Ken McClure - Resurrection

‘He wouldn’t say but he was very frightened. He said … ‘

‘What did he say?’ prompted Dewar.

‘He was afraid many people would die.’

Dewar felt himself go cold. He could feel the pulse in his temples start to beat harder. He was listening to a nightmare becoming a reality. ‘Are you sure he told you nothing more than that?’

Tariq shook his head. ‘Nothing. He said it was too awful but I know they gave him something.’

‘Do you know what?”

‘Pieces of something. I overheard a conversation one day. Ali was upset. He said something about not wanting the pieces. It was too dangerous.’ Tariq shrugged to suggest it didn’t mean anything to him. ‘He said the pieces should be destroyed but Siddiqui said he had to do what they told him or it would be the worse for him and his family.’

‘Pieces?’

‘Yes … ‘

Tariq froze suddenly. Dewar watched him turn pale before his eyes and realised that he was looking past him, his eyes wide with fear. He turned round to see a face staring at them through a gap that had opened up in a row of books behind them. It was the man from the Iraqi student association, his black beard brushing shelf, his spectacled eyes unblinking as they stared at Tariq. A shorter, more academic looking Arab appeared at the end of the shelves.

Tariq looked as if he might pass out. ‘I have to go,’ he stammered.

‘You don’t have to go anywhere with them,’ insisted Dewar in an urgent whisper. ‘They can’t do anything to you in this country. If you’re afraid, I can help. We can sort it out. Stay here with me. Tell me what they wanted Ali to do.’’

‘You don’t understand … my family …’

Tariq moved meekly towards the two Arabs and didn’t look back. Dewar felt helpless but he had the feeling he’d only make things worse for Tariq by making a scene. He caught the eye of the bearded Arab and hoped he could suggest with a look that should anything happen to Tariq it might be bad news day for him but the man remained impassive. After a short, muted exchange in Arabic Tariq was ushered upstairs with the other Arab leading the way.

Dewar, filled with frustration, hit the palm of his hand against the end of a bookshelf causing the girl by the till to look up sharply. ‘If we don’t have what you’re looking for, we can always order it,’ she said helpfully.

Dewar looked at her then realised what he’d done and apologised. He made for the stairs and left. He started to walk back to his hotel, knowing that he needed time to calm down and get his thoughts in order. He walked up Chambers Street and followed GeorgeIV Bridge up to the Royal Mile which led from the castle down to the royal Palace of Holyrood. He crossed and paused at the head of The Mound, the steep thoroughfare that joined old Edinburgh to its so-called Georgian new town. The lights of Princes street were strung out like pearls below him. To his left, the floodlit castle sat high on its ancient rock. Surely such a beautiful city could not really be host to a plot hatched in hell.

It was obvious to Dewar that Tariq had translated an Arabic word he’d heard as ‘pieces’ where ‘fragments’ would have been more correct but Tariq wasn’t a biologist. He’d had no idea what they’d been talking about. The ‘pieces’ just had to be DNA fragments of the smallpox virus. There was no other plausible explanation. The question now was, how many fragments did the Iraqi government men have access to and what had happened to them?

When Tariq had overheard Ali protesting that what they wanted him to do was too dangerous, had he been talking in general terms about the whole idea or specifically what they were asking him to do? Had Ali been approached as one of a number of people in a chain of events, each perhaps doing part of the virus assembly or had he been the final link in the chain, the scientist who would finally join up all the fragments? Whatever it was, it had been enough to push him over the edge into suicide. Could the Iraqis really be at that stage? Was the resurrection of live smallpox really that close?

Another worrying question swam into Dewar’s head. Had Ali committed suicide because he couldn’t face doing something so heinous or because he’d already doneit ? The action could have been dictated by guilt. He tried convincing himself that someone in the Malloy lab would have been aware of what he was doing if he’d been working on it in the open lab but the truth was that DNA in a test tube was a colourless liquid regardless of where it had come from. You couldn’t really tell anything by looking at it. You had to establish its sequence to start to make sense of what it was. Even then the code would have to be fed into a computer and compared to the many known DNA sequences held in international scientific databases. Only then could its real identity be established.

Would Hammadi really have risked reconstructing live smallpox virus in the open lab beside his colleagues when he knew that it would have put them all at grave risk? On the other hand, if he had used the high containment facilities in the institute for dealing with dangerous viruses, people would have been aware of it and asked questions about it. This might have forced him to take such a risk. It was not a comforting thought. It was however, the worst possible scenario. Hammadi might have refused to do anything at all. The only thing for sure was that he had killed himself. Guilt or a brave attempt to save his family for pressure?

Thinking back to what Tariq had said before they’d been interrupted, Dewar recalled him saying that Ali had not wanted to take the ‘pieces’, He had not however, suggested that he refused to take them. If Ali had accepted them he must surely have taken them into the institute for storage if nothing else. There was a chance they were still there, sitting in some rack in some fridge, probably innocent looking little plastic tubes. There would have to be a proper examination of the storage space used by Ali Hammadi in Steve Malloy’s lab. and a detailed analysis of the contents.

Dewar’s first instinct was to call a full scale alert but then he reconsidered and thought better of it. As yet there was no proof of the existence of illegal virus fragments or how far the Iraqis had come along the way to reconstituting smallpox. Perhaps the fact that the Iraqi ‘advisors’ were still in the city suggested that they had not got what they wanted otherwise they would surely have been long gone. That was a point, why were they still there? Surely they weren’t hoping to recruit someone else for the job?

Dewar decided to make finding out more about these ‘advisors’ a priority. He’d see Grant about that. He would not push the alarm button just yet. He would wait to see what Grant and Malloy for that matter, could come up with and continue to play it low-key for the moment. He called Karen at her flat when he got in and apologised for not having visited her mother, saying that something had come up.

‘I’ll believe you, thousands wouldn’t,’ said Karen.

‘Believe me,’ said Dewar. ‘I would much rather have spent an evening with your mother, than the one I’ve just had.’

‘Your fears are coming true?’

‘It’s not looking good,’ said Dewar.

‘So you won’t be back tomorrow night then?’

‘I doubt it.’

Grant looked at Dewar long and hard before saying, ‘Are you absolutely sure it’s necessary to tangle with that lot?’

‘I’m sure. What’s the problem?’

‘I know we don’t have full diplomatic relations with Iraq these days but foreigners with any kind of diplomatic status are bad news and these two must have some kind of a deal going. I’ve been down that road before. ‘Bastards can do just about anything they like and get away with it. Maybe one day we’ll get a government who can at least figure out that not all countries fill up their diplomatic corps with gormless, public-school pillocks. We’re the exception rather than the rule. There are some bad buggers out there hiding behind CD plates.’