The Pattern Maker

by Nicholas Lim

  “No more disrespect. Right?”

  “Yes, alright.”

  “Right?”

  “Yes, yes, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it, Chrissy.”

  “I don’t care what you mean or don’t mean. You have no idea what is going on. I say the world is about to change. It is. And you could have been a part of it. You are not. That was your choice. But you will show respect. Do you understand?”

  “Chris? Jade? Umm… You okay there?” The suited man stood beneath them, panting and plucking uncertainly at his eyebrows.

  Christmas rotated his wrist. “I don’t hear you.”

  “YES!!! Chrissy. Yes! Yes! Alright!!”

  “Ahh Jade? You sure you two are okay?”

  Christmas released Jade’s hair, dropping her head like a bag of rubbish. He picked up his mug and crawled back to the stove. He adjusted a knurled valve under the Billy. He coughed twice, looked back at Jade and spat. When he wiped his forehead the back of his hand came away gloss wet. He glanced out towards the beach. The sun was high.

  “It is time to perform my Dues. I must sit.”

  He settled himself cross-legged on his mat and closed his eyes.

  ***

  “Every thirty seconds somewhere in the world a person dies of malaria.”

  On the stage at the front of a small auditorium, a uniformed speaker stood at a glass lectern beneath a projector screen. Major George Skinner, Head of Parasitology, Porton Down, was trim and clean-shaven. He delivered his statistics without trace of nerves, his words clipped into pieces by their consonants, commanding attention.

  “There are five hundred million infections and up to three million deaths annually. Some epidemiologists estimate that the disease may have killed one out of every two human beings who have ever lived.”

  The magnified image of a single stained malaria parasite loomed over the room like a rose window. The auditorium was silent. The forty-strong, mostly-uniformed audience smelled of starch, hair wax and money. Skinner had their attention. But then what was more relevant to a soldier than death?

  A row of Colonels, Lieutenant Generals and Brigadiers stood up at the back, smart as salutes, as Garrett strode along the nodding line. She settled in a seat.

  “By body count you are looking at the animal most deadly to our species ever to have existed.”

  “So what?” A two-star General sitting in the front row sounded bored. “We ain’t planning an invasion of Bug World, are we?” There was scattered laughter. Encouraged, the General looked around and added with a broad grin, “Last I heard, they ain’t interested in democracy.” More laughter circled the room, fluttering up into the dark of the higher benches like moths.

  Skinner smiled. “General Wilson makes a fair point. Why are we here, gentlemen?” He paged through to a slide showing statistics. “Malaria is a two-and-a-half-million-year-old weapon present in eighty percent of our likely zones of conflict. It has proved more deadly to Anglo-American military personnel than the combined armed forces of the Third Reich and Soviet Union.”

  Silence returned, sudden as the draining of a cup. General Wilson shifted in his chair.

  “In the last century, malaria took the lives of more British servicemen than were killed by the Whermacht.”

  The auditorium was quiet. Malaria is a weapon. Garrett thought of the chain link fence surrounding the Porton base. She had the curious sensation of having stepped into a parallel world.

  “We need an effective defence. So you understand what you are being asked to fund, I’d like to take a moment to explain our recent breakthroughs.”

  Skinner showed a slide of an insect. “This is the vector. Remember the mosquito is not the disease–”

  “It's the transporter,” said a British officer in the front row. Someone laughed.

  Skinner nodded with approval. “Yes, if you like, it’s the bird that makes the drop.” He advanced a slide to show a worm-like cell with a darkened perimeter and complex internal structure. “But the attack starts here, with the ookineete cell form. It’s been described as Nature’s most precisely-engineered killing machine.” Skinner traced a route with his finger in the air. “This cell travels through mosquito tissue from gut to salivary glands–”

  “–some sorta super virus.” General Wilson interrupted. He sounded dismissive.

  “No. Viruses are simple.” The general looked like a schoolboy who had joined in by mistake and regretted it. “The malaria parasite is much more complex, a protozoan with multiple cell forms.” He advanced the slide. “The ookineete produces this: the sporozoite, the next stage of the attack. They are the Special Ops.”

