‘Some years ago.’
‘You’re still well thought of at Hereford.’
‘Good to know,’ said Steven. ‘I take it you’re carrying out the initial assault on the mill?’
‘That’s our brief… with particular emphasis on the fact that no one and nothing must escape from the building.’
‘And if it should turn out to be heavily defended?’
‘We torch the lot with incendiaries until it and everything in it is a pile of ash.’
Nice clear mandate, thought Steven as the officer walked to the front of the room. There never had been much room for Rupert Brooke in the SAS.
The officer briefed the room on what would be the unfolding chain of events. The SAS already had a recce team in position near the milclass="underline" they had been watching the building from before dawn. So far, they had reported no comings or goings. The SAS would carry out the initial assault on the building and make it secure. The biohazard team would then enter and report back. Anyone captured inside the building would be handed over immediately to the security services to be taken away for interrogation. When the situation inside the building was considered safe and stable, Steven and the police teams would be free to carry out inspection and forensic examination of the mill and its contents.
‘Any questions?’
There were none.
Shortly after 11a.m., with everyone in position, the SAS troop went into action. Steven watched as camouflaged figures flitted across and around the building, crouching and running, pressing themselves to the walls as they came close to windows. It was like watching a silent film, as he saw the soldiers communicate by hand signal alone. He had expected them to use stun grenades before breaking in through the front door but he could see from his position in the undergrowth that there had been an impromptu change of plan: they must have concluded that the ground floor was unoccupied. Their leader obviously felt that the element of surprise was still with them and should be exploited. A window at the side of the mill was forced open and two gas-masked soldiers disappeared inside.
Steven held his breath, steeling himself for the sound of an explosion or a burst of automatic fire coming from the upstairs rooms but the silence continued until the minutes started to pass like hours. It seemed such an anticlimax when the front door was opened by the two soldiers who had climbed inside. They were stripping off their masks and loosening their protective gear.
The biohazard team went inside after a brief discussion with the soldiers’ leader and Steven walked over to have a word with him.
‘Nobody home,’ said the soldier. ‘Is that good or bad?’
‘Could be either,’ said Steven. ‘Did it look like an orderly withdrawal or a drop-everything-and-run job?’
‘I’d guess at the former,’ said the soldier. ‘Nothing Mary Celeste about it, no personal possessions lying about, in fact, not much of anything lying around.’
‘Any room that looked like it was used as a lab?
‘There’s a tiled room downstairs in the basement with a large fridge in it and a few bits of glassware. There’s a little room off it which I thought was a sauna at first but maybe not. It was certainly warm but not that warm if you know what I mean and there were some empty boxes in it.’
‘What kind of empty boxes?’ asked Steven.
‘The sort you get eggs in. You know, papier mache trays.’
‘Their incubator room,’ said Steven.
The soldier gave Steven a blank look.
‘Where they were growing the virus. It’s grown in fertile hens’ eggs kept at body temperature.’
The biohazard team didn’t take long to declare the building free from any overt biological or chemical danger and Steven and Giles took a look at the ‘lab’ for themselves when the forensic team had finished their work.
‘The whole place was probably cleared out when the three of them fell sick,’ said Giles, running his fingers along a smooth, plastic-topped table. ‘So it’s back to square one.’
Steven took a look inside the incubator room where the egg boxes had been found. He counted the number of tray spaces and did a rough calculation in his head. ‘Not a big operation,’ he said. ‘They’ll need to culture a lot more virus if they’re going for a big hit.’
‘Excuse me, sir,’ said one of the forensic team who’d been going through the upstairs rooms and had just appeared in the doorway. ‘We found this in one of the drawers.’
Giles took what looked like a folded map from the man and opened it out on the table. Steven thought it was going to be a road map of the surrounding area but it turned out to be something quite different. It was a map of the UK. On it, six major cities including London and Edinburgh had been circled in red.
‘Even my cat, Tiddles, could work this one out,’ murmured Giles.
‘They are going for the big one,’ said Steven, feeling a sense of desolation come over him. Although the spectre of nuclear and biological weapons had been around for long enough, many people including himself had been clinging to the hope that they wouldn’t be used in their lifetime and hopefully never — in the way that tomorrow always seems very near but never actually comes. Now the red circles on the map were painting pictures of people falling down in the streets of major cities, struggling for breath as bloody mucous choked their airways and fever sent them into delirium. Schools and offices would close, transport would grind to a halt, electricity and water supplies would fail, food would run out and the law of the jungle would rule the streets.
‘You okay?’ asked Giles as they climbed the stairs.
‘Fine,’ said Steven.
As they reached the front door, Steven stopped and said, ‘I wonder if they took their rubbish with them…’
‘We can check,’ said Giles. ‘If they were any good, they would have…’
They walked round the sides and back of the building looking for rubbish bins and found three plastic wheelie bins lined up beside the old mill wheel enclosure. One contained mouldy grass clippings, probably left over from the summer and probably by a previous tenant thought Steven as the sour smell of partially fermented grass assaulted his nostrils: the other two bins were empty.
‘Guess they were smart enough to take it with them,’ said Giles.
‘Guess God stopped being kind,’ said Steven.
‘What were you looking for anyway?’
‘I don’t know…’ said Steven, giving an uneasy shrug. ‘Eggshells… syringes… dead chick embryos… general lab detritus…’ He spread his hands and looked about him. ‘A dead monkey even…’
‘You know, getting rid of a large monkey would be almost as difficult as getting rid of a human body,’ said Giles after a moment’s thought. ‘Not easy at the best of times but I can’t honestly see them carting it round the country with them. Maybe I should put some of the guys on to searching the grounds for shallow graves?’
‘Or the site of a recent bonfire,’ said Steven. ‘They may have burned it but the bones should still be around.’
When Giles returned from setting up the search he found Steven taking another look at the wheelie bins.
‘Dry,’ he said. ‘They didn’t use these bins at all.’
‘Maybe they put the waste in plastic bags?’ said Giles.
‘Maybe,’ agreed Steven. ‘But they didn’t store the bags in the bins either. The dirt on the bottom hasn’t been disturbed for many months. You could write your name in it.’
‘Strikes me this Ali is a real pro,’ said Giles. ‘He leaves nothing to chance.’