The Dying Light (31 page)
‘Who or what are the Silures and Ordovices?’ she asked Nock when he appeared with the motor.
He blinked at her. ‘I think they are Celtic tribes of Wales. One lived in the north, the other in the south. But don’t take my word for it. I only know about them because their names were given to rock groups. I did a little basic geology as an undergrad.’
‘Rock groups,’ she said and thought of the run of geology volumes beneath the shelf where she’d found
The Story of the Shipwrecked Sailor.
She found
Geology of the Marches
and returned to the garden bench. The book was peppered with Eyam’s notes - summaries of what he had read, together with the dates that he had explored different parts of a landscape that had begun life 500 million years ago, sixty degrees south of the equator. The story of its migration north to collide with the landmass that now forms Scotland interested her, but she found nothing to decode the sentence. At length she laid the book aside and made sandwiches, which they ate with a couple of bottles of beer at the end of the garden. Even at this distance from the house their conversation was murmured.
The Story of the Shipwrecked Sailor.
She found
Geology of the Marches
and returned to the garden bench. The book was peppered with Eyam’s notes - summaries of what he had read, together with the dates that he had explored different parts of a landscape that had begun life 500 million years ago, sixty degrees south of the equator. The story of its migration north to collide with the landmass that now forms Scotland interested her, but she found nothing to decode the sentence. At length she laid the book aside and made sandwiches, which they ate with a couple of bottles of beer at the end of the garden. Even at this distance from the house their conversation was murmured.
‘You fix the pump?’
‘Yep.’
‘It must be nice to be so practical.’
‘Well, I can’t figure all this out,’ he said.
‘You mean Hugh Russell’s death. How much did David tell you about his own problems?’
‘Not much, but I knew it got serious before he left. He just went out of range, if you know what I mean.’
‘I am struggling with some of it myself.’ She stopped and looked into his tranquil blue eyes. ‘You’re not hiding anything from me, Sean, are you?’
‘I don’t think so,’ he said, holding the beer bottle to his lips.
There was silence between them. She lifted her face to the sun and closed her eyes. Eyam was right. Nock wasn’t kosher.
‘I believe he came close to telling me something but never got round to it,’ he said eventually. ‘I wish he had now. It would explain things - why he went off without saying goodbye. To tell the truth I was a bit hurt.’
‘I know the feeling,’ she nodded.
‘But you understand more than I do?’
She shrugged.
‘That’s cool with me,’ he said with an odd, agonised expression. ‘Don’t tell me. I came out here for a life of peace.’
‘I wasn’t going to. What were you doing before, Sean?’
‘I was a researcher with the Earth Science and Engineering Department at Imperial in London - dam structures and stuff - then I got sick of London and there was some trouble with the police and I ended up here.’ He swept his hand across the view of the valley. ‘You can have a good life here if you don’t mind the quiet.’
‘Possibly,’ she said. ‘Look, I’ve got to be going.’
‘You want company?’
‘No thanks.’
‘And you won’t tell me where you’re going?’
‘Nope.’
‘Well, stick to the back roads and you should be all right. You’ve got my number?’
‘Yes, I’ll be fine,’ she replied, moving to the car and thinking about Hugh Russell leaving a few days before.
The day was slipping away from Philip Cannon. It was now clear to him that he would not get back to London until late that night or even the next morning. Temple expected him to attend two more meetings and a dinner.
The first of these took place in the Great Parlour conference room and went under the heading of a scientific briefing, in effect an un-minuted meeting of the Security Council without - unsurprisingly - Admiral Piper. A procession of scientists wearing casual clothes gave their views on TRA. It soon became obvious that those who suggested the problem was not the threat to public health claimed in the tabloids, or that it could be handled with less hysteria, were not as welcome as those armed with theories about the likely cause of the algae and its means of spreading. These were treated to an intense cross-examination by the prime minister, who had mastered a little of the science of harmful algae blooms and several times used the word anatoxin, which he unnecessarily explained was a compound that caused convulsions - a kind of neurological meltdown and respiratory paralysis. The latest data was that fifteen reservoirs and lakes were now affected; the algae seemed to be able to travel hundreds of miles and leap over the quarantine lines that had been set up.
