Hot Zone (Major Crimes Unit Book 2) (2 page)

Howard couldn’t nod because she still held his helmet, so he
said, “Okay. I’m okay. I’m okay.”

“Good. Follow me.”

Dr Hart took him to the decontamination area where they
showered in their suits before once again getting sprayed with the fine mist of
bleach. Then they passed through into another area where they removed the suits
and washed their hands, face, and necks thoroughly beneath scolding showers.
They were then signed out and back in the fresh air a minute later. Howard took
the longest breaths of his life.

Dr Hart patted him on the back. “Are you okay, Agent
Hopkins?”

Howard managed to straighten up. “You just saw me almost wet
myself. I think you can start calling me Howard.”

“Then you can call me Stevie.”

“Stevie?”

“Stephanie,” she explained. “But my friends call me Stevie.”

“Okay, Stevie. Thank you for keeping me calm back there.
Please don’t tell Mr Cotta. I think he knew this would happen.”

“I won’t mention it, and it’s nothing to be embarrassed
about. There’s something instinctively terrifying about diseases. They send our
inner caveman into a tizzy.”

Howard frowned. “A tizzy?”

“That’s about the best way to explain it. We’re biologically
conditioned to fear disease in the same way we would fear swimming with a
crocodile. Our fear responses kick in and make us panic. It takes a while to
overcome that. No reason to be embarrassed, I assure you.”

“You’re kind,” Howard told her. “And brave.”

“Ha! A member of the MCU calling me
brave
. I couldn’t
do what you people do. The way you stopped that terrorist last year. Were you
involved in that, by the way?”

Howard thought about the events Stevie was referring to and
nodded his head slowly. “I was involved, yes, but the real hero was a woman who
was working with me. She was only with the MCU temporarily but was as brave as
you are.”

“Perhaps you should invite her back then.”

“Yeah,” said Howard, thinking: If
only anyone knew where she was.

S
arah
got out of bed and switched on the television, switching to the news as she
always did this time in the morning. The old flat screen flickered persistently
and the colours were odd at the corners, but it got her through the endless
days. At first she’d hoped to see news of her imminent rescue, but other than
some early reports of her initial disappearance, there had been nothing. The
world did not seem to care very much that Sarah Stone was gone from the world.
Her scarred, mangled face would not be missed, nor perhaps even remembered.

For a while, she had almost been able to conjure up the face
of the man who had abducted her. The glaring eyes and straight teeth were a
fuzzy image at the back of her mind, but it wasn’t clear enough to make an ID.
The blow to her head had cleaned her clock and wiped any memories she had of
the events away.

Now she sat on her bed, staring at a familiar face onscreen.

MCU Director Palu seemed to have aged in the last year. The
hair on either side of his head had gone a frosty white and he’d grown a
moustache of the same colour. His medium-brown skin seemed a little paler too.
Yet, when the man spoke he demanded authority, each word as confident as the
last.

“The current outbreak has indeed been attributed to Ebola
Virus,” said Palu to a microphone, “as the press has indeed been speculating
for days. The majority of cases have been contained to a temporary treatment
site at Reading’s Whiteknight Hospital. Everything that can be done for the
patients and their families is being done. Everything that can be done to
contain the current outbreak is being done. Everything that can be done to find
a vaccine is being done. We, as yet, do not know what allowed this disease to
enter our shores, but we have no reason at all to believe it will expand beyond
our control. The National Health Service is doing all that it can to educate
people on preventative measures and are confident that they can deal with the
additional strain on resources this outbreak has caused. Thank you.” He took no
questions.

The news report switched back to the studio where the grim
face of news anchor Jack Millis filled the screen. Sarah recognised the man,
knew he’d made his name by reporting on the Dartmouth bombing she herself had
been involved with. Now, Jack Millis spoke in the foreboding tones of a man who
loved to make a crisis worse. The more people were afraid, the more they would
look to him for guidance. How, Sarah would like to give the simpering fool a
good hard kick in the nuts.

“A message of hope,” he said. “Yet one has to ask themselves
why the director of the MCU is involved in this crisis at all. Isn’t the domain
of the MCU terrorism and serious crime? Is their involvement a “sign” that this
outbreak may not be the work of unfortunate happenstance, but instead the
maniacal plotting of a deranged criminal? If terrorism is indeed behind this
outbreak of one of the most deadly of diseases, then should we be preparing
ourselves for further attacks, further outbreaks? Sobering thoughts, Britain.
Sobering indeed. Thank you for joining me this morning. I’m Jack Millis and
you’ve been watching
Morning with JM
.”

