‘So, tell me all your news,’ Steven encouraged.
‘I wanted to ask you something, Dad.’
‘Uh huh.’
‘Well, it’s been a while since we chatted about what I might do when I left school.’
‘And you’ve come to a decision?’
‘I’d really like to be a nurse...’
‘I think that’s wonderful.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes really, why do you sound so surprised?’
‘My teachers say I should be going to medical school with my grades and you would be disappointed if I didn’t.’
‘Nothing could be further from the truth, Jenny. I’m delighted, as long as you realise what you’re taking on. Being a nurse often means seeing people at their worst; it can be far from glamourous.’
‘I think I realise all that, Dad and I think I really do want to train as a nurse.’
‘That’s exactly the way you should feel, nutkin, I couldn’t be more pleased.’
‘Jenny wants to be a nurse,’ Steven announced without turning when Tally arrived home.
‘I know,’ whispered Tally, coming up behind him and placing her hands on his shoulders. ‘She called me a couple of days ago to ask how I thought you would take it.’
‘What a sneaky pair,’ Steven exclaimed, ‘what did you say?’
‘I told her you would be delighted to see her follow in her mother’s footsteps and that she’d make a great nurse. Was I right?’
‘As always.'
Tally ruffled his hair as she turned to take her coat off and go put her bag away. ‘Another of life’s milestones as you like to call them.’
‘She’s obviously put a lot of thought into it and knows her own mind. I was quite impressed... and proud’
‘And is therefore about to do the right thing...’ said Tally in a tone that alerted Steven to something else coming. ‘Give me a moment,’ she said in response to Steven’s look.
When she returned Tally sat down beside him and took his right hand in both of hers. ‘I’ve made a bit of a decision,’ she said.
Steven felt a hollow appear in his stomach. He couldn’t find words to voice his unease.
‘I’m going to go to the DRC.’
Steven was stunned. ‘That’s crazy.’
‘No... no, it isn’t, I’ve thought it through and I think it’s the right thing to do. It’s become clear they have money and resources, but they are sadly lacking in managers who know what they’re doing and what needs doing.’
‘And that’s you?’
‘Yes.’
Steven struggled to find the right questions to ask. ‘Did you volunteer or were you asked?’
‘I was approached after one of the Ebola meetings by someone who feels like me that our best, and maybe our only line of defence against an outbreak in the UK is to stop it coming here in the first place. The new investment programme for dealing with the threat of pandemics involves the recruitment of area managers to assist experienced regional managers. This should speed up response times and make sure volunteers are in the right place at the right time. Vaccination teams will be primed and ready to round up contacts of every Ebola case reported and vaccinate them quickly. They already have the personnel for the teams, but they need direction and good management. Intelligence centres will be set up in different regions of the country to corelate area reports and direct resources accordingly.’
‘Why you?’
‘I’m good at seeing the big picture and I’m fed up with my country looking the other way. I can see what needs doing and, on a personal level, I think it’s the right thing for me to do. I’ve sailed through life on a sea of middle-class niceness, protected at every twist and turn from anything resembling danger or hardship — a bit like the audience at a book festival — they know there’s something foul and nasty out there: it’s intriguing — even exciting, but the closest they’ll ever come to it is reading about it. My journey has brought me to a senior post at a top London hospital with everything I need at my fingertips, being praised and thanked routinely on an almost daily basis. I really feel the need to do my bit properly.’
Steven looked around the room as if searching for inspiration and the words to express it. ‘I really want to shake you,’ he said. ‘You get thanks and praise because you’ve earned it and you deserve it. You get it, not because you’re a pop star or a member of the royal family, but because you’re a bloody brilliant doctor and many children are alive because of you. It wasn’t luck that brought you to Great Ormond Street, it was sheer ability, a case of giving the best tools to the best practitioners.’
‘Thanks for that,’ said Tally in a small voice. ‘The hospital is prepared to give me leave and have assured me of their support...’
‘I suppose there’s nothing more to say...’ said Steven feeling helpless.
‘Yes, there is... I need your support too.’
The lump in Steven’s throat prevented him from saying anything. He Took Tally in his arms and held her tight for a long while. When he finally found words he whispered, ‘You have it, of course you do... if I can’t change your mind.’
Tally’s squeeze on his arm as she let go of him told him that wasn’t going to happen.
Worry over what Tally was about to do played a significant role in intruding on Steven’s thinking on the following few days. He found himself working on auto-pilot, moving names around on sheets of paper, altering the order, playing around with dates but a central pattern stubbornly refused to appear.
After three days, he took a mental step back and examined what working hypothesis he had come up with. A number of highly successful people who had no apparent connection with each other had been paid a great deal of money to use their expertise in order to design or do... what? Whatever it was, it had upset other people — possibly Chinese — greatly and they had responded with extreme violence. Was it over? Had they finished?
Steven acknowledged that the sense of frustration he felt was almost certainly due to a “cell network” being used. This was common in intelligence operations where individuals involved in secret operations were only told what they absolutely needed to know. This protected others in the network should one of them be captured and tortured. The ideal network would comprise people who didn’t know each other at all. Such a network however, might work well for operations like carrying out attacks on targets in occupied territories in times of war, but whether it could be scaled up in complexity, demanding the contributions of highly technical experts, but in different specialities, to work together without ever meeting, was another question. But maybe he was looking at the answer.
There would have to be at least one person who knew everything, but getting to that person seemed a long way off right now. Perhaps the way to tackle the problem of the “cell” was to think from the bottom upwards instead of top down. In Steven’s experience the driving force behind almost everything was either money or political ideology. The fact that Russian ex pat money was behind what he was looking for suggested that it was the former. These people were all very rich and had given up on politics. It could be argued that they didn’t need any more money, but, again, in his experience, people with money always wanted more. Millionaires wanted to become billionaires. Billionaires, trillionaires and so on. These people however, would be investors in the project, not world leading experts in science and medicine like Field and Pashley, but big successes in business and making money, mostly in oil, gas, mining, shipping, who had been persuaded to part with a fortune in order to make a bigger one.