  Against a stained purple background a cluster of seven spherical, balloon-like shapes floated.

  “There you go! Seven-man squads. These guys follow airborne service regs!”

  The quip from an army chaplain – whose medical corps uniform included a dog collar – drew general laughter. Again Garrett had the sense of a parallel world. Jagged impatience struck through her.

  “Except these aren't just foot soldiers. Think of them as completely autonomous units, with combat and command capabilities, built-in counter surveillance and an armaments factory all rolled into one. If just one reaches your liver, it will produce an army of ten million.”

  Someone joked, “Hey, we need to teach our paras to do that.”

  Impatience hardened into anger in Garrett as she listened to the lesson in the dark. Malaria research was being judged by medical illiterates. The unnatural conceit of her thought warned her that she should take care with herself.

  An officer at the front asked, “What’s the end result?”

  “It depends on the strain.”

  “Worse case?”

  “Without medication, with some of the newer strains of malaria falciparum, from the first signs of symptoms a soldier may be dead within twenty-four hours.”

  One of the audience members gave a low whistle.

  “Why don’t we leave this research to the civilian health services?” General Wilson asked. Skinner hesitated.

  “If I may?” Garrett’s musical voice carried through the hall. “Malaria is not a first world disease. And as a researcher once told me: pharmaceutical companies simply aren't interested in developing drugs for people who can't afford shoes.”

  “I believe the Wellcome Trust is a major researcher,” the General interrupted, his response delivered in a magisterial tone reserved, Garrett suspected, for insubordinates, politicians and women.

  Garrett ignored Skinner’s rising arm. Her voice rang clear as a tuning fork. “Worldwide cancer research expenditure runs at around thirteen billion dollars. Just five years ago, annual malaria funding was in the millions.”

  “Was it,” the General said.

  “Yes. If for one day we had the death rate of sub-Saharan Africa in the UK or US – that is, in twenty-four hours, sixty-two thousand infections and three hundred and fifty deaths – then perhaps you could rely on civilian research funding.”

  Wilson looked poisonous, like a bullied bully, combative but unwilling to take on hard facts.

  “Which is why,” Skinner had raised both hands and waved one, palm flat, “We are asking for your backing. Dollar for dollar, it’s the most cost-effective spending decision you’ll make this week.”

  Chapter 8

  The intern at the Epidemiology Department of the Sussex and Surrey NHS Trust was methodical by nature. He had seen the priority broadcast requiring early reporting on all UK malaria cases and made a mental note. In the last twenty-four hours, four autopsy reports had defined malaria as cause of death at the Eastbourne and Hastings General hospitals. In his opinion, at least eighteen more infection cases involved symptoms suggestive of the same connection. He entered all case histories with care and accuracy into the Sentinel computer system. There his responsibility ended.

  The Sentinel escalation protocols were automated. Each new record triggered an e-mail to the inbox of the registered case worker at CD
SC Colindale. Mobile devices, issued automatically to such staff, ensured instant notification.

  Unfortunately, Simon Kirkpatrick’s oversight had not been corrected. The case worker registered for malaria alerts was still Clarice Liu, officially off-duty. Just arrived at her hotel on the south coast of Crete, she was unaware that her inbox was filling up, and that on her bedside table in her empty flat in Ealing, west London, her work mobile was spinning and buzzing like a trapped mosquito.

  ***

  “You nearly pushed my pitch off course,” Skinner sorted notes like cards on his lectern, as though dealt a bad hand.

  Garrett answered from her seat at the back of the cleared hall. “I answered a question with facts.”

  “In my experience, facts are a matter of opinion,” Skinner said. A mobile phone gleamed in his hands, briefly consulted. “As it happens your intervention was a gift. Civilian funding is a kicker objection, and General Wilson doesn't like to argue with women. At least in public. Dr Garrett?”

  “Yes.”

  He stepped down from the stage.

  “George Skinner.”

  “Christine,” Garrett allowed.

