Outbreak, p.7
Outbreak, page 7
20
Battersea, London
Wednesday, 9 March, 0736hrs GMT
LUKE’S PHONE WENT off while he was still in the shower. Naked, dripping and yawning, he walked back into the bedroom as he towelled down, his bare feet making dark, damp impressions on the thick beige carpet. He was home, yet somehow he was still mentally in the Arctic.
The extraction from Svalbard had been remarkably swift and efficient. All the more surprising given the horrors he had just witnessed. Exactly twenty-seven minutes after his making the call from that grim house of horrors, he was looking out of the kitchen window at a Norwegian Air Force NH90 helicopter touching down in a swirl of snow outside. Several figures spilled out in chem-bio protective gear, carrying their specialist equipment, while the loadmaster frantically beckoned for him to get aboard. Luke was only too glad to be out of that place. Even as they lifted clear into the sub-zero night he could not stop thinking of Kristian Berge and the fact that his killer had got away. Was this a mission failure? Luke patted the documents he had stashed inside his jacket for reassurance. No, it wasn’t. But it had come at a hell of a price.
A quick cross-change at Longyearbyen airport and Luke was on a flight to London via Tromsø and Oslo. Transiting through Tromsø, the same team of medics who had vaccinated him on the way out had screened him, checked him for fever and cleared him of any contamination. He had given his contact report to the NIS intelligence officer in the lounge and agreed to file a full account from London. And now here he was, back in the Battersea flat that he and Elise shared on the south bank of the Thames; he had even managed to grab a few hours’ sleep on the way south.
But now he saw he had three missed calls, all from the office. He looked down at Elise, still asleep, her head buried beneath a pillow and her back turned away from him. Luke picked up the phone from the bedside table and took it into the next room, closing the door behind him and pressing ‘call back’. A crisp, no-nonsense voice answered immediately. Angela Scott at SIS headquarters, in Vauxhall Cross, contacting him at this barely respectable hour. He shook his head. Did she ever rest? Apparently not. But over the three years he had known her, Luke had acquired a lot of respect for Angela. Her calm, measured approach had steered them through more than one crisis. And beyond that, she had stuck up for him when others in that building had wanted his scalp, branding him ‘a maverick’, ‘a loose cannon’ and, as someone had put it, ‘a bloody cowboy’. Truth be told, he probably wouldn’t still be working for the Service now if it weren’t for her.
‘Great. You’re up,’ she said. ‘I was afraid you’d still be asleep. Good flight, I hope?’ She didn’t wait for him to answer. ‘Look, I won’t sugar-coat this, Luke. You’re about to get a knock on the door, so please don’t be alarmed. We got you out of Svalbard in such a rush they didn’t have time to give you a full-spec medical screening.’
‘Yes, they did. In Tromsø. I got the all-clear.’
‘Oh.’ She sounded deflated. ‘Well, apparently that was a bit cursory and now the Porton Down people need to give you the once-over. You have just been in close proximity to a lethal pathogen. Look, I’m sorry, Luke, I know this is probably the last thing you feel like doing right now, but we’re still getting to grips with this thing and we can’t exactly have you being the super-spreader, so just bear with us, okay?’
‘All right, so when can we expect this visit?’ he asked.
It was then that the doorbell rang.
‘Don’t answer it!’ he called to Elise in the bedroom, as he dashed into the hallway. He was too late. Elise was already up, wrapped in a dressing-gown and ahead of him, opening the door. He heard her gasp and saw her jump back as two tall figures stood framed in the doorway. Both were wearing full protective suits with purple neoprene gloves, and their faces were hidden behind double-filtered respirators. Even after all the months of seeing and wearing Covid facemasks in public, even after everything he had just witnessed up in Svalbard, Luke was still shocked to see these apparitions turning up on their doorstep, right here in Battersea. He moved quickly to position himself in front of Elise, obscuring them from her view. But once again he felt a pang of guilt. This was his job, his chosen career in the dark world of espionage, and it had brought this nastiness right into their home. Always, he had tried to shield Elise from anything like this and today he had failed.
