by Kit Pedler
From his position all he could see was a wall. He tried to shout, moistening his throat, but all that came out was a dry, bleating sound. His arms were aching with the effort of holding on to the grille. He looked to see if there was any way in which the grille could be opened. A fastening, a catch? Nothing. He shouted again and again until his body was shaking and he found himself sobbing uncontrollably. There was no one.
He clung like a monkey to the grille and found himself yelling obscenities and screaming, but still nobody came, still there was no reply. Then, finally, in a fit of impotent fury he swung his feet crashing against the side of the shaft in total frustration. Suddenly he felt his feet give. With a sudden panic he gripped the grille tighter, dangling in space. Then he put his feet up and gingerly felt the side of the tube. With one hand, as he hung precariously, he felt for the torch in his pocket.
He had kicked a panel partly away. There was something beyond, another space. He shone the dim beam of the torch through the space. He could just make out a wall and below it some steps. Quickly he put the torch away, swung his other foot up and then, getting as much leverage as possible, he swung like a pendulum smashing his feet against the loosened panel.
Once, twice, three times and, on the third go, it broke away. He swung himself onto the rough edge of the opening and, with one movement forward, fell heavily down onto some steps. The steps ended in a wooden door. His strength was now almost gone, he could hardly move up the steps. He climbed one at a time, slowly like an old man.
The door seemed to waver before him as he put his hand out and felt for the lock. If this was locked he was sure he would never have the strength to break it down. He turned the handle. Nothing happened. He turned it again and pulled it towards him. Suddenly the door swung open and a great gust of icy winter air blew dust into his face.
He staggered out into the daylight.
Fifteen
The small courtyard was about three inches deep in snow. During the climb Gerrard had been drenched in sweat, but now his clothes were rapidly stiffening in the freezing air.
It was completely silent. There was no traffic noise outside the small walled-in rectangle. No footsteps in the snow.
He walked across to a wooden door set in the far wall. It was locked. He cursed for a moment and then smiled. After the climb, the door seemed a very small obstacle. He looked around. Against the opposite wall, partly hidden in the snow, was a ladder. He dragged it over, set it against the wall, climbed and swung himself over, painfully dropping to the ground on the far side. He picked himself up among dark evergreen bushes. Some sort of park, where?
He staggered through the bushes and came out by some iron railings facing a road. Gerrard stared uncomprehendingly for a moment. It was familiar. A wide road, separated in the middle by a strip of parking meters and bays. Punctuated by statues. To both sides of where he stood the road divided around the small crescent of park.
Suddenly the scene clicked into position in his memory – Portland Place. Farther down the street was the British Broadcasting Corporation, behind him Regent’s Park. There was something badly wrong. He glanced at his watch, it read five o’clock.
Five o’clock, that was seventeen hundred hours, 5 PM. Where was all the traffic? It couldn’t be 5 AM in the morning. No! it would be dark. It must be the afternoon and yet … there were no cars parked in the bays. No traffic, no sound of traffic, only a distant rumble coming from a long way off. No lights in the offices and houses. As far as he could see down to where the road curved into Upper Regent Street – no people!
He levered himself over the railings and dropped down. The snow on the pavement was almost completely unmarked, not a sign of a footprint and only two or three heavily ribbed tyre tracks in the wide road.
He started off down Portland Place keeping to the middle between the two rows of parking meters, instinctively avoiding the empty roads. As he went, hugging himself with his arms to keep warm, jog-trotting towards Oxford Circus, he scanned the empty faces of the buildings, there was no glimmer of light. The entire street was dead, closed as if after a nuclear holocaust. As he ran, the icy air bit through his clothes and he felt the limp weakness of complete exhaustion soaking into his limbs.
As he shuffled into Upper Regent Street, barely able to move one leg in front of the other, it was like moving through a ghost city. Windows were shuttered, doors closed and barred.
