Apocalypse Cow (38 page)

‘Do you think they just put the shutter down and left it
unguarded
?’ Terry asked. ‘I mean, who’s stupid enough to walk through the Chunnel?’

‘I hope so, because we’re going to have to try and barge through it,’ Lesley said. ‘I can’t imagine anyone waiting on the other side is going to be too pleased about that.’

‘Well, let’s find out.’

Terry got back in the driver’s seat and waved the others out of the way. He revved the engine, giving everyone a mouthful of exhaust fumes, then drove forward in a half-hearted manner. The grille of the service vehicle merely tickled the shutter.

‘Give it a bit more laldy, you big girl,’ Lesley said.

‘I’d rather not stupidly kill myself after surviving all of that crap,’ Terry called in response.

Nonetheless, he went considerably faster on the second attempt. The shutter shuddered this time. When he pulled away, it had bowed outward a little. Three charges later, the shutter was deeply dented and there was a crack at the bottom where it had been ripped from the slot. A sliver of daylight shone through.

Terry was lining up for another effort when a loudspeaker crackled and an amplified voice with a thick French accent filled the tunnel. ‘Go away!’

Geldof looked around for the source of the voice and spotted a speaker above the door. A security camera was pointing its blank lens at them. He waved at it. ‘Let us in please!’

‘Non! The frontier, she is closed. Go back to your nasty, germ-ridden little country.’

‘That’s not very polite,’ Mary called.

‘Hah! It is not necessary to be polite. I am border guard; you are undesirables. I say what I want.’

Terry leaned out of the window and gunned the accelerator. ‘Let us in or we’ll break the door down.’

Once the engine had died off, a sniff came through the speaker. ‘If you want to be shot, you are welcome to try, my little English friend.’

‘I’m not bloody English, I’m Scottish,’ Terry shouted at the camera.

There was a crackly pause. ‘Then we will still shoot you, we just will not enjoy it as much.’

Terry looked like he was about to yell again. Lesley shook her head.

‘Can’t you see we’re not infected?’ she asked reasonably, spreading her hands. ‘We’re not a threat.’

‘I care not. My orders are to let nobody enter.’

‘What, are you German? Only following orders?’ asked Terry, his face red.

‘How dare you say I am like the German!’ the voice screeched indignantly. ‘I have warned you. If you try to enter France, you will be shot. I am tempted to shoot you anyway for that insult.’

The loudspeaker hiss cut out emphatically.

‘That was smart,’ Lesley said to Terry.

He folded his arms. ‘Serves him right for calling me English.’

‘Not really the right time for nationalist fervour, though, was it?’

Terry looked at his feet.

‘What do we do now?’ Geldof asked.

‘We need to hope he’s just bluffing about shooting us,’ Lesley replied. ‘Terry, can you go again?’

Terry slammed the vehicle into gear and this time really put
his
foot down. It leapt into life, battering so hard into the shutter that he was thrown forward. The bonnet was buried about a foot into the metal sheet and the crack had widened enough for them to crawl under.

The loudspeaker burst back into life. ‘If I see even one little finger, I will shoot it off!’

‘Let me try,’ Lesley said.

She lay down and peeked through the crack. A bullet whined off the concrete and pinged into the shutter. Lesley came scrambling back.

‘That was a warning shot,’ the voice announced. ‘The next one will be serious.’

Terry turned off the engine and came out, rubbing his neck.

‘I didn’t want to do this, but I don’t see what choice we have,’ Lesley said.

She turned round, stood directly beneath the camera and undid the top few buttons of her blouse.

‘Showing me your boobies will not change my mind!’ the voice said. There was a pause, before it continued. ‘But please try.’

‘I’m not going to show you my breasts.’

‘Oh,’ the voice said in amplified disappointment.

Lesley withdrew her hand and brandished the flash drive. ‘I have here all of the information on the virus. It will let you create a vaccine to stop it infecting your animals.’

‘If I do not let anything enter, our animals will not be infected,’ the voice responded.

Good point
, Geldof thought. But Lesley was not deterred.

‘It also contains irrefutable evidence the British government was behind this virus. Just think, you embarrass the hell out of Britain, and French scientists can discover the cure. You can
be
the heroes. And not only that, with the British herd compromised, vaccinated French beef can become the premier global beef product.’

‘Our beef is already the best.’ There was silence for a while. ‘Do not make any attempt to come through. I need to talk to my superiors.’

The loudspeaker cut out again.

‘That sounds promising,’ Terry said.

‘We have to hope the French government doesn’t decide to cut a deal with ours,’ Lesley responded. ‘If they do, when they let us in it will just be to have a clear shot at us all.’

They waited, watching the wedge of light coming under the shutter lengthen as the sun dropped in the sky. Nobody spoke – there seemed little point. Their fates were being decided elsewhere, by men who cared more about political expediency than human lives; exactly the kind of people who had sanctioned the creation of the virus in the first place.

After a while, Geldof returned to the vehicle and sat with his father, holding his cold hand. It seemed unfair he had survived dangerous missions in far-off lands only to die after he had shunned that life for a suburban existence of growing vegetables and taxing squirrels. Then again, Geldof had never seen James so alive as in the days after Fanny’s death, when he had been forced to reawaken the old instincts. Perhaps this was the death he had to die, rather than gradually smoking himself back to the mental age of two. Geldof remembered the violent boyish fantasies he had entertained about being trained to be a deadly soldier. That would never happen now, and as he stroked his father’s palm, he prayed that violence would never enter his life again.

