‘Even better,’ agreed Amanda. ‘What’s Pelham’s problem?’
Spencer hesitated, recognizing the irony before responding. ‘Too forthright. A personality clash.’
‘Always a need for timing and judgment,’ said Amanda, relaxing in her seat as Spencer swung off the I-395
Both of which, Spencer acknowledged objectively, this morning he’d got seriously wrong. ‘You heard of Stoddart?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Amanda. ‘I know all about Stoddart.’
Amanda’s impression of Walter Pelham was that he’d been a forgotten experiment that had dried out at the bottom of a test tube. Even the handshake was dry and cold. The emotionless, desiccated man listened expressionlessly as Spencer elaborated upon the impending arrival of the Alaska airlift he’d already been warned to expect, occasionally nodding in private agreement with himself.
‘All our isolation facilities are now free,’ he said. Heavily, looking directly at the president’s aide, Pelham added: ‘Jim Olsen’s was the first.’
‘And sufficient room for the British and French scientific people?’ Spencer pressed on. The bastard had guessed why they’d held off the scientist’s demand for his wife and a lawyer. The pause was brief. ‘We thought we might move a few more military in, too. Logistics, administration, security, stuff like that.’
Amanda matched Pelham’s quick, frowned concentration, although she remained silent. So did the facility director until Spencer became discomfited. Finally Pelham said: ‘This is a military scientific research compound with the highest security classification. Our security arrangements are fine, like our logistics and administration.’
‘It’s precisely because Detrick is the sort of place it is that the President thinks it’s necessary,’ said Spencer. ‘We don’t want people wandering into divisions and departments they’ve no right to be in, do we?’
Smoothly handled, conceded Amanda: the bastard should still have warned her. Pelham said: ‘So everyone’s to be restricted?’
‘We’ve got a major priority, Walt! Are all your involved experts taking time off for barbecues and happy hour?’
Pelham looked at Amanda. ‘You’d better get ready for the protests.’
Amanda, in turn looking at Spencer, said: ‘I suppose I had.’ Going back to the scientist she said: ‘What about the necessary division, between everything these new arrivals will entail and the sort of research you normally carry out?’
‘The isolation wings are just that, isolated,’ said Pelham. ‘So there’s no security difficulty. But there’s obviously limitations …’ He went back to Spencer. ‘And once you have to start putting your old people anywhere outside of here – or somewhere like here – you’re compounding your public awareness problem.’
Neither of these men liked each other, gauged Amanda. Which wasn’t a working necessity – she didn’t like Paul Spencer – but there seemed to be an animosity, which she hoped wouldn’t develop. The leadership of the scientific investigation group, she remembered. Quickly she said: ‘There’s been some thought in Washington about your position here and the incoming people, from Paris and London … obviously your doctors already involved – and you, yourself – have to work with whoever arrives but we thought it might be diplomatically better if you, as the installation director, didn’t appear automatically to head the oversight group. Which might have been the assumption. We want, if possible, to avoid compromising you …’
Pelham said: ‘I’m not quite sure I follow the reasoning …’
‘Detrick’s got precisely the facilities that are needed but it’s known to be the country’s micro-biological research establishment,’ continued Amanda, easily. ‘The President wants a measure of independence from that …’
‘If that’s the political thinking,’ he shrugged. ‘Who …?’
‘Jack Stoddart,’ announced Amanda, surprised the scientist wasn’t putting up more of an objection. ‘It’s a liaison function, like Paul’s will be between what’s going on here and us in Washington. Stoddart’s been involved from the beginning. And it in no way affects your authority here, internally …’
Pelham was smiling now. So too, faintly, was Spencer.
Amanda said: ‘How is he, after the woman’s death?’
‘It only happened during the night. I haven’t seen him yet.’
‘Let’s see him together,’ suggested Amanda. She paused. ‘I’d hoped to be able to see – talk to, if that had been possible – some of the victims.’
‘All there are now are bodies,’ said Pelham.
‘Yes,’ said Amanda, after a further hesitation. ‘I suppose I need to see the bodies.’
