The Next Big One

by Derek Des Anges

  “Oh, right,” said Doug Lewis, as if everything had been made clear to him. “That Ben Martin. I saved a couple of your things, had them open when they were taken down, figured it was worthwhile seeing what it was that was suddenly verboten for the press to talk about. Seemed innocuous enough at the time but as I guess you know, freedom of the press — within reason — is one of my hobbyhorses. And is, to be honest, one of the many reasons I cannot do this bloody job any more.”

  “The stench of conspiracy?” Ben hazarded, trying to sound as if he were joking. The words verboten for the press to talk about with such cheerful indifference gave him a sudden and unwelcome chill.

  “Media self-censorship versus attempted FoI repeals,” Doug Lewis cautioned him. “I know no one enjoys having to answer pointless nuisance questions about how much money we spend on paperclips every time the Mail can’t find an answerphone to hack but I think overall accountability has to be a good thing. And having them just rephrase Departmental releases with an undertone of sneering gets very boring after a while, a tame press helps no one—” he caught himself, and laughed. “Although realistically it’s so not my problem any more.”

  He sounded happy, the happiness of someone who knows he’s getting out of the situation he’s currently in and isn’t required to give any more fucks: Ben recalled it from some of the others who’d taken voluntary redundancy at work.

  “So I’m guessing,” went on Doug Lewis, “you’d like to know if there’s anything about current policy around KBV which is dodgy?”

  “Yes,” said Ben, who hadn’t quite nailed down what it was he wanted to know but was happy for someone else to fill him in.

  “Right, that’s great,” said Doug Lewis, taking Ben by surprise. “Because you know what, I can get out of this bastard office and talk to you and that constitutes press briefing and for the next couple of days I can still claim expenses so the drinks are on me. How’s the lovely Stella?”

  With a limp and what turned out to be an expired travel card, it took Ben longer than he was expecting to get to the pub Doug Lewis had suggested: inconveniently far from both Westminster and Charing Cross tube stations, halfway down Whitehall, lined with pale wood and pale men in dark suits, it looked manifestly unfriendly.

  Ben parked himself outside and spent a while regaining his equilibrium with the help of the e-shisha, until he realised that Doug Lewis didn’t have a clue what he looked like and he’d have to find the man himself.

  The Labour MP was by the bar when Ben found him.

  “Hello,” said Ben. “Ben Martin.”

  “Just in time,” said Doug Lewis. “Pick something expensive. Just kidding. Everything in here is dismally overpriced. Have what you’re having.”

  They struggled through the crush, and Ben remarked, “Not a great place for a private conversation.”

  “Best place for one,” Doug Lewis corrected, leading the way upstairs. “Everyone’s enormously full of their own importance so they’re barely listening to what the person opposite them’s saying, let alone the person just to their left. What happened to your foot?”

  Ben readjusted his grip on the bannister and said, “Stairs,” with a wan smile.

  “I was hoping for a tale of journalistic heroism,” Doug Lewis confessed, pushing open the door to a much less packed room, with gold foil lettering on both sides of the glass window.

  “I’m a student,” Ben reminded him.

  “So the debt’s heroic enough.”

  “Well,” Ben said, sinking slowly into a chair. “I was going to say ‘horrific’.”

  Doug Lewis took the opposite seat, and stretched, which wasn’t very impressive as he was, at most, five foot six. He gave Ben a charming grin full of uneven teeth, and said, “So, my mental map for you at the moment is the lovely Stella, and a surprising couple of side branches incorporating one star virologist on leave and one campaigning epidemiologist-cum-GP who spends a lot of his time sending angry letters to the people who I’m about to cease working with, thank God. Is that about right?”

  “Yes,” Ben said, slowly. “I’m…sort of investigating KBV’s background. Which is turning out to be—”

  “Murkier than you suspected,” said Doug Lewis, leaning forward eagerly. “Oh, it could have been even murkier. The public don’t know how lucky they are to have the information that they do. You look like you’ve been slapped. Normally, of course,” he looked amused, “it’s not the done thing to repeat parliamentary gossip to journalists — or at least ones that haven’t paid you — but frankly I am happy to burn every bridge I’ve got if it means I never get tempted back into politics again.”