Sarah grunted, switched off the television, and remained
sitting on the bed. The MCU had been on the brink of closure when she’d helped
them catch a terrorist named Hesbani. Now the organisation seemed to be going
from strength to strength, and even expanding beyond the scope of terrorism.
Last week she had seen on the news that the MCU had helped to apprehend an
escaped serial killer, Richard Heinz. It appeared they were going from success
to success, and she was glad. She looked back on her time with the MCU fondly,
despite not doing so at the time. She’d been a broken mess when MCU agent,
Howard Hopkins, had come to ask for her help. By the end of her association
with MCU she’d actually started to look towards the future. Things didn’t seem
quite so bleak. Aside from the ones on the left side of her face, her scars had
finally begun to heal.

Then someone had abducted her and any thoughts of the future
became muddy and dark. She didn’t even know if her captors intended to let her
live, yet four months they had held her hostage without so much as questioning
her. She’d been treated well and never tortured, yet any attempt she made to
leave was met with immediate force. She hadn’t been able to walk for a week the
last time she’d attempted to attack one of her guards, so she had relented and
resigned herself to her fate, watching the news each day to try and see if she
could gain any clue into who was keeping her and if anybody was looking for
her.

Her initial suspicion was that Hesbani’s men were taking
revenge on her for her interference in the terrorist plot last year, but they
were savages who would want her blood. They would have tortured and beaten her,
before executing her to provide a message to those who interfered with their
agendas. Hesbani’s supporters, however, had not even appeared in the news once.
The man’s operations had died with him; and his former boss, Al Al-Sharir, had
not been heard from in almost a decade. The
Shab Bakhair
cell was finished.

So who the hell was keeping her and what did they want?

The door to her en suite room — for it was no cell by
anyone’s standards — opened and in stepped one of her regular guards. The
short, stubby man was named Rat by his colleagues and he had likely got the
name from his two sharp front teeth. He was friendly enough, yet there was no
mistaking the violent nature of the man bubbling away beneath the surface.
Sarah recognised it because she was the same. Yet, in her current predicament,
her violent impulses were shackled and impotent. She had no outlet for her
anger other than by trying once again to escape, but her body had not yet
recovered from the last time.

Trying to figure a way out consumed most of Sarah’s day, as
it should have. A prisoner had a duty to think about attaining freedom and she
was no different. While she suspected she might die soon, she also knew that
she would do all she could to try and avoid that happening. Her next escape
attempt would be her seventh and she hoped against hope that it would be the
last.

“Brought you breakfast, sweetheart” said Rat, wrinkling his
nose at her like the creature he was named after.

Sarah glanced at the watch they had let her keep and
frowned. “It’s almost afternoon.”

Rat placed the tray of cereal and coffee on the bedside
table and shrugged. “The lads were up late last night with business. We have
other priorities than looking after you.”

“I thought I heard something last night. What were you up
to? Kidnapping children, or just molesting them?”

Rat didn’t get angry. He was too used to Sarah’s attempts to
rile him. Instead he just flashed his rodent smile at her. “Only molesting
that’ll get done is on you if you don’t keep a lid on that smart mouth.”

“You’d need to find a dick first. I get the impression
you’re sadly lacking.”

Rat chuckled. “When are you going to give up the attitude?
I’ll never take anything you say personally, so stop trying to get a rise out
of me. You’re my prisoner and have cause to hate me, so why would I be offended
to find out that you do?”

“A very coherent statement for a degenerate like you, Rat.”

“You’d be surprised how smart degenerates can be. In fact
this country is run by degenerates, and where would we be without them?”

Sarah rolled her eyes. “Oh, here we go. Country of infidels
and degenerates, huh? You’re going to destroy us for the glory of Allah?”

“I don’t fight for Allah, luv. Don’t even like the fella.”

“Then whom?”

“Certainly not for no god.”

“Then what are you keeping me for? What agenda do you have?”

“I have no agenda. I take orders. Orders are simpler than
agendas. They pay better, too.”

Sarah was beginning to unravel the man without him knowing
it. After months of getting nothing but silent treatment from Rat, she had got
him to open up and start bantering insults with her. Now he had forgotten
himself enough that he was dropping information without even realising it.”

“You’re a mercenary,” she spat. “At least I can respect a
fundamentalist. At least they’re fighting for something worthier than money.
They have a cause.”

Rat back snapped at her. “I have a cause.”

“To get rich? How very honourable.”

“No, not just to get rich. I’m going to change things, make
things better. I’m going to liberate the people of this country from the
oppression of an unfair system.”

“Sure you’re not the first terrorist to think his cause is
noble. You’re misguided, same as the rest of them.”

