But Kellner had already moved on. “We’re being asked to believe that Scorpia can somehow poison thousands of children and arrange for them all to keel over at exactly four o’clock tomorrow afternoon…”
“They’ll all be coming out of school,” one of the army men said. “It can’t be done! The football squad was a stunt. They want to panic us into going public with this, and if we do that the entire credibility of the government will be undermined. Maybe that’s what they want.”
“Then what are you suggesting we do?” Sir Graham Adair asked. The permanent secretary was trying hard to keep the contempt out of his voice. He remembered what he had seen at Heathrow Airport; he didn’t want to see it again all over London.
“Ignore them. Tell them to get lost.”
“We can’t!” Like almost everyone else, the foreign secretary was clearly afraid of Kellner. But he was determined to have his say. “We can’t take that risk!”
“There is no risk. Think about it for a minute. The footballers were poisoned with cyanide. They were all on the same plane at the same time. It wasn’t difficult. But if you wanted to poison thousands of kids, how could you possibly do it?”
“Injections,” Alex said. Everyone looked at him again. He had worked it out in a split second. It had suddenly come to him, as if spoken by someone else. He had been thinking about a trip he had once made to South America, a long time ago. And then he had remembered what he had seen at Consanto. The little test tubes. All that machinery … everything utterly sterile. What was it for? Now he understood the link with Dr Liebermann.
And there was something else. When he was in the restaurant with Julia Rothman, she had made a joke about the scientist.
You could say his death was a shot in the arm for us all. A shot in the arm. An injection. “Every schoolchild in London gets injected at some point,” Alex said. He was aware that he was now the centre of attention. The prime minister, half the Cabinet, the police and army chiefs, the civil servants—all the most powerful people in the country were here, in this room. He was surrounded by them. And they were all listening to him. “When I was at Consanto, I saw test tubes with liquid in them,” he went on. “And there were trays with what looked like eggs.”
“Some vaccines are grown in eggs,” the medical officer explained. “And Consanto do supply vaccines all over the world.” He nodded as he was struck by another thought. “That would also explain what you heard. Of course! The cold chain. It refers to the transportation of vaccines. They have to be kept at a certain temperature all the time. If you break the chain, the vaccine is no use.”
“Go on, Alex,” Sir Graham Adair urged. “I saw them kill a man called Dr Liebermann,” Alex said. “He worked at Consanto and Julia Rothman told me she’d paid him a lot of money to help them with something. Maybe he put something in a whole load of vaccines. Some sort of poison. It would be injected into school kids. There are always injections at the start of term…”
Adair glanced at the medical officer, who nodded. “It’s true. There were BCG injections in London last week.”
“Last week!” Mark Kellner cut in. His tone of voice hadn’t changed; he wasn’t accepting any of it. “If they were injected with cyanide a week ago, how come they haven’t all dropped dead already? How is this Julia Rothman going to arrange for the poison to work tomorrow afternoon on the dot of four?” A few heads around the table nodded in agreement and he went on. “And I don’t suppose the football squad had BCG injections while they were away. Or are you going to tell me I’m wrong?”
“Of course they’d have had injections,” the permanent secretary snapped, and Alex saw that he was no longer able to hide his anger. He wasn’t even trying. “They were in Nigeria. They wouldn’t have been allowed into the country without being inoculated.”
“Yes!” The medical officer couldn’t keep the excitement out of his voice. “They’d have been inoculated against yellow fever.”
“A month ago!” Kellner insisted.
“Then the question isn’t how did they administer the poison,” Sir Graham said; “the question is—how do they prevent it working until a time of their choosing? That’s the secret of Invisible Sword.”
“What else can you tell us, Alex?” Blunt asked.
“You were talking about remote control,” Alex said. “Well, Mrs Rothman kept a Siberian tiger in her office. It attacked me and I thought I was going to be killed—”
“Are you seriously asking us to believe this?” Kellner enquired.
Alex ignored him. “But then someone came in and pressed a button on what looked like a remote control device. You know, for a TV. The tiger just lay down and went back to sleep.”
“Nanoshells.”
The young woman who was sitting in a corner and who had been examining Alex earlier had spoken the single word. She obviously hadn’t been considered important enough to be given a place at the table, but now she stood up and walked forward. She looked about thirty—after Alex, the youngest person in the room—slim and pale, wearing a suit with a white shirt and a silver chain around her neck.
“What the hell are nanoshells?” the deputy prime minister demanded. “And, for that matter, who are you?”
“This is Dr Rachel Stephenson,” the medical officer said. “She’s a writer and a researcher … a specialist in the field of nanotechnology.”
“Oh, so now we’re moving into science fiction,” Kellner complained.
“There’s no fiction about it,” Dr Stephenson replied, refusing to be intimidated. “Nanotechnology is about manipulating matter at the atomic level and it’s already out there in more ways than you would believe.
Universities, food companies, drug agencies and, of course, the military are all spending billions of pounds a year on development programmes and they all agree. In less time than you think, the life of every human being on this planet is going to change for ever. There are some amazing breakthroughs on the way and if you don’t believe that, it’s time you woke up.”
Kellner took this as a personal insult. “I don’t see—” he began.
“Tell us about nanoshells,” the prime minister said, and it occurred to Alex that it was a while since he had spoken.
