Ken McClure - The Lazarus Strain

‘Would you care to be more specific?’

‘I wish I could be. I suppose it’s the small team thing that worries me most. Al-Qaeda set up a big diversionary tactic involving lots of people and lots of planning to make us think that an attack was about to be made on Canary Wharf in order to throw us off the scent of what? A small team being sent in to steal Cambodia 5 virus without the back-up necessary to do anything with it? I don’t think so somehow.’

You still think they’re going to use the virus?’

Steven shrugged and said, ‘No point in stealing it otherwise.’

‘I understand your reservations,’ said Macmillan. ‘But maybe the loss of three team members knocked them back?’

‘The three who died were unskilled cannon fodder, totally unused to handling dangerous biological material. Their ‘loss’ could have been anticipated by anyone with an IQ running into treble figures.’

‘But if that were the case, sending in not only a small team but a largely unskilled one would make even less sense,’ said Macmillan.

‘Exactly,’ said Steven. ‘We’re not seeing something here.’

‘What do you want to do?’ asked Macmillan.

‘Get out the file, go over everything again.’

‘Let’s both do that,’ said Macmillan.

Steven glanced at his watch when he got in and reckoned that Leila would be back in Washington by now. She would be looking forward to seeing old colleagues at the university in the morning and getting back into the swing of her old life — her apartment was probably a far cry from a run-down old cottage in Norfolk with its one-bar electric fire. He couldn’t blame her for needing or missing the intellectual stimulation she got from working at a large prestigious university but he had already started to nurture hopes that her success in designing a vaccine against the Cambodia 5 virus, when it became known, might well open up academic doors to her all over the world. England was what he really had in mind and Oxbridge would be just fine. He poured himself a gin and tonic and sat down to start working his way through the files.

Two hours and three gins later he thought he saw something that made his heart miss a beat and a thin film of sweat appear on his brow. He snatched up the phone and called Rose at Defence Intelligence. ‘Tell me, Colonel, what was it exactly that made you cotton on to the fact that the hit on Canary Wharf was a red herring?’

‘Hard to say when you pose the question that way,’ replied Rose. ‘I suppose I started to get the feeling that we were being led by the nose down a pre-charted pathway. I remember feeling pleased with our progress in the investigation and almost patting myself on the back when I suddenly realised that what we were seeing was what someone meant us to see. It didn’t have anything to do with luck or skill on our part; the clues were being laid down for us. The men we were picking up were low-level nobodies who had been sacrificed for the cause. We were meant to track them down. They were no great loss to al-Qaeda because there was nothing they could tell us because they didn’t know anything. Why do you ask?’

‘Because I think I’ve just had exactly the same feeling,’ said Steven. ‘The train of events that took us to the mill house wasn’t part of the big picture. It was another diversion.’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘Think about it, three dead men at the flat who’d been infected with Cambodia 5 virus, two of them actually murdered by their own, a vehicle parked conveniently round the back which yields a hair from a monkey and a petrol receipt. The receipt leads us to a petrol station which leads us to the mill house where we find egg cartons and a warm incubator room and then of course, the final slice of “luck”, a map of all the targets they intended to hit. It’s embarrassing to say it but we’ve been had; we’ve been set up. Your people couldn’t find any egg supplier because none was required. It was never their intention to do what we were meant to think they were going on to do.’

There was a long silence at the end of the phone before Rose murmured, ‘I wish I could argue with you…’

‘Pity,’ said Steven. ‘I was sort of depending on you. I was hoping this was all my imagination.’

‘But if the Cambodia 5 attack is nothing more than a diversion… what are they really up to?’ asked Rose.

‘I have absolutely no idea,’ said Steven.

‘Perhaps you should re-convene Earlybird and tell them what you’ve just told me?’

‘And confess to everyone that we really have no idea what al-Qaeda are up to? HMG will go bananas and it’ll look like sports day for headless chickens in Whitehall.’

‘I suppose you’re right,’ agreed Rose. ‘The Spanish will probably lobby Brussels to slap a quota on red herrings on the grounds that we’ve been over-fishing them.’

‘I can’t prove any of this,’ said Steven. ‘It’s still just a feeling. I could still be wrong. Maybe the Norfolk Police were just lucky in getting to the mill house… Maybe it was just good forensic work that came up with the monkey hair and good fortune that the garage attendant remembered the Land Rover…’

‘No,’ interrupted Rose. ‘Let me stop you there. She remembered it because it had been in to the filling station a number of times . We should have seen that earlier. We both know that no trained terrorist group would have returned to the same place time and time again unless…’

‘They had been told to,’ completed Steven. ‘They wanted to be remembered. Of course, you’re right.’

‘So where do we go from here?’

‘As I see it, there’s nothing anyone can do that isn’t already being done,’ said Steven. ‘All the services are already on high alert. We have to sit down and think our way out of this one.’

‘So we say nothing?’

‘For the moment.’

Steven saw that there was one exception he had to make and that was to tell John Macmillan. He called him and told him what he had just told Rose.

‘You know,’ said Macmillan, not sounding too surprised, ‘I’ve been sitting here wondering about that petrol receipt. If it had been found among general detritus on the floor of the van, I might just have bought it, but it was the only thing the police found in the van apart from the monkey hair…’

‘So you agree?’

‘I do. I think it was a plant.’

‘Did anything else strike you?’ asked Steven.

‘One thing,’ said Macmillan. ‘I see from your report that you asked about the sale of primates up and down the country?’

‘I was trying to find out how the opposition got their hands on a monkey to plant in the wilds of Norfolk for the army to find,’ said Steven. ‘But I drew a blank. The only orders for primates placed in the previous three months came from recognised research labs.’

‘That’s true,’ said Macmillan. ‘But one of them was the Crick.’

‘Professor Devon was using them to test his experimental vaccine on,’ said Steven.

‘The last order — for six monkeys — was placed a week after Devon died.’

‘Shit, I missed that.’

‘The real question is who wanted them and why?’ said Macmillan. ‘According to your report, Professor Devon was the only researcher using monkeys at the institute. When Dr Martin took over the work on a vaccine against Cambodia 5 there was no question of her being able to try it out on animals. Apart from there being no time, everyone had learned their lesson from the Devon debacle. Any animal tests to be carried out involving Cambodia 5 would have to be done out at Porton Down.’

‘Good point,’ agreed Steven. ‘Maybe I’ll go up to the Crick first thing tomorrow and find out who placed the order…’