The Zeno Effect Read online

  Sooner rather than later, though, the story was going to get out, Hart was certain of that. Too many people knew that something unusual had happened connected to Porton Down, and although the security agencies had closed off most of the standard channels, somebody somewhere was bound to start asking questions. In these circumstances, Hart concluded, he had two lines of attack. He needed first to get Irene onside, and to do so he had to bypass her surveillance. MI5 remained in overall control of that, but given his familiarity with their procedures he could surely find a private way to make contact with her. This was something on which he could focus over the coming weekend. The other rather more speculative and difficult task was to find some gaps in the security clampdown through which he could feed selected snippets of information. That, unfortunately, was going to take time, and Hart was not at all sure that time was what he had.

  Sitting among the hills and moors of the Derbyshire High Peak, the town of Buxton had known better days. Once a spa to be visited by those of the upper classes eager to take the waters, it still attracted a little tourism but not much else to keep its citizens employed. It retained a small hospital, however, and on that Saturday evening the generally quiet institution was facing something of a rush. Five members of the same family had been admitted, all running fevers and suffering from acute respiratory problems. The junior doctor on duty was puzzled. They looked like particularly bad cases of flu, but it was not yet the influenza season and there had been no notifications that a flu virus was abroad. Some kind of noxious-fumes leak in their home? He settled on a wait-and-see strategy. Ensure that they could breathe, monitor their condition over the weekend, and hand them over to his consultant on Monday morning. That decided, he leaned back further into his chair and tried to doze. It would be a long weekend.

  7

  The spire of Salisbury Cathedral reaches a startling 123 metres into the sky, a matter of some wonder to Julie Fenwick as she craned her neck to follow it upwards in its full medieval splendour. Her CommsTab announced that it was built in the early fourteenth century and was the tallest in England, cold facts which hardly captured its almost metaphysical weight looming over her. Julie was not easily impressed. As a young freelance journalist and vlogger she liked to cultivate a determinedly sceptical attitude, one that she felt was appropriate to her work, indeed, to what she secretly thought of as her calling. But the spire had done its business with her, as it had with so many others over the centuries, and she stood looking upwards in a state of awe.

  Coming back to earth at last, she restored a sense of the mundane by wryly observing to herself that this was probably as good a place to die as you might find. For what had brought her here was not the architectural glory in front of her, but a puzzle. Earlier that week she had seen a brief news report that a man had been found dead in the cathedral. But since then, nothing. This had piqued Julie’s professional curiosity. At the very least, surely, there was a human interest angle to be exploited and yet none of the normal outlets had pursued the story. It was as if it had never happened.

  To Julie, who maintained a healthy belief in conspiracies, this complete news blackout was not just suspicious, it was a provocation. There must be a story to uncover and she was the one to uncover it. It might not be as consequential as the Watergate conspiracy – despite the film being over fifty years old, All the President’s Men remained Julie’s favourite – but aspiring investigative reporters had to start somewhere. In this case, she decided, after a desultory wander around the cathedral itself, in the shop and tea room. In her experience shop assistants and waiting-on staff were the most willing to gossip, and a recent death on the premises should be fair game.

  She drew a blank in the tea room, but buying a souvenir mug in the shop started her chatting to a bored salesgirl. After the customary exchanges about the weather, the lack of customers that morning, and the beauty of both the town and the cathedral, Julie plunged in.

  “I read somewhere that you had a death in the cathedral recently.”

  The salesgirl brightened visibly. “Ooh yes, it was amazing. One of the cleaners found him. She was ever so shocked. That was on the Saturday night and when I got into work on the Monday the place was full of police who were searching all over.”

  Her face took on an expression of distant contemplation, as if the event had been one of mystical significance. But then she refocused on her interrogator and, clearly disappointed to have missed out on the central exhibit, added: “But the body was gone.”

  “Was it a tourist?” Julie asked. “I don’t think that the report I saw said anything about him, not even a name.”

  “No, we were never given a name either. But he wasn’t a tourist. One of the policemen checking the shop told me that he was a local guy. From Pitton, he said, out in the sticks.”

  “I wonder what they were searching for.”

  “Dunno,” the salesgirl replied. “The policeman I spoke to didn’t seem too certain himself, but there were plainclothes people everywhere, detectives I suppose, who seemed to be in charge and looked as if they knew what they were doing.”

  “Sounds really exciting. Just like a cop show on TV,” Julie said as she collected her purchase. “Did they find anything?”

  “I don’t think so, and we haven’t heard anything about it since. I guess it was just a heart attack or something. Livened the place up for a day or two though,” she added wistfully, looking as if she might enjoy a few more deaths in the cathedral if only to relieve the boredom.