‘Mr Carlton?’ He heard a muffled, disembodied voice address him. It seemed to be coming from the taller of the two, but he couldn’t be sure. ‘We’re from the Diagnostics Unit at Porton Down. I’m sorry for the intrusion at this early hour, but we need to screen you. Straight away.’
Luke nodded and asked them to wait outside the door while they got dressed, then followed Elise back into the bedroom. She whirled around to face him, her dressing-gown wrapped even tighter around her shoulders, her knuckles showing white with tension. ‘Luke, what the fuck?’
He put up his hands, about to explain, but she hadn’t finished.
‘No, seriously. What the actual fuck? You disappear for two days to God-knows-where – I don’t ask because I know you can’t tell me – and then you come crashing back into bed at five in the morning, smelling all weird. And now this? You bring two people in spacesuits into our flat and our lives. I’m sorry, Luke, but I really do think I’m owed a bit of an explanation this time.’
He could see that her shoulders were trembling as she said this and he moved to put his arms around her, but she backed away brandishing a warning finger. ‘No!’ she retorted. ‘You don’t get to sweet-talk your way out of this one. Not until you’ve got those horrid people off our doorstep. Now get dressed, finish whatever business it is they want with you and get them out of here. I’m locking myself in the bathroom until they’re gone. Is that clear?’
Luke dressed in silence, pulling on his clothes as fast as he could, then let in the pair from Porton Down and brought them into the kitchen. He sat stiffly on a chair, his left sleeve rolled up, watching them unpack their bag of tricks from a medical holdall. He looked straight ahead at the fridge as they checked the temperature on his forehead, studying the reading intently. He glanced away as the needle punctured the flesh on his forearm and they drew out two test tubes full of his blood. One man kept humming the theme tune from Game of Thrones, over and over again. Luke said nothing, but it only added to his dark mood. What if he was infected? He thought of that poor bastard Skeet, staggering around on the frozen street at this time yesterday, clutching his forehead in pain. Is this how it ends? he wondered. I get carried off and quarantined, screened from public view in some nameless isolation unit, coughing up blood and bile until I finally throw a seven and check out?
He opened his mouth wide as they swabbed the back of his throat. Finally, he felt their gloved hands probing the glands beneath his ears.
‘Checking for buboes?’ he asked them.
The humming stopped abruptly.
‘I can’t comment on that, sir,’ one replied.
‘I feel fine, by the way,’ Luke told them. ‘Just in case you’re wondering.’
‘Right, well, you’re all clear for now, Mr Carlton. The tests are showing up negative, but we’ll need your contact details.’
‘Good.’ Luke stood up and rolled down his sleeve. ‘I’ll see you out.’
‘We’re not quite done yet, sorry. We need to screen the other occupant in the flat. We understand she’s your RCP, yes?’
‘My what?’
‘Your registered current partner. That’s according to Service records.’
Luke looked from one to the other, their faces inscrutable behind their masks. ‘Guys. You’ve just told me I’m in the clear. So how could she possibly be infected if I’m not?’
‘Sorry to inconvenience you,’ one of them shrugged, ‘but it’s standard protocol.’
Biting his bottom lip, Luke went and tapped gently on the bathroom door. Elise answered, her voice steadier now. ‘Have they gone? Can I come out now?’
‘Nearly. They just need to screen you too. Won’t take a moment.’ He tried to make it sound as casual as possible.
Silence. Then the bathroom door opened. Elise stood frowning up at him, still in her dressing-gown, her face perplexed. Even in that tense moment, Luke couldn’t help thinking how lovely she looked, but her words brought him right back to reality.
‘Screened?’ she said, in a worryingly calm voice. ‘Why on earth would I need to be screened? Luke, what the hell have you brought into this flat? What are you going to tell me next? That you’ve brought home a fucking STD?’
Luke stayed silent. He had learned from bitter experience that trying to defend himself in these situations only made matters worse. The trouble was, he knew she was right. Elise had a point and he couldn’t blame her for sounding off. He just wanted this episode to be over.
