The Lazarus Strain (5 page)

The Home Office minister smiled and said, ‘So we should all adopt the Sci-Med approach to investigation; is that what you’re suggesting John?’

‘Not exactly, Minister, it’s really a different way of looking at things I’m advocating.’ replied Macmillan.

‘You’ve lost me,’ said the police commander.

‘And me,’ agreed several others.

The Home Office minister explained. ‘The Sci-Med computers are programmed to collect and collate information from the world of science and medicine in this country and pick up on any unusual trends or traits. Once identified, John’s team of investigators take over and pick away until they see if there’s anything to worry about. Is that right, John?’

‘In a nutshell, yes, Minister,’ said Macmillan, deferring to the man who officially represented his boss, the Home Secretary. The Sci-Med Inspectorate came within the jurisdiction of the Home Office although permitted to act independently when it came to investigations.

‘Well, we’ve certainly had cause to be grateful in the past to Sci-Med for what they’ve come up with out of the blue – if you’ll pardon the pun,’ continued the Home Secretary. ‘So you are suggesting a similar approach for the security services, is that correct?’

‘Yes, Home Secretary, I suppose I am, in addition to their normal modes of operation they should broaden their horizons – think laterally – give rein to their imagination.’

‘Interesting concept.’

‘And doomed to failure,’ said Colonel Rose.

‘Why so?’

‘Sci-Med only looks at things pertinent to science and medicine and only in this country. The intelligence community operates on a global scale. Any attempt to use the Sci-Med system would founder on the sheer volume of information we collect, sir - the same problem that overwhelmed the Nimrod air reconnaissance programme, if you remember: it collected too much information to analyse.’

‘It was logging every car on the M1, as I remember,’ smiled the Home Office minister.

‘That’s where people come in,’ said Macmillan. ‘Human intuition: computers don’t have that: they can’t decide what’s interesting and what’s not. Everything is given equal billing. You need people with imagination to pick out the cherries from the stones.’

‘That’s what JIC people do,’ said Rose.

‘With blinkers on,’ said Macmillan. ‘They’re told what to look for.’

‘Blinkers have their place if they stop a horse from being distracted by irrelevance.’

‘But you’ve already decided what is irrelevant before anything appears,’ said Macmillan.

‘Gentlemen, I think if we spend any more time arguing along these lines we’ll end up discussing Zen Buddhism and the meaning of life,’ said the Home Office minister. ‘I think what John’s been saying is very interesting but perhaps it should be considered again in less fraught times. What we have to consider right now is how we should be reacting to a possible but undetermined threat if the DIS interpretation of recent events is correct.’

‘The Met of course will be put on heightened alert,’ said the police commissioner.

‘As will my people,’ added the fire chief.

Macmillan just shrugged.

‘Well, I think that is about as much as any of us can do at this stage, ladies and gentlemen,’ said the Home Secretary. You will of course be kept informed of any developments as and when they occur.’

‘And when the unexpected comes to call, God help us all,’ murmured Macmillan.

Macmillan left Downing Street and returned to the Home Office where he closed his office door and slumped down into the chair behind his desk to stare up at the ceiling for a few moments. He knew he should have been more circumspect about criticising traditional security measures but frustration had got the better of him as it did every time he saw the armed police wandering around the concourse at Heathrow. Just what the hell did they think they were going to do with automatic weapons in a crowded hall? The intercom buzzer interrupted his train of thought and his secretary, Jean Roberts, said, ‘Steven Dunbar is here.’

‘Send him in.’

‘Sounds like a bear with a sore head,’ whispered Jean Roberts to the tall man in the dark blue suit and Parachute Regiment tie. ‘Careful as you go.’

Dr Steven Dunbar, medical investigator with the Sci-Med Inspectorate, smiled and walked into Macmillan’s room as he had done so often in the past. He liked John Macmillan and would be ever grateful to him for rescuing him from the prospect of a dull career in either the pharmaceutical industry or in-house medicine when his service career had ended.

