Outbreak, p.20
Outbreak, page 20
He moved away from the screen and sat down heavily at the head of the table. ‘I have to say that the fourth patient is a worry. She was one of the A & E staff on duty at Epsom General on the day they took in Ms Bradley. We’ve had to transfer her to the High Consequence Infectious Disease Centre at Guy’s. And obviously we are now having to trace and test every single person who might have come into contact with her, as well as everyone who came anywhere near Ms Bradley since the moment she sold that stuffed toy to the late Chris Coppinger.’ He shook his head at the thought of how such a benign, mundane action could have had such terrible repercussions.
‘If the numbers turn up anything close to our worst expectations,’ he said, waving to the chart on the screen, ‘then we’re looking at another Nightingale situation: a secure quarantine unit with enough beds, full twenty-four-hour care and enough PPE to see us through.’
Strained, worried faces stared back at him. There was a long silence before eventually someone broke it. It was one of the mathematical modellers who had helped draw up the chart on the screen.
‘And lockdown? Are you suggesting the country will have to go back into lockdown?’
Brendan Holmes put his hands out in front of him, as if holding back an imaginary crowd. ‘Look,’ he replied, ‘this is still very early days and we can’t be certain of the R number, the infection rate, of this virus. Remember, as long as that stays below 1.0 – that’s one new individual infected for every human already infected – then we should be able to bring this thing under control. But if it’s higher …’ He paused, as if uncertain whether to voice his fears out loud. ‘Well, if it’s higher, yes, we could be facing a national emergency. So, Clarissa.’ He brightened as he turned to the Senior Scientific Adviser from Porton Down Defence Laboratory. ‘Give us some good news, if you will. What progress on the cure?’
‘Well, this isn’t going to be straightforward,’ Dr Clarissa Gall replied. ‘If we were just dealing with a variation of smallpox, that would be bad enough but manageable – we could always have rushed in stocks from the States and probably shut this thing down overnight. No, I’m afraid this is something much more complex and sinister. Why? Because of the Marburg filovirus it’s been combined with. We’re pulling in expertise from the WHO, and from Atlanta, but we’re still a long way off coming up with a cure.’
The chief medical officer grimaced. ‘So one of the biggest challenges for us now,’ he told the room, ‘is how we sufficiently inform the public without triggering a panic.’ He picked up a sheet of paper that he’d been toying with while Dr Gall spoke. ‘My team have drawn up a communiqué that I’m going to recommend we put up on the website this afternoon.’ He began to read it out.
‘As a precautionary measure, UK scientists are working closely with international experts to implement rapid infection-control procedures for this new virus, provisionally designated as Agent X. These will include, where necessary, tracing, contacting and isolating those people who may have come into contact with infected individuals.’
‘If you don’t mind my saying,’ interjected one of the epidemiologists from Imperial College, ‘that all sounds a bit bland, doesn’t it? I mean, we’re not exactly telling them anything new there, are we? The fact is that Agent X is a man-made, genetically modified pathogen. It hasn’t jumped species in a Chinese wet market. This thing has been deliberately cooked up in a lab with malign intent. I think we owe it to the public to give them a bit more info, don’t you?’
‘Well, I was coming to that,’ replied Brendan Holmes, looking rather piqued. He read out the rest of the communiqué.
‘Initial symptoms of monkey pox include fever, headache, muscle aches, swollen lymph nodes, chills and exhaustion. A rash can develop, often beginning on the face, then spreading to other parts of the body. The rash finally forms a scab, which later falls off.’
He stopped abruptly.
‘That’s it?’ asked the epidemiologist.
‘That’s it.’
‘I’m sorry, but I think the public will say we’re taking them for fools. Have any of you looked at Twitter today? This is all over it. Here …’ Dr Gall got out her phone, thumbed the app and scrolled down. ‘Have a look at hashtag-virus, hashtag-pox, hashtag-disease. Wherever you look people are talking about it. The Sunday papers were all across it yesterday – the Sunday Times even got somebody on to Svalbard. No.’ The scientist shook her head decisively. ‘I don’t think you can keep people in the dark about this. I, for one, feel strongly that we need to level with people on what the true nature of this pathogen is and, more importantly, what precautions we’re putting in place if Agent X takes off.’ She looked at Holmes across the table in silent challenge.
