Whiteout (23 page)

TONI sat in the control room, watching the monitors.

Steve and the guards had related everything that had happened, from when the “repair crew” entered the Great Hall up to the moment that two of them emerged from the BSL4 lab, passed through the little lobby, and vanished—one carrying a slim burgundy leather briefcase. Don had told her, while Steve gave him first aid, how one of the men had tried to stop the violence. The words he had shouted were burned into Toni's brain:
If you want to be empty-handed when we meet the client at ten, just carry on the way you are.

Clearly, they had come here to steal something from the laboratory, and they had taken it away in that briefcase. Toni had a dreadful feeling she knew what it was.

She was running the BSL4 footage from 12:55 to 1:15. Although the monitors had not shown these images at the time, the computer had stored them. Now she was watching two men inside the lab, wearing biohazard suits.

She gasped when she saw one of them open the door to the little room that contained the vault. He tapped numbers into the keypad—he knew the code! He opened the fridge door, then the other man began to remove samples.

Toni froze the playback.

The camera was placed above the door, and looked over the man's
shoulder into the refrigerator. His hands were full of small white boxes. Toni's fingers played over the keyboard, and the black-and-white picture on the monitor was enlarged. She could see the international biohazard symbol on the boxes. He was stealing virus samples. She zoomed in further and ran the image-enhancement program. Slowly, the words on one of the boxes became clear: “Madoba-2.”

It was what she had feared, but the confirmation hit her like the cold wind of death. She sat staring at the screen, frozen with dread, her heart sounding in her chest like a funeral bell. Madoba-2 was the most deadly virus imaginable, an infectious agent so terrible that it had to be guarded by multiple layers of security and touched only by highly trained staff in isolation clothing. And it was now in the hands of a gang of thieves who were carrying it around in a damn briefcase.

Their car might crash; they could panic and throw the briefcase away; the virus might fall into the possession of people who did not know what it was—the risks were horrendous. And even if they did not release it by accident, their “client” would do so deliberately. Someone was planning to use the virus to murder people in hundreds and thousands, perhaps to cause a plague that might mow down entire populations.

And they had obtained the murder weapon from her.

In despair, she restarted the footage, and watched with horror while one of the intruders emptied the contents of the vials into a perfume spray marked “Diablerie.” That was obviously the delivery mechanism. The ordinary-looking perfume bottle was now a weapon of mass destruction. She watched him carefully double-bag it and place it in the briefcase, bedded in polystyrene packing chips.

She had seen enough. She knew what needed to be done. The police had to gear up for a massive operation—and fast. If they moved quickly, they could still catch the thieves before the virus was handed over to the buyer.

She returned the monitors to their default position and left the control room.

The security guards were in the Great Hall, sitting on the couches normally reserved for visitors, drinking tea, thinking the crisis was over.
Toni decided to take a few seconds to regain control. “We have important work to do,” she said briskly. “Stu, go to the control room and resume your duties, please. Steve, get behind the desk. Don, stay where you are.” Don had a makeshift dressing over the cut on his forehead.

Susan Mackintosh, who had been blackjacked, was lying on a couch used by waiting visitors. The blood had been washed from her face but she was severely bruised. Toni knelt beside her and kissed her forehead. “Poor you,” she said. “How do you feel?”

“Pretty groggy.”

“I'm so sorry this happened.”

Susan smiled weakly. “It was worth it for the kiss.”

Toni patted her shoulder. “You're recovering already.”

Her mother was sitting next to Don. “That nice boy Steven made me a cup of tea,” she said. The puppy sat on spread-out newspaper at her feet. She fed it a piece of biscuit.

“Thanks, Steve,” Toni said.

Mother said, “He'd make a nice boyfriend for you.”

“He's married,” Toni replied.

“That doesn't seem to make much difference, nowadays.”

“It does to me.” Toni turned to Steve. “Where's Carl Osborne?”

“Men's room.”

Toni nodded and took out her phone. It was time to call the police.

She recalled what Steve Tremlett had told her about the duty staff at Inverburn regional headquarters tonight: an inspector, two sergeants, and six constables, plus a superintendent on call. It was nowhere near enough to deal with a crisis of this magnitude. She knew what she would do, if she were in charge. She would call in twenty or thirty officers. She would commandeer snowplows, set up roadblocks, and ready a squad of armed officers to make the arrest. And she would do it fast.

She felt invigorated. The horror of what had happened began to fade from her mind as she concentrated on what had to be done. Action always bucked her up, and police work was the best sort of action.

She got David Reid again. When she identified herself, he said, “We sent you a car, but they turned back. The weather—”

She was horrified. She had thought a police car was on its way. “Are you serious?” she said, raising her voice.

“Have you looked at the roads? There are abandoned cars everywhere. No point in a patrol getting stuck in the snow.”

“Christ! What kind of wimps are the police recruiting nowadays?”

“There's no need for that kind of talk, madam.”

Toni got herself under control. “You're right, I'm sorry.” She recalled, from her training, that when the police response to a crisis went badly amiss, it was often due to wrong identification of the hazard in the first few minutes, when someone inexperienced like P.C. Reid was dealing with the initial report. Her first task was to make sure he had the key information to pass to his superior. “Here's the situation. One: the thieves stole a significant quantity of a virus called Madoba-2 which is lethal to humans, so this is a biohazard emergency.”