As he’d plodded heavily back over Lambeth Bridge in the pissing rain that morning, freezingly burdened by the sodden and intentionally worn supermarket tracksuit, without there having been a single photographer to record his agonizing commitment to health, science, youth or whatever other bollocks the spin doctors wanted to attach as a label, Peter Reynell determined that the publicity value of jogging was well past its sell-by date and that it was time for an already promised doctor’s verdict (‘a serious risk of permanent damage to the Achilles; this man who’s been an example to all should not risk at his young age being permanently in a wheelchair’) to get him off the hook. He could install an exercise bike or a rowing machine or something in Lord North Street and pose on it for carefully chosen and vetted friendly cameramen and give himself at least an extra hour in bed, whoever’s bed that might be.
The previous night it had been his own, alone, because the private dining room gathering at the Carlton Club had been disappointing. Not one of those carefully chosen from the 1922 Committee had turned up and if he hadn’t been as careful as he had – using the by-election celebration of the most newly elected Member to test his own popularity – it would have been disastrous. As it was, Reynell was still nervous of the subterfuge being realized and ground out by the Westminster gossip mill. All in all, it had been a pretty shitty twenty-four hours.
Reynell left the tracksuit where it fell and continued shivering for what seemed to be a long time despite running the shower as hot as he could bear. With the inferred – although tantalizingly still only dangled – support of Lord Ranleigh, the backroom manipulating party grandee who was conveniently his father-in-law, he’d worked hard cultivating what he believed to be a solid backing over the previous twelve months, seeding the rumours of a leadership challenge so that he could deny them, pledging unfaltering loyalty to the current but increasingly inadequacy-exposed prime minister, and had been sure his troops had been there, simply awaiting their call to arms. There was an obvious explanation. Simon fucking Buxton had anticipated him: read the runes – maybe even had a spy – and had a pre-emptive word in too many receptive ears. For the next few days – or weeks or months – he needed to tread very carefully indeed. No more rumour denials or tracksuited photo opportunities or television debate programmes. No more relying on inferred endorsement from a man who’d taken the abolition of hereditary peerages as a personal insult. A tactical retreat: in fact, regroup, replan and be a bloody sight more careful next time. If he could survive for a next time.
Reynell was towelling himself dry, warm at last, when he heard his private phone – his parliamentary phone – in the adjoining bedroom, its tone quite intentionally different from Henrietta’s. He actually ran to snatch it up on only the third ring, wondering who it was – what it was – from last night.
‘Sorry to call you so early, Peter. Hope I didn’t wake you.’
‘I was already up, Prime Minister,’ replied Reynell, hollowstomached the moment he recognized the voice.
‘I forgot. You exercise, of course,’ said Buxton, in apparent recollection. ‘We need to talk. Urgently. Could you come over?’
Dismissal, thought Reynell at once. His campaign had been infiltrated and last night had been his Last Supper, betrayed by a Judas to be sacrificed. The resignation letters would be exchanged by lunchtime (Dear Prime Mi
nister, it is with the greatest regret … my continued and fullest support … Dear Peter, it is with the greatest regret … your enormous commitment and contribution …) and by tonight … By tonight what? A rare dinner with Lady Henrietta, perhaps? A familiar recital of the three hundred years of Ranleigh family service to Crown and country and the disappointment the still infuriatedly disenfranchised Lord Ranleigh of Henslow would feel at not at least having a son-in-law in a junior ministerial position? Reynell said: ‘What time would you like to see me?’
‘Now,’ said Buxton peremptorily. ‘Fifteen minutes. You can get here easily in fifteen minutes, can’t you?’
‘Easily,’ agreed Reynell.
He made it in ten, on foot, and by the time he got to Downing Street he’d determined on complete denial, although acknowledging it wouldn’t save him. Buxton couldn’t have any factual, written proof of his mounting a leadership challenge because there wasn’t any – his inner caucus would damn themselves by admitting anything unless one of them was the spy – and it was even conceivable that he could turn his dismissal into an advantage by getting the stories circulating that it was the desperate act of a desperate party leader deservedly about to be overthrown. Which might just be enough to start a groundswell.