He held her gaze for just a second, then turned away. He felt distinctly uncomfortable. ‘I’m not sure we’re ready,’ he said quietly, ‘to announce our precautions. Because we haven’t taken any yet.’
64
Vauxhall Cross, London
Monday, 14 March, 1806hrs GMT
LUKE PUSHED HIS chair away from the screen and blinked several times. There was only so much scrolling through texts and transcripts and images he could take before he started to feel like a caged beast. If someone had said to him before he joined MI6 he’d be spending half his life in front of a computer screen he might have had second thoughts. But then again, just thinking about that near-miss from the speeding Mercedes that had tried to wipe him out in a backstreet of Vilnius was more than enough to get his adrenalin flowing.
He stood up and walked over to the narrow, bulletproof window of his office. This place was such a fortress he sometimes felt like he was looking out from some medieval castle with arrow slits for windows. The view from this south-facing side was a lot less inspiring than the one northward across the river. Two floors above him and on the other side of the building, the Chief and the directors had the glorious picture-window views over the Thames and Vauxhall Bridge; he got to look down on a petrol station, a spa called Chariots and the rush-hour traffic dribbling out of London.
On this early Monday evening he could see ‘normal people’ – civilians, as he still thought of them – all heading home from work. Despite the current crisis Luke knew that most of Whitehall would have emptied out by now – it was worse on a Friday, when places like the MoD main building were practically ghost towns after 5 p.m. And what exactly did he, Luke Carlton, have to look forward to? Another awkward evening with Elise and all those unanswered questions about what Hugo Squires was doing, getting so cosy in their flat. They had made no plans for this week, mostly because Luke could give her no guarantee he wasn’t going to be working late into the night. Or jumping on to a plane to somewhere cold and dangerous. Elise had already told him she would be staying on for drinks with friends after work this evening. That was fine by him. He’d go to the gym, give himself a beasting on the free weights, cook up some carbs and get in an early night.
‘Knock knock.’ He turned to see Jenny Li standing in the open door, her hand resting on the frame.
‘Oh, hi,’ he said warily. What now? This was the second case he had worked on with Jenny and it had only increased his professional respect for her and her encyclopaedic knowledge of CBRN. But, my God, the woman was a machine: she never stopped working. Was she about to inform him they were going to have to pull an all-nighter?
‘So …’ She flashed him a smile. ‘I just came to see how you were holding up. You know, given everything that happened in Lithuania.’
His hand went instinctively to his left side, where he’d sustained that heavy blow in the Lithuanian police cell. It still hurt to the touch, but he was getting used to it. ‘I’m in shock!’ Luke joked. ‘She cares!’
‘Don’t push it, Luke Carlton,’ she replied, with another smile. ‘We both know I’ve done you a favour and kept most of that stuff in the police station out of my contact report. Otherwise you can bet your pension that HR would have you spending the next ten days on some psych-evaluation programme.’
‘And we wouldn’t want that,’ Luke said emphatically. He was enjoying this exchange, some light relief at last after the unrelenting tension, both at work and at home.
‘No, we would not. So …’ she glanced at her feet ‘… I think we could both do with a drink, don’t you?’ She looked up, questioningly. ‘Unless, of course, you have plans?’
Luke gave her an appraising look, noticing for the first time the curve of her figure beneath her navy-blue jacket and skirt. Mentally, he shook himself. Stay professional, Carlton. ‘No,’ he replied, quickly adding, ‘I mean yes. Absolutely. No, I don’t have plans and, yes, we should do that. Go for a drink.’ Hardly smooth. What was the matter with him? ‘Vauxhall Tavern?’
She raised a quizzical eyebrow. ‘You’re being ironic, right, Luke?’ He wasn’t. ‘No one from this place goes there. It’s just too obvious. Think about it, it’s the closest bloody pub to SIS headquarters! No, I’m thinking that new wine bar on the river by Battersea Power Station. Caravan or something.’