Adam Hopcraft, the government chief scientific officer, listened with aloof interest, his hands thrust into the pockets of a lightweight cardigan worn under his jacket. He made notes, he nodded at his colleagues’ opinions and he sucked air through his teeth with only the mildest disdain while gazing up at the plaster frieze of hawthorn trees. For a full hour he kept his own counsel. Then Temple turned to him. ‘Well, what do you make of it now, Adam? Can you really deny that we have a crisis on our hands? One that threatens to engulf the entire water supply of the country?’
‘I agree that it seems alarming, prime minister, and I must say I have been impressed with the contributions made so far. The point remains that, while we may not yet be able to contain the algae, we can deal with it effectively with ultrafine filtration. We have flown scores of these plants from the United States. More are on order and we believe that we can cope.’
‘I wish I could have your confidence,’ said Temple, turning away.
‘And there is another point,’ persisted Hopcraft. ‘At this stage I do not think it’s wise to ignore where this thing has come from. I suggest we consider two possibilities. The first is that the algae has been with us for longer than we appreciate; that it has bloomed with the rising temperatures of spring, having spread unnoticed through the course of last year and maybe even before that. There are four thousand species of marine red algae; algae spores can travel great distances on the wind.’
‘None of that makes any difference to the nature of the threat,’ said Temple. ‘We are where we are. We have to respond to give the public confidence.’
‘Quite so, prime minister, but it may be wise to allow for the possibility that this algae has not spread through any malign agency, but is either the result of climate change and global travel - a combination of the two perhaps - or has been released by accident from one of our own environmental laboratories. Such algae are being studied at the Marine Environmental Research Station at Ashmere Holt and also by the biological weapons people at the MoD.’
‘As I understand it, Adam, the genome is different to anything we’ve seen before.’
‘Well, that is true, prime minister and . . .’
Temple turned to Christine Shoemaker. ‘Would you sketch out the analysis you’ve been doing in the past couple of days?’ She began speaking immediately so that few heard Hopcraft add that organisms adapt and evolve, and that this freshwater red algae might be a variant of an algae being studied at the Ashmere Holt lab.
Shoemaker, in black trousers and an olive-green jacket, and a new hairstyle that Cannon thought made her look like a cosmetics sales-woman, took them through a list of questions, her head arcing through 180 degrees to engage those sitting at the end of the conference table. First, was it possible for a group to infect the water supply with samples of algae? The answer to this was most certainly yes. Reservoirs in Britain were easily accessible. Second, had this kind of attack been considered by terror groups? Yes, there was a lot of evidence to say that at least two groups under surveillance had researched the possibility of harming the water supply. Third, was it within the capability of such groups to mount an attack? Yes, she reported that MI5’s scientific officers had concluded that once samples had been obtained and possibly modified it would take nothing more than a good-sized garden pond for the algae to multiply in sufficient quantities.
‘Is work being done to connect the occurrence of TRA with the movements of any of the individuals you are watching?’ asked Temple.
‘I was going to touch on that, prime minister,’ she said crisply, ‘but you will appreciate the security aspects of this matter.’
He squeezed his eyes together with understanding.
‘But we may expect some arrests over the next few days under terror legislation,’ she added, ‘which will allow us to thoroughly examine premises in the Midlands area that may be the source of this attack. But I do emphasise to those present the highly sensitive nature of this information: nothing of the police operation should pass from this room.’
By degrees, the slight possibility of the water supply being poisoned by terrorists became first a probability, then by the end of the meeting a near certainty. Cannon watched Hopcraft make interventions to try to regain a sense of proportion and scientific reason but nobody listened and, before long, tea was being served in the Great Hall. Temple had got what he wanted; not a decision or a new course of action, but an orthodoxy, which had been implanted and would be played back to him for as long as needed.