Simon Buxton was a man who had virtually been manufactured by the group of similarly disenfranchised grandees and party activists in opposition to Lord Ranleigh, a skeleton – Reynell preferred coat rack – upon which a performing figure had been moulded. Buxton was a large, artificially avuncular man whose ancestry rivalled that of the Ranleigh family but without any inherited intellectual or even commonsense ability, a shortcoming the insecure and inadequate man tried to disguise by attempting to anticipate, usually wrongly, whatever point or argument was being advanced. So frequently had Buxton’s shoot-from-the-lip propensities been used by the Opposition to lure the man into misinterpreted interruptions and interventions during Prime Minister’s Question Time that the deputy leader was now always restrainingly at his side.
None of which, Reynell reflected as he entered Buxton’s private office overlooking the rear garden and Horseguards, was of any immediate benefit to him now. Befitting Reynell’s belief in the reason for his summons, the other man was solemnly grave-faced. Without any explanation, Buxton offered a sheaf of photographs, which Reynell accepted and took his time going through because he needed time, in his total bewilderment. Whatever this was it had nothing to do with last night’s dinner or any coup attempt! Listen, don’t talk, he told himself.
Looking up at last he said: ‘Who are they?’
‘Americans,’ replied Buxton. ‘The oldest was forty-one. That’s from the Antarctic but some of our people have caught it on an American station in Alaska.’
Reynell looked down again at the photographs. ‘What are we going to do?’
‘You’re the science minister,’ Buxton pointed out. ‘You’re going to Washington, to be part of a crisis group that’s being set up. I’m making you personally responsible, Peter.’
Exiled! thought Reynell, at once. ‘I’ll do my best, Prime Minister.’
‘I’m sure you will, as you always do,’ smiled Buxton.
Amanda O’Connell’s reaction to seeing the aged bodies, even from beyond the glassed protection of the mortuary’s viewing gallery, was as numbingly chilled as Spencer’s had earlier been. The man had made an excuse to avoid accompanying her, saying there was no purpose, and Amanda conceded there hadn’t been for her, either. It was voyeurism: shaming. She actually did feel ashamed, disgusted with herself, hurrying from the gallery and the ghastly sight regimented for her benefit, covering her embarrassment by talking animatedly with Pelham about the medical investigations so far conducted, which began emptily but from which a small, justifying point emerged.
She was still disconcerted when she re-entered the director’s office, so much so that she was startled to find Jack Stoddart already waiting there with Spencer, even though that had been Spencer’s excuse for remaining behind. Amanda was sure it hadn’t been obvious to any of them, most of all not to Stoddart, who responded with self-enclosed disinterest to their introduction. Stoddart was the unpredictable factor, one she didn’t think she could assess or compartment and most certainly the last person with whom she wanted to start out at any disadvantage. She was at once further embarrassed by that attitude, remembering the early morning death of the woman – the woman whose age-withered corpse she’d just looked down upon – with whom he had been personally involved.
It was her first face-to-face encounter with Jack Stoddart, although she’d watched him on television and film more times that she could recall and read even more of his articles and all his books, but her initial perception was yet another surprise. He was physically much smaller than she’d expected, in both height and build, but what was more marked was the total absence of the electric-current vibrancy she’d been so conscious of in every screen appearance. For every good reason, Amanda reminded herself, after what he’d been through. Her embarrassment began to go, replaced by an even more unsettling irritation. Instead of the psychological posturing of judging everyone else’s act, perhaps she should analyse her own, confronted as she was by the biggest and best career chance she was ever likely to get. She wasn’t thinking right, reacting right, being right. Thank Christ she’d realized it. She said: ‘You must be exhausted.’
