Whiteout Read online

  But it would be much worse if she turned out to be right.

  An employee was absent without leave; he had lied about where he was going; and samples of the new drug were missing from the vault. Had Michael Ross done something that put him at risk of catching a lethal infection? The drug was still in the trial stage, and was not effective against all viruses, but he would have figured it was better than nothing. Whatever he was up to, he had wanted to make sure no one called at his house for a couple of weeks; and so he had pretended he was going to Devon, to visit a mother who was no longer alive.

  Monica Ansari had said, The fact that someone lives alone doesn't make them a nutcase, does it? It was one of those statements that meant the opposite of what it said. The biochemist had sensed something odd about Michael even though, as a rational scientist, she hesitated to rely on mere intuition.

  Toni believed that intuition should never be ignored.

  She could hardly bear to think of the consequences if the Madoba-2 virus had somehow escaped. It was highly infectious, spreading fast through coughs and sneezes. And it was fatal. A shudder of dread went through her, and she pushed down on the accelerator pedal.

  The road was deserted and it took only twenty minutes to reach Michael Ross's isolated home. The entrance was not clearly marked, but Toni remembered it. She turned into a short drive that led to a low stone cottage behind a garden wall. The place was dark. Toni stopped the van next to a Volkswagen Golf, presumably Michael's. She sounded her horn long and loud.

  Nothing happened. No lights came on, no one opened a door or window. Toni turned off the engine. Silence.

  If Michael had gone away, why was his car here?

  "Bunny suits, please, gentlemen," she said.

  They all climbed into orange space suits, including the medical team from the second van. It was an awkward business. The suit was made of a heavy plastic that did not easily yield or fold. It closed with an airtight zip. They helped one another attach the gloves to the wrists with duct tape. Finally they worked the plastic feet of the suits into rubber overboots.

  The suits were completely sealed. The wearer breathed through a HEPA filter--a high efficiency particulate air filter--with an electric fan powered by a battery pack worn on the suit belt. The filter would keep out any breathable particles that might carry germs or viruses. It also took out all but the strongest smells. The fan made a constant shushing noise that some people found oppressive. A headset in the helmet enabled them to speak to one another and to the switchboard at the Kremlin over a scrambled radio channel.

  When they were ready, Toni looked again at the house. Should someone glance out of a window now, and see seven people in orange space suits, he would think UFO aliens were real.

  If there was someone in there, he was not looking out of any windows.

  "I'll go first," Toni said.

  She went up to the front door, walking stiffly in the clumsy plastic suit. She rang the bell and banged the knocker. After a few moments, she went around the building to the back. There was a neat garden with a wooden shed. She found the back door unlocked, and stepped inside. She remembered standing in the kitchen while Michael made tea. She walked quickly through the house, turning on lights. The Rembrandts were still on the living-room wall. The place was clean, tidy, and empty.

  She spoke to the others over the headset. "No one home." She could hear the dejected tone of her own voice.

  Why had he left his house unlocked? Perhaps he was never coming back.

  This was a blow. If Michael had been here, the mystery could have been solved quickly. Now there would have to be a search. He might be anywhere in the world. There was no knowing how long it would take to find him. She thought with dread of the nerve-racking days, or even weeks, of anxiety.

  She went back out into the garden. To be thorough, she tried the door of the garden shed. It, too, was unlocked. When she opened it, she caught the trace of a smell, unpleasant but vaguely familiar. It must be very strong, she realized, to penetrate the suit's filter. Blood, she thought. The shed smelled like a slaughterhouse. She murmured, "Oh, my God."

  Ruth Solomons, the doctor, heard her and said, "What is it?"

  "Just a minute." The inside of the little wooden building was black: there were no windows. She fumbled in the dark and found a switch. When the light came on, she cried out in shock.

  The others all spoke at once, asking what was wrong.

  "Come quickly!" she said. "To the garden shed. Ruth first."

