man even further.
‘Would that have been difficult?’ asked Steven.
‘Easiest thing in the world to make bugs resistant to drugs,’ replied Rees. ‘You just select for the natural mutants that are always present in bacterial populations. You simply spread large numbers of them on a growth medium containing the antibiotic and let nature do the rest. Only a mutant resistant to the antibiotic can survive and grow. You then grow the survivor up and go through the same procedure with another antibiotic and so on until you finish up with a strain that is resistant to every drug in the book.’
‘But ostensibly this is still a harmless bug, right?’ asked Steven.
‘Right,’ said Rees. ‘What’s inside it in terms of DNA is another matter but I think we have found our candidate for genetic alteration. I’m going to test it with the HIV virus gene probe.’
Steven tapped his thumbnail against his front teeth.
‘You’re looking thoughtful,’ said Rees.
‘I was just thinking,’ said Steven. ‘If you’re right and this Mycoplasma thing should turn out to be the agent it would mean that it could not be treated by drugs?’
‘That’s the usual way of things with biological weapons,’ said Rees. ‘What’s the problem?’
‘The people who designed this thing were asked to make it treatable. It was a specific requirement.’
‘Wouldn’t that defeat the purpose?’ asked Rees.
‘You’d think so,’ agreed Steven. ‘But, as I say, it was a definite criterion.’
‘Rees took off his glasses and leaned back in his chair. ‘Strange,’ he said. ‘But interesting. Do you play chess, Doctor?’
‘Badly,’ said Steven. ‘My main tactic is to engineer an exchange of every powerful piece on the board I can on the grounds that they are liable to be of much more use to my opponent than me.’
‘That in itself is a clever tactic,’ said Rees. ‘You accept your shortcomings and level the playing field so that things become more equal. You bring a superior opponent down to your level.’
‘That’s one way of putting it,’ said Steven with a smile at Rees’s bluntness.
‘But when that is not an option we have no alternative but to consider what our opponent might do with the powerful pieces that are still on the board.’
‘Like the agent,’ said Steven.
‘Here we have a strain of Mycoplasma has been genetically altered,’ said Rees. ‘If, as we suspect, genes from the HIV virus have been introduced to it then we have a perfectly harmless looking organism that has the capacity to seriously damage the human immune system, rendering its victims vulnerable to a wide range of conditions and diseases — not to the extent of the HIV virus itself but still pretty debilitating. On top of that, it is immune to antibiotics so there is no way of treating it. All in all, a powerful biological agent for population control and manipulation, wouldn’t you say?’
‘You’d think so,’ agreed Steven.
‘So why would they want to introduce a weakness?’ said Rees.
Steven shrugged.
‘It doesn’t make sense,’ said Rees. ‘But there’s a danger we are taking our eye off the game. It’s always a mistake to look back when we should be thinking about what might happen next. The real question is what they intend doing with such a powerful piece on the board, not what they might have done with it in the past.’
EIGHTEEN
The sun had moved round so that it was now shining directly into the room. Rees half closed the Venetian blinds causing horizontal bands of light to stripe the left side of his face.
‘Well, chess master,’ said Steven. ‘What would you do?’
Rees smiled. ‘I’m hardly the one to ask,’ he said. ‘There’s no one I would want to control apart from my grandchildren when they run amok in my garden on a Sunday. Using biological weapons might be going a little far.’
‘As I see it, they’re either going to sell it or use it,’ said Steven. ‘These are the two possibilities.’
‘Do you really think that someone might consider using such a weapon in this country?’
‘You know as well as I how much this country is hated in some quarters,’ said Steven. ‘Our current love affair with the Americans isn’t exactly improving things.’
Rees conceded the point with a nod. ‘You’re referring to Islamic terrorist organisations, but frankly this agent would not be an attractive proposition for them. They have neither the time nor the infrastructure to benefit from it. Terrorism is by definition a case of kill and run, bomb and disrupt. Its perpetrators create an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty in order to promote the demand for change. Making people ill would not fit the bill unless the people affected knew that they’d been attacked and why they were ill. The very nature of this agent militates against that. It was designed to be a secret.’
‘So we can eliminate sale to a third party?’ said Steven.
‘We can eliminate sale to terrorist groups,’ said Rees. ‘That’s different.’
‘At least it narrows down the field,’ said Steven.
‘But to what, I must leave up to you,’ said Rees. ‘The time has come for me to retire to the confines of my comfortable little ivory tower and get back to the rigours of academe.’
Steven drove back to London feeling less than optimistic. He knew he was pre-empting Rees’s findings but the suggestion of genetic alteration to one of the apparently harmless bugs Maclean had found in his body made this seem reasonable and he had to think ahead. Crowe had been responsible for its construction and Mowbray had made sure it had remained a secret, but who was going to use it? Both of them had been members of Gardiner’s group — something he had been inclined to dismiss as a small collection of right-wing dreamers although on the other hand it had been in existence for twelve years; plenty of time to build up a significant infrastructure. There was no easy way of knowing how widespread or how deeply it had penetrated into British life in that time — who was a member and who was not. The natural home of the political right was out there in suburbia among the roses and forsythia of bungalow-land where the silent majority never voiced their opinions openly but got on with their shopping and gardening and went about their business while secretly harbouring resentment against the more vociferous left.
He reckoned that he believed Gardiner’s stated regard for the rule of law but Crowe and Mowbray were a different kettle of fish. Maybe these two and God knows who else had simply moved in and taken over. He had reconciled himself to getting nothing out of either so that only left the other two group members he knew of to approach, Colonel Peter Warner — the ex soldier now retired — and the would-be politician, Rupert Everley. Sci-Med would have set up an investigation into the background of both of them as soon as their involvement had become known so he would take a look at what they had come up with before deciding whom to approach first. He needed to find an Achilles heel to make progress.
Steven waited until he had got home before calling Macmillan and telling him about Rees’s discovery. ‘It’s going to take a few more days to be absolutely sure but it looks as if he’s on the right track.’