The Lazarus Strain (12 page)

A plague on all their houses, thought Steven as he gunned the MG past a slow moving tractor. There was without doubt a place for secrecy in government but all too often it was being used as a smokescreen for incompetence.

‘Just one of these things, I suppose,’ replied Cleary when Steven inquired about his health. ‘Right as rain now.’

Steven wondered briefly about confession being as good for ‘upset stomachs’ as it was reputed to be for the soul; before asking Cleary if he was aware that a special safe had been installed for Devon to keep the Cambodia 5 virus in.

Cleary shook his head. ‘News to me but I suppose Tim couldn’t have told us anyway.’

‘You’d think it would be difficult to install something like that without anyone being aware of what was going on,’ said Steven.

‘Perhaps it was done over the weekend or in the middle of the night,’ suggested Cleary.

‘I suppose,’ said Steven. ‘This may seem like a daft question but any idea where it might be?’

Cleary looked perplexed. ‘I’m ashamed to say that I haven’t,’ he said. ‘I haven’t noticed anything new appearing in any of the labs and there’s certainly nothing like that down in any of the animal rooms. I can’t understand why the Department of Health man didn’t say anything about this when he was here at the weekend. You’d think he would at least have mentioned the presence of a secret virus store!’

Steven snorted. ‘DOH obviously thought that they could keep everything secret at that time. They hoped they might get away with everyone thinking that the animals were infected with “just flu” - although you going through Devon’s desk must have given them a bad moment.’

‘It didn’t do me a lot of good either,’ said Cleary. ‘It was a bit of a shock, I can tell you.’

‘But the fact that you didn’t let on what you’d discovered must have encouraged them to push their luck,’ said Steven.

Cleary picked up on the accusation. ‘I had no idea what was going on,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know what to do. I take it DOH has now come clean about their involvement?’

Steven nodded. ‘Most people confess immediately after they’re found out and break open a bottle of regret.’

‘Why don’t you just call DOH and ask where the virus safe is,’ suggested Cleary.

‘Call it inter-departmental rivalry but I’d rather hoped to find it without having to ask them. Could it be in the professor’s office?’

‘I don’t recall Tim having any work carried out in there in recent weeks,’ said Cleary. ‘Although, in view of what we said about the weekend or middle of the night, maybe that’s not surprising. I did notice that he had a couple of new filing cabinets when I was going through his papers . . .’

Steven smiled. ‘Shall we take a look?’

Cleary got out the key for the Devon’s office, which he’d been keeping in his own desk drawer and they went along the corridor to Devon’s room, slaloming between workmen’s ladders and equipment, trying to talk above the noise of drills.

It went quiet again as Cleary closed the office door behind them. ‘These two in the corner,’ he said, indicating two metal, three-drawer units in civil service green. ‘They’re new.’

Steven pulled out the top drawer of the first cabinet and found nothing more sinister than alphabetical file holders holding general information files about safety and fire regulations. There was also a thick folder on Home Office rules regarding the housing and use of experimental animals. Much the same applied to the next drawer and the next: routine paperwork. Steven was beginning to think that they were just everyday office filing cabinets when he pulled out the bottom drawer of the second cabinet and was left with a false drawer front in his hand. ‘Well, this is different,’ he said, pulling back a secondary inner leaf to expose the door of a small safe with a red LED blinking on and off at one second intervals. It looked heavy and secure and had been cemented into the floor, its electrical connections enclosed in armoured sheathing.

‘Bloody hell, this was built to last,’ said Cleary when he bent down to take a look. ‘You’d need a small nuclear device to open it.’

‘I suppose that was the general idea,’ said Steven. ‘Unless of course, you had the keys . . .’ He pointed to the two key-card slots in the front door. One of the cards had been left in its slot. ‘That was careless.’

‘That’s not like Tim to do something like that,’ said Cleary. ‘But I suppose it didn’t matter too much when you have to have the second one present before you can open it. Maybe he just kept the card there.’

‘No,’ said Steven, shaking his head emphatically. ‘He would have been instructed never to do that. Leaving one card in place destroys the whole point of the thing. As it is, it’s just an ordinary safe that anyone can open if he can get his hands on the other card. Leaving one key there is a big no no. Devon would have been told that.’

