Ken McClure - The Lazarus Strain

Steven was looking at the body of a woman who bore almost no resemblance to Leila at all. This woman was plain where Leila had been beautiful. This woman had a small thin mouth, a broad nose and a chin that was almost masculine and looked about ten years older than Leila.

‘But you told me it was…’ said Giles, obviously bemused and more than a little embarrassed. ‘At the cottage…’

‘Ali told me. I didn’t see the body,’ said Steven, still staring at the unknown woman.

Martin, looking at Steven as if in complete disbelief, spluttered out, ‘Of course it’s Leila, are you suggesting that I don’t know my own sister? What the hell are you talking about, man?’

Wheels were spinning inside Steven’s head like the machinery of a fairground ride picking up speed. He looked at Martin without really seeing him but recovered some sense of the moment and said, ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘There’s been some awful misunderstanding…’

‘The man’s crazy,’ murmured Martin.

Giles looked like a man wading in out of his depth. He said to Martin, ‘I’m sorry sir, I must ask you again; are you quite certain that this woman is your sister, Dr Leila Martin.’

‘Of course it’s Leila,’ snapped Martin, still angry at what Steven had said. ‘I don’t know what this idiot here is talking about.’

Giles made a gesture with his head to signify that Steven should leave the room and Steven complied.

‘What the hell’s going on?’ hissed Giles when he came out to join him.

‘That’s not the Leila Martin I knew,’ said Steven. ‘That is not the Leila Martin who worked at Crick.’

‘I just don’t get this,’ stormed Giles, still struggling to keep his voice down to avoid those inside hearing. ‘Then who the hell is the woman lying on the trolley in there?… the woman whose own brother has just identified as being Leila Martin?’

Steven now understood the look he’d seen in Ali’s eyes when he had told him whose body was in the plastic bag. He had been enjoying a joke of his own. ‘I think she’s Leila Martin,’ he replied without emotion.

‘Am I missing something here?’ asked Giles, now displaying serious exasperation. ‘Are you telling me there are two Leila Martins?’

Steven looked at him distantly and said, ‘No, I think not. There is only one real Dr Leila Martin and I think that’s her lying on the trolley in there… She must have been intercepted as soon as she entered the country… Leila took her place.’

Giles’ eyes opened wide. ‘An imposter?’

Steven nodded. ‘Yup.’

‘What the hell was she doing there?’

The awful answer to that question was becoming crystal clear to Steven as was so much else as he realised what a fool he’d been. Leila, his Leila, the beautiful woman at the Crick had encouraged their relationship just so that she could use him to keep tabs on what he and the Intelligence services were thinking so that she could report back to Ali Mansour.

When she thought she had no further use for him, it had been she who had set up the attack on his life. She had simply passed on the details of their dinner arrangements to Ali so that he could intercept him on the road to her cottage. Even the cottage now made sense where it hadn’t before. Leila hated the place but it was remote and that must have been its attraction. It was a convenient, safe base for Ali — and it had an ice-cold cellar. Steven could see that Giles was waiting for an answer.

‘The woman I knew as Leila Martin wasn’t working on a vaccine at all. Quite the opposite; she was growing up Cambodia 5 virus. That’s why we could find no trace of the eggs al-Qaeda needed for cultivation. She was growing up the virus at the Crick.’

‘What’s she done with it?’ asked Giles.

‘She gave it to Auroragen to grow up on an industrial scale. They’ve been filling injection vials with it for inoculation… with distribution due to start today.’

‘Christ! This is a bloody nightmare.’

‘If we can’t stop it,’ said Steven, frantically pulling his phone out, ‘something like fifty million people both here and the USA are going to be injected with Cambodia 5 virus instead of vaccine.’

‘Jesus!’

Steven called the duty officer at Sci-Med. ‘Listen and listen carefully. This is the biggest situation you are ever going to handle. We are talking a grade-one national emergency. All supplies of flu vaccine emanating from Auroragen in Liverpool must be recalled immediately. The vials do not contain vaccine, they contain a biological weapon. All government departments must be alerted to the danger and the police and army should make recovery of the vials a first priority. Auroragen can supply the distribution schedules including the arrangements for the US consignment. The company was not part of the conspiracy. Got that?’

‘Got it.’

‘When you’ve finished with the top level alerts, all major UK cities on the Auroragen supply list should be instructed to implement their biohazard emergency procedures just in case any of the distribution vehicles should be involved in an accident.’

‘Understood.’

‘Any consignments in the air should be recalled and diverted to military airports away from populated areas. If they’ve already gone beyond the point of no return, the same goes for the other side of the Atlantic.’

‘Understood.’

‘Good man. Put me through to Macmillan.’

Steven confined himself to telling Macmillan quickly that the Auroragen vials contained Cambodia 5 virus, not vaccine, knowing that his boss would appreciate the urgency of the situation and want to start making calls of his own. They agreed to speak later.

By four in the afternoon all ‘vaccine’ production had been closed down at Auroragen and stocks placed in quarantine, pending removal to Porton Down. All production workers had been placed under virtual house arrest until the incubation time for Cambodia 5 had passed — just in case they had infected themselves during the course of their everyday work. But the fact that they had been so well trained in safe microbiological techniques in an effort to avoid ‘contamination’ of the vaccine after last year’s fiasco worked both ways. Their skills had also protected them from infection when handling Cambodia 5. Fifteen outward bound trucks, laden with injection vials, had been intercepted and ordered to return to the pharmaceutical company under police escort and an RAF Hercules flight had been recalled when already two hours out over the Atlantic, bound for the USA, carrying emergency ‘vaccine’ for the Bush administration.

‘I think it fair to say that the Prime Minister and the entire cabinet were astounded at the audacity of the al-Qaeda operation,’ said Macmillan. ‘Another few hours and it would have been too late. The UK and US governments would have been crippled within weeks and it’s almost certain that a global pandemic would have ensued. They asked me to pass on their sincere thanks.’

Steven nodded. ‘So, what are they going to tell the electorate about the lack of flu vaccine this year when the papers have been doing their level best to cause panic over bird flu?’ he asked. ‘There’s no time left now to come up with a real vaccine.’

‘I understand they’re going to dress up the shortage as a change in strategy,’ said Macmillan. ‘The Health Secretary will announce that they’ve decided to go for stocks of an antiviral drug instead of a vaccine. Apparently a Swiss pharmaceutical company has come up with one they’ve had some success with.’

‘In getting politicians out of a tight corner,’ completed Steven.

‘That might well be its main asset,’ agreed Macmillan. ‘But I understand that it can be effective in preventing death if it’s taken quickly enough.’