The Zeno Effect Page 9
Irene looked horrified at this suggestion.
“But then your colleagues would be onto me like a pack of wolves,” she protested, “undermining anything I said and lord knows what else.”
“No.” Hart was adamant. “We can keep your identity out of it. As long as the channel sees you as reliable and independent it will work. They won’t have to make your name known, just be convinced that the information you feed them is accurate. If you offer them a little at a time they’ll have an investment in keeping you secret.”
“And if I do this you’ll help me keep Sarah safe?”
“Yes, I will. After all, we shall be allies, friends even, and friends must stick together.”
Irene was not so sure that they could ever be friends, and certainly not convinced that Hart was entirely trustworthy, but his proposal did appear to be the only practical way forward. Reluctantly she nodded her agreement.
“OK. I’ll go along with it, to begin with at least. How do we keep in touch?”
Hart reached into his pocket and passed her a tiny plastic object, most of the face of which was some kind of screen. It was rather like a much smaller version of the pagers Irene remembered from her youth.
“I can send short encrypted text messages to this device which won’t be detected by the standard surveillance systems. There’s a beep and a light which will flash when there’s a message, and you press the key to read it. It’s one-way only so any message I send will simply be a place and time to meet. You follow those instructions and we’ll have an apparently accidental encounter. I’ll contact you soon.”
And with that he was on his way, a man strolling across the common in the sunshine and whistling quietly to himself, seemingly without a care in the world.
Irene remained seated for quite some time after Hart’s departure, wondering if she had done the right thing by agreeing to his suggestion. She knew very well that you didn’t rise so high in Hart’s world without being skilled at duplicity, and she certainly didn’t believe that he had her best interests at heart. He would have his own agenda and would not hesitate to sacrifice her if that served his purpose. But what choice did she have? At least this way she might get a chance to push the authorities towards positive action, and she did believe him when he claimed that this was also his goal. If he kept his promise to help protect Sarah then that would be a significant bonus. But the priority was to get information about Zeno into the open. That would ensure that proper contingency plans could be made to deal with the inevitable epidemic and, if Porton Down was forced to release the technical details of the virus, the full range of international scientific expertise could be brought to bear in the battle against it.
At last Irene rose from the bench and began her walk home. As she followed the familiar route across the park she looked with a different awareness at the families wandering in the sunshine, the children enjoying noisy and rambunctious games, people sitting on the grass deep in conversation or just taking pleasure in being out there in the open. How little they knew about the imminent fragility of their daily lives. Irene understood all too well that she was taking a considerable personal risk in allying herself with Hart, but that paled into insignificance compared to what might happen to so many of these people. Yes, she thought, she was doing the right thing, and with that resolve her pace quickened as she approached the edge of the park and set off homeward, looking neither to right nor left. Had she been doing so, she might have seen a rather ordinary looking man carrying a Support the Needy charity bag, who rose from his bench after she had passed and followed her out into the suburban streets. But, her mind now firmly focused on the challenges ahead, she did not, and he was able to follow her home entirely unnoticed.
On the bridge of the MS Zeebrugge its captain was staring blankly out into the darkness of the night-time Atlantic. The cruise ship was a day away from returning to port in Boston at the end of a lengthy USA/Europe round voyage and the captain was worried. In the last twenty-four hours a number of his passengers had come down with some kind of infection. The symptoms did not appear to be those of a norovirus – he had encountered that peril of cruise ship life before – but they were just as debilitating, if not more so. His medical staff were coping at the moment, but if, as seemed likely, more cases emerged tomorrow, then they would be pushed close to their limits. Still, he thought as he left the bridge for his cabin and sleep, we are nearly home. Then it will be someone else’s problem.
8
A Sunday spent searching all the usual internet sources yielded Julie very little information about Charles Livermore. She found references to scientific papers on which he had been a co-author, mostly in areas of research so technical that they were entirely opaque to someone of Julie’s humanities background. She found him on a couple of conference attendees lists and a brief mention on a university alumnus website. But that was it. No presence on social media. No biographical details. And nothing on the Porton Down website, which for security reasons did not anyway incorporate staff listings but might have been expected to make some commemorative reference to the death of a long-standing colleague.
All of which served only to feed Julie’s conviction that there was something weird going on and that she would have to do her damnedest to find out just what it was. With that in mind she had v-called the Porton Down press office first thing on Monday morning with a polite enquiry about Dr Livermore’s sad passing. She received an equally polite rejoinder to the effect that all relevant details were already in the public domain, and there was nothing that his former employers could add other than to confirm that he had been an outstanding researcher for them over a number of years. When pressed on the cause of his death the PR officer said that they understood it to have been a sudden heart attack, and when asked about Dr Livermore’s research field he observed, regretfully, that such information was covered by the Official Secrets Act so he was not in a position to make any comment.