  “There was confusion over times. Apologies. We were expecting you. I understand you have biopsy material for us?” Garrett lifted her bag. “Let’s go over to my lab.”

  Garrett followed Skinner by car out towards a small complex of two-storey flat-roofed buildings set apart from the main army base and encircled by grassland and steel fencing. A chimney stack rose a hundred feet into clear air, shining like a needle in the sunlight. At rising intervals, cables anchored the metal column to surrounding roof points. The arrangement looked fragile, the chimney improbably tall for its restraints.

  “It's an exhaust outlet. From the biosafety labs.”

  There was a military gallantry to Skinner's door-holding duty. But his uniform irritated Garrett. Medicine required imagination, not drill. She tried to dismiss the feeling and failed. She got out of her car and stared upward.

  “The air is thoroughly sterilised before venting: it’s drawn through ten feet of activated charcoal and a formalin bubble chamber then heated to two hundred degrees.” Garrett suspected Skinner had done the talk before. He sounded like a tour guide. “That's the reason for the stack height, because of the superheated gases.”

  “Exactly what sort of pathogens do you handle here?”

  Skinner led the way towards the largest building in sight, a grey, windowless caterpillar of repeating concrete sections. “Anything and everything. Something comes up no one recognises, if it’s potentially infectious, or civilians don’t want to handle it, it ends up in that building.”

  “We're also a level-five storage facility. I’m only aware of three such: this one; the Americans’ Fort Detriek; and Corpus 6, in Koltsovo, Russia. Have you ever worked in bio-safety zones?”

  “I'm familiar with level two and three procedures. I’ve used them once or twice, for notifiable diseases.” Garrett shook her head. “I’ve never heard of level four. Or five.”

  “They’re military classifications,” Skinner said. “We have ongoing defence research – developing vaccines, prophylactics, containment measures – for Ebola, anthrax, smallpox, cholera... Some of those can only be handled safely with highly-specialized procedures. And someone discovers something new, ten to one it ends up being analyzed by one of us. If Armageddon happens, we will see it start here.”

  Garrett ignored the pride in Skinner’s voice. She could see distortion caused by the heated exhaust air above them. She glanced behind her, counting fences back out to the access road and motorway.

  “And your malaria work is done here too?”

  “Yes,” Skinner said. “My lab handles the parasite-based diseases. We don’t use containment measures with malaria of course. There’s no need, it’s not contagious.”

  Skinner passed his ID card through a reader beside a revolving glass door.

  “All building entry and exit points are controlled by card access. Entry here requires a specific security clearance. I’ve been told you’ve been cleared.”

  A security guard sat behind a reception desk, chin on chest, face whitened by some concealed light. Garrett could hear sports commentary. A machine gun was propped up against the desk beside him. A hand unclasped from behind his head in distracted acknowledgement.

  “Hi George.”

  Skinner crossed a tiled lobby to a steel bank of lift doors. He pressed a call button and stood upright as if the building was calling him to attention.

  “There are above-ground labs but all the isolation areas are in the basement. An underground design is essential for our levels of biosafety.”

  There was a long ping, reassuringly-normal, like the cheerful ring of a bicycle bell.

  Doors closed behind them. The floor juddered once and Garrett's stomach lurched. She noticed a panel of buttons beside a metal intercom grill, for one basement level, a lobby and two upper floors. As they continued to descend she asked, “How far underground are these labs?”

  “About four hundred feet.”

  The image of a castellated keep drawn in gray crayon flashed across her mind again. Garrett felt weight collect suddenly in her shoes. The doors opened onto a curving corridor. Shiny battleship-grey paint covered the walls and floor and squeaked underfoot. Skinner led the way, talking enthusiastically. His patter was fluent. She got a sense that he was boasting, showing-off. Boys and their toys. She was faintly amused, and felt lighter for it.

  “This lab complex is only five years old.” Skinner turned sideways to talk to Garrett as he walked, crabwise. “The design is based on the ring architecture we found at Corpus 6 in Russia.”

