Whiteout (22 page)

TONI was in the passenger seat beside Carl Osborne when he braked to a halt alongside the gatehouse of the Kremlin. Her mother was in the back.

She handed Carl her pass and her mother's pension book. “Give these to the guard with your press card,” she said. All visitors had to show identification.

Carl slid the window down and handed over the documents.

Looking across him, Toni saw Hamish McKinnon. “Hi, Hamish, it's me,” she called. “I've got two visitors with me.”

“Hello, Ms. Gallo,” said the guard. “Is that lady in the back holding a dog?”

“Don't ask,” she said.

Hamish copied the names and handed back the press card and the pension book. “You'll find Steve in reception.”

“Are the phones working?”

“Not yet. The repair crew just left to fetch a spare part.” He lifted the barrier, and Carl drove in.

Toni suppressed a wave of irritation at Hibernian Telecom. On a night such as this, they really should carry all the parts they might need. The weather was continuing to get worse, and the roads might soon be impassable. She doubted they would be back before morning.

This spoiled a little plan she had. She had been hoping to phone
Stanley in the morning and tell him that there had been a minor problem at the Kremlin overnight but she had solved it—then make arrangements to meet him later in the day. Now it seemed her report might not be so satisfactory.

Carl pulled up at the main entrance. “Wait here,” Toni said, and sprang out before he could argue. She did not want him in the building if she could avoid it. She ran up the steps between the stone lions and pushed through the door. She was surprised to see no one at the reception desk.

She hesitated. One of the guards might be on patrol, but they should not both have gone. They could be anywhere in the building—and the door was unguarded.

She headed for the control room. The monitors would show where the guards were.

She was astonished to find the control room empty.

Her heart seemed to go cold. This was very bad. Four guards missing—this was not just a divergence from procedure. Something was wrong.

She looked again at the monitors. They all showed empty rooms. If four guards were in the building, one of them should appear on a monitor within seconds. But there was no movement anywhere.

Then something caught her eye. She looked more closely at the feed from BSL4.

The dateline said December 24. She checked her watch. It was after one o'clock in the morning. Today was Christmas Day, December 25. She was looking at old pictures. Someone had tampered with the feed.

She sat at the workstation and accessed the program. In three minutes she established that all the monitors covering BSL4 were showing yesterday's footage. She corrected them and looked at the screens.

In the lobby outside the changing rooms, four people were sitting on the floor. She stared at the monitor, horrified. Please, God, she thought, don't let them be dead.

One moved.

She looked more closely. They were guards, all in dark uniforms; and their hands were behind their backs, as if they were tied up.

“No, no!” she said aloud.

But there was no escaping from the dismal conclusion that the Kremlin had been raided.

She felt doomed. First Michael Ross, now this. Where had she gone wrong? She had done all she could to make this place secure—and she had failed utterly. She had let Stanley down.

She turned for the door, her first instinct being to rush to BSL4 and untie the captives. Then her police training reasserted itself. Stop, assess the situation, plan the response. Whoever had done this could still be in the building, though her guess was that the villains were the Hibernian Telecom repairmen who had just left. What was her most important task? To make sure she was not the only person who knew about this.

She picked up the phone on the desk. It was dead, of course. The fault in the phone system was probably part of whatever was going on. She took her mobile from her pocket and called the police. “This is Toni Gallo, in charge of security at Oxenford Medical. There's been an incident here. Four of my security guards have been attacked.”

“Are the perpetrators still on the premises?”

“I don't think so, but I can't be sure.”

“Anyone injured?”

“I don't know. As soon as I get off the phone, I'll check—but I wanted to tell you first.”

“We'll try to get a patrol car to you—though the roads are terrible.” He sounded like an unsure young constable.

Toni tried to impress him with a sense of urgency. “This could be a biohazard incident. A young man died yesterday of a virus that escaped from here.”

“We'll do our best.”

“I believe Frank Hackett is on duty tonight. I don't suppose he's in the building?”

“He's on call.”

“I strongly recommend you phone him at home and wake him up and tell him about this.”

“I've made a note of your suggestion.”

“We have a fault on the phones here, probably caused by the intruders. Please take my mobile number.” She read it out. “Ask Frank to call right away.”

“I've got the message.”

“May I ask your name?”

“P.C. David Reid.”