Rat let his calm slip a little and snarled at her. “I’m not
a terrorist. I’m fighting
for
this country not against it.”

Sarah eyeballed the man closely. “You’re fighting for this
country? How?”

“Just shut your goddamn mouth or I’ll break your jaw again.”

Sarah still felt the pain of the last beating, so decided to
keep quiet. Rat might think himself a freedom fighter or hero of some kind, but
he was not averse to giving a woman — and a prisoner no less — a good kicking.
He left her room and locked the door behind him, leaving Sarah alone once
again.
She got off the bed and went over
to the television. Her captors had screwed the set down onto the cabinet, but
they had paid no mind to the back of television, where she had removed six
delicate screws from the rear panel using the steel clasp of her watch. She was
now able to slide the back off the unit with ease, and inside was her ticket to
freedom.

The television’s various circuit boards were pressed from
copper, extremely sharp at the edges. Sarah had spent enough time examining the
different pieces of electronics to understand that the PCBs were the closest
thing she would find to a weapon. There was one attached to the television’s
inputs that was slim and about fifteen centimetres long, similar in size to the
rulers children kept inside their pencil cases. She’d already unscrewed the PCB
ahead of time, but had left it connected for the time being. Yanking it free
would eliminate her use of the television for good, the only solace in her
confinement, but it was the only thing she had managed to find in four months
of confinement that was sharp enough to cut a man’s throat.

She yanked the circuit board free and pulled out the wires,
feeling its sharpness immediately. Its edges cut into her fingers as she
clutched it tightly. She took it over to her bed and used a corner to slice a
hole in her pillow case, and less than a minute later she had cut a strip of
cotton and fashioned a makeshift grip around one end of the circuit board. Next
she forced one of the sharp corners against the wall until it snapped, leaving
behind a jagged, deadly edge. She did the same on the opposite corner and
eventually managed to fashion a point.  She had a knife. A flimsy, yet
wickedly sharp copper knife.

All she needed to do now was wait for Rat’s next visit.

B
ack
in the makeshift office on maternity ward 1, Howard sat and listened to the
experts once again. Currently, they were discussing the possibilities of what
could have caused the outbreak of Ebola Reading. “It’s very much the same
virus,” one of the doctors explained, pointing out a squiggly, knotted,
worm-like creature on the projector screen. “The proteins are unaltered. The
only changes seem to be within the binding cells, impacting the rate of
infection on the host. If the virus has been tampered with, it has been tweaked
in only a minor way, but even doing that much would take a genius-level
knowledge of genetics.”

“Is it possible that the virus changed on its own?” asked
Howard.

“Absolutely,” said Cotta. “Viruses mutate constantly to
survive.”

“Could it go airborne?”

Cotta shook his head. “Don’t let the media fool you, Agent
Hopkins. The Ebola Virus is too far removed from the ability to transmit that
way. It would take millennia for an organism to evolve in such a way.”

“But there’s a possibility that the virus is being modified
manually? Is it possible to make it airborne through engineering?”

Cotta shook his head again, even more adamantly. “It would
be a profound achievement to even come close. If this is a case of genetic
engineering, then I wholly suspect that this slight alteration is the sum total
of whoever is responsible’s ability. More important is how the virus got
started. We need to find out why so many ex-patients of this hospital have come
down with a rare 3
^rd
World
disease.”

Howard sat forward and put his elbows on the table. “You
just said
ex
-patients. What do you mean?”

Cotta looked at him and frowned. The man had a way of
looking at the rest of the room like he were surrounded by children. “You don’t
know? Almost every patient in quarantine has visited this hospital within the
last month or so. The first patients came in the longest time ago, several
weeks. The newest cases were in this hospital as recently as 6 days ago. That
is why all of the cases are local to the town of Reading. It seems that
Whiteknight is the commonality in all these cases.”

Howard chewed at the inside of his cheek. This was sounding
more and more like something deliberate. “Then the source of infection is the
hospital itself,” he said.

Cotta nodded. “So it would appear.”

Dr Hart added, “We have checked the blood bank, intravenous
medicines, water supply, the cafeteria. All have been cleared of the virus. All
in-patients have been relocated to the Royal Berkshire. We will be closing
A&E within the next few hours and redirecting ambulances there as well.
Then medical forensics will scour Whiteknight from top to bottom.”

Howard pushed a strand of hair out of his eyes. “You said
this thing passes via infected bodily fluids. Is there an area in the hospital
that all the patients would have visited? An area where they may have all
passed through?”

“We don’t know,” admitted Dr Hart. “There are many places
where patients congregate, but the ones we have checked have been clear and
there is one thing that doesn’t fit about it being the hospital itself that is
causing the infection.”