He passed a music shop; a cinema with posters still prophetically featuring a film entitled ‘panic in the Streets’, and a restaurant. He stopped and looked in hopefully, but the food under the glass cases had all been cleared. Gone were the Danish pastries, rum babas and thick slices of chocolate cake. The stainless steel shelves gleamed bare and empty. There was a stench of corruption in the air.
Suddenly his exhausted senses registered a movement behind him reflected in the plate glass window. He turned quickly. Opposite, a little farther down the road, was an open door and a man standing beside it silently, intently. He broke into a stiff-legged run towards him.
Because of the carpet of snow, Ackerman failed to hear Gerrard until he was almost on him. He turned, automatically assuming a defensive crouch, his hand on the pistol in his pocket.
Menzelos and Alford came out of the open door behind Ackerman just as Gerrard reached them.
Gerrard was gasping for breath, his strength almost gone. He grabbed at Ackerman’s arm for support not noticing the lack of response; the curious immobility of the three men as they carefully studied his face.
‘I’ve … been trapped … got to get them out … they’re still down there.’
An overwhelming wave of nausea swept through his body; his knees buckled. Alford caught him and propped him against the wall as he fell.
‘He’s seen us leave.’ Ackerman nodded towards the jeweller’s shop behind him.
‘Poor bastard’s nearly gone anyway,’ said Alford. ‘If we just leave him he’ll snuff it anyway.’
‘No.’ Menzelos came to a decision. ‘We take him back to my place.’
‘You – what?’
‘You heard. We can use him, let’s carry him back.’
Later, in Menzelos’s flat, Gerrard sat hunched in a chair, holding a large glass of brandy. The three men sat watching him without expression. Menzelos held a map on his knee as he gestured to the array of drinks on the corner bar.
‘Take another if you want it.’
Gerrard nodded and walked over to the bar. He felt warm, but unbelievably tired, the drink was going to his head, making him stagger slightly as he sat down. Dully and almost without caring, he noticed the butt of a gun sticking out of Ackerman’s pocket. Menzelos followed his gaze. He put the drink down and got up unsteadily.
‘I’ve got to get moving, got to get these samples to St Thomas’s.’ He moved towards the door and without any real surprise saw Alford quickly step in front of him, hand in pocket.
‘No, doctor!’
‘Doctor—How do you know I’m a doctor?’
‘We had a little shufti in your pockets while you were charping.’
‘Look! You’ve gotta let me go. There are people trapped down there. I’ve got to get …’
‘Dr Gerrard.’ Menzelos spoke quietly. ‘Solly here thinks you ought to be killed.’
‘I thought you just saved my life.’
‘I don’t like to kill people, it’s very risky, but you are going to help us.’
‘And if I don’t?’
Ackerman leant forward in his chair, Menzelos continued: ‘You want to get your samples to the hospital, you want to get help for your friends. We want to get out too, so we’ll help each other. Let me see your samples please, doctor.’ He held out his hand. Gerrard slowly took a small metal case out of his pocket. It contained the specimens he had collected under the tube station platform. Menzelos took the case out of his hand. Gerrard started to protest.
‘You’ll get them back, Doc.’ He opened the lid of the case.
‘Soll
y?’
Ackerman took the velvet bags of diamonds out of his pocket.
‘They’ll go in all right – wrap them up in something else, make them look more medical like.’ Ackerman began to wedge the bags in between Gerrard’s specimen bottles.
Menzelos was unfolding the map on the floor. He looked up at Gerrard.
‘Now listen …’ he began.
The four men walked quickly through the deserted streets across Piccadilly, then down towards a ghostly, deserted Trafalgar Square. The light was fading. At the lower end of the Square by the entrance to Whitehall they stopped, looking ahead carefully. The only sound was the twittering of starlings. At the far end of Whitehall, just past the Cenotaph, starkly visible against the carpet of snow, a barbed wire barricade was stretched across the broad street. Behind it were three vehicles, a large military lorry and, incongruous in the setting, an armoured car and a long, olive green caravan. They paused.
‘Do you reckon …’ began Ackerman. He didn’t finish the sentence.
