‘A virus has a genetic structure,’ stated Geraldine.
‘A fact I’m sure we all know,’ said Raisa. ‘Just as I’m sure we’ll benefit from your particular expertize when the virus is found.’
Shit! thought Stoddart, uneasily.
‘I don’t think the point I want to make need wait until then,’ said Geraldine evenly. For the sake of the discussion, let’s go for the moment with the virus theory. If it has DNA – deoxyribonucleic acid – we’ll be lucky …’ Allowing herself the balancing superciliousness she said: ‘Another fact I’m sure we all know is that a virus invades a cell and feeds off it to reproduce more viruses which then infect the body. DNA checks itself; if there’s a mutation, it repairs it. It stays as one virus and if your theory is right and we isolate it, we can raise a vaccine—’
‘What is your point?’ broke in Raisa.
‘Ribonucleic acid,’ said Geraldine and stopped. The Russian had herself sawn through the branch she had chosen to sit upon and pontificate, so fuck her.
Walter Pelham saved Raisa. He said: ‘Do we really need to be any more frightened than we already are?’
‘I don’t want to slow anything down, but the rest of you understand molecular biology. I don’t,’ said Stoddart. ‘I really would appreciate your making it as simple as possible, so I can keep up.’
‘Ribonucleic acid – RNA – is another genetic structure of viruses. The influenza bug is one of them,’ expanded Geraldine. ‘RNA doesn’t – can’t – correct itself. If there is a gene mutation while it’s replicating itself in a host cell, it can create an entirely new virus. So the vaccine we might cultivate against our first virus – if we find one – won’t be effective against the second …’
‘… Or the third or the fourth and so on and so on,’ said Pelham.
‘Jesus!’ said Paul Spencer.
‘We haven’t established it’s a virus yet,’ cautioned Pelham, urgently.
‘What can we establish?’ asked the dispirited Dupuy.
‘Temperature,’ said Stoddart shortly.
More for Raisa Orlov than anyone else Stoddart offered what brief documentary material there was, but suggested that with the Antarctic and Alaska monitoring covering only days they might prefer to wait for a complete month’s readings. Because the now destroyed field station had not existed the previous winter, there was no direct day or week comparison, but against the previous year’s records for the same period from the nearby Amundsen-Scott base there was a two-degree temperature increase, which climatically was remarkable. Even more remarkable was the five-degree rise for the same days at Noatak, for which direct comparison did exist. Because of the onset of winter at the South Pole, the existing hole in the ozone layer had closed, but there was every indication that a matching hole would form for the first time over the North Pole during the oncoming summer. If that occurred, the already unusually high early summer temperature would get higher still and cause even further ice sheet and tundra melting.
‘Which is why I think we need to talk about the other incidents that we’ve become aware of. I believe it’s a reasonable hypothesis that although pollution might be a contributing factor, the sea life diseases are being caused by the introduction into the oceans of organisms, microbes …’ He shrugged, looking between the two women. ‘Let’s just call them bugs … the entry into the oceans of bugs that have been trapped and kept dormant in the ice of the Antarctic and the Arctic …’
Paul Spencer had been slumped, head forward reflectively on his chest, although listening intently. Now he straightened, aware of the presidential danger. If this idea was accepted – even without being linked to the ageing illness – America would be the country most criticised for ignoring international treaty emission agreements. ‘It is, though, an unsubstantiated hypothesis?’ he demanded, hopefully.
Stoddart was surprised at the man’s intervention, although supposed Spencer had the right to clarification even though there seemed to be a direct channel opening up between himself and Amanda O’Connell. ‘Not entirely unsubstantiated. From a permafrost core sample sunk at Noatak four days ago a palaeobotanist attached here to this investigation earlier today isolated calcivirus, an intestinal microbe that causes diarrhoea. The core was 2,500 years old.’
‘Are you suggesting our ageing illness could be something like that … something that’s been locked up for thousands of years and is now being released?’ demanded Spencer.
‘I’m suggesting there is sufficient evidence of global warming and ice sheet melting to put the theory forward to Washington,’ said Stoddart.
