Enemy Within: A heart-wrenching medical mystery (British Military Thriller Series Book 3)

by Nathan Burrows

  The lift slowed to a halt, and Waterfield walked out into the corridor. It was perhaps a hundred metres long and lit with ornate light fittings. He stopped at the secure cabinets next to the lift and exchanged his mobile phone for a padlock key. A deep green carpet softened his footsteps as he walked down the corridor to find the room his briefing was in. Cabinet Office Briefing Room Alpha. COBRA.

  When Waterfield walked into the room and took his seat halfway down the rectangular table, no-one spoke as was customary at these briefings. There were already five attendees. Waterfield could see a junior staffer fussing around the table, ensuring that there was a fresh glass at each of the twelve seats. The Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Service was sitting in his usual seat, engrossed in a newspaper. As this was to be a security focused meeting of the Civil Contingencies Committee, he was accompanied by two other senior police officers. The Commissioner was more politician than police officer, not unlike Waterfield himself, but the Chief of Defence Staff didn’t need to bring any lap dogs with him.

  Almost eleven minutes later, by which time Waterfield had completed the cryptic crossword in his copy of The Times, the door opened and a middle-aged man walked in. He had almost no hair on his head, was wearing an off-the-shelf suit that offended Waterfield every time he saw it, and was—in Waterfield’s opinion at least—an absolute idiot. But as well as being as thick as mince on occasion, he was also one of Waterfield’s oldest friends.

  “Good afternoon, Home Secretary,” the junior staffer said, as if to announce the man’s arrival.

  An hour later, much to Waterfield’s relief, the meeting was drawing to a close. He’d contributed almost nothing to the meeting, as usual. The civilians in the room were always reluctant to involve the military in anything, as this would effectively admit defeat. Things were so bad, the papers would say, that they had to bring in the military. His only contribution was to suggest that perhaps an answer to the increasing number of small vessels full of economic migrants crossing the English Channel would be to sink a few of them.

  “They would soon get the message if we shot a couple of ships out of the water with a four-and-a-half-inch mark eight. I can get HMS Dauntless on the way, if you want?” Waterfield had said. After the stunned silence that had followed his question, the home secretary had thanked him for his contribution and said that it probably wasn’t the most appropriate response to the problem. Waterfield just shrugged his shoulders as he saw several occupants of the room suppressing smiles.

  “What a waste of time that was,” Waterfield said to the police commissioner as they retrieved their phones from the secure cabinets.

  “For you, perhaps,” the police officer replied. “Are you going to Main Building straight away, or have you got time for a pint in the Clarence? I can tell you the real reason we just bumped up the security level for the entire country.” Waterfield glanced at his watch. He had over an hour and a half until his next meeting, which was back in the Ministry of Defence’s Main Building near the tube station he had used earlier.

  “I’ve got a Finance Committee to try and stay awake through in a bit,” Waterfield replied. “So more than enough time for a snifter or two. Besides, if I remember correctly, it’s your round.”

  29

  Titch leaned forward in the driver’s seat of the transit van and peered through the rain on the windscreen. Even though the wipers were on full blast, he could barely see the brake lights of the vehicle in front of them. In the passenger seat next to him, Chalkie was smoking a cigarette, his window open half an inch to let the smoke out. He had already lit the cigarette by the time he got round to asking Titch if he minded.

  “This is bollocks, this is,” Titch said as he inched the van forward. “I can’t see a bloody thing.”

  The two men were on the A505 just outside Stevenage. The first part of their journey had been fine. It was only in the last few miles that the rain had started. At first, it was just rain, but it didn’t take long to become torrential. But Titch didn’t think it was the rain that had caused the traffic jam that they were sitting in. Ahead, in the distance, he could see some blue flashing lights with a long trail of brake lights behind them.

  “I told you we should have gone the Milton Keynes route,” Chalkie said, blowing a thin stream of smoke out of the window. “We’d be at RAF Brize Norton by now.”

  “We would be nowhere near Brize by now,” Titch replied.