‘We’ve no option,’ said Menzelos. Ackerman took the gun from his pocket and jabbed it into Gerrard’s back.
Gerrard stood absolutely still. Menzelos shook his head, leant over and took the gun from Ackerman. Taking a handkerchief out of his pocket, he wiped the surface of the gun carefully, bent down and dropped it through the grille of a drain.
‘Hey,’ began Alford. ‘What the hell …?’
‘No use,’ said Menzelos, ‘we don’t want that, they’re going to strip us – use your loaf, eh.’
‘What about him?’ Ackerman nodded towards Gerrard. ‘The bastard can shop us while we’re going through, can’t he?’
Menzelos walked slowly right up to Gerrard: ‘Solly’s right isn’t he – nothing to stop you when you’re in there.’ He pointed down Whitehall. ‘Once you’re there you can shop us can’t you, what you going to do about that, eh?’
Ackerman loomed behind Menzelos: ‘You do anything clever like that mate and I’ll hurt you rotten.’
‘I don’t know what’s in those bags,’ Gerrard began, ‘and I’ve told you I don’t care. I just want to get across the river to St Thomas’s. I give you my word …’
‘Guide’s bleeding honour,’ Alford sneered.
Menzelos was looking straight at Gerrard, he was studying his face silently. Suddenly, he reached out and deftly lifted the specimen case out of Gerrard’s pocket.
‘Now your papers, Doctor.’
‘What do you mean.’
‘The papers, in your pocket, we looked, remember?’
Slowly Gerrard fumbled in his inside jacket pocket and pulled out his wallet. Menzelos took it.
‘I don’t want to know what you’ve done, I told you. I’ll …’
‘Doc,’ said Menzelos, ‘you must think I’m a very trusting person. Now listen. I’ve got your samples and I got your papers. I’m Dr Gerrard and you’re nobody. Now down there’ – he jerked his thumb towards Whitehall – ‘they’re getting people out as quick as they can. You want to get these’ – he gestured with the metal case – ‘to the hospital and you want to rescue your friends down the tube. Now we don’t need you any more, but you need us. So, we’ll all go through nice and quiet and when we’re out the other side, you have your samples, we have ours. All right?’
‘How do I know you’ll give them back?’
‘You don’t.’
‘Why don’t we chop him here …’ Alford began.
‘No need.’ Menzelos continued: ‘Now Doctor don’t you say a word – you’re just an ordinary person. They’re not stopping anyone. They want everyone out anyway.’
‘I’ve got to tell them where my friends are trapped …’ Gerrard almost shouted.
‘You don’t have to be a doctor to tell them, do you?’ He turned and began to walk across the empty street towards Whitehall. He spoke over his shoulder: ‘Come on, we’re wasting time.’
As they reached the barbed wire barrier, two soldiers sprang forward holding automatic rifles. They were dressed in full protective clothing; helmets with transparent face visors, rubber suits and heavy gloves and boots. One of them pointed towards a short queue of people leading up a short flight of steps into the long caravan.
After a short wait in the freezing air, the four men walked up the steps into the warm, humid air of the decontamination caravan. Menzelos, using Gerrard’s papers, explained to a tired RAMC sergeant sitting at the entrance to the shower cubicles that the sample case should not be sterilized. After a number of suspicious queries, the sergeant made him open the case. Seeing the array of bottles inside, he was grudgingly satisfied and took the case away with large forceps to be wiped down externally with disinfectant.
For the next thirty minutes, the four men went through the full decontamination routine. First stripping down, handing their clothes to another soldier who packed them into wire cage boxes then showering in hot water reeking of chemical disinfectant. Finally, drying off with harsh, brown Army issue towels, collecting their clothes in the cage boxes from the sterilizer outlet and then stepping down from the far end of the caravan. The air seemed twice as cold after the Turkish bath atmosphere inside. Menzelos was carrying the sample case as they walked towards Parliament Square.