‘Works for me.’
‘Good,’ she said briskly. ‘I’ll just go and grab my coat. Looks like it’s still drizzling outside.’
They didn’t get past the foyer on the ground floor.
‘Jenny Li, Luke Carlton? I’m from the Chief’s office. I’ve been sent by Brenda to fetch you.’ It was an eager young man, rather out of breath, as if he had just run down several flights of stairs instead of taking the lift. ‘C wants to see you both now. In his office.’ As an afterthought, he added apologetically, ‘Sorry to interrupt your evening.’
Sir Adam Keeling had presided over some notable successes in his time – getting agents ‘upstream’ into ISIS, cultivating a handful of human informants inside Iran’s suspect nuclear industry. But today, Luke knew, would have been an exceptionally awkward one for the Chief. Having to tell the PM, the foreign secretary and half the cabinet that contrary to the way the situation had looked, contrary to all the snippets of raw intel pointing towards the Kremlin, this deliberate release of a deadly pathogen was quite possibly not the work of the Russian government after all. So now Luke was concerned. What did it mean to be summoned to the Chief’s office at the end of the day? It wasn’t going to be an invitation to cocktails, that was for certain.
They were ushered down the corridor, past the framed photographs of royal visits, into the carpeted inner sanctum, with its paintings on the walls and all those souvenirs from foreign intelligence agencies: a carpet, a curved dagger, an incense burner and, bizarrely, a carved seagull.
‘Welcome, both. This is art,’ announced the Chief, abruptly, the moment they walked in.
Luke had only one thought going through his mind: Is the Chief losing his marbles? Has he summoned us up here at the end of a long day just to show off his idea of an art collection? Maybe it really was time for Sir Adam to move on. But, no, he was now indicating a man sitting opposite him, tanned, with short black hair and a lot of product worked into it, wearing a button-down Brooks Brothers white shirt and a well-tailored suit. This man had ‘Langley’ written all over him, Luke thought.
‘This is Art Krantz,’ the Chief repeated, ‘one of our senior colleagues from Langley. Our friends at the CIA have made a disturbing discovery, which they have been kind enough to share with us. Art?’
The man from Virginia cleared his throat, looking first at Jenny, then at Luke as he spoke. ‘Well, it’s really the folks at the NSA who did the heavy lifting on this one, but I guess I’m the guy who’s bringing you the bad news.’ He looked across at the Chief, who nodded. ‘We’ve run the deep-trawl analysis on the intel you’ve sent us and, guess what?’ Luke and Jenny looked at him with blank expressions, waiting for the punchline.
‘We have a mole. Or, more precisely, you have a mole …’ Again, he looked from one to the other. ‘Someone inside UK intel is leaking. There’s classified intel from here popping up on far-right extremist forums on our side of the Pond.’
Luke exchanged a meaningful glance with the Chief. This was further corroboration that Earl Grey had been telling the truth. It was the Lithuanian lawyer who had first alerted Luke to this fact, back in the nightclub in Vilnius, and Luke had passed it on to Vauxhall immediately. But he felt no sense of triumph on seeing his work vindicated. If anything, this could end up being deeply embarrassing for the Service. Sure, the Americans had had their share of disasters in this department – the FBI’s Robert Hanssen passed secrets to the Soviets and Russians for twenty-two years; the CIA’s Aldrich Ames turned out to be a highly valued KGB double agent. Yet it had taken years for US intelligence to get over its sheer horror at the extent of the damage done by Britain’s ‘Cambridge Spy Ring’: the decades-long betrayals to Moscow carried out by the likes of Kim Philby, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean. The most damaging of all the double agents, George Blake, whose treachery sent hundreds to their deaths, lived on in Russia until 2020, celebrated there as a hero till the end.
As the lead partner in the so-called ‘Five Eyes’ intelligence-sharing arrangement between the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, Washington was understandably cautious about exactly what it chose to share with its allies. And now here they were again, facing the possibility that somebody inside MI6, MI5 or GCHQ was leaking intel, not to the Russians this time but to a transnational group of far-right extremists.