He had known well enough when the time had come for him to leave the armed forces in his mid thirties that an army career with the Parachute Regiment and Special Forces, in which he had become an expert in field medicine, had done little to further his chances of climbing the career pole in domestic medicine. He had simply missed the boat. There was little or no demand for a doctor with the skills of a commando or the ability to operate on wounded comrades in the jungles of South America or the deserts of the Middle East.

Fortunately for him, John Macmillan had appeared on the scene to offer him the job with the Sci-Med Inspectorate where he would be employed as a medical investigator in an organisation he had never heard of but to which he had taken like a duck to water.

Sci-Med operated as a small independent unit within the Home Office. Its function was to monitor events developing in science and medicine in the UK and spot early indications of possible problems or crimes that the police might not have the necessary expertise to either see or investigate. Sci-Med investigators were either medical or science graduates but with many other skills acquired in the course of widely varied careers. New graduates were not recruited to Sci-Med. It was Macmillan’s view that they didn’t know enough about life. All Sci-Med people had to have demonstrated high levels of intelligence and resourcefulness in other walks of life and had to have, above all else, that most valuable of attributes in Macmillan’s book - common sense in abundance.

‘How are you?’ asked Macmillan.

‘Refreshed and relaxed,’ smiled Steven. ‘Unlike you by the look of things . . .’

‘I’ve just been to a top level security meeting,’ said Macmillan. ‘Apparently al-Qaeda are getting restless. Intelligence suggests they’re going to mount a big operation but we don’t know what and we don’t know where.’

‘Sounds like a challenge,’ said Steven.

‘Apparently, we are ‘heightening security’,’ said Macmillan ruefully.

Steven smiled. He knew that this was a particular hobby horse of Macmillan’s. ‘Be extra vigilant about nail scissors on Boeing 747s, you mean?’

‘That sort of thing,’ agreed Macmillan. ‘Confiscate one passenger’s pen knife while all the others trot on board with glass bottles full of duty-free. What would you rather face, someone with a broken bottle or a pen knife?’

‘Luckily, neither eventuality is too likely,’ said Steven.

‘Just as well when common sense is in such short supply, but that’s what ‘heightening security’ usually boils down to - confiscating more bloody pen knives.’

Steven remained silent while Macmillan worked through his frustration. Eventually he looked up from his desk and said, ‘Sorry, I’m getting a bit carried away. None of this is of any direct concern to us. Did you have a good leave?’

‘I did,’ replied Steven. ‘I was up in Scotland with my daughter. It’s been a while since we could spend a decent amount of time together.’

‘Good. I suppose she’s not a baby any more?’

‘Just moved up to Primary 2,’ said Steven.

‘God, how time flies. How is she getting on? Stays with your sister in law and her husband, doesn’t she?’

‘Yes,’ confirmed Steven. ‘She’s happy. She’s turning out to be everything I’d hoped she’d be. I can see so much of Lisa in her. It’s uncanny.’

‘Well,’ said Macmillan somewhat uncertainly, ‘I trust you can take some comfort from that.’

Steven smiled and put Macmillan at his ease. ‘I can.’

Steven’s wife, Lisa, had died of a brain tumour shortly after Jenny’s birth and since that time Jenny had lived with Lisa’s sister, Sue, and her husband Richard and their own two children, Robin and Mary, in the Dumfriesshire village of Glenvane in Scotland.

‘I understand you have a job for me?’

Macmillan nodded. ‘I take it you are aware of the attack on the Crick Institute in Norfolk by animal rights extremists, the one resulting in the murder of Professor Timothy Devon?’

‘It was on every front page in the country,’ said Steven.

‘Apart from the murder of an eminent scientist and the damage they caused to the labs, they released a number of lab animals into the wild,’ said Macmillan. ‘Primates.’

‘Ah,’ said Steven.

‘When it emerged that Professor Devon was on the UK vaccines advisory committee . . .’

‘You started wondering what the monkeys had been injected with?’ said Steven.

‘Precisely. But I was assured that nothing dangerous had been involved . . .’

‘And that there was no cause for alarm,’ completed Steven with a smile. ‘Where have I heard that before?’

