‘Well done, Professor Rees,’ said Macmillan. ‘So the last part of the secret is about to be no longer a secret. I’ll pass the news on to the Home Secretary.’
‘What’s happening to Crowe and Mowbray?’ asked Steven.
‘I’m sorry but they’re being released,’ said Macmillan. ‘The Home Secretary did however, agree to your request for a search of Crowe’s lab. It’s already begun.’
‘Good,’ said Steven.
‘I need hardly add that if nothing is found it will probably be an end to the matter,’ said Macmillan. ‘There’s absolutely no other evidence that work continued on the agent after the accident in 1990.’
‘But I know that it did,’ insisted Steven. ‘And if they were prepared to kill to keep it secret after twelve years it must mean that they have plans for it, plans that mean a lot to them.’
‘I hope you’re wrong,’ said Macmillan.
‘I do too,’ said Steven. ‘But I fear I’m not.’
Newsnight finished on BBC2 and Steven drained the last of a gin and tonic before clicking the remote. He found the silence welcome but with it came thoughts of the day and his conversation with Rees. Although he and Rees had agreed that it wouldn’t make any sense to design such a weapon with an inherent weakness — treatability — and indeed, Rees had found that it had no such weakness; D’Arcy had insisted that one of the main design criteria had been that the organism be treatable. This worried him because he couldn’t see the logic behind it and a lack of understanding meant vulnerability in any situation. Logic said clearly that you would not deliberately introduce a weakness… therefore… it had to be a strength… What they were seeing as a weakness must actually be some kind of advantage but if an enemy could cure the condition how could that possibly be?… Steven suddenly thought he saw the answer. They couldn’t! Only the designers of the agent could cure it! That was why the bug had been made resistant to all the other antibiotics. It was so the other side couldn’t cure the condition. Like the bug itself, the cure was a secret too.
Feeling so pleased with himself he couldn’t stop a smile on his lips, he looked at the time. It was just after midnight but this couldn’t wait until morning. He called Rees at home and woke him up.
‘Give me a moment,’ said Rees when he heard Steven’s voice, ‘No need to disturb my wife as well.’
Steven waited until Rees had left the bedroom and gone downstairs to his study.
‘Right,’ said Rees. ‘You are now free to tell me while you’ve got me out of bed at this ungodly hour.’
‘I’ve been thinking,’ said Steven, immediately imagining something disparaging in the silence that followed. ‘About the agent, I mean. I think they did make it treatable but not by any conventional means. I think the treatment is a secret too.’
‘A secret,’ repeated Rees, but not unkindly.
‘It makes perfect sense,’ said Steven, enthusiasm welling up in his voice. ‘It’s actually a very clever addition to the bug’s properties. It would give you the power to selectively cure who you wanted to of the condition. You can even take the logic one stage further. You could use the agent to debilitate the population and exert control and then you cure the ones among them who come round to your way of thinking. They regain their health and there’s an implicit suggestion that their new political philosophy is the way back to health and happiness so more people come round to your way of thinking and they in turn are cured and so on.’
‘Isn’t science wonderful,’ murmured Rees, but he sounded intrigued.
‘You’re now going to tell me that all this is fantasy?’ said Steven.
‘No,’ said Rees thoughtfully. ‘No, I’m not.’
‘Then you think it possible?’
‘To come up with a new antibiotic that no one else knows about? Absolutely, it’s a search carried out every day by drug companies. Mind you, the vast majority of new antibiotics are no good at all and there’s a school of thought that says we’ve already come up with all the useful ones but…’
‘But what?’
‘They are looking for antibiotics that work against bugs that cause disease. No one looks for drugs that act against harmless beasties.’
‘How would you go about it?’ asked Steven.
‘Antibiotics occur widely in nature,’ said Rees. ‘Many bacteria and fungi produce them for their own defence. Genus Streptomyces and Bacillus are the most prolific.’
‘So it wouldn’t be that difficult?’
‘No.’
‘Would they do that before or after they had made all the other changes to the bug?’ asked Steven.
‘Definitely before,’ said Rees. ‘Otherwise there would be no guarantee they would be able to come up with a cure after they had carried out all the other work. It could be wasted.’
‘That is a very important point,’ said Steven. ‘Let me see if I’ve got it right. The sequence of events would be that they take a harmless strain of Mycoplasma and search for a new antibiotic that kills it, then they make it resistant to all known antibiotics, and finally they introduce genes from the HIV virus in order to make it harmful?’
‘Correct,’ said Rees.
‘Bastards,’ said Steven. ‘They could have cured it all along but they said nothing.’
‘Sorry, I’m not with you,’ said Rees.
‘If coming up with the new antibiotic was the first thing they did, they could have cured Gulf War Syndrome all along,’ said Steven.
‘Still not with you,’ said Rees.
‘The treatable property would have been present even in the very earliest forms of the agent so it would have been there in the prototype that found its way into the vaccine. They could have cured all these people by making their new antibiotic available but they kept quiet and said nothing.’
‘Because if that should become public knowledge their agent becomes useless as a weapon,’ completed Rees.
‘They’ve been keeping it a secret now for twelve years.’
‘Ye gods,’ said Rees. ‘People.’
‘What are the chances of finding another antibiotic that would kill this thing?’ asked Steven.
‘We could certainly start looking,’ said Rees. ‘But the people who came up with this thing are no fools. It’s odds on that they would have selected a starting strain that was naturally resistant to many antibacterial agents, perhaps through some aberration in its outer membrane or the like. There are thousands and thousands of antibacterial compounds out there so it would be a question of going through them all until we found the one that worked. That could take time. It would also have to be tested for toxicity before it could be used. Many antibiotics are so toxic that they can’t be used for fear of killing the patient. How much time have we got?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Steven. ‘
In the morning Steven got to the Home Office shortly before Rose Roberts arrived. ‘You’re an early bird,’ she said.
‘Looking for information on a couple of worms,’ said Steven. ‘Peter Warner and Rupert Everley.’
‘You’re in luck,’ replied Rose. ‘I just finished collating the files on these two last night. Mr Macmillan hasn’t seen them yet.’
‘I don’t think he’d mind,’ said Steven, responding to her questioning look.
‘Anything interesting?’
‘Nothing we didn’t know already,’ said Rose, handing them over. ‘What’s your interest all of a sudden?’
‘I want to talk to them,’ said Steven.
‘Everley is away in Scotland where he’s been for the last month,’ said Rose. ‘But Warner should be at his home in Kent.’