  “Alright, we’d be a lot closer to Brize by now.”

  Titch nodded. He had to give Chalkie that one. Ahead of him, some of the brake lights flicked off as the traffic started moving.

  “I still don’t get why we have to do this job,” Titch said as he waited for the queue ahead to clear. “Why can’t we just send drivers?”

  “Because drivers can’t be trusted with all the weapons we’ve got in the back. They’re all civilians, remember?”

  In the rear of the van, carefully wrapped in hessian sacking and labelled with the owner’s details, were almost a hundred SA80 A3 rifles. They belonged to members of the RAF Regiment, who were about to go on an exercise in Poland. According to Chalkie, the exercise was a thinly veiled disguise to get some troops into Poland, the closest NATO country to Ukraine, in case the Russians decided to annex the entire country instead of just the Crimean peninsula. Titch, who wasn’t one hundred per cent sure where Ukraine was, had just nodded in agreement.

  “See, the thing is, Titch,” Chalkie had said, “if those ruskies decide they want the whole country, there’s nothing to stop them just taking it. Then they’re right on our doorstep. Well, Poland’s doorstep. And we all know what happened the last time Poland got invaded, don’t we?”

  Finally, the traffic in front of them started to clear and move forward. Titch could see through the windscreen as they got closer that the blue lights belonged to several ambulances and police cars. There was a white van not dissimilar to theirs on its side on the road, and several cars all crushed together with a small army of emergency services personnel milling about.

  “Looks nasty,” Titch said as he regarded the carnage in the distance. Then he realised that the traffic jam he was in was being diverted off the main road and down a side road. “The bloody road’s closed.”

  “Leave it with me,” Chalkie said as he flicked his cigarette end out of the window and closed it. He picked up his phone and started swiping at the screen. “I’ll find us another route.”

  It took Titch a good thirty to forty minutes to get onto roads that weren’t jammed. Chalkie, to Titch’s surprise, turned out to be quite a good navigator. He kept them off the main roads and on smaller ones, but there was little traffic on them once they got clear of the main backlog from the smash.

  “We’ll go through Luton and then down to Aylesbury,” Chalkie said. “Then we can pick up the A40 outside Oxford and it’ll take us to Brize.”

  “If you say so,” Titch replied. He wasn’t familiar with the area in the slightest.

  “I got the absolute shit kicked out of me in Aylesbury once,” Chalkie said as he lit up another cigarette. “We were at Halton on basic and decided to go on the lash. Bloody disaster that turned out to be.”

  Titch grinned. He could well imagine Chalkie as a young man getting the shit kicked out of him. “What happened?” he asked.

  “There was this bird in a club who I was having a sniff round. Persuaded her to come out of the club for some fresh air with me.” Chalkie started laughing at the memory. “Got her into an alleyway outside and I was thinking, right then pet, let’s get you up against that wall. Then the oxygen sniper hit her, and she started screaming her tits off. The bouncers from the club came out and kicked seven bells out of me. Turned out one of the monkeys was her brother.”

  “You should have shut her up before they heard her,” Titch said with a smile. “That’s what I would have done.”

  “How would I have done that?” Chalkie asked, his smile faltering.

  “Given her a good slap,”
Titch replied, grinning. “Hard enough to shut the stupid cow up. Then you could have done what you wanted. You were with your mates, yeah? You could have all had a go on it.”

  Titch could feel Chalkie’s eyes on him and when he turned to look at the man, he was staring at him, open-mouthed.

  “I’m only joking, mate,” Titch said hurriedly, realising he had gone too far. “Jesus, seriously? As if.”

  Chalkie paused for a moment before replying. “Yeah, well,” he said, turning away to stare out of the window, “it was a long time ago.”

  They drove on in silence for a few miles, and Titch’s thoughts turned to the swab that he’d posted that morning. Just as George had said, the package had turned up in the mail. Titch had used a mirror to scrape the swab around the inside of his cheek, not unlike when they all had to do coronavirus tests, and then replaced it in the packaging and posted it back again. He couldn’t wait to get the results. He was going to predict that he was over ninety per cent British, maybe with a bit of Scandinavian thrown in for good measure.

