II
They were approaching Tower Bridge, St. Katharine’s Dock and the hideous concrete monstrosity that was the Thistle Tower Hotel off to their right. On their left were the converted warehouses of Butler’s Wharf. Not far beyond them lay Amy’s apartment, dark and empty. The wind was strong, blowing upriver from the estuary, and the flow of the tide helped their progress. Their wake glowed green behind them, like some luminous jet stream reflecting in the water.
MacNeil kept his concentration on the river that lay ahead. The old entry to the Traitor’s Gate in the Tower of London was all bricked up. And there was no sign of life aboard HMS Belfast as they cruised past her mooring. A thousand years of history crowded the banks of the river all around them. The Golden Hind, the Globe Theatre, St. Paul’s Cathedral, and bridge after bridge spanning the waters of a river which had borne witness to everything from the beheading of kings to the Great Fire of London and the German Blitz. All that human endeavour, inspiration and wickedness, genius and evil, brought to this sad end. People cowering in their homes, frightened to walk the streets, reduced to a life of fear and loathing by a single, deadly organism.
He turned to Dr Castelli. Perhaps now it was time to confront the truth. ‘So what do you think happened?’ he said. ‘With Choy and Blume.’
She shook her head. ‘Who knows? Stein-Francks were chasing down a vaccine. Trying to get ahead of the game. But there were plenty of others doing the same. After all, whoever could produce an effective vaccine would make billions. You know, the EU alone has over a billion euros set aside annually to buy in vaccines and antivirals in the event of a pandemic.’ She gazed off across the water. ‘But they could only produce a vaccine ahead of the game by artificially creating a version of the virus that would transmit easily from person to person. Somehow the genie got out of the bottle. Choy must have got infected. God knows how. She went with her school to Sprint Water during the October break and passed it on unwittingly to hundreds of others.’
Dr Castelli sucked in a deep breath. ‘The thing about kids is, they’re just about the most effective incubators you can get. And they’re great at passing on infection. Most adults are infectious from just before the onset of symptoms, and then for four or five days afterwards. Kids shed virus from six days before symptoms, until as long as twenty-one days after. They are walking time bombs. They have no idea they have it, but they’re passing it on to everyone they meet — when they talk, cough, sneeze. You touch stuff they’ve touched, and you’re infected. Incubation is usually one to three days, and the average person will infect one-point-four people. Kids’ll do better than that, and in closed communities they spread the virus like wildfire.’
‘So a school camp with a couple of thousand other kids is just about the worst place to send an infected child?’ MacNeil said.
‘If you were a bioterrorist, you could hardly have picked a better scenario.’
‘But Stein-Francks aren’t bioterrorists.’
‘No, they’re just trying to make money. But this time they made a bigger killing than they expected. Millions of people are going to die because somehow, somewhere along the way, they screwed up. And Choy would have been the living proof of it. Destroy her, you destroy the evidence.’
MacNeil forced himself to focus on what Dr Castelli was saying, to try to follow her logic. ‘I don’t understand. Surely she has the same virus as everyone else, so that wouldn’t prove anything.’
‘No. Her virus is different, Mr MacNeil. You told me yourself that the lab said Choy’s version of H5N1 had been genetically engineered.’
‘That’s right.’
‘So it’s different from the one that infected everyone else.’
‘How’s that possible?’
‘Because it mutated.’ Dr Castelli shrugged her shoulders as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Which it was. ‘The flu virus does it all the time — antigenic shift, reassortment, recombination. That’s why the vaccine that Stein-Francks produced didn’t work. Of course, they’d have known the virus was bound to mutate, but not as much as it did. And we had no idea that the virus that’s killing everyone had evolved from something man-made.’ She waggled a finger at him. ‘But here’s the thing. We know that Choy was at the epicentre of the pandemic, and if we’d been able to compare her virus with the one used to produce the Stein-Francks vaccine, we’d have known straight away where it came from. As good as a fingerprint. Don’t you see? That’s why they had to get rid of her.’
They were motoring up King’s Reach now, Waterloo Bridge ahead of them, the South Bank Centre to their left. Already they could see the Eye dwarfing the buildings on the south side of the river, dark, silent and still, reflecting city lights against a black sky. There was no way MacNeil could have known that Amy was a prisoner in the topmost capsule, held there by the man he had pulled from a burning car on Lambeth Bridge two hours earlier. What he did know was that once they had passed the Royal Festival Hall, and gone under the Hungerford Bridge, they would be visible to anyone watching the river from the Eye. But Blume would not be expecting them to arrive by boat. He would be on the far side of the wheel watching the road. If they cut their motor, and made a silent approach to the pier, then they might be able to catch him, and any accomplice, unawares.
As the boat passed beneath the new footbridges suspended from either side of the rail bridge carrying trains into Charing Cross, he pulled Dr Castelli’s wires apart and the motor died. They emerged silently into the short stretch of water leading down to the pier immediately opposite the Ministry of Defence.
Two girdered walkways led out from either side of the base of the wheel to the Eye’s landing stage. A large pleasure cruiser was tied up there, bobbing gently on the rise and fall. MacNeil looked up at the vast structure soaring above them. It was only when you got this close that the full scale of it made its impact. He could see a light in the control hut at the far side of the boarding and disembarkation area, but there was no sign of life.
He steered the boat gently into the pier and jumped out to tie its lanyard to the white railing that ran along its length. The little boat bumped and scraped along the edge of the pier. He knelt down beside it. Dr Castelli thought he was going to give her a hand out, but instead he whispered, ‘I want you to stay here.’ She was going to protest, but he cut her off. ‘These people are killers,’ he said. ‘No messing.’
She seemed resigned and leaned back into the boat to retrieve the rifle they had taken from the guard on the Isle of Dogs. ‘You’ll need this, then.’
But he just shook his head. ‘You keep it. If anyone comes near you, shoot them.’
‘What if it’s you?’
He gave her a look. ‘Make an exception.’
‘Okay.’
He swung himself over the rail and trotted up a covered ramp to the walkway at the south end of the pier. There, he stopped and peered towards the base of the wheel. The four huge red motors, whose rubber wheels worked like cogs to make the big wheel turn, were still. Apart from the light glowing in the control hut, there was still no sign of life. MacNeil emerged from the shadow of the ramp and felt vulnerable beneath the clear Perspex of the walkway as he covered the thirty or so yards to the embankment at a gentle run. As he passed beneath it, he glanced up at a spiral staircase climbing into darkness overhead, maintenance access to the vast motors suspended above. Ahead, a tubular gate barred his further progress. It rattled as he climbed it and dropped down on the other side. The ramps that zigzagged up to the boarding platform — where thousands had once queued daily to experience the thrill of the ride — seemed oddly haunted in their emptiness. He heard the wind as it sang through the taut spokes of the wheel, and rattled the naked branches of trees on the open concourse. Massive cables, the thickness of a man’s leg, swooped overhead to anchor the structure firmly in concrete. There were a couple of circular booths, all closed up. A café terrace, long deserted; beyond, a playpark sadly forlorn in the absence of the children’s voices which had once animated it.