‘I take your point, said Cleary.

Steven thought for a moment before saying, ‘But it is interesting to hear you say that doing something like that would be out of character for the professor . . .’

‘Tim was an absolute stickler for protocol and detail,’ said Cleary.

‘Do you have a plastic bag?’ Steven asked

‘Sure, I’ll just get one.’

‘And forceps too,’ said Steven.

Cleary returned a few moments later with a roll of small plastic bags and a pair of forceps, still in their sterile wrapping, the black stripes on the special sealing tape indicating that they had been through autoclave sterilisation. He handed both to Steven who’d put on surgical gloves – there was a box of them at the side of the small hand-basin in the office. ‘Just in case it wasn’t the professor who left the card in the slot . . .’ he said. He extracted the key-card with the forceps and dropped it into a plastic bag.

‘I take it, this means you are going to take this key away with you?’ said Cleary, watching Steven seal the bag.

‘Yes,’ said Steven.

‘What if DOH should come to call, wanting to reclaim their virus?’

‘You can tell them Sci-Med has the other key.’

‘They
will
be pleased,’ said Cleary.

‘It was more embarrassment I was hoping for,’ said Steven. ‘This was a crazy operation from the outset.’

* * * *

Two days later, Steven was requested to attend a meeting of high level officials from the Department of Health, the Ministry of Defence and the Security Service. Just before they went in, Steven asked Macmillan why he thought Sci-Med had been invited to attend.

‘Maybe it’s the cynicism of my years,’ said Macmillan. ‘But intuition tells me that we are about to be asked to co-operate.’

‘In what?’

‘In keeping our mouths shut,’ replied Macmillan.

Nigel Lees from DOH, who had obviously been detailed to clear up his own mess, convened the meeting. He opened by ‘regretting’ what had happened at the Crick Institute. They had had a difficult decision to make and in the light of unforeseen events it had turned out to be ‘ill-advised.’

Steven noted that he had avoided using the word ‘wrong’.

‘When I offer you an explanation for our actions, I hope you will accept that what we did was for the best of motives and very much in the long-term interests of the public.

Steven noted that ‘he’ had also become ‘we’. He and Macmillan exchanged cynical glances.

‘When Dr Malcolm, our man on the World Health Organisation vaccines committee, approached us and stressed the immediacy of the problem regarding bird flu we felt that we should act rather than just table it for consideration in the future. We approached Professor Devon and I suppose it was our hope,’ Lees cleared his throat and continued, ‘that he would be successful in designing a vaccine against avian strains of influenza in time for incorporation into the vaccine schedule for next year. As you are probably aware, the decision as to what flu strains to use in vaccine preparation has to be made as early as possible. In view of the warning from the WHO about the imminent high risk of an outbreak of a form of the disease to rival the 1918 pandemic, we thought it imperative to pursue this course of action with vigour.’

‘Without reference to cabinet?’

‘It was . . . our . . . my own initiative,’ admitted Lees.

‘That doesn’t explain why you commissioned the work to be carried out at the Crick Institute without proper security or facilities’ said Macmillan.

‘We quite understand your concern,’ said Lees, who gave the impression of a man used to handling hostile questioning. ‘But it was a logistical thing and time wasn’t on our side. We thought Professor Devon the right man for the job but when we approached him it was clear that he had no desire to move to Porton Down, which was our first suggestion. Apart from his reluctance to move, he pointed out that there wouldn’t be time to set up a new lab there anyway and still make the deadline so, in spite of our misgivings and in view of the anomaly surrounding the regulations for work on flu virus, we agreed that the work could take place at the Crick.’

Steven took note of how neatly Lees had moved the blame on to the dead man and it irked him. ‘Exploiting that “anomaly” could have wiped out half the country,’ he said. ‘You must have realised the dangerous nature of the virus whatever the “rule book” happens to say about influenza virus.’

For the first time, Lees lost his suave self assurance. ‘Well, luckily it didn’t,’ he said sharply.

‘One animal is still missing,’ said Steven.