Finally, after what felt like hours, the border guard returned
to
the microphone. ‘You can come in. But there are conditions: you will have to be quarantined and have your story checked out.’ There was a beat of silence. ‘And you will also have to apologize for comparing me to a German.’

‘Are you sure that last one is an official condition?’ Terry asked.

‘Yes, my superiors care very much for the welfare of their border guards.’

‘Just apologize,’ Lesley hissed.

‘Fine, I’m very sorry I compared you to a German.’

‘Bon! Now, you may come in, one at a time please.’

‘Do you think he’s telling the truth?’ asked Geldof, who had got out of the vehicle again and was eyeing the camera suspiciously.

‘Only one way to find out,’ Terry said.

He ducked down and rolled under the shutter. There were no gunshots. Lesley went next. Mary glanced back at Geldof. He waved her on, then, when she was through, crawled under the shutter on his stomach and entered foreign territory for the first time in his life.

He emerged at the bottom of a concrete ramp. Reversing towards them was a lorry, emitting a repetitive beep. It stopped a few metres away, and the back door swung open with a hiss. Standing on the threshold were four figures in baggy white biohazard suits. The tallest of the group was holding a long metal tube with a rubber handle. Geldof did not want to think about which part of the body the device was designed to probe.

‘Welcome to France,’ the leader of the suited group said, and advanced, the probe held out before him.

19

Fur coat, fancy knickers

Lesley sat in the reception area at the Paris office of the
International Herald Tribune
– the
New York Times
’s global edition – nervously stroking the chic and sexy pair of suede boots she had bought with the wad of euros the French government had dished out to get them through the next few weeks.

Their period in quarantine had lasted only a few days, during which time they were probed, pricked and prodded by the doctors, who quickly downgraded from the paranoid spacesuits to face masks. The flash drive had been whisked away almost immediately, plucked out of her bra by a gloved thumb and forefinger that almost removed her nipple by mistake. She had fretted that the French might still cut a deal with Britain, or simply steal the proof and hand it over to a French newspaper to break the story.

On the day of their release, she was taken to a small office, where a functionary explained that France was keen to see the British government humiliated, but did not want to seem to
be
involved. He handed back the drive with the stipulation that in any story Lesley wrote, she had to say she smuggled it into France by secreting it in an unspecified orifice, and had only handed over the data for the vaccine, which French scientists were working feverishly to create, after the story broke.

She agreed, and that morning they had been turned out onto the streets of Paris and left to their own devices.

Terry, Geldof and Mary went off to book a hotel while Lesley hurried straight to the newspaper, only stopping off on Avenue Montaigne to buy herself an outfit; she had to look presentable, after all. As far as she was concerned, the faster the story was in the public domain, the safer they would be. Brown was dead, but she was sure the government would still be on the look-out for them. She hadn’t even wanted to call the paper and set up an appointment in case the British were somehow tapping the phones – a touch paranoid, granted, but probably wise.

Instead, she had marched into the office and demanded to see the editor, telling the receptionist she had the biggest story the newspaper would ever print. Although the receptionist, who had the most perfect make-up and hair Lesley had ever seen, looked distinctly underwhelmed by the revelation, she relayed Lesley’s claim to the editorial department and told her to take a seat.

She had been waiting for twenty minutes, and was beginning to wonder if the editors had dismissed her as a crank, when the phone shrilled. The receptionist picked it up, nodded, and then directed Lesley to the managing editor’s office on the second floor.

Even though Lesley knew the story she was carrying was
dynamite
and there was no way the editor could refuse her, she caught herself gnawing on her nails as she approached the office. She knocked, waited for the OK to enter and then, taking a deep breath, pushed open the door.

Lesley strode towards the editor, perhaps a little too briskly to come across as confident and relaxed, her hand extended. She was so busy rehearsing her opening gambit she didn’t pay much attention at first to the person sitting in a high-backed chair across from the editor. Only when she was reaching across the desk to grasp the editor’s palm did the big floppy dick quiff register. She turned her head and there, exuding even more smugness than the last time she had seen him, sat Colin.

‘What the fuck are you doing here?’ she asked, simultaneously missing the editor’s hand and banging her knee on the thick oak desk.

‘Nice to see you too, Lesley,’ Colin said, beaming his big, stupid, twatty grin.

The staggering, mind-boggling odds against Colin being there made it clear to Lesley he had been designated as her lifelong nemesis and was going to keep cropping up to scupper her plans. In fact, the bastard was probably already having an affair with Terry. Lesley scanned the desk for a weapon – a letter opener, a stapler, a scalding hot cup of coffee – she could use to murder the little toerag. There was nothing, so she settled for sinking into the other seat. Her heart continued to plummet after her bum met fabric, down through the floors where journalists bustled to and fro, and into the sewers, where it bobbed unhappily, indistinguishable from the bloated turds floating alongside. At least that’s what it felt like to Lesley, who saw her career going the same way.
Colin’s
presence could only mean one thing: he already had the story.

Sod it
, she thought.
At least now I can say what I like to him
.

‘Really, what
are
you doing here?’ she asked. ‘I was rather hoping you’d been horrendously violated and then torn to pieces.’

Colin pouted. ‘Come on, Lesley. I always thought we were friends.’

‘I’d rather be friends with Adolf Hitler. Who, incidentally, had a much better haircut.’

‘I’m not sure what’s going on here, and I don’t really care,’ the editor said, a frown creasing not only his forehead, but his bald scalp. ‘Let’s get down to business. What do you have for me? You first.’

He pointed at Colin.

‘You just got here?’ Lesley asked.

So much for the fates conspiring in her favour. They had simply been setting her up for the biggest pratfall in history.