  Michael Ross lay on the floor, face up. He was bleeding from every orifice: eyes, nose, mouth, ears. Blood pooled around him on the plank floor. Toni did not need the doctor to tell her that Michael was suffering from a massive multiple hemorrhage--a classic symptom of Madoba-2 and similar infections. He was very dangerous, his body an unexploded bomb full of the deadly virus. But he was alive. His chest went up and down, and a weak bubbling sound came from his mouth. She bent down, kneeling in the sticky puddle of fresh blood, and looked closely at him. "Michael!" she said, shouting to be heard through the plastic of her helmet. "It's Toni Gallo from the lab!"

  There was a flicker of intelligence in his bloody eyes. He opened his mouth and mumbled something.

  "What?" she shouted. She leaned closer.

  "No cure," he said. Then he vomited. A jet of black fluid exploded from his mouth, splashing Toni's faceplate. She jerked back and cried out in alarm, even though she knew she was protected by the suit.

  She was pushed aside, and Ruth Solomons bent over Michael.

  "The pulse is very weak," the doctor said over the headset. She opened Michael's mouth and used her gloved fingers to clear some of the blood and vomit from his throat. "I need a laryngoscope--fast!" Seconds later, a paramedic rushed in with the implement. Ruth pushed it into Michael's mouth, clearing his throat so that he could breathe more easily. "Bring the isolation stretcher, quick as you can." She opened her medical case and took out a syringe already loaded--with morphine and a blood coagulant, Toni assumed. Ruth pushed the needle into Michael's neck and depressed the plunger. When she pulled the syringe out, Michael bled copiously from the small hole.

  Toni was swamped by a wave of grief. She thought of Michael walking around the Kremlin, sitting in his house drinking tea, talking animatedly about etchings; and the sight of this desperately damaged body became all the more painful and tragic.

  "Okay," Ruth said. "Let's get him out of here."

  Two paramedics picked Michael up and carried him out to a gurney enclosed in a transparent plastic tent. They slid the patient through a porthole in one end of the tent, then sealed it. They wheeled the gurney across Michael's garden.

  Before getting into the ambulance, they now had to decontaminate themselves and the stretcher. One of Toni's team had already gotten out a shallow plastic tub like a children's paddling pool. Now Dr. Solomons and the paramedics took turns standing in the tub and being sprayed with a powerful disinfectant that destroyed any virus by oxidizing its protein.

  Toni watched, aware that every second's delay made it less likely that Michael would survive, knowing that the decontamination procedure had to be followed rigorously to prevent other deaths. She felt distraught that a deadly virus had escaped from her laboratory. It had never occurred before in the history of Oxenford Medical. The fact that she had been right to make such a fuss about the missing drugs, and her colleagues had been wrong to play it down, was small consolation. Her job was to prevent this happening, and she had failed. Would poor Michael die in consequence? Would others die?

  The paramedics loaded the stretcher into the ambulance. Dr. Solomons jumped into the back with the patient. They slammed the doors and roared off into the night.

  Toni said, "Let me know what happens, Ruth. You can phone me on this headset."

  Ruth's voice was already weakening with distance. "He's gone into a coma," she said. She added something else, but she was out of range, and her words became indistinguishable, then faded away altogether. />
  Toni shook herself to get rid of her gloomy torpor. There was work to be done. "Let's clean up," she said.

  One of the men took a roll of yellow tape that read "Biohazard--Do Not Cross Line" and began to run it around the entire property, house and shed and garden, and around Michael's car. Luckily there were no other houses near enough to worry about. If Michael had lived in a block of flats with communal air vents, it would already have been too late for decontamination.

  The others got out rolls of garbage bags, plastic garden sprayers already filled with disinfectant, boxes of cleaning cloths, and large white plastic drums. Every surface had to be sprayed and wiped down. Hard objects and precious possessions such as jewelry would be sealed in the drums and taken to the Kremlin to be sterilized by high-pressure steam in an autoclave. Everything else would be double-bagged and destroyed in the medical incinerator underneath the BSL4 lab.

