Ken McClure - Resurrection

The sound of the cat lapping water made him turn round and see that the food bowl was empty. He took the plastic box with him when he went through to the kitchen and put it down on the draining board by the sink while he opened a second tin of cat food and added some dry biscuits to the mix on the plate. He gave it to the cat before coming back and taking a closer look at the contents of the box. The glass vials were a puzzle. Drugs off the street didn’t come this way and the vials had no manufacturer’s label on them. It wasn’t just that they’d had the label stripped off, he felt. They seemed far too small and narrow ever to have had one. Something told him they hadn’t come from a pharmaceutical company at all. The sealing on their ends seemed strange too. Irregular taper, uneven in size as if they’d been sealed individually instead of by a machine, as if someone had manually melted the ends in a flame.

Very carefully, he picked up one of the vials and examined it more closely. There was a white crystalline powder inside and a narrow little strip of paper with something written on it in pencil by the look of it. He held it up to catch the light from the window. He could make out the initials VM and the numbers 4 and 9. It didn’t mean anything. He couldn’t recall seeing drugs being supplied like this before. Sealed glass ampoules usually contained sterile liquid substances for injection and had a weakened area on their stem so that it could be snapped open cleanly. These vials contained a crystalline solid and there was no weakened area. They weren’t meant to be opened easily. All the same, there was something vaguely familiar about them and it disturbed him. For the moment, he put the vial back in the box and went back to see how the cat was getting on.

There was a gas water heater in the bathroom that provided instant hot water. Dewar prepared a shallow bath for the cat. He was idly watching the water level rise — painfully slowly because of the narrowness of the instant supply pipe, when he suddenly realised why the glass vials in the box seemed familiar. Beads of sweat broke out on his forehead and his fingers tightened on the rim of the bath. These vials didn’t contain drugs at all and they hadn’t been supplied by a pharmaceutical company. He’d seen vials just like them before; he’d come across them at medical school. They were used for the long-term storage of freeze-dried cultures of viruses and bacteria! Liquid cultures of laboratory-grown micro-organisms were aliquotted into small volumes in thin-bore glass tubes and subjected to vacuum drying. When all the liquid had evaporated the dried culture would be sealed inside the glass tube by melting the end. In that form, viruses could stay viable for many years.

The letters on the paper strip inside were the key to what the vial contained. In this instance, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to work out that VM must stand for Variola major , the most dangerous form of smallpox virus. No wonder Denise Banyon and Sharon Hannan had thought bad drugs to blame for their men’s condition. Kelly and Hannan had injected themselves with live smallpox virus!

Exposure to a large dose of virus now seemed like a gross understatement.

Thanks to the cat rescue operation, Dewar had just solved part of the puzzle. This of course, led to more questions. How many of these vials did Kelly have? Where had they come from? If these really were the ‘bad drugs’ then, according to Sharon Hannan, it had been Kelly who had stolen them from a man who had asked him to help in their recovery. She hadn’t known know any more than that. There was only one person who could perhaps tell him about the man and where the vials had been recovered from and that was Denise Banyon. She had to talk now. The nightmare had come true. There was a source of live smallpox outside the institute and right now, he didn’t know where the hell it was!

Dewar went through the process of cleaning up the cat which had fortunately decided that he was a friend — or at least, a provider of food, and should be tolerated as such. This was fortunate because his mind was on other things and dealing with a reluctant snarling moggie wouldn’t have helped either of them. This was particularly true of the last part of the clean-up when Dewar had to immerse the cat completely for a few seconds in warm water containing disinfectant.

He turned on the gas fire in the living room because there was no towelling in the flat to help dry the animal. The decontamination team had taken away all clothes and linen for destruction. The cat would have to see to its own rehabilitation while he thought about what to do next. It wasn’t enough to raise the alarm about the virus source, maybe not even desirable. There was nothing anyone else could do about it. It was going to be up to him. He needed a positive plan of action and it unfortunately had to centre on Denise Banyon. He took out his phone and called George Finlay.

‘How is Denise Banyon today?’

‘Still no problem,’ replied Finlay. ‘She must be one of these people with natural immunity.’

‘George, I need a favour. An unethical favour.’

‘What?’ replied Finlay uncertainly.

‘I want you to give her a TAB shot.’

‘An anti typhoid injection?’ exclaimed Finlay. ‘What on earth for?’

‘I want her to feel ill. I want her to feel achy all over. I want her to think she’s going down with smallpox. She’s the key to this whole damned outbreak. I’ve got to make her talk.’

‘Making someone believe they’ve got a deadly disease is just not on,’ protested Finlay.

‘Remember you said something about it being all right not to know the details of how all this started as long as the source of the epidemic wasn’t still out there?’ interrupted Dewar. ‘Well, it is.’

‘Good God.’

‘Denise Banyon can help me get to it.’

There was a pause before Finlay finally said, ‘All right, I’ll do it.’

‘As soon as you can please. I’ll give her a few hours and then come in. With a bit of luck she’ll be feeling ill.’

Dewar phoned Steve Malloy next.

‘Nothing new to report, I’m afraid,’ said Malloy. ‘And I’ve just about exhausted every avenue.’

‘I’ve found several cultures of the virus.’

‘What?’ exclaimed Malloy. ‘Where?’

‘In Tommy Hannan’s flat. Freeze dried cultures in glass vials. He and Kelly must have thought the vials contained heroin.’

‘Jesus Christ,’ whispered Malloy, painting the picture for himself. ‘They injected themselves?’

‘Looks that way. I’d like you to take a look at the vials,’ said Dewar. ‘Maybe you could confirm their origin?’

‘Of course,’ replied Malloy. ‘When? Where?’

‘If you could come over to the Scottish Office? I’m going back there right now. My first priority is going to be trying to get my hands on all the vials that Kelly had in his possession. I think I’ve got all the ones he gave to Hannan. I’ll have to talk to the team who decontaminated Kelly’s flat. They may have taken possession of them without realising what they were or maybe even the police have them, believing, like Kelly, that they contained drugs.’

‘Jesus, but where did Kelly get the damned things from?’

‘The story, as I know it, is that some man approached Kelly and asked him to help him recover a stash of drugs and at some point, maybe when his back was turned or whatever, Kelly stole some from him. I haven’t been able to find out anything about this man or where the stuff was hidden — or why he needed help in the first place, but I’m assuming that Pierre Le Grice must be involved somewhere along the line.’

‘I suppose you’re right, but God knows how he came to make it without anyone suspecting,’ said Malloy. ‘And as you say, why would he need help in recovering the vials? Where had he hidden them that they that they needed “recovering”?’ he asked.