Andy McNab - Dark winter

He studied it for several seconds before lifting it to the cigarette in his mouth. 'First in three years.'

'Glad you cracked too, Simon.' Suzy was all smiles. 'I only gave up a few minutes ago.' She wiggled the cigarette between her fingers at him. 'This is all your fault.'

The smoke from two cigarettes soon filled the air. 'What more do you have to tell us, Simon? What about infection? How close do we have to be?'

Emptying his lungs, he leant forwards again and gave his ash an experienced tap into the coffee-table ashtray. I was sure his eyes were watering but he still took another quick drag. 'Direct exposure to the pestis obviously means you're infected. After that, anyone within six feet of an infected person will be exposed – two metres, two yards, whatever you want to call it – and they, too, are likely to get infected. It would be simply a fucking biblical event.'

Simon flicked non-existent ash as he stared into the ashtray, his mind clearly elsewhere. It seemed an eternity before he looked up at Suzy. 'Is it really going to hap-'

'Tell you what, Simon, just do your job. OK?' If he thought she was the soft touch of us two he was wrong.

'Yes, of course, sorry.' The next drag was a lot longer and smoke spilled out of every hole in his face as he continued. 'The first sign of illness is fever, headache, cough, general weakness. Victims will feel under the weather, but think it's just another round of colds and flu. Most people, like Archibald, will just get on with life. He was a gardener. And all the time they're doing that, they're part of the contamination chain.'

His spare hand waved in front of him, pointing at his body. 'Then, within a few days, they'll get a bloody or watery cough due to the lung infection – the pneumonia. There will be shortness of breath, chest pains, along with intestinal symptoms – nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, diarrhoea, that sort of thing.'

Suzy blew a lungful of smoke towards the ceiling. 'This isn't going to have a happy ending, is it?'

Shaking his head, he slid backwards into the settee. 'As the pneumonia worsens over two to four days, it can cause septic shock. Not that you'd be too concerned because you'd be as good as dead anyway.' He squinted and looked up as he took another long drag. His hand had started to shake. 'By the time the disease is recognized in the population, after anything from ten days to two weeks, it will be too late for tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of us.' Simon sank back, his eyes on the ceiling, as if contemplating the enormity of it all. Shit, he wasn't the only one.

Suzy and I exchanged another glance. Her smile had disappeared as Simon's cigarette moved up and down in his mouth. 'The one good thing is that there is no spore form in the Yersinia pestis lifecycle, so it's susceptible to the environment – and particularly sensitive to the action of sunlight. That's why plague aerosol is infectious for no more than an hour.' He sat up and tried me this time. He sounded as if he was having difficulty breathing. 'With that amount of pestis, we're talking hundreds of thousands of innocent people. Why isn't any action being taken out there? People have a right to know of the risk, surely.'

'What about protection, Simon?'

He shrugged in submission. 'Close-contact transmission can be prevented by wearing a surgical mask of a US rating of N95 or UK standard FFP3, then there's surgical gloves, eye protection, that sort of thing.' He didn't sound at all convincing. 'Look.' He stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray. Suzy was only moments behind with hers. 'To be honest, it's all bollocks. If I was playing about with this stuff in its powder form, I'd only feel safe in an astronaut's suit.'

Suzy offered him another cigarette, which he gladly took, and the smoke was soon billowing out of them again.

I thought it, Suzy spoke it. 'Is there anything out there that we can take? A vaccine or a drug or anything like that to protect us?'

He shook his head. 'A vaccine, no. Manufacture was discontinued in 'ninety-nine. But the use of doxycycline, I think, has some effect as protection and post-exposure.'

I was straight in there. 'That's good enough for me – we need a shedful. Can you get it to Yvette today?'

He nodded. 'Sure, I can arrange all that.' He looked at Suzy. 'Are you pregnant, or do you think you may be?'

She held up her new cancer stick. 'What do you think?'

'It's just that some antibiotics have an adverse effect on foetal growth.'

Suzy stood up and had regained her smile. 'Lovely. Everything we always wanted to know about pneumonic plague, and probably a whole lot we didn't. Thanks, Simon.'

He gave a little smile that soon faded. 'I don't know exactly what's happening and I don't want to know, but the thing is… I've got a family, and I'm thinking… I'm thinking I've always wanted to take them to visit my sister-in-law in Namibia. Do you think now would be a good time?' His hand was still shaking as he stubbed out the cigarette.

Suzy and I looked at each other.

'Please, I just need to know.'

Fuck it, why not? 'Let's put it this way.' I stood up to join Suzy. 'If I was one of your kids and you said, "We're going on holiday to Auntie Edna's tomorrow," which would mean leaving school and going somewhere nice and hot, I would be really, really happy and feel really, really safe.' I looked at Suzy. 'Wouldn't you?'

'Absolutely. A kids' dream. But you won't be going with them, Simon.'

I couldn't tell whether the look on his face was shock or resignation. 'Everything's OK.' I did that stupid lowering-of-the-hands thing, trying to calm him down. 'But you won't be going to another meeting after this. Sorry, mate. Are there two guys waiting for you downstairs?'

'Oh, God, no. I have a family and-'

'Calm down, mate, it's nothing like that. They'll be driving you somewhere safe until we've done our job – or fucked up – that's all. In any case, if we do fuck up you'll be thinking how lucky you are to be in isolation. That's just the way it is.'

There was no way the Yes Man was going to take the chance of a leak. Simon was about to spend some time in a house in the country, with his family thinking he'd been whisked away to carry out some important bug stuff in the jungle.

Suzy picked up his bag for him as he slowly got his coat back on and I moved towards him. 'Simon, you got a mobile?'

'Er, yes…'

I patted him on the back in best-mate fashion. 'I'll tell you the best thing to do. Call your wife on the way down, tell her you've got to go and do some African disease stuff. Tell her to take the kids to your sister-in-law's for two weeks and you'll meet them there – the company's paying, free trip, chance of a lifetime, shit like that.'

He buttoned up his coat. 'Thank you so much.'

I shrugged. 'No problem. Just don't forget our drug deal – and be careful, mate. Be careful what you tell your wife. Don't fuck up with what you know or next time you see the boys downstairs they'll not be as nice. You understand, don't you?'

He gathered up his bag from Suzy and thanked us again as he headed for the door. Suzy walked with him. As he opened the door she put a hand on his shoulder. 'Forget what he just said.'

He looked up sharply. I was confused, too.

She said, 'If I was your wife and you said the holiday was for a couple of weeks, I'd be happy. But if you said we were going for a couple of months, I'd be over the moon.'

'Thank you, I hear what you're saying.'

She rubbed his shoulder. 'Speak to her, sort it out.'

Simon gave her a smile that was full of sadness. 'Oh, that won't be possible, I'm afraid. She died six years ago. Gillian would have loved to go home, but she never got the chance. Archibald was our gardener, you see. They used to walk the garden together every day.'