“Biohazard,” he said, obviously writing it down.

“Two: the perpetrators are three men—two white and one black—and a white woman. They're driving a van marked ‘Hibernian Telecom.' ”

“Can you give me fuller descriptions?”

“I'll get the guard supervisor to call you with that information in a minute—he saw them, I didn't. Three: we have two injured people here, one who has been coshed and the other kicked in the head.”

“How serious would you say the injuries are?”

She thought she had already told him that, but he seemed to be asking questions from a list. “The guard who has been coshed should see a doctor.”

“Right.”

“Four: the intruders were armed.”

“What sort of weapons?”

Toni turned to Steve, who was a gun buff. “Did you get a look at their firearms?”

Steve nodded. “Nine-millimeter Browning automatic pistols, all three of them—the kind that take a thirteen-round magazine. They looked like ex-army stock to me.” Toni repeated the description to Reid.

“Armed robbery, then,” he said.

“Yes—but the important thing is that they can't be far away, and that van is easy to identify. If we move quickly, we can catch them.”

“Nobody can move quickly tonight.”

“Obviously you need snowplows.”

“The police force doesn't have snowplows.”

“There must be several in the area; we have to clear the roads most winters.”

“Clearing snow from roads is not a police function; it's a local authority responsibility.”

Toni was ready to scream with frustration, but she bit her tongue. “Is Frank Hackett there?”

“Superintendent Hackett is not available.”

She knew that Frank was on call—Steve had told her. “If you won't wake him up, I will,” she said. She broke the connection and dialed his home number. He was a conscientious officer; he would be sleeping by the phone.

He picked it up. “Hackett.”

“Toni. Oxenford Medical has been robbed of a quantity of Madoba-2, the virus that killed Michael Ross.”

“How did you let that happen?”

It was the question she was asking herself, but it stung when it came from him. She retorted, “If you're so smart, figure out how to catch the thieves before they get away.”

“Didn't we send a car out to you an hour ago?”

“It never got here. Your tough coppers saw the snow and got scared.”

“Well, if we're stuck, so are our suspects.”

“You're not stuck, Frank. You can get here with a snowplow.”

“I don't have a snowplow.”

“The local council has several—phone them up.”

There was a long pause. “I don't think so,” he said at last.

Toni could have killed him. Frank enjoyed using his authority negatively. It made him feel powerful. He especially liked defying her—
she had always been too assertive for him. How had she lived with him for so long? She curbed the retort that was on the tip of her tongue and said, “What's your thinking, Frank?”

“I can't send unarmed men chasing after a gang with guns. We'll need to assemble our firearms-trained officers, take them to the armory, and get them kitted out with Kevlar vests, guns, and ammunition. That's going to take a couple of hours.”

“Meanwhile the thieves are getting away with a virus that could kill thousands!”

“I'll put out an alert for the van.”

“They might switch cars. They could have an off-road Jeep parked somewhere.”

“They still won't get far.”

“What if they have a helicopter?”

“Toni, curb your imagination. There are no thieves with helicopters in Scotland.”

These were not local hooligans running off with jewelry or banknotes—but Frank had never really understood biohazards. “Frank, use
your
imagination. These people want to start a plague!”

“Don't tell me how to do the job. You're not a cop anymore.”

“Frank—” She stopped. He had broken the connection. “Frank, you're a dumb bastard,” she said into the dead phone, then she hung up.

Had he always been this bad? It seemed to her that when they were living together he was more reasonable. Perhaps she had been a good influence on him. He had certainly been willing to learn from her. She recalled the case of Dick Buchan, a multiple rapist who had refused to tell Frank where the bodies were despite hours of intimidation, shouting, and threats of violence. Toni talked quietly to him about his mother and broke him in twenty minutes. After that, Frank had asked her advice about every major interrogation. But since they split up, he seemed to have regressed.

She frowned at her phone, racking her brains. How was she going to put a bomb under Frank? She had something over him—the Farmer Johnny Kirk story. If the worse came to the worst, she could use that to blackmail him. But first there was one more call she could try. She
scrolled through the memory of her mobile and found the home number of Odette Cressy, her friend at Scotland Yard.

The phone was answered after a long wait. “This is Toni,” she said. “I'm sorry to wake you.”

Odette spoke to someone else. “Sorry, sweetheart, it's work.”

Toni was surprised. “I didn't expect you to be with someone.”

“It's just Santa Claus. What's new?”

Toni told her.

Odette said, “Jesus Christ, this is what we were afraid of.”

“I can't believe I let it happen.”

“Is there anything that might give us a hint about when and how they plan to use it?”

“Two things,” Toni said. “One: they didn't just steal the stuff—they poured it into a perfume sprayer. It's ready to use. The virus can be released in any crowded place—at a cinema, on a plane, in Harrods. No one would know it was happening.”

“A perfume spray?”

“Diablerie.”

“Well done—at least we know what we're looking for. What else?”

“A guard heard them talk about meeting the client at ten.”

“At ten. They're working fast.”

“Exactly. If they deliver the stuff to their customer by ten o'clock this morning, it could be in London tonight. They could release it in the Albert Hall tomorrow.”

“Good work, Toni. My God, I wish you'd never left the police.”

Toni began to feel more cheerful. “Thanks.”