On the pavement there were small knots of people silently watching. Near the entrance to the House of Commons, two outside broadcast television vans were parked. Technicians were paying out cables and setting up are lights and cameras. A commentator was talking into a hand microphone. Police cars were parked on the pavement, rotating blue lights flashing silently and an ambulance moved slowly away over Westminster Bridge, its exhaust steaming in the cold.
Overhead, a helicopter was wheeling slowly west along the river, its rotors blattering in the clear air.
Menzelos turned to Gerrard, opening the sample case: ‘Now, our specimens, eh?’ He took out the velvet bags wrapped in aluminium foil by Ackerman. He closed it and handed it to Gerrard together with his wallet.
‘Matter of interest,’ said Gerrard, ‘what’s in those?’
Ackerman looked at him unsmiling: ‘Marbles, mate!’
It took Gerrard all his remaining strength to walk over Westminster Bridge and along the embankment to St Thomas’s hospital.
Hours later, he came to in a bed-in a small cubicle. Slowly, as his exhausted mind cleared, he just remembered people gathering round him in the hospital entrance – Buchan’s face. Suddenly, panic struck him. Had he told them about Anne and Slayter?
Gradually, as he took in more and more of his surroundings, he remembered. There was a large police inspector – yes that was it. The policeman was talking about ropes – rescue gear – Regent’s Park – it must be all right. With a tremendous effort he managed to raise his head off the pillow to look at his watch. Slowly he worked it out, he must have slept for nearly eight hours. Flopping his head back, he tried once more to resist a feeling of almost euphoric fatigue. They must have given him something.
As sleep overtook him, his last thoughts were of Anne.
Sixteen
At London Airport, the great, untidy complex of buildings and walkways was gradually closing down. One by one, the terminals emptied and the usual smell of coffee, kerosene and expensive scent was replaced by the dank ammoniacal smell of variant fifty-nine.
Finally only one building was active. A decontamination station had been set up in one of the transfer lounges and only passengers with special priority passes were allowed through to the few remaining planes which had permission to take off.
Flight 1224 to New York was boarding. Passengers still wrinkling their noses from the acrid smell of the showers in the decontamination centre were showing their papers to police and immigration officials who sat behind a glass panel. No one spoke, the stench of the variant reminding each person of the dying city they were leaving behind.
Men in protective suits and face-masks were spraying the outer surface of the great jet with fine aerosol mists of disinfectant as army pat
rol jeeps circled round the boarding gate.
In the rush to pack, Kramer had flung his gold-plated pen into the depths of his leather briefcase just before leaving for the New York flight.
Now as he tightened his seat belt, he half listened to the neutral sweetness of the air hostess’s voice: ‘… extinguish your cigarettes. We shall be departing in a few minutes nonstop to Kennedy Airport via Shannon and Gander. On behalf of Metro Airlines, Captain Howard and his crew welcome you aboard – thank you.’
As dehumanized tape music trickled through the passenger compartment, on the flight deck Captain Howard began his preflight checks with P2 and P3 his two co-pilots and the flight engineer.
In the galley, to the rear of the passenger compartment, the chief steward and three stewardesses began to sort prefabricated packages of food into neat piles and then arrange stacks of pressed plastic trays. Carefully fitting a neatly wrapped cheese portion in one hole, cellophane covered trifle in another, until each tray resembled a miniature shelf from a supermarket.
Kramer settled down into his seat, had a careful look to make sure the specimens were properly sealed, and immediately took the report for NASA and his pen out of his briefcase and intently began to make notes from the report.
By no stretch of imagination could he have felt what his fingers touched on the metal barrel of his pen. No human eye could have perceived a minute, drying patch of gelatinous material only one-tenth of a millimetre in diameter.
Chemical analysis would have revealed a few microgrammes of protein, water, some salts of phosphorus and magnesium. A more sophisticated examination might just have shown traces of DNA, the complex molecule essential to some forms of microscopic life. DNA and its stablemate compound RNA have the ability to act as a code store. Memorized indelibly on the spiral molecules is the blueprint for the structure of a whole organism. A sub-microscopic plan of behaviour.