David Trevellyan 03 -More Harm Than Good (10 page)

       
As I trudged forward I
noticed that one of Melissa’s wheels was developing a squeak every time it
turned. She was going to need some oil pretty soon if she didn’t want to
announce her arrival everywhere she went, and I was still wondering where she
could get some when I
realised
the smell of the air
was changing, too. The stagnant
odour
near the lift
was gradually being replaced by something with a sharper, harder edge.

       
“What is that?” I said.
“It smells like chlorine.”

       
“I think it is
chlorine,” Melissa said.

       
“Where’s it coming
from?”

       
“The swimming pool, I
expect.”

       
“Which swimming pool?”

       
“The
hospital’s
.”

       
“I didn’t know it had
one. Where is it?”

       
“Round the next corner.”

       
“But wait,” I said,
taking a moment to make sure I had my bearings straight. “Wouldn’t that bring
us up into the street?”

       
“If we went up,” she
said. “Yes, it would.”

       
“You’ve lost me.”

       
“The
pool’s
down here. Underground. Between the hospital and the nurses’ home.”

       
“I didn’t even know
there was a nurses’ home.”

       
“Oh, yes.
That big, ugly, modern building on the opposite side of the road.
The pool’s actually bang in the middle, twenty feet below street level.”

       
“Are you sure?”

       
“I am. And just think.
All those stressed out office workers heading home every evening. What would
they do if knew they were a few yards above a horde of student nurses in tiny
little bikinis?”

       
“Do people use it much?”
I said, trying to imagine how it would feel to be in a pool of water beneath
one of the busiest commuter streets in London.

       
“Actually, I have no
clue,” she said. “I’ve only seen it on the plans. And don’t get any ideas, cause
we’re not going that far. There’s something else you need to look at.”

       
After another thirty
yards the corridor made a ninety-degree turn to the left, but we didn’t follow
it.

       
“Can you get that for
me?” Melissa said, nodding towards a door set into the right hand wall. It was
painted the same shade of grey as the floor, and the purple stripe continued
straight across it. There was nothing to indicate what it led to. And there was
no handle attached to it, either. I glanced down at Melissa,
then
gave it a push. It opened easily, and beyond it was another featureless
corridor. This one was about eighty yards long, and slightly narrower than the
first. Its walls were the same pale green, but there was no sign of any
coloured
lines. The floor wasn’t as worn. There was less
junk hanging from the ceiling, and the lights were spaced further apart, making
the place noticeably dimmer. But the main difference, as far as I could see,
was the CCTV cameras that were here. There were two. Both in protective, wire mesh
cages. One was facing me, to monitor anyone entering the corridor. The second
was focused on the only other possible exit - a single door about half way down
on the right hand side.

       
I shrugged, stepped into
the new corridor, and held the door for Melissa. She wheeled past me and kept
going, faster than before, till she was level with the door. Then she spun her
chair hard to the right and waited for me to catch up.

       
“This is it,” she said.
“This is why I’m here. And you, too, now.”

       
The door appeared to be
made of wood. Pale, maybe ash, with a delicate grain running from top to
bottom. It didn’t look very robust. You’d think that one decent kick would be
all you’d need to open it. I’d seen ones like it in offices all over the world,
right down to the flimsy metal handle and standard wall-mounted keypad to the
left. There was only one unusual aspect. The surface had been damaged. There
were three gashes, almost parallel, roughly at shoulder height. Each one was about
five inches long, but they were surprisingly shallow.
Only
about an eighth of an inch deep.
And even in the low light you could see
a hint of something metallic, glinting, just below the surface.

       
All was clearly not as
it seemed, but without the cosmetic damage, you’d never have known.

       
“See those dents?” she
said. “What do you think happened?”

       
“I’d like to think that
a bad tempered T-Rex had tried to claw its way through,” I said. “But I guess
I’ll have to settle for something more mundane. How about a bad tempered human
with an axe?”

       
“Right second time.
Although I can’t be certain they were bad tempered.”

       
“Who was it?”

       
“We’re not sure.”

       
“When did it happen?”

       
“The afternoon before
you arrived.”

       
“And why this door?”

       
“We have two theories.”

       
“Which are?”

       
“The first is that it
was an innocent mistake.”

       
“OK. And option two?”

       
“That someone wanted
what’s on the other side.”

       
“What is on the other
side?”

       
“As far as I know,
there’s the entrance to a World War Two air raid shelter, now bricked up.
A standby electricity generator, now disused.
And one other thing.
The largest repository of Caesium-137
in the south of England.”

Chapter Nine

Melissa put a little more meat on the bones for me as I followed her
back towards the lift.

       
“Caesium-137 is a kind
of medical waste,” she said. “It’s extremely radioactive. And it stays that way
for a very long time. More than thirty years.”

       
“Nasty,” I said. “What
state is the stuff in?”

       
“It’s a metal, which is liquid
at room temperature. So it has to be stored and transported in special
containers.”

