EIGHTEEN
Steven put the phone down feeling utterly bemused. Leila hadn’t turned up at either her apartment or the university. There had been no indication at the airport that she intended going anywhere else first so what the hell was going on? It made him wonder about her insistence that she should call him rather than the other way around. If it hadn’t been for the query over the animal order she’d placed, he wouldn’t even know that she wasn’t back in Washington. ‘Oh, Leila,’ he murmured softly. ‘Leila… Leila, my beautiful Leila, what are you playing at?’
Steven wondered whether Leila’s apparent lack of frankness was personal and had something to do with some other relationship she might be engaged in — but maybe this was personalising the problem too much. However difficult he found it, he must try to avoid that and make his head rule his heart. It was however, possible to reconcile both with his first decision. He had to find out where she’d gone. Although her work might be over for the moment, Leila was still a major figure in the fight against any attack involving the use of Cambodia 5 virus. He called the duty man at Sci-Med and asked him to get on to Heathrow and find out as quickly as possible which flight she had boarded and where she’d gone.
While he waited for a reply, Steven called John Macmillan and told him what had happened.
‘Maybe she decided to take a holiday first,’ suggested Macmillan. ‘She’s been working round the clock for the past few months.’
‘She didn’t say anything about taking a holiday to me,’ said Steven.
‘Should she have?’
‘We are friends… we had a relationship.’
‘I noticed,’ said Macmillan. ‘Maybe you imagined that it would be on-going and she didn’t?’
‘Nothing like that,’ Steven assured him. ‘If I’m honest, I hoped that might be the case but Leila made it quite clear that her career came first and that she was going back to the States to continue it. She couldn’t wait to get back to the university in Washington… she said.’
‘So why not be honest about what she was planning…’ mused Macmillan, as if trying to decide whether or not the deception was big enough to cause Sci-Med concern.
‘I’m trying to see things objectively,’ said Steven. ‘But emotional involvement is getting in the way. I find myself thinking she’s gone off to France or Spain to meet up with some secret lover.’
‘Which of course, would be of no concern to Sci-Med,’ said Macmillan.
‘Quite,’ agreed Steven. ‘But there may be another reason she’s gone missing and that’s why I need an objective view.’
Macmillan took a few moments to compose his thoughts before taking a deep breath and saying, ‘Dr Martin has been — is — more than a bit player in all of this. She is the designer of our main hope of defence against a potentially disastrous biological weapon. It is essential we know exactly where she is at all times — especially if it should be somewhere other than where she said she’d be.’
‘I suppose that was what I wanted to hear,’ said Steven. ‘I’ve put the wheels in motion to find out what flight she boarded and where she was going when I said goodbye to her on Tuesday.’
‘Good. I have to say in any other circumstances I’d replace you with one of the others because of your personal involvement but you’re in this too deep and you’ve already brought us a long way. You’re probably still our best chance of finding out what al-Qaeda are really up to. I won’t give you a lecture about steeling yourself to be objective but you must continue to think round all the angles, Steven — whoever it concerns. You’re good at it, maybe the best: continue to be.’
Macmillan had already hung up but Steven murmured, ‘Yes, Boss,’ before switching off his phone and slumping down into his chair by the window. The light was almost gone and the traffic on the river was lit up like pearls on velvet. He concentrated on the one star he could see in the sky as he forced himself to think round all the angles where Leila was concerned. The trouble was he knew so little about her. There just hadn’t been time to say much to each other about their past lives because of the demands and sense of urgency of the situation they’d found themselves in. It had been a bit like a wartime romance with no time for considerations past or future; only the ‘now’ had been important. This was a situation that had to be remedied. He called the duty man at Sci-Med and said, ‘I’ve got another job for you. I need you to find out everything there is to know about Dr Leila Martin and her career. Get on to her university in Washington and see if you can get them to send a full CV. If they prove difficult, get John Macmillan to put the request through the CIA chief of station in London. If the worst comes to the worst he’ll be at the meeting of the UK Joint Intelligence Committee tomorrow.’
‘A CIA man at the JIIC meeting?’ exclaimed the duty man.
‘That’s normal protocol,’ said Steven. ‘He leaves when domestic matters are discussed. This is top priority,’ he insisted. ‘I need this information.’
‘Understood.’
‘Anything back from Heathrow yet?’
‘Nothing. I’ll get on to them again.’
Another hour was to pass before the duty man called back. ‘Heathrow says that no one named Leila Martin left through the airport on Tuesday on any of their flights.’
‘They’re sure?’ exclaimed Steven.
‘They’re positive.’
‘You’re telling me she never left the country?’
‘No, they’re telling you she never left the country and, like I say, they’re quite sure. If you turn on your laptop, I’ll forward some stuff to you that’s just come in from Washington on Dr Martin. I told them we needed the CV for an article The Times was doing about American academics working in the UK and they sent it without question.’
‘Well done,’ said Steven. ‘”A” for initiative.’
‘Mum will be pleased… Use decoder l54.’
Curiouser and curiouser, thought Steven. If Leila hadn’t left the country… this could put a whole new complexion on things. He knew he shouldn’t read too much into it but his spirits rose when the thought occurred to him that there was just a chance that the whole thing might be some kind of misunderstanding. Leila might have forgotten something and gone back to the cottage to get it. It had taken longer than she’d anticipated and she’d simply missed her flight! Rather than bother calling anyone, she had stayed over, made new arrangements and flew out next day or whenever they could get her on another flight! It was only a working hypothesis but he liked it. He called the duty man at Sci-Med once more and asked him to check again with the airport — this time against all departures on Wednesday or even Thursday.
‘Will do. Get the CV okay?’ asked the duty man.
‘I’m just about to download it,’ said Steven. He set up his laptop to receive and decode Leila Martin’s CV and spent the next fifteen minutes going through it. He didn’t feel comfortable doing it because it seemed underhand, disloyal, almost the action of a secret policeman investigating his own family but he knew it had to be done.
He read that Leila Martin was the daughter of a French father and Moroccan mother. Her late father had been a distinguished neurologist who had written several books on the subject, one of them now a widely recognised university text book, her mother a concert pianist who had been establishing herself as a particularly brilliant interpreter of the works of Liszt had had her career cut tragically short by arthritis in her thirties. Leila had been brought up in Paris and educated both there and at a finishing school in Berne, in Switzerland. She had returned to study biological sciences at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and had gone on to obtain a doctorate in immunology from the Seventh University of Paris before heading off to the USA to take up successive post doctoral fellowships at the University of California at Los Angeles and at Harvard Medical School in Boston. She had then moved to the World Health Organisation in Geneva to work on vaccine design for third world immunisation programmes before returning to the States to become associate professor of immunology at the university in Washington where she was currently employed.