  “This is the perimeter access corridor.” Skinner pointed at a door sign, 1II. “There are seven numbered sectors covering differing specialties: One is for Bacteriology, Two is Parasitology – my sector. Three’s Virology etc.”

  “Sectors run inward towards the hub across concentric rings of increasing safety. The outer labs are rated to biosafety level two. Those with inner access doors lead onto the level three suites and staging areas, which in turn lead on to the level four lab ring, and, in some cases, level five, the central storage hub.”

  “The design ensures higher-rated agents are enclosed in more, and successively-restricted, containment environments, like Russian toy dolls. Each lab is maintained at constant negative air pressure relative to its outer neighbour, and all vent through a single central shaft to the chimney, so air only ever flows inward. That will be much like the civilian level three labs you may have used.”

  Civilian. Garrett said nothing. Skinner gestured at the surrounding walls. “We have many additional safeguards. For example, where we are now, the corridor, all the labs, ops rooms, service shafts, ventilation system – this whole subterranean complex is surrounded by a metre-thick concrete sheath nine hundred feet in diameter. In the event of a contamination incident all exits are automatically sealed, the lift shaft we just used is filled with a high-pressure Styrofoam-derivative that sets like rock in under thirty seconds. Here we are.”

  Skinner stopped by a door marked 2II. He passed his card through a reader.

  “Welcome to Parasite World.” The entrance made a peculiar sucking sound as it opened, like an intake of breath.

  Chapter 9

  “Next!”

  Surgeon-Cmdr Charles White replaced a green file on top of a pile of discards and accepted a new document from his aide.

  “A routine Sentinel notification.”

  James Hanratty – a young man of pale complexion and slickly-black hair – settled back in his chair. A minute passed, the only sounds the ticking of the mantel clock, the muted rumble of traffic passing down Whitehall outside the Metropole building, and Hanratty’s occasional nervous cough. Malaria. White gazed out of a window, trying to remember something. He sensed his junior’s impatience.

  The Metropole overlooked Trafalgar Square. The tall sash windows of White’s
office were thickly double-glazed. White reached forward for a fountain pen. Beyond the sleeve end of his navy jacket a starched-white cuff appeared, links twinkling. Links. Yes: links were his job. The pun pleased him. He glanced up at the crest on the gilded picture frame of the Queen on the wall, at the motto of his service, “Regnum Defende”, below the winged sea-lion. The heraldic animal represented Department Five’s historical links with all three armed services. Links everywhere. He returned to the file. He was day-dreaming.

  “Is there anything more on these malaria cases?” he asked, scribbling a note.

  “The CDSC have asked the hospital concerned for a pathology report.”

  White poked at pieces of paper with his fingertips. As a senior defence analyst, clearance Ultra, his chief responsibility was giving advice. These summary judgements were based on interpretation of intelligence information which, in all shades of grey, passed unceasingly across his Whitehall desk. Scientific facts, expert testimonies, opinions, conjectures, confessions, lies, counter-lies, rumours: the challenge did not lie in a shortage of information. No, no. His fingers nudged cautiously at the slips of paper floating around on the surface of his desk like tiles in a board game.

  The challenge lay in the interpretation.

  The young man coughed, then said, “Just a health matter I think. We could look into it, but maybe that would be a duplication of effort.”

  “Hmm.”

  White stared out of the windows again. The problem with advice was that it couldn’t be taken back. Once given, it acquired a life of its own. He had found that out to his cost.

  He was well aware of the mantra that had circulated the Metropole after his mistake five years ago: ‘Damned if you do, doomed if you don’t’.

  Five years? Was it five years since that summer? And not a day since that he hadn’t thought of it.

  They’d been having a heat wave just like now. A report had come in of four unexpected deaths from flu at a hospital in Newhaven on the south coast. Initial lab results had confirmed the influenza was an unusual orally-transmissible Type A, Subtype H1N1 strain. New cases were being reported hourly. An epidemiologist had traced the outbreak to a battery chicken farm and discovered bio-safety violations. When he had realised no-one else had put together the picture White had immediately raised a COBRA alert to request a cabinet-level briefing.