Dark Winter ns-6

by Andy McNab

  ‘Of course. He isn’t here at the moment, he’s gone to Waitrose. After doing nothing but complain and chair that damned committee to stop the thing being built, you can’t keep him out of there!’

  We both laughed, said goodbye, and I headed towards the kitchen to make us a brew.

  The intercom buzzed and I hit the button. A slightly anxious voice crackled, ‘Hello, I’m Simon, I believe I’m expected. A lady called Yvette told me to be here at three.’

  I hit the entry button as Suzy came out of the bedroom and shut the door behind her, then started to check round the flat in case we’d left the odd SD sitting on the tea-tray.

  I flicked the kettle on in the kitchen, then opened the front door. Looking down the stairwell, I could see the top of a neatly cut and combed blond head making its way towards me from a couple of flights below. As he got closer, I saw he was in his early thirties, tall and thin, and very well groomed. That made sense: you probably would give yourself a good scrub after spending the day surrounded by flesh-eating bugs and all that sort of shit.

  When he reached the landing I stepped back to let him in. He had to be at least six four: I was looking into his neck. He was clutching a battered canvas shoulder-bag he must have had since his student days. He could have been captain of the basketball team, but was probably too polite.

  ‘Hello, mate.’

  He hesitated in the hallway, his hand half out, not too sure what to do. We shook and smiled at each other. He was very clean-shaven, and his cheeks had the kind of bright red patches you usually only see at the circus. Maybe it had been an effort climbing the stairs, or maybe he was just flapping. He struck me immediately as one of those people who had pocketfuls of niceness. I hoped we weren’t going to spoil things for him.

  I pointed to my right, and he followed me through to the front room. I offered him the settee. ‘I’ve just put the kettle on – want a brew?’

  Suzy came in and held out her hand with a welcoming ‘Hello.’ He was half-way down into the settee but still as tall as she was when her hand disappeared into his. ‘Nothing for me, thanks. I won’t be staying long, there’s a car waiting for me. I have another brief at four thirty.’

  Suzy was all smiles as her eyes locked briefly on mine. It wouldn’t be a brief he was going to at half four but isolation, until this job was over. ‘You don’t want any of his tea? Wise move – I bet most of the stuff in your laboratory tastes better.’

  Terrible joke, but he laughed all the same, still not sure whether to stand up again or sit right down. Suzy waved him into the seat. ‘Simon, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, Simon, Simon Ma—’

  She held up her hand. ‘Simon’ll do just fine. Well, Simon, what have you got for us today?’

  19

  ‘May I?’ His bag hovered above the table while he waited for permission.

  ‘Of course.’ Suzy was doing a good job of making him feel comfortable, but with his arse sunk down in the settee and his knees up by his chin he certainly didn’t look it.

  The bag went down and he took off his coat to reveal a maroon cardigan over his brown checked shirt. He still looked nervous; maybe it didn’t look like an FCO brief and he was worried we’d have to shoot him afterwards.

  Once he’d unbuckled his bag, he pulled out a clutch of ten-by-eight colour photographs and put them on the table. He cleared his throat.

  ‘Simon, quick question before you start?’ I always wanted to know who was giving me a brief. Not having enough knowledge to pass on is sometimes more dangerous than not knowing anything at all. ‘Can you tell us where you’re from?’

  Suzy’s chewing filled in the second or two of silence while he wondered if that would be OK.

  ‘Of course. I’m a doctor, formerly working in Namibia, before becoming a consultant at the School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine here in London. After the US anthrax attacks I became a technical adviser on biological agents slash weapons for the Foreign Office – briefings for embassy staff, that sort of thing.’

  Suzy interrupted, with a smile, ‘What have you been told about why you’re here today, Simon?’

  ‘Just that I’m to fill you in on pneumonic plague and its potential as a weapon. No more than that.’

  She nodded her thanks and I signalled that I had no further questions. He picked up the dozen or so ten-by-eights and passed them to me. ‘This is the type of case I’ve tried to treat over the years.’