‘So we’re going to tackle this on two fronts,’ announced the Chief. He was on his feet now and pacing the room. Art Krantz remained seated, but Luke could see his eyes following Sir Adam around the room, tracking him like a hawk. ‘Security Branch will run their official investigation in conjunction with SO15 at the Met. That will take its natural course.’ He turned to face Luke and Jenny. ‘But I want you two to work in parallel on this – for me. MI5 are putting together a crisis team to deal with the UK extremist end of the Agent X bio threat. I want both of you on it. Luke, you’ll be attached to the agent-running team. Jenny, you’ll be on the investigative team. You’ll report to Thames House at 0845 tomorrow morning.’ The Chief stepped forward a pace and placed a hand on each of their shoulders, as if he were a priest giving them a sacred blessing. ‘I’m counting on you both,’ he said quietly. ‘Help us find that mole.’
65
Near Braintree, Essex
Tuesday, 15 March, 0747hrs GMT
THE RAIN WAS sweeping in horizontal skeins across a landscape drained of colour. The team on the ground fanned out in pairs across the fields, while the tech team scanned the internet and even the dark web for any hints, any clues. Whoever had gone into that disused military bunker in north Essex and freed the chained-up macaque could surely not have gone far. They also, clearly, had no idea of the danger they had exposed themselves to. If the Cambridge people – the scientists – were right, the assumption went, then the virus should already have taken effect, the monkey would be contagious – whether it was alive or dead.
The tech team had been busy for the last twenty-four hours, since the moment of discovery on Monday morning when they learned that their research primate had vanished. They started with the obvious – the National Anti-Vivisection Society, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and the Captive Animal Protection Agency. If the monkey was in their hands, someone somewhere would surely have been unable to resist talking about it online. But the trawl had drawn a blank. Either it wasn’t them, or their opsec – their operational security – was better than people gave them credit for.
It was just past 8 a.m. when two of the field team spotted something at the edge of the road: it looked like a pile of old brown clothes at first, the sort of thing a casual fly-tipper couldn’t be bothered to take to the municipal dump. But as they approached they could make out furry limbs, an outstretched hand, almost human, and a small face, constricted into a rictus smile, teeth bared, lips pared back over gums discoloured with dried blood.
‘Found ’im.’ The older of the pair called it in, turning his back to the wind as he spoke into his phone. There was a brief exchange and when it ended he straightened up. He could not believe what he was seeing. ‘Oi!’ he shouted. ‘Get the hell away from it! Don’t be a twat! Put it down!’
The younger man had walked up to the dead monkey, picked up the loose chain around its neck in one hand, a slender, lifeless limb with another, and taken a grinning selfie with his phone.
66
Thames House, London
Tuesday, 15 March, 0845hrs GMT
SHOWERED, SHAVED AND dressed in casual rig, as his mates in the Royal Marines would have called it, Luke parked his Land Rover behind Tate Britain on the north bank of the Thames. He then walked briskly down Millbank for the last few hundred metres to the MI5 headquarters building at Thames House.
When he and Jenny had filed out of the Chief’s office the previous evening nothing had needed to be said. There was no more talk of going for that drink: they both knew the moment had passed. Luke had gone home and done exactly what he’d always planned to: he’d given himself a serious workout down in the gym, pushing himself until his muscles screamed and the wooden floor beneath him was splashed with his sweat. When he came up to the flat, still glowing with exertion, he found Elise was back from her work drinks and, after a brief, strained exchange, they had ended up arguing about Hugo Squires.
‘He’s harmless, you know,’ she’d told him, as she started emptying the dishwasher and putting plates in a cupboard. ‘And he’s a great comfort to me when you’re away.’
‘I’m sure his intentions are entirely honourable,’ Luke said, and immediately regretted it.
Elise sighed in exasperation. ‘I wouldn’t have expected you to understand, Luke. Sometimes I think you have the EQ of a hedgehog.’