‘Transmission,’ said Geraldine, almost to herself but thinking back to the conversation with Peter Reynell in London.
‘What?’ said Dupuy.
‘The discussion we had about the ageing virus emerging at either Pole; that it could be wind borne,’ reminded Geraldine. ‘We’ve clearly got influenza mutating across species, from whales to humans. And it’s moving inland, well away from coastal regions. A more obvious transmission than wind is seabirds – and other scavenging birds – feeding off infected carcases and spreading the infection inland through their droppings.’
‘And if sea animals become infected by the ageing process it could be spread the same way?’ said Pelham.
‘Yes,’ said Stoddart. ‘That’s my theory, to go with all the others.’
Three o’clock, Geraldine saw, looking at her watch; eight in London. Still time to call Reynell, which was what he’d asked her to do if anything emerged from the session.
Robert Stanswell had created several computer programmes specifically to analyse the disparate reports of unusual or inexplicable illnesses or occurrences throughout the world and decided that what was showing on the screen was definitely something that should be forwarded to the White House, as well as going back to the various sources, because what he was looking at now was at least a week old. The information came from Shiznoka in Japan, Palan, a US dependency in the Indonesian archipelago, and Dag Nang in Vietnam, and recounted people suddenly being stricken with debilitating senility that was defying diagnosis.
Eighteen
Peter Reynell knew that in a political lifetime of rarely stumbled high-wire performances, today was going to be his most difficult yet, without a balancing pole or safety net if he took just one misjudged step. And with probably many of the very selective audience, with Simon Buxton in their forefront, ready for him to fall. Reynell didn’t think, though, that he was totally suspended over the abyss. The previous night’s disclosure by the gossip-attuned Henrietta that the prime minister had infuriated those for whom he was a figurehead by an over-commitment at a European leaders’ summit, had been useful. And the breakfast call from Geraldine Rothman was a technical bullshit bonus.
Reynell wondered how many of those fence-perched vultures Buxton had already tried to influence in the brief time there’d been, in anticipation of what the man thought was to come? Or – the more appropriate word – in preparation for what Buxton imagined to be his chance for a destructive encounter. There would certainly have been some search for allies after the European debacle. The more there’d been, the greater would be the rebound upon Buxton himself, further proof to his puppet masters of the man’s incompetence and misjudgment.
Simon Buxton had fervently accepted the insisted-upon, string-tugging attachments to become the obedient marionette of the party’s backroom manipulators for the unquestioned public and historical glory of being first minister. Reynell had no doubt that his caucus, banner-led by Henrietta’s father, clearly imagined him being just as obedient. Maybe they’d look back upon this moment, when he quite determinedly hadn’t approached Lord Ranleigh for advice, as the first unrealized hint of his being his own untethered, opportunistic manipulator, a dancing doll to no one’s tune.
Although he believed he’d already thought, rethought and thought out again every twist and pitfall he might encounter, Reynell still timed and hopefully utilized the short walk beneath the v
ery real shadow of the House of Commons on a brightly sunlit day from Lord North Street to Downing Street, the timing to get him there in the middle – neither uncertainly too early or uncaringly too late – of the rest of the cabinet.
Reynell was as careful inside Downing Street, greeting everyone but refusing alliances by stopping at any group, his first need to see if he was listed upon the prepared agenda. He wasn’t. Reynell scored the first point to himself, minimal though it initially was; it could later be suggested that Buxton dismissed what his science minister wanted to raise as too unimportant for official entry.
So could the way Buxton conducted the meeting, calculated an increasingly confident Reynell. There was only the most cursory acknowledgement of his presence (‘Good to see Peter back among us’) before the supposedly detailed analysis, prompted and then led by Buxton himself, who attempted to admit his European summit debacle as a knowingly offered sacrifice, in order to later gain concessions. Freed by his absence – as well as by his unconnected portfolio – from any active participation, Reynell used the debate to balance the for and against attitudes towards the prime minister, at once discerning a distancing from the Chancellor of the Exchequor and the Foreign Secretary, both of whom, as Buxton’s strongest supports, comprised his strongest opposition. Reynell calculated that a change of allegiance – even from just one of them – would bring enough in their wake to make his leadership bid practically unstoppable. The eventual endorsement of Buxton’s account was unconvincing and Reynell was further encouraged that when invited the Foreign Secretary declined to add anything to Buxton’s account, unwilling to be associated with the blatant apologia.