  I looked down and found myself inspecting a series of close-ups of a bloated old man’s body – head, arms, torso, legs – covered in swellings and weeping pus. His gangrenous fingers and toes looked like they’d been pushed into a food processor. I tried not to look at the one of his face, at the terror in his eyes. This guy was being eaten alive. The foil rustled on Suzy’s blister pack and I knew she was trying to avoid it too.

  Simon’s eyes flickered between the two of us with a nervous smile, trying to establish if this was the level of information we wanted. As Suzy put the last of the scary pictures back on to the table, he took it as his cue to carry on. ‘There are two main variants. Bubonic plague, you’ll have heard of – it was responsible for the Black Death in the fourteenth century, killing over thirty million in Europe alone. Bubonic plague was what the nursery rhyme was all about – “Ring a ring o’ roses, a pocketful of posies”.’

  Suzy finished it for him. ‘“Atishoo, atishoo, we all fall down!”’

  I didn’t join in. It was another nursery rhyme I’d never learned. My stepdad didn’t like things like that going on in the house. My mum had to be at work at the launderette, not wasting time teaching her kids that sort of nonsense. Knowing shit like that never got anyone a job.

  He cleared his throat again. ‘Yes, thirty million in Europe alone, the biggest chunk of population ever killed by any epidemic. But bubonic plague is the less deadly variant of the two.’ His eyes flicked between the two of us again. ‘The variant I am talking about today is pneumonic plague, which infects the lungs and is so highly contagious that it’s an A-class weapon. The only other two with that designation are smallpox and anthrax – that’s how bad this disease is. If treatment is delayed more than twenty-four hours after infection, the mortality rate is virtually one hundred per cent.’

  Suzy was leaning towards him now. ‘So its supply or whatever is tightly controlled?’

  He smiled fleetingly. ‘It cannot be controlled. Pneumonic plague is caused naturally by the bacterium Yersinia pestis , found in rodents and their fleas on every continent except Australia and Antarctica. It occurs in humans when they’re bitten by plague-infected fleas – but thankfully there are just thirty cases a year, on average, worldwide.’ He tapped the ten-by-eights still on the table, and looked sad. ‘Old Archibald had the misfortune to be one of them.’

  I didn’t really give a shit about poor old Archibald. I wanted to keep Simon on track. ‘It can be used as a weapon?’

  He sighed and shook his head. ‘It doesn’t bear thinking about. Just fifty kilograms sprayed over a city the size of London would infect as many as a hundred and fifty thousand people, nearly a third of whom would be expected to die. And those are just the primary victims. That figure would be multiplied many times if infected people carried it to other cities or countries. Pneumonic plague spreads like wildfire, transported by respiratory droplets – a simple cough or sneeze will infect anyone within range. The trouble is, there are no effective environmental warning systems to detect plague bacilli, so you wouldn’t know you’d been infected until symptoms appeared.’

  I realized I still had my jacket on and semi-stood to take it off. ‘How long does that take then – you know, the symptoms?’

  ‘The time from exposure until development of first symptoms is normally between one and six days, but most often two to four.’

  ‘So, what are we looking for?’

  ‘Well, the first indication of an attack would most likely be a sudden outbreak of illness, presenting as severe pneumonia and sepsis. If there
are only small numbers of cases, the possibility of them being plague may at first be overlooked, given the clinical similarity to other bacterial or viral pneumonias – and the fact that so few Western physicians have ever seen a case of pneumonic plague. It may be up to ten days before public-health authorities recognize what’s happened, and by then, anyone infected will be dead.’ He pulled up the sleeves of his cardigan. ‘Using this form of plague as a biological weapon would be simply catastrophic.’

  ‘If you were a terrorist, how would you use it?’

  ‘ Yersinia pestis can be grown in large quantities and, with just a little skill, could be quite easily disseminated. The agent would have to be milled into a very fine powder so it could be dispersed in aerosol form. A crop-sprayer could be used over a town or city, or individuals could disperse it using compressed oxygen bottles, maybe large hospital bottles in a vehicle, to pump the agent out as they drove round the streets. Then again, it could be hand-held – a smaller compressed oxygen bottle concealed in a rucksack, or even a conventional aerosol can. It really doesn’t matter how – once it’s delivered an infectious and invisible cloud would remain suspended in the atmosphere for up to an hour, waiting to be inhaled.’