  Toni got one of the men to help her wipe Michael's black vomit off her suit and spray her. She had to repress an urge to tear the defiled suit off her body.

  While the men cleaned up, she looked around, searching for clues as to why this had happened. As she had feared, Michael had stolen the experimental drug because he knew or suspected he had been infected with Madoba-2. But what had he done to expose himself to the virus?

  In the shed there was a glass case with an air extractor, rather like an improvised biosafety cabinet. She had hardly looked at it before, because she was concentrating on Michael, but now she saw that there was a dead rabbit in the case. It looked as if it had died of the illness that had infected Michael. Had it come from the laboratory?

  Beside it was a water bowl labeled "Joe." That was significant. Laboratory staff rarely named the creatures they worked with. They were kind to the subjects of their experiments, but they did not allow themselves to become attached to animals that were going to be killed. However, Michael had given this creature an identity, and treated it as a pet. Did he feel guilty about his work?

  She stepped outside. A police patrol car was drawing up alongside the biohazard van. Toni had been expecting them. In accordance with the Critical Incident Response Plan that Toni herself had devised, the security guards at the Kremlin had automatically phoned regional police headquarters at Inverburn to notify them of a red alert. Now they were coming to find out how real the crisis was.

  Toni had been a police officer herself, all her working life, until two years ago. For most of her career, she had been a golden girl--promoted rapidly, shown off to the media as the new style of modern cop, and tipped to be Scotland's first woman chief constable. Then she had clashed with her boss over a hot-button issue--racism in the force. He maintained that police racism was not institutionalized. She said that officers routinely concealed racist incidents, and that amounted to institutionalization. The row had been leaked to a newspaper, she had refused to deny what she believed, and she had been forced to resign.

  At the time she had been living with Frank Hackett, another detective. They had been together eight years, although they had never married. When she fell out of favor, he left her. It still hurt.

  Two young officers got out of the patrol car, a man and a woman. Toni knew most local police of her own generation, and some of the older ones remembered her late father, Sergeant Antonio Gallo, inevitably called Spanish Tony. However, she did not recognize these two. Over the headset, she said, "Jonathan, the police have arrived. Would you please decontaminate and talk to them? Just say we have confirmed the escape of a virus from the lab. They'll call Jim Kincaid, and I'll brief him when he gets here."

  Superintendent Kincaid was responsible for what they called CBRN--chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear incidents. He had worked with Toni on her plan. The two of them would implement a careful, low-key response to this incident.

  By the time Kincaid arrived, she would like to have some information to give him about Michael Ross. She went into the house. Michael had turned the second bedroom into his study. On a side table were three framed photographs of his mother: as a slim teenager in a tight sweater; as a happy parent, holding a baby that looked like Michael; and in her sixties, with a fat black-and-white cat in her lap.

  Toni sat at his desk and read his e-mails, operating the computer keyboard clumsily with her rubber-gloved hands. He had ordered a book called Animal Ethics from Amazon. He had also inquired about university courses in moral philosophy. She checked his Internet browser, and found he had recently visited animal-rights Web sites. Clearly, he had become troubled about the morality of his work. But it seemed no one at Oxenford Medical had realized that he was unhappy.

  Toni sympathized with him. Every time she saw a beagle or a hamster lying in a cage, deliberately made ill by a disease the scientists were studying, she felt a tug of pity. But then she remembered her father's death. He had suffered a brain tumor in his fifties, and he had died bewildered, humiliated, and in pain. His condition might one day be curable thanks to research on monkey brains. Animal research was a sad necessity, in her opinion.

  Michael kept his papers in a cardboard filing box, neatly labeled: "Bills," "Guarantees," "Bank Statements," "Instruction Manuals." Under "Memberships," Toni found an acknowledgment of his subscription to an organization called Animals Are Free. The picture was becoming clear.

  The work calmed her distress. She had always been good at detective procedures. Being forced out of the police had been a bitter blow. It felt good to use her old skills, and know that she still had the talent.

