by Ken McClure
The way that the four scientists averted their eyes suggested that it was.
‘It’s hardly surprising that a company making cholera vaccine should have cultures of cholera, is it, Dunbar?’ Mosely called out.
Steven returned to the office. ‘Your vaccine is going to be analysed before it goes anywhere, Mosely. And if it should turn out to be something other than cholera vaccine — as you and I know it is — you and your Schiller Group are going down for ever and a day.’
Mosely’s hand shot out and thumped down on a white button set in a red mounting on his desk. Nothing happened.
‘Damn,’ said Mosely with a small smile. ‘The floor was supposed to open and drop you into a pool of hungry crocodiles.’
Steven didn’t like the smile on Mosely’s face. The man was in no position to be making jokes… but he seemed to think that he was.
Ricksen, who had been rooting around in the lab, had just come up behind Steven. He said, ‘There was one of these buttons on his desk upstairs too… I need the card that opens your safe, Dr Mosely.’
Mosely opened a desk drawer and, holding the card between two fingers, handed it over without comment. Steven followed Ricksen outside and watched him place the card in the safe’s reader slot. The door opened to reveal a glass panel. Ricksen was about to touch it when Steven yelled, ‘Get back!’ It was the same kind of panel he’d seen in Charles French’s place. ‘It’s biometric.’ He called to Tim. ‘I think we need Dr Mosely’s assistance here.’
Tim ushered Mosely out of his office and Steven took pleasure from the change of expression on the Lark executive’s face. ‘Open it.’
‘Screw you.’
Tim primed his weapon.
‘You wouldn’t dare.’
‘You know, Mosely, I think it just might be a night for daring…’ said Steven. ‘Open it.’
Mosely placed his hand on the glass surface and it opened to reveal a number of disks. Ricksen took charge of them and went through to Mosely’s office to scan their contents. Mosely was put under guard with the scientists while Steven continued inspecting the lab, until Ricksen returned with a broad smile on his face. ‘Bingo! Schiller membership, the lot.’
Steven said to Tim, ‘I think we have what we came for.’
Steven and Mosely were the last to come up in the lift. Despite holding a gun on Mosely and having possession of the disks, Steven was disturbed to see what he could only construe as a look of self-satisfaction on Mosely’s face. It was the expression he’d noticed in the office a little while earlier. It had slipped when the disks were discovered but it was back. Steven motioned with the Glock that Mosely get out first, and the man acknowledged with a nod. As he stepped out, he raised his hands above his head.
The scientists from the basement lab, the SAS men, Steven, Ricksen and Mosely were all now standing in the glass-fronted hall of the building, preparing to leave. Mosely moved forward and faced the glass doors, his hands now resting on his head. ‘Well, well, well,’ he said, loudly enough for everyone to hear. ‘Here we all are, the managing director of Lark Pharmaceuticals and four of my staff, being held at gunpoint by armed terrorists intent on stopping life-saving vaccine getting to the British public…’
Steven frowned, but before he could reply the world outside erupted in a blaze of lights and loudhailers.
‘Shit, the button on the desk,’ said Ricksen.
‘Correct,’ murmured Mosely. ‘A direct alarm to the police, indicating we were under terrorist attack. I think they’ve done rather well, don’t you?’
Steven could see dozens of armed response officers and rows of police vehicles outside. In his mind’s eye he could see what the police were seeing and it didn’t look good. Twelve black-clad men brandishing automatic weapons, four white-coated men huddling together in fear, and Mosely with his hands on his head.
‘We’re not carrying ID,’ said Tim.
‘I’ll go out,’ said Steven.
‘Yes, why don’t you, Dunbar?’ said Mosely smugly.
Ricksen interrupted. ‘Think, Steven. Those guys out there are itching for an excuse. Look at them. They’re running on pure adrenalin and now they have the chance to confront real terrorists face to face. They’ll mow you down as soon as you reach for your ID.’
‘Keep your guns trained on this lot,’ Tim ordered his men. ‘It’s the only thing keeping us alive.’
Steven knew that was true. The fact that he still had his gun in his hand and his proximity to Mosely were probably the only things that had stopped the police marksmen from targeting him already. ‘I’ll have to go out,’ he said. ‘It’s the only way to stop this ending in bloody mayhem.’