21
King’s Cross Station, London
Wednesday, 9 March, 0832hrs GMT
SHE LOOKED JUST like any one of the thousands of others milling around the concourse in one of London’s busiest railway stations at that time of the morning. Jeans, trainers, baseball cap pulled down low over her forehead and a canvas tote bag over her shoulder. She walked past WHSmith, past Pret, past the ticket machines and the information desk, stopping just short of the Platform 9¾ shop. She joined others beneath the huge black departures board, squinting up at the flickering columns, appearing to search for her platform number. From high up on the walls above, the Tannoy burst into life.
‘Security teams are in twenty-four-hour operation at this station,’ crackled the voice. ‘CCTV footage is being recorded for your safety.’ Noted. ‘See it, say it, sorted,’ concluded the pre-recorded announcement. She had seen just one uniformed policeman so far, a bobby on the beat, wearing one of those old-style custodian helmets, his bulky, overweight frame crammed inside a yellow hi-vis waistcoat. But she knew there would be others, not necessarily in uniform, plain-clothes officers from British Transport Police, working in pairs. They had warned her about them.
She cast a final glance up at the departures board, made a point of checking her watch, then strolled over to a kiosk selling coffee and croissants. She bought herself a flat white in a takeaway cup and took it with her. She walked over to Platform 9¾, past the throng of Harry Potter fans, and took out her phone. Just another tourist taking pictures. She photographed everything: the white station pillars, the black cordon set up to manage the queue, then further off, the Harry Potter shop, the Parcel Yard pub, a Caffè Nero. She checked her watch once more and flinched, as if suddenly realizing she was about to miss her train. Apologizing with a smile, she pushed her way past the fans and out into the concourse, leaving King’s Cross station by a different exit from the one she had used to come in.
She had seen what she needed to; every detail was now committed to memory. The reconnaissance was complete.
22
Vauxhall Cross
Wednesday, 9 March, 0837hrs GMT
LUKE NOSED HIS battered Land Rover out of the underground car park beneath their Battersea flat and drove eastwards towards the green and sandstone building that had served, since 1994, as the headquarters of Britain’s foreign intelligence service, MI6. With Elise’s final brittle words still ringing in his ears, he was glad to be heading into work. And there was urgency today. He had been summoned to a briefing with the directors on the third floor. Beside him, on the ripped leather cover of the passenger seat, lay the actual documents he had lifted from the makeshift Arctic lab. He had at least been able to get the pair from Porton Down to screen them for him before they left.
Luke swerved out of the busy traffic on Albert Embankment and pulled up at the heavy steel barrier, waiting for the cameras to swivel towards him. His eyes flicked up to the sad, twisted, leafless branches of wisteria that spread out above the entrance awning, and above that to the pale yellow of the walls and finally the cluster of communications antennae crowded together on the roof. Then the dark green gates slid open, and there was another pause as the black-uniformed security men checked over his vehicle. When they gave him the nod he drove it, ever so slowly, into the ground-floor car park, then used the electronic fob on his lanyard to key himself into the building. He passed the plaque on the wall commemorating the official royal opening and the large SIS emblem in the foyer: the crown, the unicorn, the lion rampant and the motto ‘Dieu et mon droit’. He nodded a greeting to some of the night shift as they passed him heading in the opposite direction and checked his watch. Not quite 0855. Was there still time to grab a coffee before he went into the briefing? He certainly needed one. But, no, that might look a bit too casual, given the urgency of the situation. He pressed the lift button and rode up to the third floor. This, he guessed, would be an ‘exploratory meeting’. It was the Service’s way of deciding what to do about something they simply had not seen coming.
Outside Briefing Room B Luke stopped for a moment, composing himself as he went through exactly what had happened up there in that cold, dark house in Svalbard. The one he had been helicoptered out of just fourteen hours ago. Were they going to haul him over the coals now about Kristian’s death? And Skeet’s? Probably. He expected nothing less. He could hear the questions already in his head. ‘But, Luke, were these actions necessary and proportionate? To whom did you refer for authorization?’ He bet it hadn’t been like this in his uncle’s day, and for a moment he found himself wishing he had been born a generation earlier.
