Питер Мэй - Lockdown

‘Where is she?’ MacNeil was disturbed. He had made certain that Blume was completely alone before making his approach. And yet, why would Blume have exposed himself like this, on his own and unprotected, unless he felt confident that he had an edge on MacNeil?

Blume tipped his head back and looked up into the sky. ‘She’s up there,’ he said. And for a moment MacNeil didn’t understand, until he turned and followed Blume’s eyeline and realised he was talking about the wheel. Blume smiled at MacNeil’s confusion. ‘Right at the very top,’ he said. ‘Best seat in the house, absolutely free of charge. But it’s a long way down — if you’re a bad boy.’

MacNeil stared at him, every fibre of his being urging him to do this man physical damage. It took a supreme effort of will to control himself. ‘What do you want?’

‘I want to know what you know, and who else knows it.’

MacNeil’s eye fell on the inscription engraved in the black marble plinth of the statue. They went because their open eyes could see no other way . He said, ‘I know there was some kind of accident. That Choy got infected with the flu virus you were working on. That this whole pandemic is happening because you people got careless.’

Blume rolled his eyes and shook his head. ‘Is that what you think?’ he said. ‘Is it really? How charitable.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, it wasn’t an accident, Mr MacNeil. We infected poor little Choy quite deliberately. And we sent her to Sprint Water knowing — no, hoping — that she was going to trigger a pandemic.’

Whatever MacNeil might have expected to hear, it hadn’t been this. Blume’s simple confession was breathtaking in its scale. To the extent that MacNeil couldn’t think of anything to say, except, ‘Why?’

Blume sighed. ‘It’s a long and painful story, Mr MacNeil. Stein-Francks was on the verge of ruin. A catastrophic collapse. And it had all been going so well. A certain amount of money had, shall we say, changed hands. Certain officials at the World Health Organization had declared FluKill as the drug of choice against the bird flu pandemic that everyone was predicting.’ He smiled wistfully. ‘Which didn’t please our competitors at Roche. Basically, we put Tamiflu out of business.’ He folded his arms across his chest and leaned against the International Brigade. ‘All the major Western countries were putting in orders. And I’m talking billions. Of course, you have to speculate to accumulate. And so we invested hugely in production. We had to increase output to meet demand. We started building a new production facility in France. We put all our eggs in the one basket — or in this case, the one nest. But it seemed like such a sure thing. Everyone wanted FluKill. And then... well, then, the Vietnamese and the Cambodians and the Chinese started killing millions of birds. Millions! The economic damage was unthinkable. But they did it. And in the course of a season, the threat began to fade. The bird flu was passing, the scare stories started disappearing from the columns of the press. Even the WHO became distracted by other issues. And governments all over the world suddenly decided that they had other priorities for the money they had earmarked for FluKill. Orders were cancelled. Others never materialised. Stein-Francks was all but finished, Mr MacNeil. Oh, we still had plenty of money. The trouble is, it was in all the wrong places. Mostly in a product nobody wanted to buy any more.’

Understanding dawned on MacNeil, like mist clearing on an autumn morning. ‘So in the absence of a market for your drug, you decided to create one.’

Blume nodded slowly. ‘That pretty much sums it up. We knew we were playing with fire, but we really did think we could control it. Produce a version of H5N1 that would spread easily amongst humans, and then produce the vaccine that would prevent them from getting it. Not, of course, before all those orders for FluKill had been fulfilled. Naturally, we knew the virus would mutate. But we figured it would almost certainly still come within the compass of the vaccine. That, I’m afraid, was where it all went wrong.’

He looked at MacNeil, and the big Scotsman saw regret in his eyes. But MacNeil knew that it wasn’t regret for all those lost lives. Blume was only sorry that it ‘all went wrong’ for the same simple commercial reasons that had motivated him in the first place. ‘Millions of people are going to die,’ MacNeil said. ‘Millions already have.’

Blume breathed his exasperation. ‘What difference does it make? One life, a million, ten million. It’s just a matter of scale.’

‘You’re right,’ MacNeil said. ‘But only because each individual life is important. And when it’s you, or someone close to you, then it’s personal.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Like losing a son.’

Blume looked at him, and for the first time his self-confidence visibly wavered. ‘I’m sorry about that,’ he said.

‘No, you’re not. You killed him. As surely as if you’d taken a gun and put a bullet in his head. As surely as you killed that little Chinese girl and stripped the flesh from her bones. Your own daughter!’

Blume blew air through contemptuous lips. ‘She wasn’t my daughter. Not even my adopted daughter. Her paperwork will tell you that she was adopted by Mr and Mrs Walter Smith, whoever they might be. In fact we bought her. In the international marketplace. It’s amazing how cheaply people can be bought these days. Literally. And children with such disfigurement, well, they cost pennies.’

MacNeil pictured the head that Amy had fashioned from the child’s skull, and wondered what miseries she had known. Discarded by her natural parents, bought and sold, smuggled across borders. God only knew what kind of treatment she had suffered at the hands of the men and women who had so ruthlessly exploited her. And then, suddenly, to have found herself living in an affluent London suburb, attending the local school, being sent on a holiday to Sprint Water. She must have thought she had died and gone to heaven. Only to be infected by a deadly flu, and when it failed to kill her, murdered by the very people she had probably come to trust.

‘She was supposed to die from the flu,’ Blume said, ‘and be cremated with all the rest. How could any of us have predicted that she would survive it? We couldn’t afford to have her around, living proof of what we’d done. Especially with that woman from the Health Protection Agency poking around.’

‘You’re not human,’ MacNeil said. He took a step towards him, and Blume pulled a small handgun from his coat pocket. He pointed it unsteadily at the policeman.

‘That’s close enough,’ he said. ‘There’s not going to be any negotiating with you, Mr MacNeil, is there?’

MacNeil felt his own lips trembling with anger. ‘No. There’s not.’

‘Then I’m just going to have to kill you.’

‘Aye, I guess you are.’ A movement in his peripheral vision made him glance to his right as the tiny figure of Dr Castelli stepped determinedly out from behind the statue and swung the butt-end of her rifle at Blume’s head. It caught him a bruising blow just above the temple and sent him sprawling to the ground. His gun rattled away across the cobblestones.

‘You despicable little shit!’ she said. ‘You killed all these people for money! I can’t believe you did that. You... you sent that child amongst us, to infect us with your abomination, like some poor little angel of death. You... you...’ She had no more words to express her anger, and instead she wrestled the rifle to her shoulder and fought to point it clumsily at Blume. He dragged himself up on to one elbow and raised a hand as if that might protect him from the bullet. ‘No, don’t,’ he shouted.