  “Take the next left, Titch,” Chalkie said. It was the first words he’d spoken for a while. Titch had considered saying something else about their conversation, but Chalkie hadn’t mentioned it, so neither did he. “That’ll take us into the outskirts of Luton.”

  The rain that had been hammering down for the last hour started to ease until, eventually, Titch could turn the wipers off. The area they were in was a lot more urban. Titch could see run-down houses and groups of young men gathered on the corners of the streets. He took the left-hand turn, which took them onto a high street of sorts. Dilapidated shops lined the sides, selling clothing, vegetables, food, and all the usual stuff you found on an average high street. But it didn’t look like any other high street that Titch had ever seen. For a start, the signs weren’t in English but in Arabic. The few women he could see hurrying about their business were all wearing burkas, the majority with mesh screens across their eyes, and the men all seemed to be staring at Titch and Chalkie.

  “Bloody hell, Chalkie,” Titch said as he stared out of the window. “Are we in another fucking country?”

  30

  Charlotte stretched, rolling her shoulders back to iron out a spasm between her shoulder blades. She had spent the last few moments replacing the cathode and anode buffer containers in the small machine in front of her, which was nowhere near as easy as the representative who’d sold them the machine had said. When she was content that the containers were secure, and the levels were showing as correct on the attached laptop, she reached for the capillary array. It could hold up to eight different samples at a time, but today Charlotte only had one sample to analyse. Robert Hunter’s.

  The machine she was using was a state-of-the-art genetic analyser made by Applied Biosystems. It could do far more than what she was using it for. Pretty much any type of sangar sequencing, fragment analysis, or de-novo sequencing were all well within its capabilities. It could even do mutational profiling and micro-satellite analysis, but today, all Charlotte was using it for was a relatively simple autosomal testing to answer a single question. Where was Robert Hunter actually from, genetically speaking?

  Charlotte loaded the capillary array and hit a few keys on the keyboard before getting to her feet. The test would take a few minutes, so she crossed to her desk where her primary computer had just pinged with an incoming e-mail. Charlotte opened the e-mail and double clicked on the attachment. As she read the summary from Doctor Katayama Toshiko, the head researcher in the Level 4 laboratory, she felt her heart quickening. They had done it! She quickly forwarded the e-mail on to George’s private Protonmail account. This was going to make his day.

  George,

  Please see attached. Phase One has been completed! Katayama has successfully extended the incubation phase in the mice to almost two weeks with almost no cytokine release. Call me when you get this.

  Charlotte

  Charlotte was so excited that she could almost feel her heart fluttering in her chest. The research team had been working with an influenza virus to see if they could extend the incubation period of the disease. It had been incredibly difficult to separate out the various phases that the virus went through, but they had managed to change the genetic sequence of the virus to enable it to replicate without triggering an immune response. The biological alarm that the immune system rang—the release of macrophages and neutrophils that would produce cytokines to start the fight against the virus—was effectively silenced. If they could lengthen this sequence, then they could also shorten it, creating a potential cure for influenza. Not a vaccine, but an actual cure.

  In her pocket, Charlotte’s phone rang. She pulled it out and looked at her phone, surprised that George had got back to her so quickly. He normally didn’t check his Protonmail account until the evening. It wasn’t as if he could access it from work, after all. But when Charlotte looked at the screen, it wasn’t a number she recognised.

  “Hello?” Charlotte said as she answered the call. A female voice replied.

  “Is that Dr Lobjoie?”

  “Speaking.”

  “Hello, it’s Lizzie Jarman calling. I was at the presentation on Sunday.”

  “Lizzie,” Charlotte smiled as she brought up a mental image of the young woman. “How lovely to hear from you. I do hope you’re calling with some good news?” As she spoke, she clicked into a folder on her desktop and replaced the mental image with the photograph from Lizzie’s application form.

