Free Wildcard by Ken McClure Page A

Macmillan. ‘The authorities up in Manchester are going to be working flat out to contain the outbreak. Although there will be an epidemiological team investigating the cause, I want you involved as well, because it’s absolutely vital that we establish the source as quickly as possible. I’ve had this okayed at the highest level, so you’ll have a free hand to operate as you see fit. You’ll have the support of the police and the Public Health Service should you need them, and of course you’ll have access to all the medical and scientific back-up you need. What do you say?’
    ‘Do I have a choice?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Then I say I’d best get started.’
    ‘Miss Roberts will prepare a background file for you in the usual way. After that, you’re on your own.’
    ‘This hasn’t reached the press yet?’ said Steven.
    ‘Only because the disease doesn’t have a name and there’s no obvious African connection to scaremonger about, but six associated people going down with something nasty is not going to go unreported for long.’
     
     
    Steven had lunch in a city pub, an old-style pub with high ceilings and self-conscious Victorian fittings. He cut an anonymous figure as he sat in a corner, eating a cheese roll and sipping a beer while mulling over the situation. The thing troubling him most was the fact that the Public Health people had failed to establish a connection between the woman in Manchester and the Ndanga flight. If there really wasn’t one, it would suggest that there was an original source of viral haemorrhagic fever in Manchester. Not a happy thought. And not a likely one, either, he decided after some consideration. Despite the failure to establish a connection, there just had to be one. Maybe some lateral thinking was called for.
    Although the true natural reservoir of Ebola and the other filovirus infection, Marburg disease, had not yet been established, he was aware of a strong suggestion among investigators that animals – particularly monkeys – were involved in the chain of events. If his memory served him right, the very first case of Marburg disease had been contracted in the German town of that name, back in the late 1960s by a worker who got it from an African lab monkey. If by any chance the woman in Manchester had had contact with animals – perhaps as a ‘friend of the zoo’ or as a voluntary helper or some such thing – that might conceivably be where she had picked up the disease. That would be the best possible outcome, he concluded. It would also be one hell of a coincidence.
    Steven returned to the Home Office to pick up his briefing file, which he’d been told would be ready by two thirty if Miss Roberts worked through her lunch hour to collate information supplied by the authorities in Manchester. She obviously had, for a purple folder was waiting for him on her desk when he went into her office. Jean Roberts had gone off to have a late snack but she had left a Post-it note stuck to the cover of the file, wishing him well. He in turn left her one, thanking her.
    Steven paused on the pavement outside and thought about taking the file home to read, but then decided on using the facilities of the medical library at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, where he had a reader’s card. He would have access there to all the reference books and current journals he might need.
    The first page of the Sci-Med file was entitled ‘Primary Victims’. Humphrey Barclay, he read, had been a middle-ranking civil servant who had been attached to the Foreign Office for the last fourteen years after shorter stints at the Ministry of Agriculture and the DHSS. He had a BA from Durham University in geography and had joined the civil service immediately after gaining his degree, a lower second. Two years later he had married Marion Court-Brown, daughter of a Surrey stockbroker, whom he had met at university. The marriage had produced two daughters, Tamsin and Carla.
    Barclay’s