‘Can I call you in the States?’ he asked.
Leila shook her head. ‘Please Steven, don’t make things more difficult for me,’ she said, wiping away a tear from her cheek. ‘Give me time to settle back into my life. When that happens, I’ll call you.’
‘Promise?’
Leila put a finger on his lips. ‘I promise.’
‘There’s nothing I can say to make you stay?’
Leila smiled and placed the palms of her hands gently on Steven’s chest. ‘Please, Steven, let’s not prolong this. It’s agony for both of us.’
Steven conceded. He kissed her gently on the forehead and then on the lips before turning to go.
Steven joined John Macmillan for a meeting of the Earlybird committee at the Home Office, thinking as he entered the room, that the mood of the meeting appeared to be more upbeat than his own.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ said the Home Office minister chairing the meeting, ‘I don’t think it’s too optimistic to say that we are winning the race. Auroragen and Dubois report that the vaccine is well ahead of schedule and the security services have uncovered no evidence at all that al-Qaeda have been able to culture large amounts of virus.’
‘Thank God for that,’ said the Metropolitan Police Commissioner.
‘And so say all of us,’ said Nigel Lees.
‘So, what do you think happened?’ asked John Macmillan. He was looking at the people from MI5, MI6 and DIS.
‘We are of the opinion that simple logistics defeated them in the end. It was just too big an undertaking for what apparently was too small a team,’ said the MI6 man.
‘We would agree with that,’ said the woman from MI5. ‘Constant vigilance stopped them getting what they needed to grow up sufficient quantities of the virus.’
‘And what about DIS, Colonel, what do they think?’ asked Macmillan.
‘Much the same,’ replied Rose. ‘We failed to identify even one successful attempt to get their hands on the fertile eggs they needed to culture the virus but…’
‘But what, Colonel?’
‘Well, you’d think that that was something they would have planned for in advance, wouldn’t you?’
You would indeed, thought Steven but he didn’t say it out loud.
‘Maybe they thought it would be much easier to do than it turned out to be,’ suggested Lees. ‘But whatever the reason, I think we owe a debt of gratitude to the police and our security services for thwarting their efforts.’
Always a crowd pleaser, thought Steven as ripples of agreement went round the room.
‘We’re not out of the woods yet,’ said Macmillan. ‘Just because we haven’t found evidence of virus production does not automatically mean that such a facility doesn’t exist.’
‘Of course not,’ agreed Lees. ‘And I think we are all agreed that we must maintain the highest standards of vigilance until Dr Martin’s vaccine is ready and has been deployed on both sides of the Atlantic to protect our people.’
‘Of course, we have to remember that it may not work at all,’ said Macmillan, much to Lees’ annoyance who saw this as an attempt to rain on his victory parade. ‘It’s a completely untested vaccine.’
‘Personally, I think we should be much more positive about things,’ said Lees. ‘Dr Martin did an absolutely magnificent job in doing what she did at such short notice. We are all in her debt and I for one, have every confidence in her work. I’m sure her vaccine will work.’
‘You hope it will work,’ corrected Macmillan. ‘Just like we all do.’
SEVENTEEN
‘Well, what do you think?’ asked Macmillan, pouring coffee when they had returned to his office.
‘There’s something wrong,’ said Steven, starting to pace up and down. ‘All that back-slapping and self-congratulation… it made me feel… nervous. They seem happy to believe that al-Qaeda were guilty of lack of foresight or bad planning. That implies that they’re stupid or incompetent. They’re neither.’
‘Would you care to be more specific?’
‘I wish I could be. I suppose it’s the small team thing that worries me most. Al-Qaeda set up a big diversionary tactic involving lots of people and lots of planning to make us think that an attack was about to be made on Canary Wharf in order to throw us off the scent of what? A small team being sent in to steal Cambodia 5 virus without the back-up necessary to do anything with it? I don’t think so somehow.’
You still think they’re going to use the virus?’
Steven shrugged and said, ‘No point in stealing it otherwise.’
‘I understand your reservations,’ said Macmillan. ‘But maybe the loss of three team members knocked them back?’
‘The three who died were unskilled cannon fodder, totally unused to handling dangerous biological material. Their ‘loss’ could have been anticipated by anyone with an IQ running into treble figures.’
‘But if that were the case, sending in not only a small team but a largely unskilled one would make even less sense,’ said Macmillan.
‘Exactly,’ said Steven. ‘We’re not seeing something here.’
‘What do you want to do?’ asked Macmillan.
‘Get out the file, go over everything again.’
‘Let’s both do that,’ said Macmillan.
Steven glanced at his watch when he got in and reckoned that Leila would be back in Washington by now. She would be looking forward to seeing old colleagues at the university in the morning and getting back into the swing of her old life — her apartment was probably a far cry from a run-down old cottage in Norfolk with its one-bar electric fire. He couldn’t blame her for needing or missing the intellectual stimulation she got from working at a large prestigious university but he had already started to nurture hopes that her success in designing a vaccine against the Cambodia 5 virus, when it became known, might well open up academic doors to her all over the world. England was what he really had in mind and Oxbridge would be just fine. He poured himself a gin and tonic and sat down to start working his way through the files.
Two hours and three gins later he thought he saw something that made his heart miss a beat and a thin film of sweat appear on his brow. He snatched up the phone and called Rose at Defence Intelligence. ‘Tell me, Colonel, what was it exactly that made you cotton on to the fact that the hit on Canary Wharf was a red herring?’
‘Hard to say when you pose the question that way,’ replied Rose. ‘I suppose I started to get the feeling that we were being led by the nose down a pre-charted pathway. I remember feeling pleased with our progress in the investigation and almost patting myself on the back when I suddenly realised that what we were seeing was what someone meant us to see. It didn’t have anything to do with luck or skill on our part; the clues were being laid down for us. The men we were picking up were low-level nobodies who had been sacrificed for the cause. We were meant to track them down. They were no great loss to al-Qaeda because there was nothing they could tell us because they didn’t know anything. Why do you ask?’
‘Because I think I’ve just had exactly the same feeling,’ said Steven. ‘The train of events that took us to the mill house wasn’t part of the big picture. It was another diversion.’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘Think about it, three dead men at the flat who’d been infected with Cambodia 5 virus, two of them actually murdered by their own, a vehicle parked conveniently round the back which yields a hair from a monkey and a petrol receipt. The receipt leads us to a petrol station which leads us to the mill house where we find egg cartons and a warm incubator room and then of course, the final slice of “luck”, a map of all the targets they intended to hit. It’s embarrassing to say it but we’ve been had; we’ve been set up. Your people couldn’t find any egg supplier because none was required. It was never their intention to do what we were meant to think they were going on to do.’