  Thanking her for the mug and the chat, Julie strolled out into the Cathedral Close where she found a bench, sat down, and opened her CommsTab. Pitton, she thought, where the hell is Pitton? A few seconds of searching established that Pitton was a small village about seven miles to the east and that, largely because of a very popular pub – the Silver Plough – there was a regular shuttle service, especially at weekends. Julie did some calculations. She had to get home to Southampton later that day, but given the frequency of the Saturday evening shuttles she ought to be able to make it out there, have a look round, and be back in Salisbury in time to get home.

  Pitton in the afternoon sunshine turned out to be quite picturesque, a mixture of relatively modern housing and older but expensively refurbished cottages. Some of them even had thatched roofs. After being dropped close to the pub, Julie set out to explore and quickly came across a small cottage which had police blue and white ‘No Entry’ tapes across its garden gate and front door. She walked past slowly a couple of times, contriving to take a furtive photograph with her CommsTab while pretending to consult it. There was nothing much to see, however, and there was no way round to the back of the house without breaching the tapes, so Julie satisfied herself with the photograph and returned to the shuttle drop-off point.

  The Silver Plough was open – in fact, it was rarely closed – so with plenty of time before she had to return to Salisbury, Julie went in. She found herself in a large bar area dominated by dark wooden beams which stood out against a white background on both walls and ceiling. It was very quiet, there being only a few customers scattered around the tables and a solitary barman filling the time by polishing glasses. Julie seated herself at the bar.

  “Gin and tonic please.”

  “With lemon or lime?”

  “Lime definitely. Much better that way.”

  “Yeah, I think so too, but you’d be surprised how many people prefer lemon.”

  The barman brought her drink. “You here on holiday?”

  “Just for the day really. I was seeing the sights in Salisbury and came across a recommendation for this village and pub. So here I am.”

  Determined to keep the conversation going she smiled at the barman and added, “It’s a pretty village and you don’t see thatched cottages very often these days.”

  The barman rose to the bait. “No, they’re much less common now. Skilled work, thatching, and not many left w
ho can do it.”

  “I passed a cottage down the road with police tapes on it. Has something bad happened here? Not what you’d expect to come across in a quiet little village like this.”

  The barman leaned towards her conspiratorially.

  “Biggest thing that’s happened in the village in years,” he said. “The guy who lived there was found dead in Salisbury Cathedral last Saturday and the police were crawling all over the place for a couple of days.”

  “Wow! That must have disturbed the rural peace a bit. So was the death suspicious for there to be that much police interest?”

  “Well, he wasn’t old, only in his fifties. Lived here for most of his life apart from when he was away at university. He was a scientist. Charles Livermore. Worked up at Porton Down. Maybe that’s why the police were involved. They do secret stuff up there. The guys were going into the house wearing those protective suits.”

  “You mean the kind they wear for crime scenes?” Julie asked.

  “No, more elaborate than that. Full masks, breathing kit and stuff.”

  “Oh right.” Julie had to work hard to conceal her excitement. “I suppose he wasn’t very old, was he? Poor man. Did they find out what happened?”

  “Rumour is that he had a heart attack. Funnily enough, he was in here on the night before. Seemed fine. Had a meal and a pint. I remember thinking that he must be in a good mood since usually he only had a half. Bit of a loner, Charles, an oddity, though I quite liked him.”

  Her mind still processing the information about Porton Down and the protective suits, Julie turned the conversation onto other topics until the arrival of a shuttle was announced by a noisy group entering the bar.

  “Here we go,” said the barman. “Saturday madness begins.”

  “I’ll leave you to it then,” Julie smiled. “I can catch that shuttle back to Salisbury. Thanks for the company.”

  By the time she was back in the city she had decided that her next move would be a seemingly innocent call on Monday morning to the PR people at Porton Down. A pity about the delay, she thought, as she settled into the Southampton bus, but at least she could spend the rest of the weekend seeing what might be found online about Charles Livermore and his scientific specialism. It would be good preparation for the Monday call.

  On a Sunday afternoon, weather permitting, Irene Johnson was in the habit of taking a walk on Tooting Common. It was not far from where she lived, and although she would never have admitted it, the fact that one of the roads crossing the Common was called Dr Johnson Avenue was a continuing source of mild amusement. Her late husband had always made poor jokes about it when they walked the park together. On this particular Sunday the weather did more than permit her stroll. It was positively encouraging: bright sunshine, blue skies, and a breeze just strong enough to moderate the heat to comfortable levels.

  Irene was in need of pleasant diversion. It had been a stressful and disturbing week with the Zeno threat weighing heavily on her conscience. Although decisions had been taken to which she was bound by the terms of her contract as a Scientific Adviser, she remained convinced that the strategy of silence that the Ministry had adopted was profoundly misguided. Not just misguided, but deeply morally questionable. She had already partly broken that silence with the cryptic message that she had entrusted to Ali, but she was worried that she had not heard anything further from Ali and had only managed a prosaic CommsTab conversation with Sarah in which both were careful to avoid the subject.

