Ken Follett - Whiteout

She looked again at the monitors. They all showed empty rooms. If four guards were in the building, one of them should appear on a monitor within seconds. But there was no movement anywhere.

Then something caught her eye. She looked more closely at the feed from BSL4.

The dateline said December 24. She checked her watch. It was after one o'clock in the morning. Today was Christmas Day, December 25. She was looking at old pictures. Someone had tampered with the feed.

She sat at the workstation and accessed the program. In three minutes she established that all the monitors covering BSL4 were showing yesterday's footage. She corrected them and looked at the screens.

In the lobby outside the changing rooms, four people were sitting on the floor. She stared at the monitor, horrified. Please, God, she thought, don't let them be dead.

One moved.

She looked more closely. They were guards, all in dark uniforms; and their hands were behind their backs, as if they were tied up.

"No, no!" she said aloud.

But there was no escaping from the dismal conclusion that the Kremlin had been raided.

She felt doomed. First Michael Ross, now this. Where had she gone wrong? She had done all she could to make this place secure-and she had failed utterly. She had let Stanley down.

She turned for the door, her first instinct being to rush to BSL4 and untie the captives. Then her police training reasserted itself. Stop, assess the situation, plan the response. Whoever had done this could still be in the building, though her guess was that the villains were the Hibernian Telecom repairmen who had just left. What was her most important task? To make sure she was not the only person who knew about this.

She picked up the phone on the desk. It was dead, of course. The fault in the phone system was probably part of whatever was going on. She took her mobile from her pocket and called the police. "This is Toni Gallo, in charge of security at Oxenford Medical. There's been an incident here. Four of my security guards have been attacked."

"Are the perpetrators still on the premises?"

"I don't think so, but I can't be sure."

"Anyone injured?"

"I don't know. As soon as I get off the phone, I'll check-but I wanted to tell you first."

"We'll try to get a patrol car to you-though the roads are terrible." He sounded like an unsure young constable.

Toni tried to impress him with a sense of urgency. "This could be a biohazard incident. A young man died yesterday of a virus that escaped from here."

"We'll do our best."

"I believe Frank Hackett is on duty tonight. I don't suppose he's in the building?"

"He's on call."

"I strongly recommend you phone him at home and wake him up and tell him about this."

"I've made a note of your suggestion."

"We have a fault on the phones here, probably caused by the intruders. Please take my mobile number." She read it out. "Ask Frank to call right away."

"I've got the message."

"May I ask your name?"

"P.C. David Reid."

"Thank you, Constable Reid. We'll be waiting for your patrol car." Toni hung up. She felt sure the constable had not grasped the importance of her call, but he would surely pass the information to a superior. Anyway, she did not have time to argue. She hurried out of the control room and ran along the corridor to BSL4. She swiped her pass through the card reader, held her fingertip to the scanner, and went in.

There were Steve, Susan, Don, and Stu, in a row against the wall, bound hand and foot. Susan looked as if she had walked into a tree: her nose was swollen and there was blood on her chin and chest. Don had a nasty abrasion on his forehead.

Toni knelt down and began to untie them. "What the hell happened here?" she said.

THE Hibernian Telecom van was plowing through snow a foot deep. Elton drove at ten miles an hour in high gear to keep from skidding. Thick snowflakes bombarded the vehicle. They formed two wedges at the bottom of the windshield, and they grew steadily, so that the wipers described an ever smaller arc, until Elton could no longer see out and had to stop the van to clear the snow away.

Kit was distraught. He had thought himself involved in a heist that would do no real harm. His father would lose money, but on the other hand Kit would be enabled to repay Harry Mac, a debt that his father should have paid anyway, so there was no real injustice. But the reality was different. There could be only one reason for buying Madoba-2. Someone wanted to kill large numbers of people. Kit had never thought to be guilty of this.

He wondered who Nigel's customer represented: Japanese fanatics, Muslim fundamentalists, an IRA splinter group, suicidal Palestinians, or a group of paranoid Americans with high-powered rifles living in remote mountain cabins in Montana. It hardly mattered. Whoever got the virus would use it, and crowds of people would die bleeding from their eyes.

But what could he do? If he tried to abort the heist and take the virus samples back to the lab, Nigel would kill him, or let Daisy do it. He thought of opening the van door and jumping out. It was going slowly enough. He might disappear into the blizzard before they could catch him. But then they would still have the virus, and he would still owe Harry a quarter of a million pounds.

He had to see this through to the end. Maybe, when it was all over, he could send an anonymous message to the police, naming Nigel and Daisy, and hope that the virus could be traced before it was used. Or maybe he would be wiser to stick to his plan and vanish. No one would want to start a plague in Lucca.

Maybe the virus would be released on his plane to Italy, and he would pay the penalty himself. There would be justice.

Peering ahead through the snowstorm, he saw an illuminated sign that read "Motel." Elton turned off the road. There was a light over the door, and eight or nine cars in the car park. The place was open. Kit wondered who would spend Christmas at a motel. Hindus, perhaps, and stranded businessmen, and illicit lovers.

Elton pulled up next to a Vauxhall Astra station wagon. "The idea was to ditch the van here," he said. "It's too easily identifiable. We're supposed to go back to the airstrip in that Astra. But I don't know if we're going to make it."

From the back, Daisy said, "You stupid prick, why didn't you bring a Land Rover?"

"Because the Astra is one of the most popular and least noticeable cars in Britain, and the forecast said no snow, you ugly cow."

"Knock it off, you two," Nigel said calmly. He pulled off his wig and glasses. "Take off your disguises. We don't know how soon those guards will be giving descriptions to the police."

The others followed suit.

Elton said, "We could stay here, take rooms, wait it out."

"Dangerous," Nigel replied. "We're only a few miles from the lab."

"If we can't move, the police can't either. As soon as the weather eases, we take off."

"We have an appointment to meet our customer."

"He's not going to fly his helicopter in this muck."

"True."

Kit's mobile rang. He checked his laptop. It was a regular call, not one diverted from the Kremlin system. He picked it up. "Yeah?"

"It's me." Kit recognized the voice of Hamish McKinnon. "I'm on my mobile, I've got to be quick, while Willie's in the toilet."

"What's happening?"

"She arrived just after you left." 1 saw the car.

"She found the other guards tied up and called the police."

"Can they get there, in this weather?"

"They said they'd try. She just came up to the gatehouse and told us to expect them. When they'll get here- Sorry, gotta go." He hung up.

Kit pocketed his phone. "Toni Gallo has found the guards," he announced. "She's called the police, and they're on their way."