This was pretty much what Julie had expected and she resisted the temptation to enquire about the protective suits worn at the Pitton cottage and the extensive searches carried out at the cathedral. No point them knowing what she had already pieced together; so much better to save that information for the first instalment of the story. Even if she had asked, they would surely have done no more than to affirm that this was standard procedure in any such case. Clearly she was being stonewalled and she took that as confirmation that there was indeed something here worth investigating. She observed as much to the editor of The Wessex Web, an independent and somewhat unconventional news site covering the southern region, who retained Julie as a jobbing reporter.
“Well,” he said, “not necessarily. Organisations like Porton Down are pretty paranoid at the best of times, let alone when they have a sudden death to deal with and a pushy reporter on the line.”
“Even so,” she insisted, counting off the points on her fingers. “The protective gear at his house; the extensive searches at the cathedral; the complete lack of public information about him; and the total news blackout on all of that.”
Julie laid special emphasis on that last observation knowing full well that her editor would be unable to resist rushing in where other news sources feared to tread.
“OK, OK, I hear you,” he said. “It’s certainly worth pursuing. Write a punchy piece covering those topics. I’ll look out some library pictures of Porton Down and the cathedral, and we’ll use the shot you took of the guy’s house. I’ll give it some prominence and we’ll see what that stirs up. If anything.”
For the next hour Julie did as he suggested and then watched as he mounted the pictures and the story on the Wessex Web site, complete with her byline and under the unoriginal if attention-seeking headline, ‘Porton Down Puzzler’.
“There you go, Julie. Another step on the long, hard road to a Pulitzer Prize. Except we don’t have Pulitzers here so I’ll buy you a drink instead. Come on.”
“We’ve had a journalist asking about Livermore’s death this morning, Mr Hart. She was quite persistent, wanting to know about his work, how he died, and so on. Of course, our press office took the agreed line but the person talking to her had the feeling that she might know more than she was letting on.”
“What’s her name and who does she work for?”
The security chief consulted a note on his desk. “Her name is Julie Fenwick and she said she was a freelance covering the southern region. Didn’t give a specific news organisation.”
Hart jotted down the name. “Leave it with me then. I’ll get our people onto it and let you know if we find anything significant. Thanks for keeping us informed.” And although he had no such intention, he added, “I’ll pass the information on to the other agencies so you’ve no need to do anything more.”
Hart stared at the name on his pad for several minutes. Perhaps this Julie Fenwick was just the person he was seeking. If she had become sufficiently interested to contact Porton Down in spite of the careful information blocks that the intelligence agencies had put in place, then she might be a good channel for his and Irene’s leaks. He turned to his terminal, brought up the DSD’s secure database and typed in her name.
Half an hour later he had all he needed. Julie Fenwick came originally from the Malvern area, the daughter of a farmer. She was twenty-four years old, single, and lived in a small apartment in Southampton. She had graduated with a respectable degree in English and had worked as a stringer and freelance journalist since then. There was nothing particularly distinctive in her confidential security records. She had edited a student news website at university, and while she had been outspoken on local student issues she did not appear to have espoused any more general political affiliations nor established a record of activism or dissent.
There was, however, one aspect of her biography that particularly attracted Hart’s attention. On a number of occasions, both in print and on social networks, she had made a case for the importance of an independent fourth estate if those in power were to be held to account. Nothing especially radical – that would certainly have attracted the attention of the intelligence agencies – but clearly a strongly held belief which, presumably, informed her ambitions as a journalist. Ideal, then, for someone to be manipulated with carefully controlled leaks of confidential information.
He was confirmed in that view a little later in the day when the automated search algorithm that he had set up came back with a new internet item for Julie Fenwick. Hart read her article on The Wessex Web with growing interest. She was obviously persistent and also sharp enough to have fitted together some pieces of the jigsaw. A suitable person to be given one or two additional snippets then, and all the more so since The Wessex Web was probably sufficiently obscure to evade the prying eyes of the other agencies until it was too late. He would message her from an untraceable source and arrange for her to meet Irene as soon as he could safely bring them together.
It was with some distaste that Irene began her day by picking up the usual mess of circulars and charity come-ons that had dropped through her letterbox. How this archaic approach to marketing survived in an age of widespread digital communication remained one of the great unanswered questions as far as Irene was concerned, but survive it did, and on a daily basis she dumped the lot unread into her recycling bin. But on this particular morning her eye was caught by a leaflet and plastic return bag from an organisation called Support the Needy because prominently attached to it was an envelope addressed to her personally. Her curiosity piqued, she opened it to find a note and yet another envelope, this one also addressed to her and in what looked very much like Ali’s handwriting. The cover note simply said: ‘If you wish to respond to this letter securely you can do so by wrapping your reply in a donation of clothing, placing it in the plastic bag, and leaving the bag outside for collection tomorrow morning.’ Irene opened the letter, which was indeed from Ali, and read its contents with growing astonishment.