“Thank you, Constable Reid. We'll be waiting for your patrol car.” Toni hung up. She felt sure the constable had not grasped the importance of her call, but he would surely pass the information to a superior. Anyway, she did not have time to argue. She hurried out of the control room and ran along the corridor to BSL4. She swiped her pass through the card reader, held her fingertip to the scanner, and went in.

There were Steve, Susan, Don, and Stu, in a row against the wall, bound hand and foot. Susan looked as if she had walked into a tree: her nose was swollen and there was blood on her chin and chest. Don had a nasty abrasion on his forehead.

Toni knelt down and began to untie them. “What the hell happened here?” she said.

THE Hibernian Telecom van was plowing through snow a foot deep. Elton drove at ten miles an hour in high gear to keep from skidding. Thick snowflakes bombarded the vehicle. They formed two wedges at the bottom of the windshield, and they grew steadily, so that the wipers described an ever smaller arc, until Elton could no longer see out and had to stop the van to clear the snow away.

Kit was distraught. He had thought himself involved in a heist that would do no real harm. His father would lose money, but on the other hand Kit would be enabled to repay Harry Mac, a debt that his father should have paid anyway, so there was no real injustice. But the reality was different. There could be only one reason for buying Madoba-2. Someone wanted to kill large numbers of people. Kit had never thought to be guilty of this.

He wondered who Nigel's customer represented: Japanese fanatics, Muslim fundamentalists, an IRA splinter group, suicidal Palestinians, or a group of paranoid Americans with high-powered rifles living in remote mountain cabins in Montana. It hardly mattered. Whoever got the virus would use it, and crowds of people would die bleeding from their eyes.

But what could he do? If he tried to abort the heist and take the virus samples back to the lab, Nigel would kill him, or let Daisy do it. He thought of opening the van door and jumping out. It was going slowly enough. He might disappear into the blizzard before they could catch
him. But then they would still have the virus, and he would still owe Harry a quarter of a million pounds.

He had to see this through to the end. Maybe, when it was all over, he could send an anonymous message to the police, naming Nigel and Daisy, and hope that the virus could be traced before it was used. Or maybe he would be wiser to stick to his plan and vanish. No one would want to start a plague in Lucca.

Maybe the virus would be released on his plane to Italy, and he would pay the penalty himself. There would be justice.

Peering ahead through the snowstorm, he saw an illuminated sign that read “Motel.” Elton turned off the road. There was a light over the door, and eight or nine cars in the car park. The place was open. Kit wondered who would spend Christmas at a motel. Hindus, perhaps, and stranded businessmen, and illicit lovers.

Elton pulled up next to a Vauxhall Astra station wagon. “The idea was to ditch the van here,” he said. “It's too easily identifiable. We're supposed to go back to the airstrip in that Astra. But I don't know if we're going to make it.”

From the back, Daisy said, “You stupid prick, why didn't you bring a Land Rover?”

“Because the Astra is one of the most popular and least noticeable cars in Britain, and the forecast said no snow, you ugly cow.”

“Knock it off, you two,” Nigel said calmly. He pulled off his wig and glasses. “Take off your disguises. We don't know how soon those guards will be giving descriptions to the police.”

The others followed suit.

Elton said, “We could stay here, take rooms, wait it out.”

“Dangerous,” Nigel replied. “We're only a few miles from the lab.”

“If we can't move, the police can't either. As soon as the weather eases, we take off.”

“We have an appointment to meet our customer.”

“He's not going to fly his helicopter in this muck.”

“True.”

Kit's mobile rang. He checked his laptop. It was a regular call, not one diverted from the Kremlin system. He picked it up. “Yeah?”

“It's me.” Kit recognized the voice of Hamish McKinnon. “I'm on my mobile, I've got to be quick, while Willie's in the toilet.”

“What's happening?”

“She arrived just after you left.”

“I saw the car.”

“She found the other guards tied up and called the police.”

“Can they get there, in this weather?”

“They said they'd try. She just came up to the gatehouse and told us to expect them. When they'll get here—Sorry, gotta go.” He hung up.

Kit pocketed his phone. “Toni Gallo has found the guards,” he announced. “She's called the police, and they're on their way.”

“That settles it,” Nigel said. “Let's get in the Astra.”

AS Craig slipped his hand under the hem of Sophie's sweater, he heard steps. He broke the clinch and looked around.

His sister was coming down from the hayloft in her nightdress. “I feel a bit strange,” she said, and crossed the room to the bathroom.