  “Gossip?” Ben prompted, taking a sip of his beer. It wasn’t remotely the kind he usually drank, but the pub didn’t seem interested in deviating from the standard garden varieties plus some dubiously expensive imports, and it wasn’t as if he was paying for it.

  “Hah, right, so,” Doug Lewis shifted his weight comfortably in the chair and replaced his already half-empty drink. “The story which was flying around for some time — not without justification — was that our Rita — that’s Rita Clyde-Witham to you, MP for South Peterborough and Minister of Small Nonsense Title That Was Made Up To Keep Her Happy — had been given a bung to keep some reports quiet. This was a little while back, and the reports in question were the ones where it turned out that KBV has a honking great big latency period that nobody predicted and which, coincidentally, completely changed the likelihood of it emanating from that nature reserve — what’s it called—?”

  “Badai-Turung”, said Ben, who was pretty sure he was consistently messing up the pronunciation.

  “Right, that place. Now the question of who asked her to shut them down and why also ends up in the flurry of parliamentary gossip, because we have a bar in there and people forget that parliamentary privilege only applies to the stuff they say in Commons, not the stuff they blurt out after eighteen brandies sprawled in front of a fireplace when I happen to be listening.” Doug Lewis beamed the beam of a man who has been waiting for a long time to stick a knife into a lot of backs. “They forget we’re not all part of those nasty little fraternities where people do unspeakable things to pigs and everyone guards everyone else’s interests because everyone has blackmail material on everyone else. Not all of us are venal, corrupt arseholes.”

  “But she didn’t do it?” Ben said, trying to dig the point out from under Doug Lewis’s apparent joy at quitting.

  “Oh no,” Doug Lewis said. “But, it became common, or common-ish knowledge that Rita had been asked to do this because it was ‘contrary to the interests of XXXXX/XXXXXX’. With whom she has a lot of her own interests, if you follow me.”

  Ben sipped urgently on his drink to cover for a sudden, all-pervading coldness.

  “Not to mention their generous donations to her personal campaign fund and the party in general,” the MP went on with a grimace, “although it’s worth noting that several years ago when we actually had the reins they were throwing us cash as well. They’re not particularly partisan, if you follow me: they just want to be left alone to make a lot of money.”

  “Sounds normal,” said Ben, his heart thumping wildly.

  “Mm, the more you deal with the business sector the more you realise most of them would genuinely sell their own granny,” Doug Lewis said, with disconcerting pleasure. “Bunch of bastards. God I’m glad I don’t have to deal with those sleazebag fucking lobbyists any more. Where was I?”

  “Rita’s interests.”

  Someone stood up suddenly, their chair scraping along the floor with an aggressive squeak of wood over wood. Ben half-jumped in his seat, his drink sitting warm and slightly forgotten in his hand.

  “Ah, yes.” Doug Lewis took another mouthful. “Yes, happily Rita considered public health more important than XXXXX/XXXXXX’s interests.” He looked thoughtful, and then laughed to himself. “Or she got drunk and forgot she was supposed to be suppressing them, which also happens a lot. God bles
s Rita Clyde-Witham’s keen love of Californian Shiraz or we’d be poorer on a lot of fronts. Always have an opposite — I won’t say enemy — with plenty of weaknesses, Ben, it helps a great deal.”

  Doug Lewis made an imaginary toast with a mostly-empty glass.

  “So,” said Ben, slowly, “do you think it was possible that XXXXX/XXXXXX already knew about KBV before the index cases? Because I’ve been turning up some things which suggest that…”

  Doug Lewis, his mouth full of beer, widened his eyes. He put the pint glass down, almost entirely empty, swallowed, and held up a finger. “Personal opinion? Unverified? Based on what’s been coming out recently? Based on what you’ve said and their grubby little fingers sticking into the parliamentary pie for the last couple of decades?”

  Ben nodded.

  “I’d say it’s very possible they’ve done more than just know about it.”

  Ben’s next emergency tutorial with Sherazi, the following day, contained little respite.