  “Yes, I suppose I am. I’ve decided to take the sabbatical.”

  “That’s wonderful news, Lizzie,” she replied, looking at the photograph on the screen. Lizzie really was a pretty little thing. “Will that be the next cohort, or later down the line.”

  “That’s what I wanted to ask. The next cohort leaves next week, don’t they?”

  “Yes,” Charlotte said. “The flight leaves from Norwich Airport on Sunday.”

  “That soon?”

  “Yes, that soon.” Charlotte paused for a moment, but Lizzie didn’t say anything. “Carpe diem, Lizzie.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “It means seize the day. It’s what I think you should do.” Charlotte looked at Lizzie’s face on the screen and zoomed in so that it filled the screen. “I’ll be on that flight as I’m going to collect some samples, so there’ll be at least one friendly face.”

  “Oh, okay. I see. Um, I guess that will be okay.”

  “I’ll e-mail you all the details across. Are you able to get to Norwich for a medical this week at some point?”

  “A medical? With you?” Lizzie asked.

  “No, not with me,” Charlotte replied, laughing. “I’m not that sort of doctor. It would be with a private doctor in Norwich. No charge to you, obviously.”

  “Okay, I’ll need to speak to my flight sergeant but that should be okay if it’s in normal working hours.”

  “Excellent, excellent,” Charlotte replied. “I’ll include the clinic’s details in the e-mail. Do you have any questions for me?”

  “No, I don’t think so. I’m just a bit nervous, that’s all.”

  “That’s quite understandable, Lizzie. Everyone’s a bit nervous when they do something that’s unusual to them for the first time. But I promise you, it’ll be worth it.”

  Charlotte ended the conversation, thanking Lizzie and telling her how pleased she was at her decision, and sent her the standard welcome e-mail, copying in Claire as the cohort leader. Then she crossed back to the genetic analyser. While she had been speaking with Lizzie, the sample in the machine had finished and the results automatically uploaded to the vast database the Ascalon Institute had access to.

  “Right then, Robert Hunter,” Charlotte said as she looked at the laptop screen. “Let’s see just how British you really are, shall we?” According to the screen, he was ninety-two per cent English, six per cent German, and two per cent Swedish. “Oh dear,” she muttered as she clicked into the manual over-ride for the results. �
��That won’t do at all.”

  31

  Lizzie pressed the tuft of cotton wool into the crook of her arm as instructed, although she didn’t need to be told. The nurse who had just taken her blood sample smiled at her.

  “All done,” the nurse said. “You feel okay?”

  “Yep,” Lizzie replied, shuffling to the edge of the examination couch.

  “Just stay there for a few moments so we can make sure you don’t feel faint or anything. The results will take around ten minutes and the doctor will be in to finish off.”

  “That quickly?” Lizzie said, surprised. “I thought they normally took a bit longer than that.”

  “They might in the NHS,” the nurse replied with a smile, “but we’ve a lab right next door so it’s quicker here.” It wasn’t just that, Lizzie thought. It was the fact that money was involved. From the opulent look of the private clinic Lizzie was in, quite a lot of money. “Let me get you a coffee while you’re waiting.”

  As the nurse disappeared with several small tubes full of Lizzie’s blood, Lizzie got her phone out and took a selfie, making sure she got as much of the background in as possible. The clinical room was certainly a step above the ones she was used to. She sent the photograph to Adams with a caption. This is how the other half lives. He responded a few moments later with a smiling face emoji. After her flight sergeant had effectively stood her down for the rest of the week, Lizzie had packed her bags and left Honington for Adams’s flat. He’d left for his late shift at the hospital with a spring in his step after they’d spent the entire morning in bed.

  When the nurse returned with Lizzie’s coffee, she was accompanied by a kind-looking man in his fifties dressed in a white coat, a stethoscope draped around his neck in case anyone didn’t realise he was a doctor. Underneath the coat was a full three-piece suit.