‘And that is regrettable. However, I’m sure that the army are on top of things. The main thing is that no member of the public has yet come into contact with the escaped animal and therefore there can be no risk to the public at large. It may well be that the animal is already dead.’

‘Or on its way to London in a taxi,’ said Steven, attracting an angry glance from Lees but it was only there for a moment before the urbane air of calm reasonableness returned. ‘We at DOH would, of course, prefer if this whole unfortunate affair were to end here and without repercussion. In a nutshell, this is why you were asked here this morning, ladies and gentlemen – to request your understanding and forbearance. We sincerely regret what happened but we do hope that you accept the well-intentioned motivation behind it. Her Majesty’s Government, at the highest level, has decreed that it is of the utmost importance that we prepare ourselves for any likely outbreak of disease in our country and not only from natural causes, as I’m sure our Defence colleagues will agree – the threat of biological attack is ever present. I do hope you will let matters end here but of course, if your conscience should insist that questions be raised in the house and that the matter should be taken into the public domain then of course, we will understand . . . we were at fault.’

Nice finish, thought Steven. Not a dry eye in the house.

The senior man from the Ministry of Defence was first to respond. ‘I’m sure none of us here wants a scandal,’ he began. ‘There’s little to be gained by trying to score cheap political points off each other.’

‘And a scandal is precisely what we’ll have if this hits the papers,’ said a woman from the Security Services. ‘There will be demands for resignations and calls for public inquiries from all varieties of
homo politicus
jostling for position and their place in the limelight.’

‘Not to mention ambulance-chasing lawyers submitting claims for compensation for imagined trauma from half the population of Norfolk,’ said the Home Office minister.

‘Then I am delighted that we all seem to be agreed, ladies and gentlemen,’ said Lees. ‘We let the matter end here?’

There were no dissenting voices but when the hubbub died down Macmillan said quietly, ‘If the design of a vaccine against the imminent threat from an . . . “altered avian strain” was an absolute imperative for DOH, what’s happening about it now?’

‘Ah,’ said Lees. He smiled like a naughty schoolboy caught scrumping apples. ‘I was just about to bring that up . . . Although we don’t have the results of Professor Devon’s last experiments due to his untimely death, we do know from a report he submitted three weeks ago that he had been successful in constructing several attenuated forms of the . . . er . . . virus and had high hopes for one of these strains being useful as the seed strain for an effective vaccine. Ideally . . . we would like work to continue on it at full speed, still with a view to incorporating it in the vaccine schedule for February . . .’

My God, he means at the Crick, thought Steven. He’s got balls; I’ll give him that. He could see that others were exchanging surprised glances.

‘As this strain is – and I can’t stress this too highly – a much attenuated form of the . . . er . . . Cambodian virus, we were rather hoping that you might all agree to work being allowed to continue at the Crick. There simply would not be time to move the project elsewhere . . . Naturally there would be a thorough overhaul of security measures . . .’

‘Just how attenuated is “much attenuated”?’ asked the Security Services woman.

‘The BSL-3 labs at the Crick would be more than adequate for its containment,’ replied Lees.

‘Who would do the work?’ asked Macmillan.

‘At the outset, when we asked Professor Devon about a possible collaborator on his staff at the Crick should one be necessary, he suggested Dr Leila Martin in view of her past experience with flu vaccine both with WHO and in her own lab in Washington. We believe that Dr Martin is more than capable of carrying on the work.’

‘As long as there’s no danger to the public,’ said the Home Office minister. ‘It makes sense.’

‘None at all,’ said Lees.

‘But is there going to be time?’ asked Macmillan.

Lees made an ambivalent gesture with his shoulders. ‘You’re right to question that,’ he said. ‘It’s going to be touch and go but Dr Martin has agreed to give it her best shot and work all the hours that God sends. We, for our part, have made arrangements with the vaccine manufacturers to delay things until the very last moment in order to incorporate any new seed strain should it arrive late. Red tape will be cut to an absolute minimum. No one wants a repeat of this year’s debacle when the USA was 50 million doses short of winter vaccine and we were twenty percent down on requirements ourselves.’