Stoddart shrugged slumped shoulders. ‘I haven’t thought about it.’ He didn’t feel tired. He’d actually managed to sleep, after Patricia’s death. So what did he feel? Anger, at his impotence to have done anything. Say the right words. And guilt. Most of all guilt, a huge, hollowing self-blame at causing the deaths of four people, one of them Patricia Jefferies. Because he had killed them, as surely as pressing a trigger or depressing a plunger: not evacuating them from the field hut the moment he’d seen the condition of the bodies inside and, even worse, insisting upon carrying them, inadequately sealed, back to McMurdo and finally here, to America. Was that what they were here for, this woman whose name he’d already forgotten and the man who’d said something about the White House: here to talk about culpable negligence and liability, maybe caution him about legal representation? Was there a criminal charge, as well as a civil claim? It didn’t matter. He’d plead to both. Or either. There wasn’t any defence. Mitigation maybe, but only just. That scarcely mattered either.
She needed to remain in charge, Amanda decided. As she had been at the end of the earlier meeting: in charge, calling the shots – the right shots – and cracking the self-pitying shell Stoddart was creating around himself before it had time to harden. She leaned forward, forcing him to focus upon her, to disclose the Alaska outbreak, repeating it when at first it didn’t appear to register.
‘The northern hemisphere!’ Stoddart groped. ‘It’s travelled … happening there … Oh Jesus! How, so far apart? What was the cause? The conduit?’
Having got him, Amanda refused to let him go, realizing as she talked of international co-operating groups and combined research, that she was talking in Spencer-like sound bites to keep Stoddart’s attention. By the time she finished he’d straightened and was leaning towards her, intent not to miss anything. There was, however, still doubt in his attitude.
‘What about my bringing the bodies back … the others who died?’ he said.
Amanda picked up the point, way ahead of the other two men. She said: ‘That’s what you had to do. The right thing. For the research to start …’
‘The others …?’
‘That couldn’t have been prevented. You didn’t know. None of us knows yet.’
Stoddart’s mind wouldn’t hold a consistent thought and he decided that perhaps he was exhausted, although he didn’t feel anything like he had when he’d landed at Andrews Air Force base. ‘This investigation …? Am I to be part of it?’
‘You’re to head it,’ declared Amanda.
Stoddart’s doubt returned. He looked directly at Pelham and said: ‘Surely that’s�
��’
‘I’m going to be practicably involved,’ cut off the director, ahead of any longer explanation.
‘Yes,’ said Stoddart, to himself more than to anyone else. ‘I need to know what it is. What caused it and how to stop it. I must do that.’
It was Amanda’s decision – still unsettled by what she’d seen in the mortuary and insisting medical examinations had the obvious priority – that they shouldn’t remain for the C-130 arrival from Alaska, still at least three hours away. There wasn’t any further sexual appraisal as she settled in the passenger seat. As they made their way through the security checks, Amanda said: ‘I thought we reached an agreement.’
‘So did I.’
‘Don’t smart-ass, Paul. You didn’t warn me about any extra military presence.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I don’t want to be sorry about anything, certainly not you keeping something from me. I thought I made that clear.’
It was stupid and he shouldn’t have done it, Spencer conceded. But he didn’t like the way he was being relegated. Despite which, trying to ingratiate himself, he said: ‘You handled Pelham brilliantly.’
Amanda shook her head, refusing the flattery. ‘He didn’t want to head the group. Why not?’
Spencer shook his head in return. ‘Maybe he doesn’t think they’re going to find out what it is or how to stop it. And doesn’t want to carry the can.’
Amanda was silent for several minutes, until the direction signs to the Beltway began to come up. Then she said: ‘What was the point Pelham was making to you, about James Olsen?’
Didn’t she miss a fucking thing? thought Spencer. ‘I didn’t think he was making any point. If he did, I don’t know why.’
The bastard was lying, at least partially, Amanda decided. He’d only have himself to blame: she’d warned him clearly enough.
At the National Security Agency the deputy analysis director read the translation for a second time and decided it was precisely what the White House wanted. In fact, according to regulations, he should have immediately started to ring alarm bells, particularly with the CIA. When there was no reply from Spencer’s telephone he sent an email alert and decided he could afford to wait a couple of hours, three at the outside. But no longer than that. This was something he should move on. The NSA is at Fort Meade, in the same state of Maryland as Fort Detrick, and at that moment Spencer was, ironically, only twenty miles away but driving in the opposite direction.
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