Ken McClure - The Lazarus Strain

‘They’re all the same to me,’ said Giles.

‘The bugs know the difference,’ said Steven. ‘There are a few anti-viral drugs coming on to the market but they tend to be of limited use. Prevention is still better than a cure when it comes to virus infection.’

Acting on the spur of the moment, Steven drove up to Norfolk’s north coast next morning and went for a walk along the beach. He felt decidedly rough after the night before but the cool breeze coming in off the North Sea soon cleared his head and he took pleasure from being outdoors on a day when gulls were wheeling above the waves and the sun was sparkling on the water. He’d always liked beach walking, particularly on wide expanses of hard packed sand where the horizons seemed infinite and the sky fell into the ocean. Today was a special day: it was the day Leila’s vaccine strain would be handed over to the drug company. He glanced at his watch and saw that it would already be on its way — she had opted to travel up to Liverpool with it and supervise the handover personally. After that, she would get her life back — a life he very much hoped to be part of in the coming weeks. He would call her this evening when he got home.

It had been a long time since he had felt so interested in a woman and despite the fact that he knew so little about her, he had even started considering how Jenny might take to there being a new woman in his life and when might be the right time to tell her. Of course, this might be a two-way problem, he recognised. There had been times in the past when the revelation that he had a daughter had cooled a relationship. Many intelligent career women did not automatically warm to the prospect of playing mother to a ready-made family. He picked up a pebble and threw it out into the sea, berating himself for even thinking about such things when he hardly even knew Leila Martin.

Normally he would have sought out a pub to have lunch after such a walk but the excesses of the previous night steered him instead to a harbour-side coffee shop where he ordered scrambled eggs on toast and a mug of black coffee. He examined water colours of local scenes, painted by local artists while he waited but he’d never been a big fan of water colour; he found it too insipid for landscapes or seascapes. He ate his meal and had a second mug of coffee before heading back to his hotel to continue what he had been about to start last night. Once the report was done he reckoned he might be able to take some time off. With a bit of luck Leila might even be persuaded to do the same.

‘You smell of fresh air,’ said the receptionist at the hotel when he asked for his key.

Steven smiled. It was something his mother used to say to him as a child when he came back from a day in the hills in his native Cumbria. ‘I’ve been for a walk on the beach,’ he explained.

‘Lucky you,’ said the girl. ‘I’ve been stuck here all day,’

Starting to note down the various steps he’d taken during the investigation made him think about what Giles had said the night before about writing up reports. He found himself trying to order events in a logical way rather than in the sequence they’d actually happened. Giles was right; official reports were no place for recording gut instinct — the real reason he’d gone to Nick Cleary’s house after feeling that the man was holding something back after he’d first interviewed him. Reports were written after the event, when hindsight was on tap.

He could see now that some of the tests he had asked for were redundant almost before the results had come back from the lab. The DNA profiles he’d asked for at the Crick to eliminate the possibility of a member of staff having touched the key on the secret safe had failed to reveal a match because there really had been a third man involved in the attack on the institute — the Ali character who seemed to have cropped up so often without being identified. DIS had found his DNA in the flat where the three dead men had been found, adding more fuel to the suspicion that he had killed two of them. They couldn’t identify him from any data file but they had confirmed that his DNA was a match for the profile that had been found on the safe key in the Crick.

‘He certainly gets around,’ murmured Steven. It was a thought that made him wonder why? If al-Qaeda was engaged in a big operation, why should one man crop up so often? True, Ali was probably the leader but it tended to imply that the team he led was small. There again, a small team would be more secure than a large one where the risk of capture or failure increased with the appointing of every additional member, but there were certain things that a small team could not achieve and cultivating a lethal virus and using it to carry out a major biological attack on several cities simultaneously across the UK was one of them.

Ali seemed to have been involved in everything from hunt sabotage to recruiting animal rights activists for the raid on the Crick. Ali had organised the raid. Ali had tortured the information he needed out of Professor Devon. Ali had murdered Devon and facilitated the theft of the infected monkey. Ali had been at the flat where the dead men were discovered — he had almost certainly murdered two of them… so how much manpower was Ali left with?

Had Ali been at the mill house too? Steven wondered. Maybe the forensics people had the answer to that and perhaps to how many other people had been present at the mill. He phoned Frank Giles.

‘God, I hope you’re not going to suggest going out for a beer,’ said Giles when he heard Steven’s voice. ‘I’ve had a head full of broken glass all day.’

Steven told him what he wanted to know.

‘Just the four,’ said Giles. ‘The three dead men and the one unidentified male who was also at the flat in town.’

‘Thanks,’ said Steven and put the phone down. He was feeling nervous. There was something not quite right about all this and the questions were coming thick and fast. Why had the operation at the mill been so small when the amount of virus required for a Cambodia 5 virus attack would be much greater? Four people involved and three were dead. The working hypothesis had been that they had other facilities somewhere in the UK — maybe even up and running as Leila had proposed — but they would need skilled technicians and a supply of fertile hens’ eggs — lots of them. The security people who had been monitoring the egg suppliers had reported no unusual orders being placed so where were they getting them from? Steven phoned Colonel Rose at DIS.

After an exchange of pleasantries, Steven told him what was on his mind. ‘There is no alternative to fertile hens’ eggs,’ he said, ‘and they need thousands of them. Can you check again with the suppliers and make absolutely sure that none were left off the list?’

‘Will do,’ said Rose. ‘But I’m pretty sure none has.’

Steven noted the slight rebuke but this was no time to tip-toe around other people’s sensibilities. He added, ‘And maybe they could examine orders from all their usual customers to see if there has been any abnormal increase being ordered. It’s absolutely vital. The eggs are their Achilles heel. We know their intent and we know their targets but they can’t hit them if they don’t have enough virus and for that they need lots of eggs.’

‘I suppose ordering them through an accepted source like a large research institute would be the thing to do if they could manage it,’ said Rose.

‘Cutting out the lab supplier altogether would be even better if they were to come to an arrangement with one of the large poultry concerns,’ said Steven.

‘We’ll check that too,’ said Rose. ‘I’ll let you know as soon as I hear.’

Steven didn’t like it when things didn’t make sense and he had just started thinking about another puzzle from the mill — the way the monkey had been opened up. There had been little or no surgical expertise involved and that was probably why the three men had contracted the disease. They had known nothing about aseptic technique or what safety measures to adopt when dealing with dangerous biological material. Someone had instructed them to remove the lungs and windpipe from the animal — and then what? Unskilled workers would be incapable of extracting virus and setting up egg cultures so who had done this? Ali? The ubiquitous Ali? Something wasn’t quite making sense. Al-Qaeda needed a large team but he kept seeing a small one.