The Zeno Effect Read online

  Worried by all this, she had called her father just yesterday to check on his health and he had told her that, although there were not yet any reported cases in his isolated corner of rural Argyll, the small tourist towns of the Highlands were suffering. In the likes of Oban and Ullapool, which carried ferry traffic to the Western Isles, or Fort William, which was something of a tourism gateway, the flu had arrived with travellers, and their medical facilities were now fighting losing battles. Bill and Jess, he added, had been forced to close the shop in Edinburgh when customers all but disappeared, and they were now permanently back in Coldstream. According to Bill the atmosphere in the town was extremely tense, sitting right on the border as it did, with armed guards and defensive blockades posted at each side of the bridge across the Tweed. Here, too, panic about the flu was spreading, not helped by unverified rumours that boats had been seen crossing the river in the dead of night.

  These unhappy thoughts accompanied Ali all the way home, so it was with some relief that she climbed the stairs to her top-floor flat. In the years since she had moved to Forrest Road she had come to love her building’s combination of history and newly acquired modern reconstruction. Once it had been a staircase of respectable and quite large apartments – the kind that had brass bell-pulls at the street entrance which residents took turns to polish – but in the later twentieth century it had become rather dingy, split into student accommodation, poorly maintained, and with graffiti on its once imposing front door. Recent work on improving Edinburgh’s older housing had, however, led to external cleaning and internal refurbishment. Each of the original apartments was now divided into two smaller modern units aimed at single occupants, although the staircase was still constructed of the same unforgiving stone, and the bow windows overlooking the street were still in the traditional Edinburgh style. Ali’s kitchen, her invariable first destination on arriving home, looked out across the rooftops towards Edinburgh Castle. It was a fine vantage point from which to view the firing of the one o’clock gun, something that had fascinated little Charlotte because of the time-gap between seeing the puff of smoke and then hearing the detonation. Now, admiring the castle as she stood waiting for her espresso machine to complete its cycle, this reminder of Charlotte returned Ali’s thoughts to Sarah and to the suggestion that she and her family might be brought to Scotland.

  She carried her coffee through to the living area and sat staring vacantly at the blank wall-mounted TV screen. Would Sarah be persuaded? And even if she could be, reaching Scotland was no longer simply a question of obtaining permits and getting on a train. Travel within England was heavily restricted, and that was before you got anywhere near the border. And on top of that there was no chance that either Sarah or Hugh would be allowed to leave. They were too valuable a resource. So how could it be done?

  As if in response to her unspoken question her CommsTab sprang to life. ‘V-call from Douglas MacIntyre’ it announced. Ali touched the accept icon and, before Douglas could say a word, smiled at the screen.

  “Well,” she said, “that was quick.”

  He laughed. “Michael Lang just called me and said that you had agreed, so now seemed as good a time as any. We’ll need to move soon given how fast things seem to be falling apart in England.”

  “Is it really that bad?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid so. They spent too long denying everything when, if they had been honest, they could have been preparing people to deal with it.”

  “Should we meet tomorrow then?”

  “Mmmmn, we could,” Douglas paused and then added tentatively, “but I’m free this evening if you are. Perhaps we could have dinner? Just down the hill from you in the Grassmarket there’s a rather good Italian restaurant, L’Avventura, which is still open and relatively safe. They have a scanner to test customers’ temperatures and they won’t let anybody in who is running any kind of fever.”

  “Yes, I read about that on one of the city newsfeeds. But does it work?”

  “There’s no reason why it shouldn’t. The fever is a very early sign of the flu – you’re not generally infectious until later. Or so I’m told.”

  Ali hesitated. Apart from a couple of evenings with Ravi and Eleanor she hadn’t been out for dinner since that last time with Richard. The diversion would be welcome and Douglas seemed like a decent enough person. Quite good-looking too, she caught herself thinking.

  “OK. Let’s do it. What time?”

  “Can we meet there in an hour?”

  “I think I can manage that,” she said. “See you there.”

  There was just about time for a shower and a change of clothes, she calculated, but not long enough to wash and dry her hair. She would put it in a ponytail – people always said how much that suited her. She giggled a little at this thought. After all the distress she had been through with Richard, here she was thinking about looking attractive for yet another intelligence agent. Still, at least she knew about this one’s work in advance.

  Douglas was waiting outside for her when she arrived at the restaurant. They were greeted just inside the entrance by a woman who briefly pointed a small scanner an inch or so from their foreheads, consulted a screen, and then waved them through. True to its name, the dining area was decorated with enormous black-and-white frame enlargements from Antonioni’s classic film. Not perhaps the most encouraging décor for romantic diners, Ali reflected, given how bleak were the images and, indeed, the whole tenor of the film. Still, few customers would recognise the reference. Ali only did so because of her father’s determined attempts to educate her in the history of the cinema.

  Once seated, Ali realised that the place was completely full.

  “It’s really busy, isn’t it. How did you manage to book a table at such short notice?”

  Douglas looked a little sheepish. “Well,” he said, “I actually booked it yesterday when Michael told me he would be seeing you today.”