  Suzy pursed her lips. ‘This powder, Simon, could it be transported in a bottle? And how big an area would, say, twelve full wine bottles contaminate?’ She placed her wet gum on the edge of the table before standing up and going over to her handbag.

  Simon’s eyes followed her. ‘A bottle, yes, if it was well sealed.’

  Suzy sat down with her cigarettes and lighter in her hand. He looked at me as she took out a Benson & Hedges, and the expression on his face told me the penny had dropped.

  ‘That’s why I’m here isn’t it – some pestis has been discovered? Twelve seventy-five-centilitre bottles – nine litres. Where? What control measures are in place? Has the public health—’

  Suzy interrupted him with the offer of a cigarette and, to my surprise, he took one.

  ‘No, Simon, we don’t know what control measures are in place. We’re trying to find the stuff.’ She glanced at me and I nodded as her disposable clicked into life. Considering where he was going after this, it didn’t matter if he knew or not. She dragged in a lungful of smoke and handed him the lighter.

  He studied it for several seconds before lifting it to the cigarette in his mouth. ‘First in three years.’

  ‘Glad you cracked too, Simon.’ Suzy was all smiles. ‘I only gave up a few minutes ago.’ She wiggled the cigarette between her fingers at him. ‘This is all your fault.’

  The smoke from two cigarettes soon filled the air. ‘What more do you have to tell us, Simon? What about infection? How close do we have to be?’

  Emptying his lungs, he leant forwards again and gave his ash an experienced tap into the coffee-table ashtray. I was sure his eyes were watering but he still took another quick drag. ‘Direct exposure to the pestis obviously means you’re infected. After that, anyone within six feet of an infected person will be exposed – two metres, two yards, whatever you want to call it – and they, too, are likely to get infected. It would be simply a fucking biblical event.’

  Simon flicked non-existent ash as he stared into the ashtray, his mind clearly elsewhere. It seemed an eternity before he looked up at Suzy. ‘Is it really going to hap—’

  ‘Tell you what, Simon, just do your job. OK?’ If he thought she was the soft touch of us two he was wrong.

  ‘Yes, of course, sorry.’ The next drag was a lot longer and smoke spilled out of every hole in his face as he continued. ‘The first sign of illness is fever, headache, cough, general weakness. Victims will feel under the weather, but think it’s just another round of colds and flu. Most people, like Archibald, will just get on with life. He was a gardener. And all the time they’re doing that, they’re part of the contamination chain.’

  His spare hand waved in front of him, pointing at his body. ‘Then, within a few days, they’ll get a bloody or watery cough due to the lung infection – the pneumonia. There will be shortness of breath, chest pains, along with intestinal symptoms – nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, diarrhoea, that sort of thing.’

  Suzy blew a lungful of smoke towards the ceiling. ‘This isn’t going to have a happy ending, is it?’

  Shaking his head, he slid backwards into the settee. ‘As the pneumonia worsens over two to four days, it can cause septic shock. Not that you’d be too concerned because you’d be as good as dead anyway.’ He squinted and looked up as he took another long drag. His hand had started to shake. ‘By the time the disease is recognized in the population, after anything from ten days to two weeks, it will be too late for tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of us.’ Simon sank back, his eyes on the ceiling, as if contemplating the enormity of it all. Shit, he wasn’t the only one.

  Suzy and I exchanged another glance. Her smile had disappeared as Simon’s cigarette moved up and down in his mouth. ‘The one good thing is that there is no spore form in the Yersinia pestis lifecycle, so it’s susceptible to the environment – and particularly sensitive to the action of sunlight. That’s why plague aerosol is infectious for no more than an hour.’ He sat up and tried me this time. He sounded as if he was having difficulty breathing. ‘With that amount of pestis , we’re talking hundreds of thousands of innocent people. Why isn’t any action being taken out there? People have a right to know of the risk, surely.’

  ‘What about protection, Simon?’

