by Andrew Tudor
Part 2
ONSET
1
Although the newsfeeds were increasingly depressing, Hart found himself drawn back to them several times a day. There was, he thought, a morbid fascination to seeing life unravelling in so many parts of the world, all triggered by Charles Livermore’s self-appointed day of reckoning just four months earlier. The WHO was not yet officially willing to describe the spread of influenza as a pandemic, but pandemic it undoubtedly was and one for which, although they had tried to deny it, the English were by now widely blamed – quite fairly so in Hart’s view.
The leak to Julie Fenwick had done its job, not simply in forcing the English authorities to act, but also in spreading the word across the globe. There were now documented cases of the flu on every continent except Antarctica where the fortunate handful of scientists had been cut off by weather conditions for several months. In some places – those that were poor, overcrowded, and with limited medical facilities – the epidemic was already running completely out of control. Death rates there were appallingly high and remained very considerable even in richer and better equipped countries. The English Flu, as it had come to be named, turned out to be unusually capable of adapting to changing circumstances.
Much to Hart’s surprise the reason for the virus’s facility at adaptation remained officially unknown. There had been speculation, of course, especially when two different mutations had been detected, a particularly virulent one in India and another milder variant in Chile. It was unheard of for a virus to mutate that quickly so a plethora of conspiracy theories had flooded the internet. Some were hugely popular if patently far-fetched, often relying on the familiar tropes of alien invasion or end-of-days mysticism. Others, invoking the twenty-first century’s extraordinary advances in genetics, were much closer to the truth but were submerged amid the constantly shifting currents of opinion that flowed across global social networks. Hart had no doubt that governments and scientists around the world suspected that they were dealing with a virus deliberately engineered for rapid mutation. But none of them had an interest in making that public for fear of causing escalating levels of panic among populations by now on tenterhooks.
There had already been some social unrest, not least in England where demonstrators converged on Porton Down in the immediate aftermath of the Wessex Web revelations. At first such events were quite easily suppressed. Under the guise of environmental considerations, travel within England had for several years been limited to officially sanctioned routes and vehicles, thus ensuring that there was little difficulty in constraining the demonstrators’ ability to reach rural Wiltshire in any numbers. Furthermore, the intelligence agencies – including Hart’s own – instantly descended on the organisers and provocateurs of such actions. The Wessex Web had been temporarily closed down and the DSD had detained and interrogated Julie Fenwick for several days. It was with a certain ironic satisfaction that Hart noted her determination not to give up her ‘Deep Throat’. He had chosen her well.
As time passed, however, and the sickness and mortality rates climbed precipitously, rumblings of dissent grew louder to be greeted by an increasing presence of armed police and military on the streets of English cities. For the most part this very public show of force – or ‘safety maintenance’ as the official euphemism had it – did its job in keeping order, although Hart believed that the stability it achieved was at best superficial. Too many essential functions were teetering on the edge of failure as illness deprived them of the skills and labour necessary to keep them running. To walk around London, as Hart did regularly, was to witness a city deserted by many of its inhabitants, while those who were prepared to take the risk wore surgical masks or respirators and carefully avoided any contact with each other.
It was a strange sight, this thinly populated metropolis, its ghost-like figures unrecognisable behind their masks, passing by without so much as a look. Restaurants and bars were mostly closed, theatres and cinemas dark, offices and businesses staffed by skeleton crews if they were staffed at all. Hospitals were overloaded, and anyway incapable of doing much other than alleviating some of the worst symptoms of their all too frequently dying patients. The government had with great fanfare extended the customary seasonal offer of mass flu vaccination beyond its normal range of recipients. But this was more a public relations exercise than a preventive intervention since they knew full well that the vaccine would have little or no effect on Livermore’s original strain, let alone on its proclivity for sudden mutation.
All this, Hart recognised, was taking a severe toll on the tolerance of the population. Families fearful of infection confined themselves to home – schools and other educational institutions had been closed for some weeks – venturing out only to buy food at those supermarkets designated to hold the ever-decreasing and, therefore, rationed supplies. The economy was tumbling further and further into recession, faced with travel and trade embargoes from former international allies as well as a rapid decline in domestic production and consumption. The City of London, past keystone of the English economy and much vaunted provider of international financial services, had proved helpless in the face of worldwide economic crises. Basic infrastructure provision was just about holding up; there was still power, water, and waste disposal. But how long that could continue remained a matter for constant speculation in the newsfeeds, speculation which itself bolstered the spreading sense of imminent catastrophe.
It would not take much for all this to tip people over the edge into… what? Hart simply did not know. There were long-standing divisions and inequalities in English society which had hitherto been papered over by a combination of ideological manipulation and carefully concealed repressive measures, processes in which the DSD had played its full part. A crisis of this kind, which affected huge swathes of the population, could well feed into those underlying social tensions and generate a pressure which would ultimately find public expression.
