The Stein-Francks press conference was to announce a further stepping up of FluKill production to meet the increased requirements. A cynical journalist amongst the press pack asked Dr Blume if the increase in production might have anything to do with the announcement by several developing countries that they intended to produce their own generic form of the drug. Blume easily shrugged off the clear implication that his company was only interested in maintaining its monopoly.
‘We have a brand-new facility in France, custom-made to produce FluKill,’ he said. ‘It comes on-line next week. It has been a long time in the planning. So this is no rush move to fight off the competition. We can produce the drug faster and more efficiently than anyone else. And we have all the quality controls in place to ensure its effectiveness.’
‘Your vaccine didn’t prove very effective.’ The journalist’s tone reflected the general feeling of resentment around the country that anyone should profit from the disaster.
‘A matter of great regret,’ said Blume. ‘Not for any crass, commercial reason, but because of the lives it might have saved.’
‘And why didn’t it work?’ Another voice fired off its accusation.
‘Because we guessed wrong,’ Blume said simply. ‘Bird flu has been around for a long time, but it was only in 1997 that we confirmed the first human case of it. On that occasion, the virus was transmitted from bird to human. But from that moment on, it was only a matter of time before the bird virus combined with a human flu virus, making it transmissible from human to human. We knew when that happened, the human race would be in big trouble. A pandemic was inevitable, and would almost certainly be worse than the Spanish Flu of 1918. That killed fifty million people. So the race was on to find a way of beating it this time before it began.’ He ran a hand back across his bristly skull. ‘We, along with many others, tried to create in the laboratory something that would look to the immune system like a humanly transmissible avian flu. And so create a vaccine. That involved mixing and matching genes from the H5N1 bird flu virus with a common human flu virus. For that purpose we chose the H3N2 strain, which has been behind most recent human flu outbreaks.’ The doctor shook his head. ‘The goal was to substitute the eight genes of each virus, one by one, with the eight genes from the other, to see which combinations would create versions easily spread amongst humans. The trouble was, that with more than two hundred and fifty possible combinations, hitting on the right one was a bit like winning the lottery.’
‘But you thought you’d done it.’
‘Yes. Because when the real virus actually emerged, we found we had created something almost identical. The trouble was, it was just different enough that the immune system wasn’t fooled, and we knew it was going to take anything up to six months to put that right.’
‘So has anyone at Stein-Francks come up with a reasonable explanation of why the pandemic started in London rather than Asia?’
‘That’s not our job,’ said Blume smoothly. If he detected the hostility coming from his questioners, he was ignoring it. ‘It’s something you’ll need to ask the Health Protection Agency.’ He paused. ‘But you don’t have to be very smart to figure that it only takes one infected individual from Vietnam, or Thailand, or Cambodia, to fly into London, New York or Paris, and you’ve sown the seed. In this modern age of air travel, we really do live in a global village. And we’ve created the perfect incubators for breeding and passing on infection, in the buses and planes and underground trains we travel on. We were a human disaster waiting to happen.’
The newscast cut back to the studio and breaking news of a development in the race to fill the power vacuum left by the death of the PM. But by now Laing had lost interest and turned it off. He swivelled in his chair and looked speculatively at MacNeil. ‘You’re a fucking idiot, man. Quitting now. You’re a good cop...’ He hesitated. The compliment had been grudging. Something he was loathe to admit. ‘You could have been sitting in my seat in a few years.’
‘By which time Sean would nearly have finished school.’ MacNeil shook his head. ‘There’s no second chances with kids. You can’t turn the clock back on childhood.’ He looked beyond Laing, out of the window to Kennington Road below. The shops and restaurants opposite the police station. Trafalgar Lock and Key, Perdoni’s Restaurant, Peter’s Gents Hair Stylist, the Imperial Tandoori. All more familiar to him than his own son. He’d spent more time in the company of Laing, for God’s sake!
Laing said, ‘I’ll need to ask for your FluKill back before you clock off tomorrow.’ MacNeil looked at him. ‘I’m sorry, Jack. You’re no longer on the front line. Or at least, you won’t be.’
‘Fine.’
Laing slapped his palms on his desk. ‘You’ve got two hours to get that site searched before I send the diggers back in.’
Chapter Three
I
It was a little like a jigsaw puzzle, putting a person back together. Amy sat breathing into the claustrophobic cotton of her mask and smelled the decay rising from the table in front of her. She remembered her first real facial reconstruction. It had been in Manchester. She had travelled up by train and stayed with relatives. The lady had been dead for nearly three months. Her skull had been boiled slowly in water and detergent, with some bleach, and still it stank so much that the FSS had rented her a hotel room to work in. They didn’t want Amy stinking up a lab, or someone’s office.
The hotel management had been suspicious of all the plain-clothes cops popping in and out, parking unmarked cars out front, visiting the young Chinese woman in room 305. They probably suspected some kind of prostitution. In any event, the chambermaid had complained about the smell, and Amy had been asked to leave.
Tom had laid out a body bag on the table, draped it with a clean sheet and assembled the bones in their rough anatomic position. The hands and feet he had left in small piles. The spine he had divided into its cervical, thoracic and lumber sections, but the pieces were not in their correct order. Neither were the ribs. Amy smiled when she saw the skeleton diagram that he had pinned to the wall. Bones had never been his forte. From day one at med school he had been more interested in the organs, the cardiovascular system, the brain. But something about the human frame had attracted Amy. It was, after all, the structure around which everything else was built. Which was what had led her improbably, in the end, to teeth.
She started carefully rebuilding the hands. The small hands of a child. There were 206 bones in the adult human, more than half of them in the hands and feet. But there were 350 in an infant. Some bones fused as they grew. Amy was uncertain how many bones there would be in this particular child, but she was sure she would spot any that might be missing.
She looked up, along with half a dozen others, as the door swung open and Zoe came in. They all knew she’d been standing out on the front steps even before they smelled the smoke off her.
‘Mask!’ someone called. She’d forgotten to put it back on.
‘Oops, sorry.’ She pulled it up over her mouth and nose. ‘You know you’re just as likely to catch it from touching something an infected person’s been touching,’ she said. ‘As long as no one’s sneezing in your face.’ She was a post-graduate microbiologist training in forensics at the FSS, and she liked to show off. But the contagious qualities of the flu virus were known to everyone these days. It was why the government had introduced emergency measures to prevent the printing and distribution of newspapers. Paper was a perfect carrier. Newsprint handled by an infected person would pass the disease on to another reader. Once the virus was on your hands, it could pass into your system via food, or even by rubbing your eyes. News was only disseminated now by radio, television and the internet.