Buxton was an astute enough politician not to need a weather-vane to tell him the direction from which a cold wind was blowing and overcompensated in his greater than usual anxiety to deflect it, three times wrongly anticipating a point and having to be corrected, once by the Foreign Secretary who scarcely bothered to conceal his irritation. Buxton twice more got it wrong, on both occasions with health minister Roy Cox – someone Reynell suspected of being an undeclared Buxton ally – and Reynell concluded he couldn’t have chosen a more advantageous moment even with Machiavelli and Lucretia Borgia as joint campaign managers.
Reynell was always to remain unsure if in his eagerness to escape the session Buxton hadn’t for the briefest moment genuinely forgotten him at the very end curve of the elongated table, although it only required a sideways nod from the Cabinet Secretary to remind the man. Reynell’s immediate thought was that it didn’t matter if it were feigned or not, Buxton’s apparent need to be prompted – the fact that others in the room might come to think that he had forgotten – could only be in his favour.
‘Ah, Peter!’ said the man, nodding himself in Reynell’s direction, before going back to those grouped around the table. ‘We have an unscheduled item, gentlemen.’
The haughtiness was all too obviously forced, judged Reynell. So the man was rattled. He had to further it as much as he could to tighten Buxton’s over-commitment spring. Reynell said: ‘In view of its importance I had hoped for it to be listed, Prime Minister …’
‘Your show, Peter. No second thoughts then?’
If Buxton had stopped with the first sentence the onus would have been upon him, accepted Reynell. But the stupid man had to indicate that he knew, or thought he knew, what it was all about. ‘No second thoughts whatsoever …’ He looked directly at the health minister. ‘And I’m sorry, Roy, that I haven’t had time to speak to you in advance. I only got back from Washington late last night. I’m returning first thing tomorrow.’
Buxton’s incompetent avidity broke through, as Reynell had gambled it would, by his digressing to the health minister. ‘Let’s hear all about this mystery illness then, shall we!’
With every eye upon him Reynell allowed the slightest frown at the flippancy, although stopping just short of directing it positively at the prime minister. ‘Hardly a mystery illness but still potentially a disastrous one. And frightening from the way it appears to be mutating and transmitting.’
‘What is it?’ demanded the health minister.
‘Influenza,’ announced Reynell, finding it difficult to avoid looking at Buxton to see what expression there would be on the man’s face. Instead, straining every last particle from Geraldine Rothman’s breakfast call, he launched into his earlier determined and shaving mirror-rehearsed medico bullshit. He identified the haemaglutinin and neuraminidase proteins comprising the outer skin of the fifteen strains of influenza currently known to medical science, each identified numerically against the protein’s initial letter. Against Buxton’s acknowledged tendency to exaggerate, Reynell presented himself as the fact-following non-alarmist, preferring forty million to one hundred to be the 1918 death toll from the disease, even correcting its source to be a French transit camp for American soldiers and not San Sebastian, which gave it the wrongly accusatory label of ‘Spanish Flu’. The disease, Reynell lectured, had then as now been cross-species, as easily able to jump to humans from its swine fever pig host as it was to transmit from almost every bird.
