England
A poster on the door read: TODAY 7 P.M. – THE FACULTY OF SCIENCE PRESENTS A FREE LECTURE – ‘A NEW BREED OF AIRBORNE VIRUSES: THE STUFF OF SCI-FI OR A REAL AND PRESENT DANGER TO US ALL?’ GUEST SPEAKER: DR KATE MADDOX FROM OXFORD UNIVERSITY.
MI6 officer Jason Harley had intended to wait outside for her, but heavy rain had begun to splatter the pavement around him, and was already starting to soak into the shoulders of his suede jacket. He’d had to park his elderly Jaguar too far away to be able to sit inside and listen to cricket on the radio; not without the risk of missing her, at least, so he pulled his baseball cap – part rain protection, but mostly male-pattern baldness disguise – lower over his forehead and went in.
It was warm and dark in the lecture theatre with forty or so students in attendance, many of them pecking away on mobile phones or laptops. As Harley climbed the stairs to slide into the back row of raked seating, he noticed that most of the screens displayed social networking sites and games. He couldn’t prevent a quiet but judgmental sort of tut slipping out at their seemingly total lack of interest. Why bother to show up if you were going to sit and play Angry Birds instead of listening?
‘Of course, what is of primary concern to us virologists is the way in which West Nile disease is transmitted. It’s not airborne, as I’m sure you know, and therefore not strictly relevant to my lecture today, but I’ll talk about it for a few minutes, because it’s really fascinating …’
The speaker was a slim woman with long, shiny brown hair and a mid-Atlantic accent. She stood on the stage with her back to the audience, and Harley admired her high heels and tight pencil skirt as she pointed to a PowerPoint slide of the map of the world, dotted in various locations with outsize illustrations of mosquitoes, their long thin legs dangling like a toddler’s faint scribbles. Kate Maddox, he thought, you are damn lucky to be alive.
‘Mosquitoes become infected after feeding on virus-carrying birds, such as crows, and the mosquitoes can then infect humans …’
He wondered if she remembered him. He was pretty sure that his appearance would not be a welcome one, especially when he explained why he’d been sent to talk to her.
‘… and this map shows the increase of West Nile encephalitis in the Western world in the last decade …’
Kate turned back round to face her audience, and it struck Harley how beautiful she was. She was unrecognisable as the wild-eyed woman she’d been two years previously, when he’d first seen her during the raid on a lab, the secret HQ of a criminal virologist named Gaunt. Kate and her boyfriend Paul had been held prisoner there, a fate doubly painful to her, in the knowledge that her little boy had just been sent out into the world with a deadly virus. It had been a frantic race against time to get them out, find the antivirus – and then find her son, Jack.
‘One biotech company has found that blocking angiotensin II can treat the “cytokine storm” of West Nile virus encephalitis – and, even more exciting, of other viruses too. The potential of this is enormous, and I feel we scientists are getting close to developing a vaccine that will work on a variety of strains of similar mosquito-borne viruses.’
A fleeting look of anxiety passed across Dr Maddox’s features as she talked, clearly noticing the students shifting in their seats, playing games on their phones, or whispering, but it was so brief that Harley was probably the only one to notice it.
She’s losing them, he thought, half sympathetically, half curious to see how she would react. He watched her closely as she pushed back her shoulders and inhaled deeply. A subtle movement, but one that denoted a gathering of control. Harley recalled the last time they’d met: at the funeral of the poor bastard killed in the same lab raid. Stephen Wilson, Paul’s twin brother. A weird one, as they all thought Stephen had died years earlier anyway, in a fire. Must have been like burying a ghost. Harley remembered a blistering hot day, with the floral tributes already withering on the grave. Not much body left to bury – the virus had turned it to purée within minutes of being unleashed. He shivered.
‘But it’s the lab-manufactured ones we need to be more concerned about. “Designer” viruses, created to cause havoc, that could quite conceivably wipe out whole continents if they got into the wrong hands – or rather, remained in the wrong hands.’
The students stopped fidgeting and visibly sat up straighter, as did Harley, even though he was well aware of the facts already. A heavily tattooed boy near the front whistled softly.
‘Seriously? So that shit really does go on?’
Dr Maddox smiled at him. ‘I shouldn’t say that kind of thing – walls have ears, ha ha! But take haemorrhagic viruses, for example, my primary area of expertise. My partner, Dr Isaac Larter – some of you may have heard of him, he’s extremely well-known in his field – and I have been studying one particularly virulent strain for years, the Watoto virus, which is similar to Ebola but airborne, making it easier to transmit. Its origins are natural – the word Watoto means “child” in Swahili, as its first victims tend to be children – and there have been several breakouts in West Africa. Fortunately these have been restricted to remote and contained areas, but we always have to be on the lookout for shifts in its genetic make-up. And you may have heard of the recent case in which two sets of researchers found a way to make bird flu infectious through airborne transmission – which could ultimately wipe out half the human race. Because of the fear of bioterrorists stealing the virus, or the new strain escaping from a lab, the researchers agreed to stop research …’
Kate Maddox looked out at the now rapt, if slightly blurry faces in front of her. She intentionally never wore her glasses to give lectures, as a means of not allowing herself to get intimidated by her audience – public speaking had never been her strong suit, although she knew it came with the territory. She hadn’t needed her specs, though, to discern that they’d been rapidly losing interest up until this point.
Phew, she thought. Got ’em back again. A mention of the threat of global annihilation usually did the trick. This lecture was proving hard work, though. She wished she could be back in the lab in Oxford, bantering with Isaac – her ‘work husband’ as Paul referred to him, without rancour, for Isaac was a good friend to Paul as well as to Kate. We must have him and Shelley round soon, Kate thought, as she talked through the grisly symptoms of Influenza A virus, subtype H1N1. It’s our turn to cook them dinner. Isaac was in the US at the moment, at the big immunology conference, rubbing shoulders with many of the top researchers in the field. Kate was supposed to be there too – had even booked her ticket – but last week Jack, ironically, had come down with chickenpox. He was fine now, just a bit spotty. He’d been lucky and hadn’t suffered too much, but Kate hadn’t wanted to leave him.
She spoke for another half an hour, until her voice became croaky and her legs ached with the tension. Isaac can bloody well do the next one, she thought, and next time I’ll be the one who gets to swan off to a conference in California.
The university was a four-hour journey from her home in Oxfordshire, and she was glad she’d had the foresight to ask them to book her into the local Travelodge. She was looking forward to a large drink and to kicking off the high heels that were making her feet cramp up.
‘Well,’ she said briskly, ‘we’re out of time, so I will leave you all to start building your bunkers and never venturing outside again without face masks and biohazard suits on.’
Polite laughter ensued, and the same short, hirsute professor who’d introduced her shambled back on to the stage to thank her and lead a half-hearted round of applause.
As the students filed out, Kate started putting away her laptop. The professor sidled up to her, scratching his beard. He was a full head shorter than her, and seemed to address his comments to her briefcase. Kate thought he looked as though he lived in Middle Earth.
‘Wondered if you would like to, er, come for a coffee, Dr Maddox? I would love to discuss your research into the Watoto virus in more detail. It’s absolutely fascinating. I could give you a lift?’
Kate had a brief image of them getting