  “You have a lot of material,” Sherazi said, as Ben navigated through the folder he has renamed from ‘hideous conspiracy’ to ‘KBV project’ that morning. “A lot of different viewpoints, a lot of interesting sources. If you actually write something with this I might be forced to give you a decent grade. You’ve even made inroads beyond just copying lists of symptoms out of the NHS leaflets.”

  Ben said, “Er…thanks?”

  He had, in fact, also scanned the NHS leaflets with a view to quoting them in the section tentatively labelled ‘introduction to the virus’, but he thought that Sherazi probably didn’t need to know that.

  “So far you’ve got a very sanitised approach,” Sherazi added. “Which is factually fine, but it’s dryer than the Atacama.”

  “You want me to be more lurid?” Ben winced.

  “It’s not like there isn’t plenty of footage and inch-age which focuses on the effects on a body without straying into schlock horror,” Sherazi said, mousing through Ben’s heavily-edited notes. “Even if your framing is ‘look at the wonderful efforts of the NHS’ or ‘where does KBV come from’, you’re going to need to talk about what it does to people. You can assume public knowledge all you like but — go on, finish the sentence—”

  Ben said, dutifully, “But the public are idiots and have to be told everything ten times in case they forget.”

  “Bingo,” Sherazi said, resuming her coffee and leaving off his notes. “A sidebar on the effects is enough. Bullet points, even. I’m not asking for a graphic description of charnel houses full of convulsing, blood-vomiting final scenes. Just sell the gravity of the situation.”

  Ben winced again, but nodded, and began to close his laptop.

  “Oh, and some sort of interim report with what you have so far,” Sherazi said, wrapping both hands around her travel mug. “Throw together something that looks like a piece for the end of the term.”

  “Argh,” said Ben, without meaning to.

  “You, especially,” Sherazi warned him, “need to counteract how shittily you’re doing in Kyle’s class.”

  He went straight to the quiet study area, which was currently about as quiet as a piss-up in a tropical bird house, and threw together some speculations.

  The Uzbek source, anonymised. Noelle Anathan, uncooperative: a short transcript. Rumours from A Westminster Source, to be identified in his notes but not the final piece.

  Ben sat back and looked at the skeleton of the article. So far it presented only one coherent story: a pharmaceutical company involved in the spread of a deadly virus. With Lydia whatshername in Dr Anathan’s unwilling statement, with Dr Crawford, there were hints that whatever had happened wasn’t perhaps as much of an…accident. He looked back at the remarks about the trials in Tashkent. Definitely not an accident.

  Which didn’t make any kind of sense, Ben thought, firmly. If this was some sort of militarised…bug, some kind of biological weapon, it’d be fast and furious and airborne or something. It always was in films. Every time someone coughed everyone else froze up and reached for masks, that kind of thing. And it was the kind of bullshit conspiracy theorists came up with, pub bores who told you that FIFA being full of crooks meant you couldn’t trust scientists about global warming…

  He reread what he’d written, and added in the comments made by Louisa Halifax about ‘poor John’, the landfill site boy.

  A clear picture begins to emerge, he wrote, of something rotten in the state of this UNNAMED PHARMACEUTICAL COMPANY.

  After all, hadn’t Dr Anathan made a point about how good their lawyers were?

  Ben tapped his teeth for a minute. He couldn’t think of a reason to publish that didn’t seem like bear-baiting; he couldn’t think of a reason not to which didn’t feel like cowardice. He wondered what, for example, Phil Jacy would do: publish and bait the bear. He thought of Doug Lewis happily pointing out that a tame press helped no one.

  He took out his phone, and scrolled down through the contacts until he reached one with a large orange G next to it.

  “Hello?” Ben inched away from the quiet study area with his laptop still open in his hands. “Uh, Ben Martin. I spoke to one of your colleagues before. No, not the film reviews Ben Martin, the other one.”

  Someone bumped into him from behind: he apologised, and moved out of the way.

  “That’s right,” he said, once they’d identified him. “Do you want to take a risk on another one? I’ve got all the sources labelled and dated.”

  There was a certain amount of discussion that he was not privy to. They put him on hold, and Ben stood in the widest part of the corridor, his Macbook growing heavy in his hands, trying to keep an eye on his bag as it held his place at the tables.

