Wildcard by Ken McClure Read Free Book Online Page A

started to look round the room in the dim light coming from outside. There was a photograph of Lisa in her nurse’s uniform – she had been a nurse in Glasgow, where he had met her while on an assignment – and a photograph of the pair of them together when they went on holiday to Skye. He remembered that it had rained solidly for seven days before the weather had afforded them one beautiful day to walk in the Cuillins and appreciate just how lovely the island was. There was a picture of Jenny with Sue’s children at the beach in Dumfriesshire, holding hands as they paddled together, their eyes bright with childish joy. There was a picture of himself in uniform and one in civilian clothes with his friend Mick Fielding when they had served in Special Forces together. Mick now ran a pub down in Kent; at least, that’s what he’d been doing the last time Steven had heard about him – Mick tended not to keep up with old friends. God help the troublemakers down there, he thought with a smile.
    There were a few bits and pieces he had rescued from the family home after his parents died, mainly books, but also a Spanish guitar he had bought when he was seventeen and still played when the notion took him. Not much to show in the way of possessions for a man on the wrong side of thirty-five, he concluded. The music stopped and he got up to pour himself another drink. He turned on the TV to hunt for news.
    ‘The virus that has recently claimed the lives of three airline passengers, a stewardess and a nurse at the hospital where they were treated is thought to be a new one, previously unknown to medical science,’ announced the newscaster.
    ‘How the hell did they get hold of that so quickly?’ exclaimed Steven.
    ‘This was the conclusion of medical scientists who examined specimens taken from the victims of the Heathrow incident in a maximum-security lab at Britain’s biological defence establishment at Porton Down. The source of the virus remains unknown. Health officials when contacted by Sky News in the last hour, however, have stressed that the outbreak posed no threat to the general public.’
    Bloody hell, thought Steven. Does everything leak these days?
    The report was accurate and had obviously been leaked to the media by someone present at the briefing. Accurate or not, any government assurance that things posed ‘no threat’ still smacked of the false assurances given during the time of BSE, he thought.
    The news editor had decided to pad out the story and had found a microbiologist to interview.
    ‘Dr Marie Rosen is a medical microbiologist at a leading London hospital. Where do you think this virus emanated from, Doctor?’ asked the interviewer.
    ‘Well, I haven’t seen the report yet,’ replied the woman. She was dressed in ‘sensible’ clothes and rimless glasses that sat well down her nose. Her skin looked as if it desperately needed moisturising and her plentiful mop of grey hair suggested she had recently been standing out in a gale. ‘But I understand that the aircraft at the centre of this incident had just arrived from Africa. That would seem to be the likely source of the virus. It wouldn’t be the first to come … “ out of Africa ”.’ She seemed pleased with her allusion.
    ‘Why do you think this is, Doctor?’ continued the interviewer, not bothering to smile. ‘Why should new viruses appear all the time in Africa when this doesn’t happen anywhere else in the world?’
    ‘I would question whether or not they really are new viruses,’ replied Rosen. ‘I think it highly likely that they’ve been there all along, but with so much of the African interior being opened up these days, and people moving around much more than they used to, we’re seeing what happens when a vulnerable population are suddenly exposed to agents they have not come into contact with before.’
    ‘A bit like the situation when Native Americans were exposed to measles when the Pilgrim Fathers landed?’