Whiteout(115)
Toni Gallo sat in the back of a plain gray Audi beside Odette Cressy. Odette was a blond woman Toni's age, wearing a dark business suit over a scarlet shirt. Two detectives sat in the front, one driving, one studying a direction-finding radio receiver and telling the driver where to go.
The police had been tracking the perfume bottle for thirty-three hours. The helicopter had landed, as expected, in southwest London. The pilot had got into a waiting car and driven across Battersea Bridge to the riverside home of Adam Hallan. All last night the radio transmitter had remained stationary, beeping steadily from somewhere in the elegant eighteenth-century house. Odette did not want to arrest Hallan yet. She wanted to catch the maximum number of terrorists in her net.
Toni had spent most of that time asleep. When she lay down in her flat just before noon on Christmas Day, she felt too tense to sleep. Her thoughts were with the helicopter as it flew the length of Britain, and she worried that the tiny radio beacon would fail. Despite her anxieties, she had dropped off in seconds.
In the evening, she had driven to Steepfall to see Stanley. They had held hands and talked for an hour in his study, then she flew to London. She slept heavily all night at Odette's flat in Camden Town.
As well as following the radio signal, the Metropolitan Police had Adam Hallan and his pilot and copilot under surveillance. In the morning Toni and Odette joined the team watching Adam Hallan's house.
Toni had achieved her main objective. The deadly virus samples were back in the BSL4 laboratory at the Kremlin. But she also hoped to catch the people responsible for the nightmare she had lived through. She wanted justice.
Today Hallan had given a lunch party, and fifty people of assorted nationalities and ages, all wearing expensive casual clothes, had visited the house. One of the guests had left with the perfume bottle. Toni and Odette and the team tracked the radio beacon to Bayswater and kept watch over a student rooming house all afternoon.
At seven o'clock in the evening, the signal moved again.
A young woman came out of the house. In the light of the street lamps, Toni could see that she had beautiful dark hair, heavy and lustrous. She carried a shoulder bag. She turned up the collar of her coat and walked along the pavement. A detective in jeans and an anorak got out of a tan Rover and followed her.
"I think this is it," Toni said. "She's going to release the spray."
"I want to see it," Odette said. "For the prosecution, I need witnesses to the attempted murder."
Toni and Odette lost sight of the young woman as she turned into a Tube station. The radio signal weakened worryingly as the woman went underground. It remained steady for a while, then the beacon moved, presumably because the woman was on a train. They followed the feeble signal, fearing it would fade out and she would shake off the detective in the anorak. But she emerged at Piccadilly Circus, the detective still tailing her. They lost visual contact for a minute when she turned into a one-way street, then the detective called Odette on his mobile phone and reported that the woman had entered a theater.
Toni said, "That's where she'll release the spray."
The unmarked police cars drew up outside the theater. Odette and Toni went in, followed by two men from the second car. The show, a ghost story with songs, was popular with visiting Americans. The girl with beautiful hair was standing in the queue for collection of prepaid tickets.
While she waited, she took from her shoulder bag a perfume bottle. With a quick gesture that looked entirely natural, she sprayed her head and shoulders. The theatergoers around her paid no attention. Doubtless she wanted to be fragrant for the man she was meeting, they would imagine, if they thought about it at all. Such beautiful hair ought to smell good. The spray was curiously odorless, but no one seemed to notice.
"That's good," said Odette. "But we'll let her do it again."
The bottle contained plain water, but all the same Toni shivered with dread as she breathed in. Had she not made the switch, the spray would have contained live Madoba-2, and that breath would have killed her.
The woman collected her ticket and went inside. Odette spoke to the usher and showed him her police card, then the detectives followed the woman. She went to the bar, where she sprayed herself again. She did the same in the ladies' room. At last she took her seat in the front orchestra and sprayed herself yet again. Her plan, Toni guessed, was to use the spray several times more in the interval, and finally in the crowded passages while the audience was leaving the building. By the end of the evening, almost everyone in the theater would have breathed the droplets from her bottle.
Watching from the back of the auditorium, Toni listened to the accents around her: a woman from the American South who had bought the most beautiful cashmere scarf; someone from Boston talking about where he pahked his cah; a New Yorker who had paid five dollars for a cup of cawfee. If the perfume bottle had contained the virus as planned, these people would by now be infected with Madoba-2. They would have flown home to embrace their families and greet their neighbors and go back to work, telling everyone about their holiday in Europe.
Ten or twelve days later, they would have fallen ill. "I picked up a lousy cold in London," they would have said. Sneezing, they would have infected their relations and friends and colleagues. The symptoms would have gotten worse, and their doctors would have diagnosed flu. When they started to die, the doctors would have realized that this was something much worse than flu. As the deadly infection spread rapidly from street to street and city to city, the medical profession would have begun to understand what they were dealing with, but by then it would be too late.