‘In 1997 there was an H5N1 flu transmission from chicken to humans in Hong Kong,’ continued Reynell, chancing at last to look at the prime minister’s blood-drained face. ‘It led, you might remember, to the entire chicken population of the then British colony being destroyed, despite which some – fortunately very few – people died …’ Time after all for a little hyperbole, Reynell decided. ‘Affected chicken virtually melted from within into a bloody, infectious pulp. A new strain of infection I felt it my duty to return today to warn about seems to be carried at the moment by whales, but already it’s mutated into a fatal human disease …’
Rather than lose the momentum by itemizing the global outbreaks, Reynell took assuredly from his briefcase Paul Spencer’s selectively copied report from the previous day, gesturing to one of the secretariat to distribute around the table. ‘That, currently, is the extent of the infection, worldwide. At the moment so small and in parts of the world which lack the facilities or knowledge to comply with international regulations. Under those international treaty obligations, influenza is a notifiable disease to the World Health Organization. The United States, France and Russia, who also have these facts, are informing the WHO today. I think it is important – particularly as England is one of the four notification centres throughout the world and we already have isolated cases here – that we do the same.’ He’d opened the trap jaws as wide as they would go and Buxton was remaining worryingly – unusually – silent! Reynell risked a second look at the man against whom he was at that moment making his first open move. Buxton remained fixed-faced, almost unblinking, his absolute concentration boring in, laser-like. Reynell looked blankly back.
It was the health minister, coming abruptly up from what Reynell had circulated, who responded. ‘But of course it has to be notified. That goes without saying. But I don’t understand why—?’
‘Neither do I,’ came in Buxton, the habitual need to anticipate a resurgence but knowing he had much from which to recover on this disastrous day.
He could choose his own reply! snatched Reynell, disbelievingly. ‘I already have the prime minister’s authority – and confidence – to be part of a group composed of ministers of the three countries I have mentioned examining unexplained occurrences, the majority sea-based. It was the decision of the prime minister – as it was by the leaders of the other three countries – that this examination be carried out in conditions of the utmost secrecy, to avoid public alarm. This influenza outbreak is just one such incident which I believe has, in the interest of public safety and protection, to be disclosed. But to avoid drawing attention to what else we are doing in Washington, the decision taken there was that the notification should be through national capitals.’
Positioned where he was – he was sure at Buxton’s insistence – at the runt end of the table, Reynell was denied a comprehensive view to anticipate visually the first of
the eruptions, which came from the virtually unseen Foreign Secretary far to his right.
‘What international examination is so secret and so essential to avoid public alarm that this Cabinet has been kept unaware of it?’ demanded Ralph Prendergast, a beak-nosed man whose mastery of a speech impediment just failed to avoid it seeming as if he were tasting as well as uttering his words. The peculiarity made the demand sound even more outraged.
‘There was an approach, from the US President. About things too vague to consider bringing before Cabinet,’ floundered Buxton.
‘A possible global pandemic doesn’t strike me as being vague,’ said Cox.
‘I was unaware of a possible global pandemic until this morning!’ protested Buxton.
Reynell allowed the affronted look to be briefly – but sufficiently – visible before becoming engrossed in the Cabinet agenda before him. Prendergast had been a Buxton man, Cox an uncommitted. Neither were any longer. Nor, from the quickness of the continued protests, were the Home Secretary or the Chancellor of the Exchequor. The demand from the Chancellor, Gordon Adams, for a fuller explanation of what was happening in Washington brought Reynell back into the discussion but satisfied – euphoric – though he was, Reynell refused to concede Buxton a millimetre.
‘I find myself in difficulty, Prime Minister?’ he invited, sure he could hear the jaws finally snap shut around the pompous, avuncular man.
Buxton’s face wasn’t rigid or colourless any more. He was flushed, blinking, for once robbed even of the half thoughts customarily sufficient for him to begin to speak. ‘Yes,’ he blurted, illogically. ‘I mean I think it’s time everything was discussed.’
‘Everything?’ persisted Reynell, relentlessly.
‘Yes,’ flustered Buxton. ‘I suppose so.’
Reynell hadn’t expected to get this far – hadn’t in his wildest dreams expected it to have gone a half or a quarter as much to his benefit as it had. But he’d tried to prepare for every eventuality, providing himself with photocopies of everything the CIA and Science Foundation had discovered, with the addition of what Gregori Lyalin had disclosed about Lake Baikel. Reynell intently watched the distribution and reaction around the table, alert for the timing. It was the health minister who primed him. As Cox raised his head to speak, Reynell said: ‘And that is not all. In fact, there is something conceivably even greater than any global influenza pandemic.’
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