Howard frowned. “Oh?”

“No employees of the hospital have been infected. Not a
single one. Doctors, nurses, and porters are all healthy. It is only
ex-patients who have been infected. If the reservoir was the cafeteria, for
instance, then the infection rate would be the same amongst staff. There is
nowhere that patients visit that staff do not.”

“Which,” said Cotta, “makes it highly likely that it is
medical supplies or equipment that is at fault.”

“Does this hospital have a strain of Ebola on site?” asked
Howard.

Dr Hart shook her head. “Of course not. We have a pathology
lab, but we use it only for testing patient samples. The nearest place that has
Ebola on ice is probably Porton Down, and that’s military.”

“So how do you think this thing started?” Howard wasn’t the
expert here and he didn’t intend to act like one. He was getting lost in the
possibilities.

“We are checking the patient backgrounds,” said Cotta.
“Usually these things start after a patient travels to a ‘hot zone,’ a place
where natural reservoirs of the virus exist. One of the early patients, deceased
now, has family in Sierra Leone. Possibly he was the one who brought the Ebola
Virus into the UK.”

Howard nodded, but there were things that still did not add
up. “That doesn’t explain why this is a new strain, does it? Ebola Reading is
different. People are dying in unnatural patterns. No doctors or nurses have
been infected. Mother Nature is predictable, whereas man is quite the opposite.
If this virus isn’t conforming to typical behaviours, then it seems highly
likely that someone is behind this.”

Dr Hart agreed. “I don’t doubt what you are saying, Agent
Hopkins. The reason you are here is because there are certain elements of
pre-meditation about this.”

“We are not detectives,” snapped Cotta. “We are here to
study and contain the virus. We are wasting time trying to help agent Hopkins
with his investigations. We have already dwelled on it far too long.”

Howard didn’t react. Cotta was making it more and more
obvious that he resented MCU’s involvement. Howard could even understand why.
He was there to snoop and pry, to ask question after question, casting an ever
wider net until he found answers. Cotta was concerned with exact opposite
methods, working in ever decreasing circles until he had the virus trapped,
understood, and contained.

“I would like nothing more than to get out of your way, Mr
Cotta,” said Howard, “but you experts, here, are the only ones who can answer
my questions.”

“I agree,” said Cotta. “Which is why I will give you Dr
Hart. Leave the rest of us in peace and direct your questions only to her from
now on.”

Howard looked at Dr Hart who seemed a little put out by her
services being offered on her behalf but not upset or angry. She smiled at
Howard and tucked a strand of blonde hair behind her ear. “Okay, I suppose that
makes sense. Where would you like to begin?”

“With the staff. I want to know who saw to these patients.”

Dr Hart frowned. “You think it was a healthcare worker?”

“I think somebody did this, somebody who knew what they were
doing. A member of the public would be too ignorant of a virus like Ebola, not
to mention incapable of getting a live strain of it. Anyone outside of the
health industry would be terrified to be in the same room as Ebola Virus. No, I
think whoever did this was somebody comfortable being around deadly diseases. I
think a doctor did this.”

Cotta chuckled. “You have your theory, Lieutenant Columbo,
now go investigate it somewhere else.”

Howard smiled. “I will, but only after I interview everybody
in this room.”

***

Of course, Cotta had been furious at
the indignity of having Howard disrupt his work, even though he himself was
exempt from questioning. Cotta was from the WHO and had not even been in the
country at the time of the initial outbreak. Several other members of his task
force were also of no interest, for they had been loaned out from other
institutions. Only a handful of the doctors and experts present worked at
Whiteknight hospital fulltime and Howard gained very little from them to help
his investigation. They all seemed like well-adjusted individuals, full of
compassion and distress at the number of people sick on their watch. Howard
took as much info as he could from them before deciding to take his
investigation elsewhere — much to the delight of Cotta.

Dr Hart led him to a secure office that was piled with
stacks and stacks of files and paperwork. “These are all of the patient records
for the infected patients,” she said. “Cotta has had them all placed into a
digital database, but we’ll have to do things the old fashioned way.”

Howard moved over to the largest pile on the office’s cheap
pine desk and picked up the top file. “Sometimes it’s easier to lay out the
facts when you can hold them in your hands. Is there anything the patients have
in common, other than having visited Whiteknight previously? They’re all
ex-patients, but what were they in for?”