  She was uncertain as to what, if anything, she could or should do next. If – when – the spread of the Zeno virus reached epidemic proportions, containment would be much more difficult than it would be if action were taken immediately. But there was little prospect of that given a government determined to keep the Porton Down breach secret, and even if she felt ethically justified in going public it was not clear how she could do it with any hope of success. Most English communications channels had been brought under powerful central control in recent years, an insidious but highly effective process, and Irene had no idea how that control might be bypassed. If she took the desperate step of speaking out it was likely that nobody would hear, and even if they did the government propaganda machine would rapidly undermine her with slurs on her reputation and quite probably worse.

  Overcome by the wretched impossibility of it all, Irene slumped onto a nearby bench and stared out across the usually comforting green parkland without really seeing any of it – the children at play, dogs in pursuit of tennis balls, people sitting in the sunshine entirely unaware of what lay in wait. Lost in distressing thoughts she barely noticed when someone sat down on the bench along from her.

  “Good afternoon, Professor Johnson. A beautiful day, is it not?”

  Jolted out of her gloomy ruminations, Irene turned towards the voice. It was Hart, Director of the DSD, issuer of warnings that might be threats or threats that might be warnings.

  “What on earth are you doing here?” she asked. “Are you following me? I thought you had unscrupulous minions to do that sort of thing.”

  “Indeed we do,” Hart replied with a wry smile, “but in your case they were not mine but from MI5 and they are altogether too busy elsewhere to trail around behind you at weekends.”

  Irene was astonished and not a little disarmed by this admission. She inclined her head towards him.

  “I should be honoured then,” she said, the obvious sarcasm somewhat undercut by her returning his smile. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

  “I think we might be on the same side, you and I, at least as far as Zeno policy is concerned. Neither of us agree with it but we’re unlikely to have any impact through the customary channels.”

  Irene gave him a hard look. “It was obvious from last week’s meeting where I stand but I don’t recall you offering any vocal support.”

  “Yes, that’s true. I didn’t judge it to be appropriate at the time. Adding my voice to yours would not have made any difference to the outcome, and I felt that I could do more in other ways.”

  Irene shook her head. “I’d like to believe you,” she said, “but given your official position that’s really quite difficult.”

  “Of course.” Hart moved along the bench closer to her and spoke quietly. “Perhaps if I give you some confidential information, that will help to persuade you?”

  Irene remained silent and Hart continued.

  “As you have surmised, you have been under surveillance for some time along with a number of your contacts. That includes both your daughter and her friend Alison MacGregor.”

  Although Irene had already come to believe as much, it was still a shock to hear it so bluntly stated and by someone who was in a position to know.

  “As a result of your slightly odd behaviour earlier this week,” Hart went on, “some of my colleagues came to the conclusion that you might have passed information about the Zeno breach to Dr MacGregor and, through her, to your daughter. This was confirmed for them when Dr MacGregor managed to evade an attempt to detain her on her way back to Scotland on Friday.”

  “Detain her! Is she OK?” Irene was horrified at the thought that she had put Ali, and perhaps Sarah, in danger.

  “As far as my colleagues know she reached Edinburgh safely and is now out of their reach.”

  “And Sarah, have they done anything to her?”

  “No. Not that I’m aware of.” Hart was careful to leave the question open. “No doubt she is still under surveillance. I wouldn’t necessarily know. But I can certainly tell you if I hear anything and perhaps help you to bypass surveillance to warn her.”

  Hart paused to allow Irene to think through the ramifications of what he had said. After a lengthy silence, she turned towards him with a resigned shrug.

  “And what would you want from me?”

  “Just co-operation really. An alliance. I’d like to know how much Aliso
n MacGregor and your daughter know and, more important, I’d like your help in putting some obstacles in the way of government policy on Zeno.”

  “They don’t know much,” she replied. “Just that there’s been a Zeno breach, but no information about the virus. When I spoke to Ali I didn’t know what virus was involved.”

  “But they do know about the Zeno effect itself?”

  “Sarah certainly understands it. It’s her field after all. I assume she explained it to Ali.”

  “Yes, I suppose she would have.” Hart looked into the distance for a moment. “That means that the Scottish authorities know enough about the breach to be concerned.”

  Irene saw where that might lead. “Surely they’ll go public and that will force our government’s hand.”

  “I’m not so sure,” Hart demurred, “they don’t know much and they would be wary of jumping the gun for lack of detail. I don’t think we could rely on that to solve our problem, at least not in the immediate future.”

  Irene, noting the plural pronouns, felt that she had little choice but to go along with Hart’s inclusion of her.

  “What do you think we should do then?”

  “We need to find a way of getting the information out there which bypasses the official media outlets. That’s not easy. The intelligence agencies have national communications pretty much tied up. Trust me, I know.” He looked rueful at this admission. “If I can establish a safe channel I would need you to provide the information, to be the contact. Nobody’s better placed than you as an obviously reliable source for the facts.”