Mosely looked as if he might be about to ignore Steven’s gun and make a move away from him. ‘You wouldn’t really shoot me, Dunbar, would you?’
‘No, I would,’ said Tim flatly. ‘And that’s a fucking promise.’
Mosely believed him.
A new sound joined the general cacophony outside, that of the whirring blades of a helicopter, its down-lights illuminating a chosen landing spot in front of the building. The police, not sure what was going on, moved out of the way, forming a semicircular perimeter of waiting, armed officers. As the ’copter’s engines died a loudspeaker crackled into life, filling the night air with the sound of a woman’s voice.
‘Attention, attention, this is the Home Secretary speaking. You have been misinformed. The men inside the building are not terrorists: they are SAS soldiers. I want everyone to lay down their weapons.’
No one moved.
‘I am going to come out now. When I give the signal you will all lay down your weapons, both inside and outside the building.’
The helicopter door opened, and a woman, accompanied by a man Steven could see was John Macmillan, got out and moved away from the aircraft, followed by searchlights.
‘Christ,’ murmured one police officer, ‘it is the Home Secretary.’
‘I’d know those shoes anywhere,’ said another.
The Home Secretary spread her arms as if in a scene from a passion play, then dropped them. All arms were laid on the ground.
Mosely thought he saw the chance to pick up Steven’s gun, but Steven felled him with a single punch. It was over in the wink of an eye.
‘Bet that felt good,’ murmured Tim.
The Home Secretary took over the police address system and asked that all commanders come to her immediately. After a bizarre series of introductions involving Sci-Med, MI5, the SAS and the police, she said, ‘When I was wakened by the police and told that Lark Pharmaceuticals was under attack by terrorists, I contacted Sir John and he organised a helicopter from City Airport to bring us down immediately. Thank God we were in time.’ She turned to Steven. ‘I take it your suspicions were correct?’
‘It looks like it,’ said Steven. ‘We’ll know more when the vaccine is analysed.
‘In that case, Sir John,’ she said, turning to Macmillan, ‘the jury will remain out on Tower Bridge until it has been. Now I’m going home to bed.’
It took Lukas Neubauer and his people two days and nights to come up with the answer he brought to the Home Office.
‘It’s definitely not cholera vaccine,’ he said at once, getting sighs of relief from Steven and Macmillan. ‘It’s a dodgy adjuvant.’
‘A what?’ asked Macmillan.
Steven was also looking puzzled, but for a different reason. He said, ‘Adjuvants are substances you add to vaccines to provoke a better response from the immune system.’
‘Correct,’ said Neubauer. ‘But this particular one has a bit of a bad reputation. It was banned because scientists thought it was damaging the immune system and might even be provoking auto-immune disease. At the concentration I found in the Lark vials it would certainly damage the immune system.’
‘Making the people who got it much more likely to develop a range of illnesses.’
‘And much less likely to survive them. You’d be lucky to see out the next th
ree or four years.’
‘So people would not be living longer and longer after all,’ said Macmillan thoughtfully. ‘The life expectancy of anyone over sixty would drop like a stone, and a burden would be removed from the state
…’
‘But what a state,’ said Steven.
‘Agreed,’ said Macmillan. ‘And a good reason for you to continue with Sci-Med.’
‘We’ll see.’
The information contained on the disks recovered from the Lark laboratory led to the Schiller Group’s becoming a proscribed organisation in the UK and a wave of arrests and sudden resignations, many at quite senior level. Norman Travis was one of those arrested.
Steven and Tally made their trip to Newcastle to seek out the graves of the people who’d died in the nineties in the abortive attempt to expose the Northern Health Scheme for what it really was. Macmillan had promised that they would be given national recognition, but for the moment flowers would suffice.
After visiting the burial place of Dr Neil Tolkien they arrived at the cemetery where James Kincaid, the journalist who’d started the original investigation, and Eve Laing, the nurse who’d fallen in love with him, lay side by side. Steven felt a lump come to his throat as he watched Tally arrange the flowers. When she stood up, Steven expected to see sadness in her eyes but found something else that he couldn’t quite fathom.
‘Steven… my mother was two days away from receiving that vaccine.’ She looked at the ground before saying, ‘Your country needs you, Dr Dunbar… even more than I do, damn it.’
And then Tally reached up and gave Steven the kind of kiss not normally thought appropriate in cemeteries.
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