Thwarted, Craig turned his attention to the film on TV. The old witch, transformed into a beautiful girl, was seducing a handsome knight.

Caroline emerged, saying, “That bathroom smells of puke.” She climbed the ladder and went back to bed.

“No privacy here,” Sophie said in a low voice.

“Like trying to make love in Glasgow Central Station,” Craig said, but he kissed her again. This time, she opened her lips and her tongue met his. He was so pleased that he moaned with delight.

He put his hand all the way up inside her sweater and felt her breast. It was small and warm. She was wearing a thin cotton bra. He squeezed gently, and she gave an involuntary groan of pleasure.

Tom's voice piped: “Will you two stop grunting? I can't sleep!”

They stopped kissing. Craig took his hand out from under her sweater. He was ready to explode with frustration. “I'm sorry about this,” he murmured.

Sophie said, “Why don't we go somewhere else?”

“Like, where?”

“How about that attic you showed me earlier?”

Craig was thrilled. They would be completely alone, and no one would disturb them. “Brilliant,” he said, and he stood up.

They put on coats and boots, and Sophie pulled on a pink woolly hat with a bobble. It made her look cute and innocent. “A bundle of joy,” Craig said.

“What is?”

“You are.”

She smiled. Earlier, she would have called him “so boring” for saying something like that. Their relationship had changed. Maybe it was the vodka. But Craig thought the turning point had come in the bathroom, when they had dealt with Tom together. Perhaps Tom, by being a helpless child, had forced them to act like adults. After that, it was hard to revert to being sulky and cool.

Craig would never have guessed that the way to a girl's heart might be cleaning up puke.

He opened the barn door. A cold wind blew a flurry of snow over them like confetti. Craig stepped out quickly, held the door for Sophie, then closed it.

Steepfall looked impossibly romantic. Snow covered the steeply sloping roof, lay in great mounds on the windowsills, and filled the courtyard to the depth of a foot. The lanterns on the surrounding walls had halos of golden light filled with dancing snowflakes. Snow encrusted a wheelbarrow, a stack of firewood, and a garden hose, transforming them into ice sculptures.

Sophie's eyes were wide. “It's a Christmas card,” she said.

Craig took her hand. They crossed the courtyard with high steps, like wading birds. They rounded the corner of the house and came to the back door. Craig brushed a layer of snow off the top of a trash can. He stood on it and heaved himself up onto the low roof of the boot lobby.

He looked back. Sophie was hesitating. “Here!” he hissed. He held out his hand.

She grasped it and pulled herself up onto the can. With his other
hand, Craig grabbed the edge of the sloping roof, to steady himself, then helped her up beside him. For a moment they lay side by side in the snow, like lovers in bed. Then Craig got to his feet.

He stepped onto the ledge that ran below the loft door, kicked off most of the snow, and opened the big door. Then he returned to Sophie.

She got to her hands and knees but, when she tried to stand, her rubber boots slipped and she fell. She looked scared.

“Hold on to me,” Craig said, and pulled her to her feet. What they were doing was not very dangerous, and she was making more of it than she should, but he did not mind, for it gave him a chance to be strong and protective.

Still holding her hand, Craig stood on the ledge. She stepped up beside him and grabbed him around the waist. He would have liked to linger there, with her clinging to him so hard; but he went on, walking sideways along the ledge to the open door, then helped her inside.

He closed the door behind them and turned on the light. This was perfect, Craig thought excitedly. They were alone, in the middle of the night, and nobody would come in to disturb them. They could do anything they liked.

He lay down and looked through the hole in the floor into the kitchen. A single light burned over the door to the boot room. Nellie lay in front of the Aga, head up, ears cocked, listening: she knew he was there. “Go back to sleep,” he murmured. Whether she heard him or not, the dog put her head down and closed her eyes.

Sophie was sitting on the old couch, shivering. “My feet are freezing.”

“You've got snow in your boots.” He knelt in front of her and pulled her Wellingtons off. Her socks were soaked. He took those off, too. Her small white feet felt as if they had been in the fridge. He tried to warm them with his hands. Then, inspired, he unbuttoned his coat, lifted his sweater, and pressed the soles of her feet to his bare chest.

She said, “Oh, my God, that feels so good.”

She had often said that to him in his fantasies, he reflected; but not in quite the same circumstances.