He knocked once, then pushed open the door without waiting for an answer.
‘There he is! The man himself!’ Sid Khan, MI6’s distinctly unconventional director of International Counter-Terrorism, half rose out of his chair to greet Luke. Generously proportioned and deceptively casual, he was wearing one of his trademark cherry-pink polo shirts, his own private two-fingers-up to the Establishment, even though it paid his monthly salary. For a man tasked with helping to keep Britain safe from the next terrorist attack by ISIS, Al-Qaida or some obscure far-right extremist group, Khan always managed to appear remarkably chilled.
‘Good morning, Director,’ Luke replied, keeping it polite and formal, as he took the empty seat offered. Khan was still standing, beaming down at him even now Luke was seated. Did they know something he didn’t? He glanced quickly round the room, nodding in greeting. There were six people at the table in that briefing room and he recognized only two. Khan and Angela Scott, who flashed him a fleeting smile. Her pale, freckled face was drawn and worried, but the other four seemed tense and expectant. One had close-cropped grey stubble and looked almost old enough to have served in his uncle’s day in the seventies. The others, two women and a man, he guessed were all in their late thirties, like him.
‘Bloody outstanding, Luke,’ Khan was saying. Luke felt his boss was gazing down at him rather like a father whose son has just learned how to ride a bicycle. It made him feel distinctly uncomfortable. ‘You played an absolute blinder up there!’ Khan continued. For one awful moment Luke wondered if this was sarcasm. He had been in the Arctic for less than twenty-four hours, yet in that time two people had been killed on his watch and one was from a friendly intelligence service. The lawyers were going to be all over him for this. Now he could see everyone looking at him, waiting for him to respond.
‘Just doing my bit,’ Luke said modestly, and flashed a smile.
‘Just doing your bit?’ Khan mimicked, looking round the room with a huge grin. ‘I’d say it’s a bit more than that, young man. He’s only bloody GRU! You’ve nailed it for us!’
GRU? Russian military intelligence? Who was he talking about? Luke’s mind was racing to keep up here. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘who are you referring to? Not Victor Skeet, surely.’
‘No, not Victor Skeet,’ Khan said patiently. ‘I’m talking about Yevgeny Vasiliev. The Russian in the hut. Patient Zero!’
Khan had sat down now, but he was still looking at Luke expectantly with eyebrows raised. Everyone seemed to be waiting for some kind of reaction from him, but Luke was at a loss to know what the connection was here. And then he got it. ‘Those documents in Cyrillic I sent you last night?’
‘Bingo,’ said Khan. ‘We found Vasiliev’s name on one of them, among a lot of other stuff that’s still being worked through, and we ran it through the database downstairs. Turns out he works in the chemical and bio-warfare division of the GRU.’ Khan looked around the room triumphantly and now Luke could see Angela was regarding him with something approaching professional pride. ‘This,’ Khan concluded, ‘has Russian military intelligence stamped all over it! And it’s come just in time for the JIC this afternoon.’
The JIC. The Joint Intelligence Committee, the top-secret Whitehall group that issued all the taskings to Britain’s intelligence agencies, made infamous under Tony Blair’s premiership for its fatally flawed assessment of Iraq’s long-defunct programme to build weapons of mass destruction.
Luke couldn’t quite put his finger on exactly why, but right now, somewhere in the back of his head, a voice was urging extreme caution: this was all sounding a bit too simple. ‘Can we be a hundred per cent certain on that?’ he asked. ‘I mean, the GRU got their knuckles rapped over the Salisbury Novichok poisoning, didn’t they? Then there was the Navalny affair they thought they could get away with and didn’t.’
‘What are you saying exactly, Luke?’ It was Angela who asked this. She had always encouraged him to question, to argue, to take the contrary view at times, so he knew it wasn’t a hostile interruption.