  Eventually they returned.

  “Yep,” he said, “I can email it right now if you want?”

  There was another enquiry.

  “Yeah it’s okay,” he said, “I’m pretty sure it’s okay. I mean, you can get it read-through first, right?”

  Once they were off the line he became aware that Tasneen was standing directly behind him.

  “Alright?” he asked, balancing his Macbook on his raised knee to send them the article.

  “Could ask you the same thing,” Tasneen said, leaning on the wall beside him. “You look terrible.”

  “What?” Ben hit send with a small, triumphant flourish. “I feel fine.”

  “You look like the spectre of plague and death,” Tasneen insisted, as Ben reached back to grab his bag. “And maybe you should try and put a lead on your impulse to flog stuff the second you’ve written it?”

  “Oh,” said Ben, with a guilty start. “Uh. Why?”

  “Didn’t Sherazi tell you—”

  “They’ve got lawyers, they’re not going to publish it if it’s dodgy,” Ben said, with an assurance he suddenly didn’t feel.

  “Uh huh,” Tasneen said, unconvinced. “I don’t think you want to piss Sherazi off.”

  “God no,” Ben agreed, shoving his Macbook into his bag. “But she did tell me to write something.”

  “Did she tell you to sell it?” Tasneen persisted, waiting for him to finish struggling with the laptop.

  “No-ot exactly.”

  “Yeah,” Tasneen said, as they turned towards the stairs. “Didn’t think so.”

  They reached the head of the staircase, filled with distorted echoes of shrieking teenagers and groaning mature students, and Ben said, “So…how are things at home? Any better?”

  Tasneen made a so-so gesture and grabbed the handrail. “Mum’s…calmed down a bit? I think? She’s being way nicer to Aliyaah now, she’s like…transferred all her affections onto her instead, so Aliyaah’s like, this is a bit creepy, but whatever. Uh. Aliyaah’s dad is still a pig, he’s talking about disowning her constantly and he sent my uncle this long letter, an actual letter, about how Mum ‘stole his daughter’ and how I’ve ‘brainwashed her into an abominable lifestyle’ and my uncle just told him to grow up.”

  They reached th
e landing, and got no further: a collection of students in black t-shirts were standing with a microphone and an oscilloscope and had the former pointed at the corner of the stairwell.

  After a moment or two the sound students packed up and moved up the stairs, past them, without any discussion.

  “And,” Tasneen went on, deliberately stamping on the next step down, “Mum said she’d pay for tickets to MCM next year to apologise for being shitty.”

  “Well that’s good,” Ben said, as some drama students barged past them on their way up.

  “Yeah,” said Tasneen, who didn’t sound as if she thought it was. “And my brother keeps sending me messages on Facebook about how I’m an evil traitor and Aliyaah is a worm in the nest or something, and then going on about how it’s the best thing that ever happened to him because he’s getting laid so much, and how I can go fuck myself.”

  “That’s.” Ben stopped and frowned. “I mean, assuming that’s true and not him showing off, that’s kind of…dangerous, right now?”

  Tasneen stared at him for a minute, her brows knit in a scarf of confusion, and then she said, “Oh, yeah. KBV. I, uh.” She looked at her boots. “I don’t want to know if he’s been…reducing the risk. I guess probably not.”

  “I suppose you just have to keep your fingers crossed,” said Ben, trying not to sound too hopeless, too bitter. They hit the next landing down.

  “Don’t think I haven’t thought of it,” Tasneen added, at last. “He didn’t used to be this much of a dickhead. He was at least 40% less of a prick. Maybe more, I don’t know.” She swung round on the handrail. “He definitely wasn’t basically a walking erection back then, either. Every other day it’s another gross unsubtle brag on Facebook and I swear he didn’t know half these girls, my timeline is mostly just ‘has become friends with’ and I know what kind of friend.”

  Ben said nothing. They turned into the cafeteria, and were hit with a wall of noise. It was raining like the end of the world outside, and the wall-length windows looked more like a water feature.

  “Your turn to pay for coffee,” Tasneen said.