  She found Michael's address book and his appointments diary in a drawer. The diary showed nothing for the last two weeks. As she was opening the address book, a blue flash caught her eye through the window, and she looked out to see a gray Volvo sedan with a police light on its roof. That would be Jim Kincaid.

  She went outside and got one of the team to decontaminate her. Then she took off her helmet to talk to the Superintendent. However, the man in the Volvo was not Jim. When his face caught the moonlight, Toni saw that it was Superintendent Frank Hackett--her ex. Her heart sank. Although he was the one who had left, he always acted as if he had been the injured party.

  She resolved to be calm, friendly, and businesslike.

  He got out of the car and came toward her. She said, "Please don't cross the line--I'll come out." She realized right away she had made an error of tact. He was the police officer and she was the civilian--he would feel that he should be giving orders to her, not the other way around. The frown that crossed his face showed her that he had felt the slight. Trying to be more friendly, she said, "How are you, Frank?"

  "What's going on here?"

  "A technician from the lab appears to have caught a virus. We've just taken him away in an isolation ambulance. Now we're decontaminating his house. Where's Jim Kincaid?"

  "He's on holiday."

  "Where?" Toni hoped Jim might be reached and brought back for this emergency.

  "Portugal. He and his wife have a wee time-share."

  A pity, Toni thought. Kincaid knew about biohazards, but Frank did not.

  Reading her mind, Frank said, "Don't worry." He had in his hand a photocopied document an inch thick. "I've got the protocol here." It was the plan Toni had agreed on with Kincaid. Frank had obviously been reading it while waiting. "My first duty is to secure the area." He looked around.

  Toni had already secured the area, but she said nothing. Frank needed to assert himself.

  He called out to the two uniformed officers in the patrol car. "You two! Move that car to the entrance of the driveway, and don't let anyone by without asking me."

  "Good idea," Toni said, though in truth it made no difference to anything.

  Frank was referring to the document. "Then we have to make sure no one leaves the scene."

  Toni nodded. "There's no one here but my team, all in biohazard suits."

  "I don't like this protocol--it puts civilians in charge of a crime scene."

  "What makes you think this is a c
rime scene?"

  "Samples of a drug were stolen."

  "Not from here."

  Frank let that pass. "How did your man catch the virus, anyway? You all wear those suits in the laboratory, don't you?"

  "The local health board must figure that out," Toni said, prevaricating. "There's no point in speculation."

  "Were there any animals here when you arrived?"

  Toni hesitated.

  That was enough for Frank, who was a good detective because he did not miss much. "So an animal got out of the lab and infected the technician when he wasn't wearing a suit?"

  "I don't know what happened, and I don't want half-baked theories circulating. Could we concentrate for now on public safety?"

  "Aye. But you're not just worried about the public. You want to protect the company and your precious Professor Oxenford."

  Toni wondered why he said "precious"--but before she could react, she heard a chime from her helmet. "I'm getting a phone call," she said to Frank. "Sorry." She took the headset out of the helmet and put it on. The chime came again, then there was a hiss as the connection was made, and she heard the voice of a security guard on the switchboard at the Kremlin. "Dr. Solomons is calling Ms. Gallo."

  Toni said, "Hello?"

  The doctor came on the line. "Michael died, Toni."

  Toni closed her eyes. "Oh, Ruth, I'm so sorry."

  "He would have died even if we'd got to him twenty-four hours earlier. I'm almost certain he had Madoba-2."

  Toni's voice was choked by grief. "We did all we could."

  "Have you any idea how it happened?"

  Toni did not want to say much in front of Frank. "He was troubled about cruelty to animals. And I think he may have been unbalanced by the death of his mother, a year ago."

  "Poor boy."

  "Ruth, I've got the police here. I'll talk to you later."

  "Okay." The connection was broken. Toni took off the headset.

  Frank said, "So he died."

  "His name was Michael Ross, and he appears to have contracted a virus called Madoba-2."