evening.’
‘Are you going with them?’
‘Yes.’
Macmillan’s eyes asked the same question of Ricksen.
‘If that’s okay?’
‘You bet,’ said Steven. He turned to Macmillan. ‘We’re going to need Lukas Neubauer and the lab to be on stand-by throughout the night. I’ll get the vaccine to him as quickly as I can.’
‘I’ll talk to him. Strikes me it’s going to be a long night for all of us. I’ll ask Jean to arrange some sustenance.’
Jean had not only come up with food and drink for them by the end of the afternoon but also some publicity photographs of the Lark Pharmaceuticals building. Steven was able to show these to the SAS commander who arrived at a service entrance to the Home Office at eleven p.m., one of twelve soldiers dressed in black counter- terrorist gear, travelling in four green Land Rovers. The others stayed where they were inside their vehicles.
Steven had to admit that neither he nor Ricksen had ever been inside the Lark building.
‘Great,’ said the man, who introduced himself as Tim.
‘Relax,’ said Steven. ‘I’m not looking for subtlety here. I need you to hit that building like a train and secure it as quickly as possible. I don’t think there will be too many people in the labs and offices at this time of night but if there are any, contain them but don’t hurt them. I don’t want anyone going anywhere or destroying anything. There will be people in the transport bays loading vaccine onto lorries. I don’t want them or the vehicles going anywhere for the time being.’
‘Understood. And if we meet resistance?’
‘Overcome it,’ said Steven. ‘Minimum force. These people will be innocents doing their jobs. I just need everything to come to a standstill until we find what we’re looking for.’
‘Which is?’
‘Let’s say I’ve reason to believe that the vaccine supplies this company are about to send out are not what they’re supposed to be. I need samples for our lab to analyse and, ideally, information about what’s really in the vials. Last but not least I need any information you can get about the organisation responsible for putting it there.’
‘The vials we can get from the loading bay,’ said Tim. ‘And we gather all files, disks, laptops from the exec suites?’
Steven nodded. ‘The managing director is a Dr Mark Mosely. Concentrate on his office before anything else.’
It took Tim and his men eleven minutes to occupy and secure the Lark building. The personnel on site — mainly transport and loading staff, as expected — were herded into the staff canteen, given an apology, and asked to wait there behind locked doors until further notice. No one chose to argue with the black-suited, armed men wearing balaclavas.
Steven and Ricksen joined Tim in Mark Mosely’s office. Tim watched while Steven made a thorough search of the room, selecting items to take back with him to London along with the vaccine samples obtained by the soldiers from the loading bay.
‘Christ, I hope you’re right about all this,’ murmured Ricksen.
‘You and me both,’ replied Steven.
‘Make that three of us,’ Tim chipped in. ‘The boss isn’t putting this operation through the books.’
‘Could get a bit busy under Tower Bridge,’ said Steven, a comment that passed over the heads of the other two.
‘Ready?’ asked Tim.
Steven took a last look round the office. ‘I’ll just make sure there aren’t any wall safes…’ He was thinking about Charles French’s penthouse.
He hadn’t really expected to find anything under the various pictures on the wall but when he moved Ville d’Avray slightly to the left with his fingertips he took a step back in surprise when an entire wall panel slid open.
‘What the f-’ exclaimed Ricksen. ‘What is it?’
‘A lift,’ said Steven, slightly bemused.
‘But there’s a lift just outside the door,’ said Tim.
‘Could be an executive lift,’ said Ricksen. ‘You know what these guys are like… executive this, executive that.’
Steven pressed the single button at the side and the lift door slid open. He looked inside. ‘One button. Only goes to one floor.’
THIRTY-THREE
Tim looked at the inside of the lift and decided they could get four into it. He called in one of his soldiers and told another where they were going.
It was a tight squeeze: Steven was very conscious of the smell of gun oil from the soldier’s automatic weapon which was only inches from his nose as the soldier held it flat against his chest. ‘Ready?’ he asked, then pressed the button.
After what seemed a very long, slow descent, the lift bounced gently on its cables as it came to a halt and the door slid back to reveal brightness.
The two SAS men leapt out, moving to opposite sides and levelling their weapons at the four white-coated people working in what was clearly a basement lab. They froze. Tim signalled to his soldier that he was going to check what appeared to be a smaller room at the far end of the lab, and Steven watched as he kicked open the door.
A man was sitting at a desk. ‘What the hell?’ he exclaimed.
‘Over to you,’ said Tim over his shoulder to Steven.
Steven presented his ID. ‘Dr Steven Dunbar, Sci-Med Inspectorate.’
‘Dr Mark Mosely. This is my research lab. This is an outrage. Get out of here.’
‘Keep an eye on him,’ Steven told Tim as he left the small office to start examining the lab. ‘Very nice,’ he murmured, admiring the quality of the equipment. ‘A state of the art molecular biology lab… and some well-qualified people, I’ll bet,’ he said, eyeing the four nervous people standing motionless under the watchful gaze of the soldier.
He opened the door of an incubator and removed one of the Petri dishes from it. He angled it to read the writing on the lid. ‘Vibrio cholerae. Well, that answers a few questions. Is this where you made that ingenious cassette?’
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.’