  He shrugged in submission. ‘Close-contact transmission can be prevented by wearing a surgical mask of a US rating of N95 or UK standard FFP3, then there’s surgical gloves, eye protection, that sort of thing.’ He didn’t sound at all convincing. ‘Look.’ He stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray. Suzy was only moments behind with hers. ‘To be honest, it’s all bollocks. If I was playing about with this stuff in its powder form, I’d only feel safe in an astronaut’s suit.’

  Suzy offered him another cigarette, which he gladly took, and the smoke was soon billowing out of them again.

  I thought it, Suzy spoke it. ‘Is there anything out there that we can take? A vaccine or a drug or anything like that to protect us?’

  He shook his head. ‘A vaccine, no. Manufacture was discontinued in ’ninety-nine. But the use of doxycycline, I think, has some effect as protection and post-exposure.’

  I was straight in there. ‘That’s good enough for me – we need a shedful. Can you get it to Yvette today?’

  He nodded. ‘Sure, I can arrange all that.’ He looked at Suzy. ‘Are you pregnant, or do you think you may be?’

  She held up her new cancer stick. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘It’s just that some antibiotics have an adverse effect on foetal growth.’

  Suzy stood up and had regained her smile. ‘Lovely. Everything we always wanted to know about pneumonic plague, and probably a whole lot we didn’t. Thanks, Simon.’

  He gave a little smile that soon faded. ‘I don’t know exactly what’s happening and I don’t want to know, but the thing is . . . I’ve got a family, and I’m thinking . . . I’m thinking I’ve always wanted to take them to visit my sister-in-law in Namibia. Do you think now would be a good time?’ His hand was still shaking as he stubbed out the cigarette.

  Suzy and I looked at each other.

  ‘Please, I just need to know.’

  Fuck it, why not? ‘Let’s put it this way.’ I stood up to join Suzy. ‘If I was one of your kids and you said, “We’re going on holiday to Auntie Edna’s tomorrow,” which would mean leaving school and going somewhere nice and hot, I would be really, really happy and feel really, really safe.’ I looked at Suzy. ‘Wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Absolutely. A kids’ dream. But you won’t be going with them, Simon.’

  I couldn’t tell whether the look on his face was shock or resignation. ‘Everything’s OK.’ I did that stupid lowering-of-the-hands thing, trying to calm him down. ‘But you won’t be going to another meeting after this. Sorry, mate.
Are there two guys waiting for you downstairs?’

  ‘Oh, God, no. I have a family and—’

  ‘Calm down, mate, it’s nothing like that. They’ll be driving you somewhere safe until we’ve done our job – or fucked up – that’s all. In any case, if we do fuck up you’ll be thinking how lucky you are to be in isolation. That’s just the way it is.’

  There was no way the Yes Man was going to take the chance of a leak. Simon was about to spend some time in a house in the country, with his family thinking he’d been whisked away to carry out some important bug stuff in the jungle.

  Suzy picked up his bag for him as he slowly got his coat back on and I moved towards him. ‘Simon, you got a mobile?’

  ‘Er, yes . . .’

  I patted him on the back in best-mate fashion. ‘I’ll tell you the best thing to do. Call your wife on the way down, tell her you’ve got to go and do some African disease stuff. Tell her to take the kids to your sister-in-law’s for two weeks and you’ll meet them there – the company’s paying, free trip, chance of a lifetime, shit like that.’

  He buttoned up his coat. ‘Thank you so much.’

  I shrugged. ‘No problem. Just don’t forget our drug deal – and be careful, mate. Be careful what you tell your wife. Don’t fuck up with what you know or next time you see the boys downstairs they’ll not be as nice. You understand, don’t you?’

  He gathered up his bag from Suzy and thanked us again as he headed for the door. Suzy walked with him. As he opened the door she put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Forget what he just said.’

  He looked up sharply. I was confused, too.

  She said, ‘If I was your wife and you said the holiday was for a couple of weeks, I’d be happy. But if you said we were going for a couple of months, I’d be over the moon.’

  ‘Thank you, I hear what you’re saying.’

  She rubbed his shoulder. ‘Speak to her, sort it out.’