‘When I asked exactly what the animals had been infected with, the institute spokesperson declined to tell me without reference to something he called “higher authority”. I asked him to call me back when he had such authority but nothing’s happened so far.’

‘Were all the animals recovered?’

‘In a manner of speaking. The army was called in to shoot them.’

‘The army?’ exclaimed Steven. ‘Why the army?’

Macmillan shrugged.

‘Were they successful?’

‘I understand they got five out of the six.’

‘So one on the loose . . . but of course, nothing at all to worry about.’

‘That’s why I want you to go up there. It’s a messy business but the question for us is: is it a dangerous mess?’

‘Are the animals known to have been in contact with any members of the public?’

‘One attacked an elderly couple in Holt. The man received bites to his shoulder and was treated in hospital. He was released and appears to be none the worse for his experience.’

‘So there may be nothing to it,’ said Steven.

‘I’d like your assurance about that,’ said Macmillan. ‘The Crick is a civilian establishment, not military, so the attitude of their spokesperson might just have been typical civil service reluctance to say anything about anything - assume that the day of the week is a secret until some higher authority gives you permission to reveal it.’

‘I’ll have a poke around,’ said Steven.

‘Jean has prepared a file for you on Timothy Devon and the institute.’

‘Good, I’ll not pretend that I’m familiar with the man’s work.’

‘He was an expert in vaccines,’ said Macmillan. ‘Not exactly headline grabbing stuff but in recent times, with all the talk of biological attack and our preparedness to deal with such an attack – or lack of it - vaccination schedules are very much in the minds and on the lips of our political masters. There is general concern over our ability to vaccinate the population if a biological attack should occur. It’s the sort of thing that could become an election issue.’

‘As it did in the US last year.’

Macmillan nodded. ‘I think we can be sure that that would not have been lost on the government here,’ he said.

‘On the other hand, I didn’t notice
us
running out of flu vaccine last year,’ said Steven.

‘Apparently, we license a greater number of suppliers,’ said Macmillan.

‘Maybe there’s a lesson there for the Yanks,’ said Steven.

‘The Americans didn’t license thalidomide,’ said Macmillan.

‘
Touche
,’ said Steven.

FOUR

Steven read that Timothy Devon had been fifty-eight at the time of his death. He was married to Joan, a former fellow lecturer in Biochemistry at the University of Warwick and was the father of two daughters, Julia and Imogen, aged 22 and 24. He had been head of the Crick Institute for eight years having previously worked at Warwick and before that, at the Institute of Virology in Glasgow. He had recently become a grandfather when Julia, who lived in Manchester with her graphic designer husband, Ben, had given birth to a son, James Timothy.

The forensic photographs of his body were horrific. Despite the awful sights he had seen in the course of his professional life, Steven still found himself grimacing while examining them. It was impossible not to imagine the hell the man must have gone through before death had come as a merciful release just as it was impossible not to question if concern for animal welfare could ever have justified such barbarity in the mind of any normal person. Steven concluded not. The people who had done this to Devon were sick in the head: they were sadists entirely without conscience. There was some awful difference between seeing damage done to a human body in the heat of battle and that applied coldly and dispassionately by a torturer. It might be argued that both arose as the result of human failing but the latter was so much more difficult to come to terms with.

Devon had been an acknowledged expert on vaccines and had acted as an advisor to successive governments and on several occasions. Like many academics called on by government on an
ad hoc
basis, his profile had generally been low but a recent rigorous defence of the MMR vaccine had brought him into public consciousness, particularly when he had attacked the science used to question its safety and the scientist who had expressed these doubts. The spat had attracted wide press attention and the government had subsequently appointed him to their vaccines advisory committee, a position he had used to warn of the dangers of losing public confidence in essential vaccination programmes. Doubts about vaccines given to soldiers in the Gulf War and the scare over MMR had done much to damage such confidence, he had argued. Government had to address that problem and look to the future in order to anticipate further needs. At present, the nation in his view would be ill-equipped to deal with a measles epidemic let alone a smallpox or anthrax attack.