Cannon went to the room on the north-east corner of the house where the younger sister of the beheaded Lady Jane Grey, Lady Mary, had been imprisoned for marrying without the Queen’s consent, a billet that he always seemed to be consigned. He sat on the edge of his bed and phoned two political editors at Bryant Maclean’s newspapers to talk about the algae crisis meeting. As he expected, both asked him about the possibility of a snap election. He explained that the prime minister was keeping his options open and that he would make his decision on the merits of the case - a vacuous pomposity, if ever there were one - without allowing such things as red algae to play any part in his thinking. These untruths told, he swung his legs onto the bed, closed his eyes and thought of the young woman locked up in the room for two long years at the pleasure of Her Majesty, Elizabeth I.
Kilmartin left the constituency home of Sidney Hale MP disappointed. Hale was not the same person who had engineered David Eyam’s second appearance at the Intelligence and Security Committee to establish the existence of Deep Truth. A union man, a left-wing diehard with thirty years of bare-knuckle politics behind him, Hale had suffered a series of small strokes during the winter. He kept his illness secret but it was obvious he could not continue as an MP. He had welcomed Kilmartin warmly at the little house on the outskirts of Rugby and offered him a drink, but Kilmartin saw that the proceedings of the ISC all but eluded him: Hale couldn’t remember the circumstances of Eyam’s second appearance, what had preceeded it, who else was involved, or why he had been so taken up with the subject. Meetings from his early years were still clear, but more recent events were blurred. He told Kilmartin with a smile that these days he could barely keep awake, which wasn’t necessarily a disadvantage in Parliament.
At the door Hale stood pathetically stooped and fumbled a handshake, but then a gleam of the old light appeared in his eyes. ‘The man you need is the fellow from Carlisle. Good sort even though he’s on the government benches.’
Home beckoned. He set off cross-country towards Herefordshire. With a clear road he’d make it before dark, but ten minutes into the journey he received a call from Dawn Gruppo, who said that Temple wished to see him at Chequers that evening. He made excuses but Gruppo said that the matter was of the utmost urgency. He gave her his car registration number for the security gate at Chequers, took down directions because she told him that it would not come up on the satellite navigation system and drove south towards the Chiltern Hills.
Within a few hundred yards of the track leading to Dove Cottage, a silver BMW fell in behind the Bristol. It must have been waiting in a gateway at the bottom of the hill. She saw two men in her mirror and immediately put her foot down. The BMW did not keep pace with her; either the Bristol was now fitted with a tracker or the BMW’s satnav told the driver that there was a long straight track ahead of them and there was nowhere for her to go, unless she decided on the suicidal option of turning left at a hairpin bend and climbing a steep incline through some woods. It was the road she had mistaken for the approach to Dove Cottage a couple of nights before. She took her foot off the accelerator before the bend so her brake lights didn’t show. With a solid, antique agility the Bristol took the corner well, indeed a bit tighter than she anticipated because the rear wheel ploughed up the bank sending a shower of earth into the air. She rose through the woods with surprising speed, the light and shadow of the trees strobing in her left field, and reached the top of the hill, at which point the tarmac road hooked right and petered out into a track where several rusting pieces of farm machinery were parked. She spun the car round with a handbrake turn to face the direction she’d come and, with all the anger of the last few days metabolising to aggression, she raced forward to the top of the hill to see the BMW coming towards her.
The instructor of Evasive Driving Skills For New Intelligence Officers would certainly have disapproved of her next course of action, which was to aim the Bristol at the BMW. She did so knowing that hers was the much heavier vehicle and the revamped V-8 engine would probably protect her from the impact of a head-on collision. But this was not to be. As she ran down the hill at a mere forty mph, the nerves of the BMW’s driver faltered and he adjusted his line to take in a strip of grass and the edge of the ditch. As the cars approached each other his front wheel slipped into the ditch and before she knew it the Bristol had barged past, scraping the length of his vehicle and causing his back wheel to follow the front. The Bristol received one or two knocks and some paint damage but nothing more. She glanced in the mirror and saw two men scramble out of the car, which had come to rest at an angle. It made her let out a peal of laughter, the first in God knows how long, and it lightened her whole being.
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