‘Right you are sir,’ said Dewar.
‘I think this one is probably just a paperwork exercise but good luck anyway.’
Dewar had lunch at a pub by the river on the way back to the flat. It was sunny so he sat outside in the autumn sunshine with a pint of Guinness, watching the river traffic go by and thinking it might be the last time he’d do that this year. He was pleasantly surprised at how quiet the pub was. It encouraged him to open his briefcase and take out the folder he’s been given. He flicked through the contents while he waited for his prawn salad.
Basically it was a list of the universities and research institutes currently holding DNA fragments of the smallpox virus. There were twelve, two in Scotland, the rest in England. Eight had already complied with the audit request, four were still to file. The two in Scotland were among the four. Of the eight that had made returns, seven had submitted lists that agreed with the central source file. One, the Institute of Biosciences in Manchester appeared to have two more fragments than they were officially credited with. That seemed like a good starting point, thought Dewar as he put away the file and took a sip of his beer.
Hector Wright turned out to be a short fat man in his late fifties. He had a shock of white hair, a pugnacious expression and eyes that looked and learned all the time. He would never manage to look elegant or distinguished, whatever he wore, but no one would ever sell him a vacuum cleaner he didn’t want.
‘So you want me to tell you all about smallpox,’ said Wright as he slumped back down in his chair behind his desk after shaking hands. Dewar caught the body language of a man about to launch an interrogation. ‘Why?’
‘I understand you’re a leading expert on the subject,’ said Dewar, deliberately misunderstanding the question.
Wright nodded thoughtfully. He knew that Dewar had side-stepped the question. He also reckoned that he wasn’t going to get anywhere by pursuing it. ‘I don’t know if anyone can ever claim to be an expert on that little bastard,’ he said with feeling. ‘When I worked with it all these years ago it always seemed to have some new trick up its sleeve. You’d think you understood it then — I know it’s stupid to say this about a virus for God’s sake — it’s about the most basic life form you can get and some people would argue that it isn’t even that — but it was almost as if it had a mind of its own, that it was malevolent, if you get my meaning, that it wanted to kill you.’
Dewar saw that the man meant what he was saying; he wasn’t just coming out with it for effect.
‘I don’t mind telling you I got pretty mad when these people put a stop to the WHO proposal to wipe it out altogether back in ‘95. All that rubbish about destroying something that God had created and what an interesting little beast it really was. Jesus! the only function a smallpox virus ever had on this earth was to kill human beings. There’s no intermediate vector, no animal hosts, no life cycle of its own; it only affects us and we’re talking about a fifty percent kill rate with Variolamajor.
‘As much as that?’
And that doesn’t mean to say the other fifty percent get better like nothing ever happened. More often than not it leaves the survivors brain damaged, sometimes mad, often blind, always disfigured. If you come out of it with only a face that looks like you stood in front of a grenade when it went off you can count yourself a very lucky person indeed.’
‘It’s that bad?’
‘The worst.’
‘You’ve actually experienced it in the field then?’
‘1975, Somalia. I was with the WHO team who encircled the last outbreak. Like Apaches round a wagon train we were, closing in for the kill, vaccinating everything that moved so the disease couldn’t spread out from its epicentre.’
‘It must have given you a tremendous sense of achievement when you finally realised that you’d actually done it, wiped out a disease that’s plagued man throughout recorded history and probably before that.’
‘Damn right. Me and a few others, mainly Americans, got pie-eyed for a week but you know, it hardly made the papers back here.’
‘Really?’
‘People in this country had already forgotten what smallpox could do. By that time it was something that happened in far off lands. If we’d wiped out something that affected Cheltenham it might have been a different story but Africa? Bottom of page five if we were lucky. Until of course, the accident happened.’
‘Accident?’
‘Birmingham. Everyone thought it was okay to work on the virus under lab conditions. After all, you know exactly where the virus is at all times in the lab. Glass containers are much more predictable than human beings; they don’t cough, spit, throw up over you or bugger off to Majorca when they feel like it. We didn’t have the fancy containment facilities they have today and all the rules and regulations to go with it but we were still pretty careful in our own way. Each lab did its best; some were better than others of course. It was up to individual consultants to impose their own rules but Birmingham was a lesson to us all.
The damn thing got out of what everyone thought was a secure lab. It killed a woman medical photographer almost before we knew it and you know what the worst thing was? To this day we don’t know what really went wrong. We don’t know how it got out.’
Dewar was picking up a lot from Wright. The man was just talking conversationally but he found himself already developing a more than healthy respect for the virus.
‘After that there was no more working in hospital labs and the like with live smallpox. Thank God, there could have been many more accidents.’
‘My information is that there are only two places on earth that are allowed to store live smallpox?’ said Dewar.
‘That’s right, Atlanta and Koltsovo although some pessimists think it still might be viable in corpses of people who died of the disease.’
‘You’re kidding,’ said Dewar.
‘I’m not talking about bodies that have undergone normal decomposition,’ said Wright. ‘I’m talking about bodies subject to special environmental conditions. It’s been suggested that the permafrost regions of Russia might still harbour live smallpox in bodies buried there nearly a hundred years ago. The ground conditions would be just right.’
‘Requiescat in pace,’ said Dewar.
‘Amen to that,’ agreed Wright.
‘I’m told the entire smallpox genome has been DNA sequenced,’ said Dewar.
‘That’s right. We know every last base pair of its evil little self. A string of letters you can’t even make a word out of and it’s killed millions.’
‘Does that mean you could actually build it in the lab if you wanted?’
Wright smiled as if recognising the real reason for Dewar’s interest. ‘Who in their right mind would want to do that?’ he asked innocently.
‘I didn’t say anything about right mind.’
‘Point taken. No, there are easier ways of playing God. The genome has been cut into fragments so that researchers can work on bits of the virus.’
‘So I understand.’
‘And I’ve just heard about a ban being placed on the movement of these fragments,’ said Wright, putting two and two together. ‘Does that mean that you suspect someone of trying to re-assemble them?’
‘There’s no real evidence of that. It’s just a precaution,’ said Dewar. He didn’t want to insult a man of Wright’s intelligence by pretending that nothing at all was amiss.
‘But it’s something you’re looking into?’
Dewar nodded.
‘I wish you luck and hope to God, it really is just a precaution.’