Whiteout(70)
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.
2 AM
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 h?nds 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.