‘I hope you’re not looking to me to defend the filling of forms,’ said Steven.
‘No, I just like having a rant from time to time — I like a good rant.’
‘So, how are things with Norfolk’s finest when they’re not ranting?’ asked Steven.
‘They’ve quietened down a lot,’ said Giles. ‘Finding Ali has been taken out of our hands by Her Majesty’s public schoolboys and what happened at the Crick is now yesterday’s news. The attention of the great British public has moved on: the Chief Super can sleep easy and I can get a night off. Dare I ask if the spooks have had any success?’
Steven shook his head.
‘So we’re still in trouble?’
‘Could be,’ agreed Steven. ‘But Dr Martin at the Crick has succeeded in coming up with a vaccine strain that should protect against Cambodia 5. Her strain is due to be delivered to the pharmaceutical company tomorrow. They’ll put it into production right away.’
‘What does that involve?’ asked Giles.
‘Full scale growth of the vaccine virus in fertile hens’ eggs in Auroragen’s virus culture suite.’
‘Sounds like what they were attempting at the mill house,’ said Giles.
‘It’s the same technique only they were growing up the Cambodia 5 virus itself to be used as a weapon and thankfully, on a much smaller scale. Auroragen will get through 100,000 eggs a day with production at full swing and produce something over a hundred million doses of vaccine.’
‘Mind you, the opposition have had a head start. They may have caught up a bit by now,’ said Giles.
‘And I thought you were going to cheer me up,’ said Steven.
‘Look on the bright side,’ said Giles. ‘It gives us both an excuse to get pissed.’
‘Same again?’ asked Steven.
‘So what happens once the vaccine has grown up in the eggs?’ asked Giles when Steven returned with two more beers.
‘They harvest the amniotic fluid from the eggs — that’s the stuff which contains the virus — and then it’s put into injection vials which will be used to vaccinate people in Europe and the USA.’
‘So you’re injecting people with one virus to protect them against another?’
‘That’s exactly it,’ said Steven. ‘The body will produce antibodies against the first virus — the harmless one — which will also work against the killer because they are so similar — one is an attenuated form of the other. It’s called live-virus vaccination. They use the same technique for smallpox. They inject a virus similar to smallpox called Vaccinia into you and it stimulates antibodies which work against smallpox itself.’
‘How do you know the flu one will work?’
‘In this case we don’t,’ said Steven. ‘Normally it would be tested on animals first but there hasn’t been time. We’ll just have to hope.’
‘And if the worst comes to the worst and it doesn’t work?’
‘The public will be defenceless against a Cambodia 5 attack. If the intelligence services don’t find Ali and his pals in time and destroy the virus stocks they’ve been growing up, they’ll spray it around city centres up and down the country and we’ll have a major epidemic on our hands and by the end of the first month, probably a pandemic across the globe.’
‘But surely there must be drugs they can use?’ said Giles.
Steven shook his head. ‘There’s a common misconception that you can use antibiotics to treat virus infections — but you can’t. Antibiotics work against bacteria not viruses.’
‘They’re all the same to me,’ said Giles.
‘The bugs know the difference,’ said Steven. ‘There are a few anti-viral drugs coming on to the market but they tend to be of limited use. Prevention is still better than a cure when it comes to virus infection.’
Acting on the spur of the moment, Steven drove up to Norfolk’s north coast next morning and went for a walk along the beach. He felt decidedly rough after the night before but the cool breeze coming in off the North Sea soon cleared his head and he took pleasure from being outdoors on a day when gulls were wheeling above the waves and the sun was sparkling on the water. He’d always liked beach walking, particularly on wide expanses of hard packed sand where the horizons seemed infinite and the sky fell into the ocean. Today was a special day: it was the day Leila’s vaccine strain would be handed over to the drug company. He glanced at his watch and saw that it would already be on its way — she had opted to travel up to Liverpool with it and supervise the handover personally. After that, she would get her life back — a life he very much hoped to be part of in the coming weeks. He would call her this evening when he got home.
It had been a long time since he had felt so interested in a woman and despite the fact that he knew so little about her, he had even started considering how Jenny might take to there being a new woman in his life and when might be the right time to tell her. Of course, this might be a two-way problem, he recognised. There had been times in the past when the revelation that he had a daughter had cooled a relationship. Many intelligent career women did not automatically warm to the prospect of playing mother to a ready-made family. He picked up a pebble and threw it out into the sea, berating himself for even thinking about such things when he hardly even knew Leila Martin.
Normally he would have sought out a pub to have lunch after such a walk but the excesses of the previous night steered him instead to a harbour-side coffee shop where he ordered scrambled eggs on toast and a mug of black coffee. He examined water colours of local scenes, painted by local artists while he waited but he’d never been a big fan of water colour; he found it too insipid for landscapes or seascapes. He ate his meal and had a second mug of coffee before heading back to his hotel to continue what he had been about to start last night. Once the report was done he reckoned he might be able to take some time off. With a bit of luck Leila might even be persuaded to do the same.
‘You smell of fresh air,’ said the receptionist at the hotel when he asked for his key.
Steven smiled. It was something his mother used to say to him as a child when he came back from a day in the hills in his native Cumbria. ‘I’ve been for a walk on the beach,’ he explained.
‘Lucky you,’ said the girl. ‘I’ve been stuck here all day,’
Starting to note down the various steps he’d taken during the investigation made him think about what Giles had said the night before about writing up reports. He found himself trying to order events in a logical way rather than in the sequence they’d actually happened. Giles was right; official reports were no place for recording gut instinct — the real reason he’d gone to Nick Cleary’s house after feeling that the man was holding something back after he’d first interviewed him. Reports were written after the event, when hindsight was on tap.
He could see now that some of the tests he had asked for were redundant almost before the results had come back from the lab. The DNA profiles he’d asked for at the Crick to eliminate the possibility of a member of staff having touched the key on the secret safe had failed to reveal a match because there really had been a third man involved in the attack on the institute — the Ali character who seemed to have cropped up so often without being identified. DIS had found his DNA in the flat where the three dead men had been found, adding more fuel to the suspicion that he had killed two of them. They couldn’t identify him from any data file but they had confirmed that his DNA was a match for the profile that had been found on the safe key in the Crick.
‘He certainly gets around,’ murmured Steven. It was a thought that made him wonder why? If al-Qaeda was engaged in a big operation, why should one man crop up so often? True, Ali was probably the leader but it tended to imply that the team he led was small. There again, a small team would be more secure than a large one where the risk of capture or failure increased with the appointing of every additional member, but there were certain things that a small team could not achieve and cultivating a lethal virus and using it to carry out a major biological attack on several cities simultaneously across the UK was one of them.