“Absolutely everything,” said Dr Hart, flapping her arms.
“The first case was an old lady called Eleanor Drayton. She came in with a
stomach bug but returned less than a week later with debilitating flu-like
symptoms. We gave her a bed but didn’t realise the severity of her condition
until she started coughing up blood. The next cases came nonstop for days,
ranging from people staying in the cancer wards to a group of outpatients who
had only come in for minor procedures. One young man, who has thankfully shown
signs of recuperation, came into A&E to have his pinkie reattached after
cutting it off with a hedge trimmer. He went to surgery. There is no
commonality, no department they all went to.”

“Maybe they didn’t go to the virus, maybe the virus came to
them. Do doctors move around departments?”

“Not really. Some of the more senior doctors and consultants
may have wide ranging expertise and help other departments when they are busy.”

“Second opinions, you mean?”

Dr Hart nodded. “Or just picking up the slack for
undermanned departments. Sometimes doctors may go on rounds, if they’re free.
It’s something the directors of the trust promote in order to cut waiting
times. If a heart surgeon is free, which is rare, granted, he might go down to
A&E to deal with minor wounds, discharge those already seen to, or just
fill in paperwork. It’s not a popular scheme, especially with the more
specialised doctors, but it has helped us rise slightly above our peers, which
comes in handy when those same heart surgeons and oncologists want government
hand-outs for expensive new equipment.”

Howard opened up the folder in his hand and glanced at it.
“Let’s start at the beginning. Who dealt with Mrs Drayton?”

“Let me see,” Dr Hart looked through the file for a few
moments, checking over the squiggles and signatures that meant nothing to him.
“Suzanne Mitchell was the attending nurse. Dr Chris Casey, the attending
doctor. I know them well. Neither would have anything to do with this.”

Howard said nothing, unwilling to rule anybody out.

“Wait, what’s this?” Dr Hart pulled a handwritten page from
the file and examined it. “It’s a letter of complaint about Dr Krenshaw. He’s
an area consultant, one of the most senior doctors in the trust.”

“Why did Mrs Drayton complain about him?”

“The usual. He was rude to her, allegedly. Krenshaw can be
quite abrupt with patients. He spent a decade in Africa, treating AIDS,
malaria…”

“Ebola?” Howard enquired.

“I don’t know. He did a lot of humanitarian work, so I
suppose he would have come up against it at some point. He is an epidemiologist
with a PHD in infectious diseases.”

Howard raised his eyebrow. “You mean the most qualified,
most suspicious person in this hospital? Wow, you think you might have
suggested his name earlier?”

“Look, Agent Hopkins. These are my colleagues, people I
trust, people who have dedicated their lives to healing. While everybody might
scream out ‘guilty’ to you, to me they are friends. I suspect none of them, but
I am helping you because I know you have an investigation to do. Dr Krenshaw is
a humanitarian, above reproach.”

Howard gave no reply. He was verging on anger for not being
informed immediately of Dr Krenshaw’s suspect credentials immediately, but the
longer the tense silence went on, the more he understood that Dr Hart and her
colleagues were not conditioned to view each other with suspicion. They relied
on one another too much.

“Okay,” said Howard gently. “Where is Dr Krenshaw now? I
need to speak with him.”

“He isn’t here. He moves between hospitals in the trust.”

Howard folded his arms and thought. Did that make the man
more or less suspect? There had been no confirmed outbreaks at other hospitals,
so perhaps Krenshaw wasn’t the source of the outbreak. There had also been no
confirmed infections within the last few days — did that correspond with
Krenshaw’s absence?

“We need to cross-reference Krenshaw with the infected
patients,” Howard said.

Dr Hart exhaled and put her hands on her hips. “Okay, I’ll
get started.”

Howard got started too. He leafed through a stack of files
and was frustrated to find a dozen different doctor signatures. It seemed that
no member of staff was exclusive to the infected patients, so that was his
leading theory shot.

“I think I’ve found something,” said Dr Hart.

Howard went over to the doctor where she sat cross-legged
and barefoot on the floor. “What is it?”

“I’ve cross-checked the patient’s original hospital visits —
when they likely became infected — with the days Dr that Krenshaw was at
Whiteknight. He was in the hospital the same times as every single patient
infected with Ebola Virus. That might be true of other doctors, of course,
but…”

“It certainly makes Krenshaw a person of interest, and with
his specialisation in infectious diseases, I have to speak to him right away.
Where can I find him?”

“I’ll be right back,” said Dr Hart, exiting suddenly and
leaving her shoes behind.

Howard tapped his foot, anxious to get going. Everything
added up to the culprit being this epidemiologist, Krenshaw, and if it was him,
then the man could be planning another biological attack right that very
second.

Dr Hart returned five minutes later, her lips thin, her
nostrils flared. “I found out where Dr Krenshaw is,” she said. “He’s at Reading
Children’s Hospital.”

Howard headed towards the door. “We need to move.”