  Ali arched an eyebrow. “So I’m that predictable, am I? You knew that I’d agree about Sarah and would be willing to go out to dinner with you? Must be the intelligence training.”

  “No, no, of course not.” Douglas was flustered. “I just took a gamble. Seemed to be worth it. And it turns out that it was, because here we are.”

  “So we are,” Ali agreed, “and I’m suitably impressed with your forward planning. Now, what are we going to eat?”

  Having won this preliminary skirmish, at least in her own eyes, Ali settled in to enjoy her evening. And enjoy it she did. After sorting out the case that she would make in her letter to Sarah, they agreed that she would write it tomorrow, add the details of Michael’s offer, and then Douglas would arrange for its delivery. Official business thus transacted, and the main course yet to arrive, they were free to talk of other things. To Ali’s delight Douglas proved to be an entertaining dinner companion, and, as the evening progressed, for the first time in weeks she began to relax. For a while the horror of Zeno receded into the background.

  All too soon the meal was over and the restaurant rapidly emptying of customers. Despite Douglas’s protestations, Ali insisted on splitting the bill – she had her standards she told him – and they took themselves out into a now dark and deserted Grassmarket.

  “If I can’t buy you dinner at least let me walk you home,” Douglas insisted.

  “Fair enough,” she said, and slipped her arm through his as they set off up the hill.

  Passing the statue of Greyfriars Bobby she found herself telling Douglas how, as a child, she had loved visiting this little dog and had as a result always wanted a Skye Terrier of her own. But work commitments meant that she had never been in a position to properly look after a pet, so she had to be satisfied with the succession of rescue dogs that shared life with her father.

  By the time she had finished extolling the virtues of his present canine companion – a Lurcher called Pike – they had arrived at her front door
.

  “Thank you,” she said. “That was a lovely evening.”

  He smiled. “Good. I certainly enjoyed it, so thank you for coming. We’ll have to do it again sometime soon.”

  “I’d like that. Perhaps I could cook you dinner. I can cook, you know.”

  Then, as much to her own surprise as his, she reached up and kissed him fleetingly on the lips, turned away, and with a hand raised in farewell disappeared into the building.

  Syntagma Square in Athens had seen many demonstrations over the years, but few quite as explosive as this one. The square was filled to overflowing, thousands upon thousands of chanting protesters, many wearing roughly fabricated face masks, and all eager to find someone to blame for the rapidly rising death rate. A section of the crowd closest to the parliament building was confronted by black-clad rows of riot police, their faces concealed behind masks, their weapons and shields at the ready. As more people entered the square the sheer pressure of numbers squeezed the protesters up against the police lines until, whether from orders or from panic, a shot was fired. A kind of groan rolled through the crowd and with it a ripple of movement that threatened to flood over the riot police. Suddenly there were more shots as tear-gas canisters rained down on increasingly panicked people. Now the ripple became a tidal wave, spreading in all directions.

  Fighting broke out, some between protesters and police, some between different elements in the crowd as they sought desperately to escape the fumes. One splinter group, led by radicalised former KKE members, smashed their way into the luxurious foyer of the five-star Hotel Grande Bretagne, while others, from various of the right wing anti-immigrant parties, spilled into the surrounding streets in search of non-Greek shops and cafés to attack. As the chaos grew, the rumble of heavy vehicles heralded the arrival of army reinforcements and the sound of gunshots became a continuous barrage. Wherever you looked, people were dying, whether trampled by the mob or hit by bullets that ricocheted crazily around the square. And right across the sprawling city of Athens the virus continued to do its work.

  2

  One of the many benefits of Jonathan Hart’s position as DSD director was that at a time of severely restricted travel he had unlimited use of a chauffeur-driven official car. A second perk of the job, and in the present circumstances an even more important one, was access to one of the secretive government Treatment Centres specifically reserved for members of the ruling elite and their families. So it was that Hart, along with his wife and child, were being driven at speed into central London to the King Edward VII’s Hospital in Marylebone. The hospital had been chosen to house a Treatment Centre in part because it had a history of association with the military going back to the Boer War, a connection reflected in the fact that throughout the twentieth century its official designation had even included the revealing addendum ‘for Officers’. It also had an excellent reputation in expensive healthcare, encouraging an increasingly worried Hart to harbour at least some hope for his daughter’s recovery.

  Rosemary was clearly suffering from a severe case of the flu. Even in the relatively short time it had taken him to get home she had, Jill said, deteriorated significantly. Her temperature was now worryingly high and her breathing increasingly laboured. She lay across the back seat of the car with her head in Hart’s lap, pale-faced but still conscious, struggling for breath and looking up at him with the kind of implicit trust that perhaps only a nine-year-old child might have in her father. He would surely protect her, as he always had. Hart hoped against hope that this would turn out to be true. In rushing her to the hospital he was ensuring that she would get the best care available, but, as he of all people knew, the virus was no respecter of medical expertise. They could only aim to keep her alive in the expectation that her own immune system would ultimately do its job.