Although Hart had told her of the attempt to waylay Ali en route to Edinburgh he had given her no details, and the lengths to which they had gone to detain her were nearly as startling to Irene as was Ali’s ingenuity in escaping them. After recounting those events, Ali’s letter went on to ask if there was any additional information about the Zeno breach, in particular about the specific virus involved, so that the Scottish government could be better prepared for an epidemic. Finally, she assured Irene that the person delivering the letter was to be trusted and warned her that she was undoubtedly under the kind of extensive surveillance that had been utilised in Ali’s pursuit.
Irene laid the letter on the kitchen table in front of her, absent-mindedly flattening out its creases as she considered what to do. There was no question but that it really was from Ali. To confirm exactly that, the letter mentioned an event from Ali’s and Sarah’s past – involving boys, alcohol, and some money ‘borrowed’ from Irene’s handbag – that could only be known to the three of them. So this was undoubtedly a channel of communication to the Scottish government, and if Irene told them what she knew it would not only break the terms of her employment as an English government adviser but it would also probably count as a treasonable act. Still, the security agencies already knew that she had given some information to Ali and they were not yet knocking on her door in the dark hours of the night. Would this really be any different to what she had already agreed to do at Hart’s instigation? And how far would his promised protection of her reach? Not, she thought, as far as covering for her passing information to a foreign power. But she had already decided that there were serious limits on his commitment to her well-being so her deal with him could hardly be a factor in this decision. The real issues were the seriousness of the Zeno threat and the unacceptable behaviour of her government in refusing to warn its own citizens, as well as the rest of the world, about the terrible prospect of disease that they faced.
Irene was decided. She would tell Ali what she knew in the hope that the Scottish authorities would not only make their own preparations but would also ensure that the information about Zeno was made public. That way, even if Hart’s strategy did not work there would be another route through which information could emerge. No doubt it would ultimately be traced back to her but Irene was already prepared for that as a consequence of the arrangement with Hart. What did she have to lose? Every day brought the potential disaster nearer and, compared to that, Irene’s career and even her liberty were no longer matters of huge importance.
When she reached that conclusion it was as if a shadow had lifted from her mind. Now she could see clearly what had to be done for all their sakes. She would spend the coming day at work assembling everything she could about the virus, the breach, and probable consequences. Then she would incorporate that material into a letter to Ali and, in the morning, consign it to the care of the anonymous collector of charitable donations.
It was a relief to have made a decision at last and she felt energised by it. Whistling tunelessly under her breath, she got up from the table and prepared herself for the working day. It was going to be one of the more interesting ones.
In Edinburgh, Alison MacGregor’s day was proving to be rather less than interesting. Since she was now persona non grata in England there was no way she could continue as a Scientific Liaison Officer and nobody had quite got round to deciding how she should now be employed. The Chief Scientific Adviser suggested that she take a few days off to recover from her ordeal, after which they could sort out a new role for her. Ali jibbed at this proposal, as much as anything because she didn’t want to be sitting around with no work to distract her from thoughts of the impending Zeno crisis. They finally agreed on her completing all the reports due from her last posting in London and the
n accepting the offer of holiday time. As a result, she was now sitting in the office extending those tasks for as long as she possibly could. It was not compelling work, and repeatedly she realised with a start that her mind was wandering off unbidden.
At one point she found herself thinking of Richard, trembling with fury and frustration at the comprehensiveness of his betrayal. While it was never a particularly serious involvement on her part, it had been an ostensibly intimate relationship and she felt soiled by the ways in which he had taken advantage of her and of her desires. She sat at the desk physically hunched into herself at the memory of their sexual encounters, pleasurable enough at the time but, in retrospect, rendered grubby by the scale of his deception. She counted herself fortunate that the whole thing had been relatively short-lived. Imagine what it must be like – and she knew that there were cases of just this – to discover that a long-term relationship had always been a masquerade played out in the cause of state security.
Ali shivered at the thought, staring fixedly at her screen trying to refocus on the tasks in hand. This was no time to be upsetting herself with regrets about the past. What was likely to follow in consequence of Zeno was much more important. Yet again she reviewed what she knew. It was really pitifully little, and until Irene replied to her letter, assuming that she did reply, there was not much more that Ali could do. On top of that, she was becoming increasingly apprehensive about the Zeno effect itself, regardless of what specific virus had actually been released. From what Sarah had told her about the accelerated process of mutation she knew that they were not just facing a short-term epidemic, however disastrous that might be, but also a much more frightening long-term risk from a virus which would and could change its form unpredictably. She wasn’t convinced that her superiors in the Scottish Science and Health Executives had quite grasped the magnitude of this threat, or had understood that it meant being caught up in a constant losing game of catch-up in the struggle against disease.