Ken Follett - Whiteout

"That settles it," Nigel said. "Let's get in the Astra."

AS Craig slipped his hand under the hem of Sophie's sweater, he heard steps. He broke the clinch and looked around.

His sister was coming down from the hayloft in her nightdress. "I feel a bit strange," she said, and crossed the room to the bathroom.

Thwarted, Craig turned his attention to the film on TV. The old witch, transformed into a beautiful girl, was seducing a handsome knight.

Caroline emerged, saying, "That bathroom smells of puke." She climbed the ladder and went back to bed.

"No privacy here," Sophie said in a low voice.

"Like trying to make love in Glasgow Central Station," Craig said, but he kissed her again. This time, she opened her lips and her tongue met his. He was so pleased that he moaned with delight.

He put his hand all the way up inside her sweater and felt her breast. It was small and warm. She was wearing a thin cotton bra. He squeezed gently, and she gave an involuntary groan of pleasure.

Tom's voice piped: "Will you two stop grunting? I can't sleep!"

They stopped kissing. Craig took his hand out from under her sweater. He was ready to explode with frustration. "I'm sorry about this," he murmured.

Sophie said, "Why don't we go somewhere else?"

"Like, where?"

"How about that attic you showed me earlier?"

Craig was thrilled. They would be completely alone, and no one would disturb them. "Brilliant," he said, and he stood up.

They put on coats and boots, and Sophie pulled on a pink woolly hat with a bobble. It made her look cute and innocent. "A bundle of joy," Craig said.

"What is?"

"You are."

She smiled. Earlier, she would have called him "so boring" for saying something like that. Their relationship had changed. Maybe it was the vodka. But Craig thought the turning point had come in the bathroom, when they had dealt with Tom together. Perhaps Tom, by being a helpless child, had forced them to act like adults. After that, it was hard to revert to being sulky and cool.

Craig would never have guessed that the way to a girl's heart might be cleaning up puke.

He opened the barn door. A cold wind blew a flurry of snow over them like confetti. Craig stepped out quickly, held the door for Sophie, then closed it.

Steepfall looked impossibly romantic. Snow covered the steeply sloping roof, lay in great mounds on the windowsills, and filled the courtyard to the depth of a foot. The lanterns on the surrounding walls had halos of golden light filled with dancing snowflakes. Snow encrusted a wheelbarrow, a stack of firewood, and a garden hose, transforming them into ice sculptures.

Sophie's eyes were wide. "It's a Christmas card," she said.

Craig took her hand. They crossed the courtyard with high steps, like wading birds. They rounded the corner of the house and came to the back door. Craig brushed a layer of snow off the top of a trash can. He stood on it and heaved himself up onto the low roof of the boot lobby.

He looked back. Sophie was hesitating. "Here!" he hissed. He held out his hand.

She grasped it and pulled herself up onto the can. With his other hand, Craig grabbed the edge of the sloping roof, to steady himself, then helped her up beside him. For a moment they lay side by side in the snow, like lovers in bed. Then Craig got to his feet.

He stepped onto the ledge that ran below the loft door, kicked off most of the snow, and opened the big door. Then he returned to Sophie.

She got to her hands and knees but, when she tried to stand, her rubber boots slipped and she fell. She looked scared.

"Hold on to me," Craig said, and pulled her to her feet. What they were doing was not very dangerous, and she was making more of it than she should, but he did not mind, for it gave him a chance to be strong and protective.

Still holding her hand, Craig stood on the ledge. She stepped up beside him and grabbed him around the waist. He would have liked to linger there, with her clinging to him so hard; but he went on, walking sideways along the ledge to the open door, then helped her inside.

He closed the door behind them and turned on the light. This was perfect, Craig thought excitedly. They were alone, in the middle of the night, and nobody would come in to disturb them. They could do anything they liked.

He lay down and looked through the hole in the floor into the kitchen. A single light burned over the door to the boot room. Nellie lay in front of the Aga, head up, ears cocked, listening: she knew he was there. "Go back to sleep," he murmured. Whether she heard him or not, the dog put her head down and closed her eyes.

Sophie was sitting on the old couch, shivering. "My feet are freezing."

"You've got snow in your boots." He knelt in front of her and pulled her Wellingtons off. Her socks were soaked. He took those off, too. Her small white feet felt as if they had been in the fridge. He tried to warm them with his hands. Then, inspired, he unbuttoned his coat, lifted his sweater, and pressed the soles of her feet to his bare chest.

She said, "Oh, my God, that feels so good."

She had often said that to him in his fantasies, he reflected; but not in quite the same circumstances.

TONI sat in the control room, watching the monitors.

Steve and the guards had related everything that had happened, from when the "repair crew" entered the Great Hall up to the moment that two of them emerged from the BSL4 lab, passed through the little lobby, and vanished-one carrying a slim burgundy leather briefcase. Don had told her, while Steve gave him first aid, how one of the men had tried to stop the violence. The words he had shouted were burned into Toni's brain: If you want to be empty-handed when we meet the client at ten, just carry on the way you are.

Clearly, they had come here to steal something from the laboratory, and they had taken it away in that briefcase. Toni had a dreadful feeling she knew what it was.

She was running the BSL4 footage from 12:55 to 1:15. Although the monitors had not shown these images at the time, the computer had stored them. Now she was watching two men inside the lab, wearing biohazard suits.

She gasped when she saw one of them open the door to the little room that contained the vault. He tapped numbers into the keypad-he knew the code! He opened the fridge door, then the other man began to remove samples.

Toni froze the playback.

The camera was placed above the door, and looked over the man’s shoulder into the refrigerator. His hands were full of small white boxes. Toni's fingers played over the keyboard, and the black-and-white picture on the monitor was enlarged. She could see the international biohazard symbol on the boxes. He was stealing virus samples. She zoomed in further and ran the image-enhancement program. Slowly, the words on one of the boxes became clear: "Madoba-2."

It was what she had feared, but the confirmation hit her like the cold wind of death. She sat staring at the screen, frozen with dread, her heart sounding in her chest like a funeral bell. Madoba-2 was the most deadly virus imaginable, an infectious agent so terrible that it had to be guarded by multiple layers of security and touched only by highly trained staff in isolation clothing. And it was now in the hånds of a gang of thieves who were carrying it around in a damn briefcase.

Their car might crash; they could panic and throw the briefcase away; the virus might fall into the possession of people who did not know what it was-the risks were horrendous. And even if they did not release it by accident, their "client" would do so deliberately. Someone was planning to use the virus to murder people in hundreds and thousands, perhaps to cause a plague that might mow down entire populations.