  The next couple of hours went by in a flurry of activity. After Hart had carried her into the hospital, the medical system took over. Rosemary was installed in a large family room which also included beds for her parents. She was connected to a plethora of monitors and drips, as well as to a mask supplying oxygen, and, for a while at least, her breathing was less laboured. With a weather eye to Hart’s official position, the hospital administration ensured that a very senior consultant arrived to examine Rosemary inside half an hour and she confirmed that the symptoms were indeed those of the current flu strain. Tests would be carried out to check but she had little doubt about the diagnosis. They would do everything possible to make the patient comfortable, give her some medication to boost her immune system, but beyond that it was just a question of wait and see.

  This was no more than Hart had expected. Wearing surgical masks, he and Jill settled themselves into chairs on either side of the bed. Hart felt oddly lulled by the continuous beep of the monitor, and looking down at his now sedated daughter he reflected on the sequence of events that had brought them here. For him it had begun with the discovery of Charles Livermore’s body in the cathedral, although his awareness of impending disaster had only started to take proper shape at that crisis meeting in the Department of Health. It was then that he had learned the full scope of the Zeno experiments and, although he had said nothing at the time, he had been aghast that Porton Down and Curbishley had been allowed to pursue such a foolhardy course of action. Irene Johnson’s objections, which she had obviously made from the very beginning, were irrefutable. Yet the powers that be had overridden her protests and allowed Curbishley free rein to develop what was clearly an uncontainable biological weapon.

  How was that possible? How could intelligent and presumably sane people allow such a project to go ahead? His best guess was that Curbishley had convinced them that his scientists would develop some kind of antidote or vaccination in tandem with the engineered virus, and that the prospect of possessing such a weapon had inclined them to believe him despite the absence of any plausible evidence to support his case. In Hart’s experience people in power were easily beguiled when offered something that they thought would give them even more power, especially so in an England that, as far as the governing elite were concerned, now wielded much less international influence than once it had. The prospect of standing proud on what they liked to speak of as ‘the world stage’ all too often proved irresistible. The fact that this was no longer practical, or even desirable, appeared to escape them, although it was clear enough to Hart. Certainly he did not see such misguided ambitions as any kind of justification for embarking on an enterprise as hazardous as the Zeno project.

  But then, as he had always believed, it was not for him to take such decisions. He was a servant of the state. However ill-advised a government might be, if the people saw fit to elect it then it was Hart’s job to implement those aspects of its policies that required his particular kinds of expertise. He had no delusions about the ethical pitfalls of that commitment. His was a world in which, by and large, the ends justified the means, and if that required dubious morality – sending Osborne to inveigle himself into the life of Alison MacGregor, for example – then so be it. While he was not naïve enough to think that there were no limits at all on his actions, he was clear that the moral restraints that ordinary people might expect in their own lives did not apply to the inevitably murky activities of the intelligence world.

  Thus far in his work he had not been obliged to confront directly what he considered to be a really serious ethical dilemma, although he liked to think that he would recognise that point should he reach it and would behave accordingly. In fact, until this Zeno business he had generally been untroubled by such concerns. But he was troubled now, and no longer just in the abstract. Looking down at his unconscious daughter while gently stroking her hand in the hope that she might be aware of his presence, powerful emotions were affecting what he always thought of as primarily rational calculations. Now, suddenly and uniquely in his experience, the administrative and the political were becoming deeply personal.

  Writing to Sarah too
k longer than Ali had expected. She had spent a whole morning drafting and redrafting a letter and she was still not satisfied with the result. The problem was that, as she well knew, Sarah was happy where she was. She enjoyed her work, Charlotte had many friends, and Hugh had been content to go along with things even though, as one Scot to another, he had often told Ali that he would like to return home in the fullness of time. In the present much more precarious circumstances Ali was sure that she could convince Hugh of the need to move, but she was less certain about Sarah. Her friend could be very stubborn – ‘determined’ was how Sarah preferred to describe it – and, although she had studied in Scotland, moving there now was something she would be likely to resist.

  Still, Ali knew that she had to make the effort. She was convinced that things were going to get a great deal worse as the epidemic spread, especially in England where the disease had established its first foothold and where the government seemed incapable or unwilling to propose any kind of coherent strategy to combat it. Decades of underfunding of the National Health Service, in combination with forbiddingly expensive private health insurance, meant that adequate medical treatment was out of the reach of many people. At least in Scotland they were pledging massive resources to the task, a very public commitment which, whatever its likely medical efficacy, had so far served to minimise unrest. Although England had not yet descended into the extreme protests and social disorder that were reported from some parts of the world, there were clear signs of growing and vocal dissatisfaction which was being met with increasingly repressive measures. In her time working there Ali had been dismayed to discover quite how authoritarian English society had become, with its constantly paraded nationalism and widespread insistence that others – outsiders, ethnic minorities, so-called scroungers – were always to blame when anything went wrong. Even now, after Livermore’s and Porton Down’s responsibility had been widely publicised, there were many who insisted that foreigners were behind it all, whether immigrants or terrorists, a belief that the authorities were more than happy to encourage.