       
“What happens if it gets
out of those containers?”

       
“Nothing good. It’s
incredibly soluble, so it gets into everything, all over the place. It starts
by seeping into the ground water, and then Mother Nature takes over and
distributes it through the rain cycle. After Chernobyl it was found over ten
thousand miles from the accident site, to give you an idea. From there it gets
into the food chain. Animals. Fish. Fruit. Vegetables. Everything. And if it
gets into the body, through eating or drinking something contaminated, you’re
in real trouble. It’s much worse than other radioactive agents because for some
reason your organs treat it like potassium, and absorb it incredibly easily.”

       
“And if that happens?”

       
“You die.
A slow, hideous, drawn-out,
agonising
death.
And children are particularly vulnerable. Specially their
thyroids.”

       
“So if I was a
terrorist, I’d have a special fondness for this stuff?”

       
“Definitely. Its effects
are deadly. They’re invisible. They spread naturally over huge distances, and
once the genie is out of the bottle it’s impossible to put back in. Put it this
way - when Bin Laden was caught,
caesium
was needed
for nine of the thirty-four schemes he was working on. And you know what else?
The other reason terrorists love it?”

       
“What? Why?”

       
“If you can get hold of
some, you can use it within seconds. You don’t need complex delivery systems.
Advanced technology. Special training.
Or lots of people.
You just take the lid off the container and pour it on the floor.
Or down a drain.
Or into a reservoir.
And that’s it. Hundreds, maybe thousands of people will die.”

       
“And there’s a lot if it
here?”

       
“Stacks of it.
Because this place isn’t just a regular hospital.
It’s the
central holding facility for all the hospitals in the region.”

       
“How many?”

       
“Seven, altogether. The
waste from all of them is brought here. It’s broken down by a couple of factors
– type of contaminant, degree of toxicity, that kind of thing –
then consolidated. Special technicians take care of that. And when they’re
done, it’s sent to the relevant places for reprocessing.”

       
I paused for a moment,
trying to think of a tactful way to say what I was thinking.

       
“Please don’t take
offense at this,” I said. “But you’re painting a picture of moths and flames,
here. And you don’t seem to be doing much to keep them apart. What am I
missing?”

       
“Nothing,” she said. “If
you’re talking about me, personally. But what do you expect to see?
Caesium
is a priority one threat. Safeguarding it isn’t
just down to Jones and me. We’re only one small part of a huge machine. The
visible tip of a tried-and-tested iceberg. We’re sent in after a possible
incident to make absolutely certain nothing’s slipped through the cracks. We’re
a duplicate resource, but the stakes are so high we can’t afford to take any
risks.”

       
“And in this case,
nothing’s slipped through? Are you sure?”

       
“Here’s another thing
about
caesium
. It doesn’t occur naturally. So, if you
want some, you have to make it, buy it, or steal it. And if this was anything,
it was an attempt at stealing, yes?”

       
“It looks that way.”

       
“Now, we don’t just wait
around for someone to snatch a barrowful, and then run around trying to catch
them. We stop them before they get the chance. We have the snoops at GCHQ on
the case, listening in to everything, 24/7.
Plus a whole
network of agents and
specialised
, dedicated
informers.
If
there’s
as much as a whisper of
anything related to
caesium
, they’d know. And none of
them heard a thing.”

       
“What if it’s someone
new, who’s not on the radar yet? Or someone good enough to disguise what
they’re doing?”

       
“It could be someone
new, I guess. But they’re certainly not good. Attacking that door was stupid.
You couldn’t get through it with a hundred axes, let alone one.”

       
“Maybe the axe thing was
a diversion, to make you take the attack less seriously. Maybe they got in
another way.”

       
“There are no other
ways. And the door’s security log shows no one opened it.”

       
“Couldn’t the log have
been hacked? Or fiddled?”

       
“There’s an outside
chance of that, yes. Which is why a hazardous materials team is coming tomorrow
to do a full inventory. But based on the sum total of all the data from all our
avenues of enquiry, I believe they’ll prove the correct amount of
caesium
is here, and put the whole question to bed.”

       
“Why wait till
tomorrow?”

       
“We need a team with
special equipment. You can’t just pick this stuff up and count it, obviously.
And tomorrow’s the soonest they can be here.”

       
“Aren’t there emergency
crews?”

       
“For containing leaks,
and urgent relocation from compromised facilities, yes.
But
not for inventory work.
And don’t forget, the scene of crime report
showed no evidence of any tampering and no manic axe men were picked up anywhere
on the CCTV, so it was more likely to be a badly trained fireman who damaged
the door.”

       
“Why would a fireman
have been here?”

       
Melissa stopped her
chair in the
centre
of the corridor and looked up at
me.

       
“Oh,” she said. “David,
I owe you an apology. I forgot you weren’t in this from the start. The
marks on the door were discovered by the hospital technicians
when they tried to go back in after a fire alarm. Standard procedure calls for
them to report any damage, then lock down the site so it can be investigated.”