Almost twenty years earlier Hart had been a young undercover officer at the time of the London riots. He remembered vividly how quickly they developed, how generally peaceful people had become caught up in street violence, looting and arson. It had simply needed the right catalyst to set things going, in this case the shooting by police of a young black man and a subsequent protest march. Within days there were similar actions in other English cities, although none reached the pitch achieved in London, and then the disturbances died away almost as quickly as they had arisen.
It was a pattern that Hart had recognised at the time. As a student he had written a dissertation on the causes and trajectories of just this kind of collective behaviour, and he could see now that all the preconditions for such an upsurge were in place. It might be, of course, that people’s fear of infection and their retreat into their homes would minimise the risk. But Hart was not convinced. The sheer scale of the influenza outbreak was unprecedented in the modern era, as was the desperation that it engendered in people who witnessed sickness and death among their friends and relations. Not since the fourteenth century’s Black Death had an illness spread so swiftly across continents, a rapidity matched by the pace at which social networks documented and amplified its progress. It was a truly terrifying prospect for most people who, uniquely in their experience, were being forced to confront not only the premature mortality of their loved ones but also the increasing probability of their own.
It was his growing awareness that social order was balanced on a razor’s edge that had prevented Hart from taking the next step in his planned sequence of leaks – detailing the Zeno effect itself. In principle, the channel through Irene and Julie was still available to him. After the worldwide publicity that followed her revelations about the source of the flu, Julie had gained considerable freedom of operation. While she wasn’t exactly untouchable, any attempt to muzzle her, whether by detention or even assassination, would now attract adverse international and domestic interest of a kind that the go
vernment was eager to avoid. Several transnational newsfeeds had retained her both as a vlogger and as an analyst of the English situation, installing her in a London apartment and providing her with protection, contacts, and secure communication systems. Of course, the intelligence agencies were still watching her, although as time passed and the health crisis intensified they found themselves lacking the resources necessary for full surveillance of anybody. They, too, had lost staff to the virus, and these limitations meant that Hart’s channel to Julie remained open and secure.
Yet he had baulked at using it. It seemed to him that there was no longer much to be gained by exposing the full details of the Zeno effect and of the government cover-up. No one had the means to arrest the accelerated mutation rate of the virus so, Hart reasoned, the risks of much intensified panic far outweighed the likely positive consequences. True, forcing the authorities into publishing technical details of the Porton Down work would allow for international collaboration in the search for a solution. But that would be a very long-term gamble which, again, was probably not worth the risk. Hart sighed. He was going round in circles, he told himself, and there was no point to it. Better to get on with the more immediate job of maintaining some semblance of order in England. He was, after all, director of an agency committed to defending domestic security and that had to remain his first priority.
He turned his attention back to his CommsTab where an international newsfeed was currently spreading even more gloom. The fortress state of North Korea, in the person of its latest Great Leader, was, as ever, busy laying the blame for its own flu epidemic at the door of its southern neighbours and their allies, against whom it threatened unspecified retaliation. Hart was indulging a half smile at the familiar madness of statements from the improbably named Democratic People’s Republic, which was neither democratic nor belonging to the people, when a pop-up on his screen signalled a v-call from Jill, his wife. He disliked being interrupted at work – Hart’s life was carefully constructed into mutually exclusive compartments – so his response was brisk.
“Yes Jill, what is it? I’m busy.”
Only then did he look properly at the screen and take in the fact that his wife appeared to be distressed.
“I’m sorry, Jonathan, but I think it might be a good idea if you came home. Rosie is running a rather high temperature and not breathing very easily at all.”
Rosie – Rosemary as he preferred it – was their nine-year-old daughter, much adored by her father who was not otherwise given to close emotional ties.
“She seemed fine this morning when I left.”
“Yes, it came on very suddenly during the day. Could you come home soon? I think we might need to get her to your government treatment centre. I don’t want to risk the local hospital.”
“Absolutely,” he said, picking up his possessions from the desk as he did so. “Keep away from the hospital – it’s a death trap. I’ll arrange for the treatment centre on my way. Stay with her. She’ll be OK. I’ll make sure of that.”
Alison MacGregor was distracted. She was all too aware that her attention was wandering after almost three hours in a seemingly endless meeting of the recently created Scottish Virology Research Group, of which she had been made secretary and facilitator. The Group was known to her more facetious science administration colleagues as the Baby Bug Hunters, a designation which had stuck in spite of its patent inaccuracy. Though they were indeed small, viruses could hardly be counted as bugs, nor was the Group in the job of hunting them. The SVRG was an attempt to bring together Scotland’s leading expertise in areas germane to dealing with the flu. Its members were drawn from several universities and from the Scottish Health Service, and it was chaired by a very senior professor from the University of Glasgow. He had, Ali knew, a formidable scientific reputation, but as a chairman he lacked any inclination to direct discussion into practical areas. For the last twenty minutes two members of the Group had been engaged in an arcane disagreement about an obscure aspect of genetics and the Chairman, who appeared to be enjoying the debate, was showing no sign of returning them to the more pressing topics in hand. Hence Ali’s impatience, which was shared by several others around the table as she could see from their fidgeting.
