than Ebola, but not judging by the rapidity with which the stewardess and the others went down with it after coming into contact with Barclay.’
‘But they had direct contact with Barclay,’ said the professor, clearly unwilling to let the matter drop.
‘What is the point you are making, Professor?’ asked Phelps, his voice betraying slight impatience.
‘Merely that some of the other passengers might have received smaller initial doses of the virus and therefore might conceivably take longer to go down with the disease.’
‘What did you have in mind?’
‘A cough or a sneeze from Barclay would have given rise to small fluid droplet particles, which could for all intents and purposes be deemed to be body fluids.’
‘I take your point, Professor, and we did consider that aspect, but the surviving stewardess was able to tell us that Barclay did not have any coughing or sneezing fits while he was on board the aircraft, although he did vomit once.’
The professor’s silence emphasised his point.
Phelps appeared to develop a slight tic below his left eye. ‘Well, as of this morning, all the other passengers are absolutely fine,’ he said, hoping to put an end to speculation.
‘Am I right in thinking that this new virus appears to have a hundred-per-cent mortality rate?’ asked Heathrow’s chief medical officer. ‘There were no survivors, were there?’
‘You’re quite right,’ said Phelps, ‘but thankfully there were only a small number of patients and therefore that is perhaps not significant in a statistical sense. It is true, however, that they all died.’
‘So in that respect the disease could be said to be even worse than Ebola?’
‘Yes, on the basis of just five cases,’ agreed Phelps. ‘Ebola itself has a seventy- to eighty-per-cent mortality rate. It would be quite unusual to find anything more deadly than that. Let’s hope we’ve seen the last of this particular bug so we won’t get the chance to compare it.’
‘And so say all of us,’ muttered the man behind Steven and Cummings.
‘I take it you have no idea how Barclay himself caught the disease?’ asked Fred Cummings.
‘None at all, I’m afraid. I understand there is no current outbreak of haemorrhagic fever in Ndanga or its immediate neighbours, so it’s all a bit of a mystery.’
Steven left the meeting with Fred Cummings and they went for a drink. ‘So what’s your interest in all of this?’ asked Cummings as they sat down with their beer.
‘The foreign secretary’s due to visit Ndanga in the next couple of weeks. His people want to be sure there’s no outbreak of Ebola or anything like it in the country, so they asked Sci-Med if we could sniff around, see what we could come up with on the unofficial grapevine.’
‘And?’
‘It seems to be clear from all accounts but, like the man said, it’s a bit of a mystery how Barclay went down with it in the first place.’
‘Happily, it’s not my mystery,’ said Cummings. ‘Salmonella from dodgy restaurants I can cope with, the occasional pocket of TB, seasonal blips of meningitis, yes, but the thought of something like one of these African viruses on the streets of London makes my blood run cold.’
‘Or just run,’ said Steven. ‘From every orifice, I understand.’
‘The trouble is, it is going to happen one day. I’ve never been more sure of anything.’
‘You don’t think we’re prepared?’
Cummings took a sip of his beer and thought for a moment. ‘There’s a real danger of complacency,’ he said. ‘The Heathrow people did a good job, but the fact is that their problem was confined to the inside of an aircraft. They had all the time in the world to surround the problem and contain it, and they did. All credit to them, but there’s a danger of people in my line of work thinking that it’s always going to be that easy, or that the virus really isn’t that dangerous when it is. The real lesson to be learned from this incident is the fact that a highly trained nurse, equipped with all the protective gear available, still managed to contaminate herself. Despite what Phelps said, it’s surprisingly difficult to avoid contact with body fluids, especially in a domestic situation where people tend not to have Racal suits with self-contained air supplies hanging in their wardrobes or boxes of surgical gloves sitting by the kitchen sink. Frankly, it’s damned nearly impossible. I think we’d see a very different picture if Ebola or Marburg broke out on a large housing estate instead of in an airliner at thirty-five thousand feet.’
‘Put that way, it doesn’t bear thinking about,’ said Steven.
‘And d’you know the worst thing? If it did, the whole medical profession put together couldn’t do a blind thing about it. We’d be completely powerless. It would be like the great plagues of the Middle Ages all over again. We’d have to resort to nosegays and prayer books.’
‘Then the solution must be to tackle the problem at source,’ said Steven. ‘Seek out the natural reservoirs of these viruses and destroy them before they spread into the community.’
‘Unfortunately their source, whatever it is, lies in Africa and nothing is ever easy in Africa. CDC Atlanta has been trying to establish the natural source of Ebola for decades without success. The Pasteur Institute in Paris is trying to get a handle on it by examining all the data ever logged about the disease, but records are less than scrupulous.’
‘I can imagine.’
When he got home, Steven poured himself a gin and tonic and put a CD on the stereo to fill the room with the soulful tenor sax of Stan Getz. He found two fax messages lying in the tray of the machine and sat down in his favourite chair by the window to read them. They were from two of his contacts in the medical charities, one working with the Red Cross and the other with a voluntary organisation called Medic Outreach. Both stated that, as far as they could ascertain, Ndanga was free of haemorrhagic fever and had been for some time. He faxed back his thanks.
Steven switched out the lights and rested his head on the chair back for a moment to look up at the sky. It was a clear night and he could see the stars — that was why he liked sitting in this chair. He reflected that finding out what he wanted to know had all been surprisingly easy. No one had reported that they didn’t know or that they weren’t sure. Everyone had said that there was no haemorrhagic fever in Ndanga. Barclay’s misfortune in contracting the disease had just been one of these things — whatever that meant, he mused; it tended to be a generally accepted explanation anywhere outside academia. Just one of these things… just one of those ‘crazy’ things, as the song said, or one of those ‘unexplained’ things that spawned late-night television programmes that invariably never came to any conclusions. To the list he added one of those ‘foolish’ things, when he realised with a wry smile that this was the title of the current Getz track. But whatever the reason for Barclay’s bad luck, he felt confident that he could tell Macmillan in the morning that there was no good reason for the foreign secretary’s visit not to go ahead. With a bit of luck, he himself should be able to catch an afternoon flight up to Scotland and be in Dumfriesshire with his daughter by early evening.
Steven’s five-year-old daughter, Jenny, lived with his sister-in-law, Sue, and her solicitor husband, Richard, in the Dumfriesshire village of Glenvane where she was being brought up with their own children, Mary, aged eight, and Robin, six. This had been the case since Steven’s wife, Lisa — Sue’s sister — had died of a brain tumour some two years ago. It had become his practice to visit Scotland every second or third week and stay the weekend, so that Jenny would not forget who her real father was and he could enjoy watching her grow. Despite her tender years, there was a lot about Jenny that reminded him of Lisa and he took pleasure from that — especially the look in her eyes when she thought that he might be keeping something from her. That was Lisa to a tee and he just melted inside when she did it.
To say that Steven had taken Lisa’s death badly would be a gross understatement. Although there had been seven months to prepare for the inevitable after the initial diagnosis, her death had hit him hard, and after the funeral he had given up on just about everything. He hadn’t worked at all for over nine months afterwards, preferring instead to seek solace in booze and trying desperately to live in the past by shutting out the present and ignoring the very possibility of a future. But, like most people going through the hell of bereavement, he survived and came out the other side — perhaps not better for the experience, but knowing a great deal more about himself than he had before. He could now look back on his painfully short time with Lisa — a little over four years in all — with great fondness. He still missed her but it was no longer that awful knife-in-the-guts feeling.
The situation with Jenny was not ideal but his job was such that it ruled out arrangements involving day help or nanny care. He had toyed with the idea of finding a more ordinary job so that he would be home every night and