At last the two men fell into a mutually recriminatory silence whereupon everyone else looked hopefully towards the Chair.
“Um, yes. Thank you, gentlemen. Most enlightening. Anything else we need to consider, Alison?”
Ali, who was determined that the already over-extended meeting should not continue for a moment longer, ignored a couple of other items on her own Any Other Business list and offered relief to all.
“No, Chair, I think we’ve probably covered everything for this week.”
“Excellent. Well, thank you all for coming. See you next week when we meet… um?”
“In Stirling,” Ali supplied.
“Ah yes. Stirling. Till next week then, when we can continue that interesting discussion.”
This was the signal for an immediate rush to the door leaving Ali to retrieve any papers left lying around the room. Some of them highly confidential, she reminded herself as she prepared to go.
“Do you have a moment, Alison?”
It was a recently retired Professor of Genetics, Michael Lang, whom she had known vaguely when he had been Sarah Johnson’s PhD supervisor.
“Of course, Michael. What can I do for you?”
“Well, you could organise a new chairman,” he replied with a mischievous grin, “but I don’t suppose that’s really possible. No, I wanted a word about Sarah and Hugh. Both of them could be very useful to us in this work and I wondered if you knew how settled they were in York. I’ve been given funds to set up a secret unit focusing specifically on Zeno so I could find them decent research jobs. I’m not at all sure that England is a good place for them to be right now.”
Ali nodded. “I agree about them being in England. In fact, I made that very point to Sarah last time I saw her and things have got much worse since then. But isn’t the border pretty much closed now?”
“I’m told that exceptions can be made in special circumstances, although that still doesn’t mean that they could get through the English side of the fence even if we were willing to accept them. But I’ve been speaking to someone else I think you know – Douglas MacIntyre – and he seems to believe that if there are people I want to recruit from England then there are ways and means. He didn’t elaborate though.”
“No, I bet he didn’t,” Ali said with a smile. “But he does seem to get things done. He can certainly contact Sarah privately, as he probably told you.”
“Mmmmn, he did.” Michael looked at her quizzically. “He thinks highly of you. In fact, he suggested that I had this conversation. He seemed to think you might be an ideal go-between. Would you?”
“I’d certainly like to get them up here if it’s possible. What do you suggest?”
“I’ll get back to Douglas and ask him to contact you directly, and I’ll let you know what exactly I can offer them. Then you and Douglas can do whatever is necessary. Best if I don’t know the details, I think.”
Ali and Michael parted ways outside the Summerhall Virology Building. Eager to recover from the torpor induced by the meeting, she decided to cheer herself up by not returning to the office and instead walking home across The Meadows. As a child she had spent many hours playing in the park on what had then looked to her like a vast plain of green set down in the midst of Edinburgh’s grey buildings. Today, in spite of the fact that it was a mild afternoon even for twenty-first century winter warmth, there were only a few people around, most of them walking dogs, and some of them, she noted, wearing protective masks.
As a result of the information that she had secured from Irene, the Scottish government had been able to act early enough to slow the spread of flu, though certainly not to stem it. Still, there were more than enough c
ases to be frightening, and, as everywhere, people were becoming less willing to venture out unless absolutely necessary. This fearfulness had not been helped by the decision to close the border with England to all but approved traffic. While this did have some small effect on limiting the passage of the virus into Scotland, it also served publicly to underline quite how serious was the threat. Hitherto the border had been viewed by Scots as an essentially xenophobic construction by the English who had fenced it a couple of years earlier in response to yet another scare about illegal migrants arriving via Scottish routes. Now, though, it had taken on the mantle of a last-ditch Scots defence against incoming disease.
As she left the main park and wandered slowly along Middle Meadow Walk, Ali mused on the parlous state of their resistance to the spreading virus. Of course, they were doing what they could – witness the frustrating meeting that she had just attended – but it was clear that this was not going to be sufficient. Unless someone could crack the Zeno code the world would face wave after wave of flu of varying degrees of virulence. Some people would undoubtedly be immune, others might develop resistance, but the death toll would still be fearsome. The reports that she had seen from England were shocking and, although her own country had put in place treatment and quarantine procedures very early, Scottish cities were beginning to follow a similar pattern to those south of the border. Containment was not going to be enough.
