Catch Your Death (33 page)

She ached inside for Jack; prayed that he was okay, that Vernon would be taking care of him. Where would Vernon go? Surely he would wait to see what happened and wouldn’t whisk Jack straight back to America. Maybe he would head back to Miranda’s. Or maybe he would go to the police now that Jack was safe. She wished she’d had a chance to talk to him after Sampson had said Jack could go with him. Her phone was in her pocket, and she itched to send Vernon a text. But could she do it without being seen? Maybe once they were inside.

‘
Come with me,’ Sampson said.

He led them across the courtyard, gravel crunching beneath their feet, to the front door of a large, shabby Georgian house. It would have been a handsome house once, but now the paintwork was flaking from the window frames and sills, and a thick layer of dust dulled the gloss paint of the front door. Ivy crept up the walls, and dead leaves and sweet wrappers had piled up in the corners of the porch. There were no other buildings in sight, except for a few abandoned farm buildings just visible on the horizon. They were alone.

Sampson pressed a button and spoke into the intercom, too quietly for Kate to hear. Paul caught her eye and attempted a reassuring smile, but it slipped from his face.

The door was opened by a uniformed young man with a shaved head, who nodded at Sampson before retreating into the shadows. They found themselves in the entry hall to a traditional English upper-class home: dark wood and dusty chandeliers, paintings of men with gundogs lining the walls. The place smelt musty, an uninhabited house, or a museum that rarely opened its doors.

‘
Follow me,’ Sampson instructed, and they followed him down the hall, the bald security guard taking up the rear.

Sampson stopped in front of a metal door, incongruous in its traditional surroundings. The guard stepped in front of him and took out a mobile phone, murmuring a few words into it. Almost immediately, the door opened and Sampson nodded for them to follow.

The first things Kate noticed were the drop in temperature and the bright lights. They were standing in a small, bare room with metal surfaces and the hum of an air conditioner. It was like a shift in a dream, when you suddenly find yourself in a new landscape with no connection to where you were before. Sampson shut the door behind them, leaving the guard on the outside, and another door opened at the other end of the room. An Asian man entered, wearing a white lab coat.

He began to ask them questions – ‘Had they been abroad recently?’, ‘Had they suffered from any viruses?’ – but Sampson told him to shut up.

‘
These are Gaunt’s special guests,’ he said.

The Asian man raised an eyebrow. ‘I see.’

‘
Where is he?’

‘
He’s in his office. I think he’s waiting for you.’

The man stared disconcertingly at Kate, as if she were a fascinating specimen he’d heard a lot about.

‘
Follow me.’

He opened the door to reveal a stairway leading downwards, into what must be the cellar of the house. It was almost too surreal to be frightening, thought Kate - almost, but not quite. Yet at the same time, she felt an involuntary twinge of excitement: she was surely so close to the truth now. She caught Paul’s hand and gave it a squeeze. She could tell he was trying to be brave and masculine, but that, underneath, he was even more nervous than she was.

At the bottom of the stairs, they found themselves in a long, brightly-lit corridor, as spotlessly clean as the upstairs part of the house had been grimy. They followed Sampson. There were several rooms to the left and right, with windows revealing empty bunks that had been stripped of bedding. There was something intensely creepy about the empty rooms. They reminded Kate of the rooms where mental patients are kept. Except it was as if all the patients had died. Or maybe these were simply the rooms where the inhabitants of this strange place slept when they were working overnight.

Sampson knocked on a door at the end of the corridor.

It was opened by a thin man with a grin that revealed yellow teeth. When he spoke, a blast of halitosis almost made Kate retch. Or perhaps it wasn’t just the smell – it was the memory. She knew him. He was the man she had seen in the woods; and the doctor who had given her the injection after the fire. Other memories swam back. He had been there in the hospital when she was recovering. Dr. Gaunt. Dr. Death.

He licked his dry lips with the tip of his tongue.

‘
Ms. Carling,’ he said. ‘How delightful to see you again. Or should I call you Dr. Maddox?

He turned to Paul. ‘You look so much like your brother. Well… how your brother used to look.’

He laughed and Paul tried to grab him, to shove him or punch him, but Sampson was too quick, grabbing Paul and pushing him into the office.

‘
Maybe I should kill Wilson now,’ Sampson stated coldly.

Dr. Gaunt thought about it. ‘Perhaps… oh, not just yet. There’ll be plenty of time for that later. Did everything go smoothly with the child?’

‘
Yes. His father has him.’

‘
Marvellous.’ Gaunt rubbed his papery palms together. He took a seat behind his desk and picked up a locket which he played with as he spoke. ‘It really is charming to see you again, Kate. Last time I saw you, you were excited about your new life in America. And it seems you did very well out there. I checked up on your progress every now and then, asked my contacts out there to keep an eye out for you. You owe me one, for helping set all that up for you.’ He sighed. ‘And then you had to spoil everything by deciding to come back to England.’

Kate felt sick. Had her whole life been engineered by these people? ‘I don’t owe you a thing.’

‘
Oh, you do. Actually, you owe Leonard Bainbridge most of all. He had this horrible sentimental streak. Though, to be fair, there was some pragmatism in his decision to help get you into Harvard to continue your studies. He thought – and I agreed – that you might be useful to us one day. Hmm. I suppose you could say that day has now come. .’

‘
What are you talking about?’

He smiled what he clearly thought was an enigmatic smile.

Paul spoke up: ‘You wiped her memory.’

Gaunt looked mildly surprised. ‘You know about that.’

‘
Yes,’ said Kate. ‘You used something called the Pimenov Technique on me.’

‘
Been doing some investigating, have we? You’re right. Except we never finished the job properly.’

All the way through this conversation, Kate was aware of Sampson watching her intently, staring at her in a way that made goose pimples rise on her flesh. She half-turned to look at him and was shocked to see an expression she recognised: lust. He was thinking about having sex with her. The thought made every part of her cry out in horror. Is that why they had brought her here, so Sampson could rape her and kill her? For the first time since entering Gaunt’s office, she was terrified.

But she managed to speak. ‘Is that what you’re going to do now – finish the job? Wipe my memory properly?’

Gaunt smiled. ‘There’s no need.’ He leaned back in his chair. ‘Things have been set in motion tonight; things that are impossible to stop.’

‘
What are you talking about?’

‘
I wonder… when you had your little boy – Jack, isn’t it? – I wonder if you imagined a great future for him. A scientist like you, perhaps. I expect his father imagined him as a famous baseball player. Successful, anyway. A star.’

He laced his long bony fingers together, like a man who has just enjoyed a satisfying meal.

‘
Jack is going to be famous, that’s for certain. The little boy who changed the world.’

And Kate realised, with a jolt of horror that brought tears to her eyes, what Gaunt was talking about.

CHAPTER 41

‘
You’ve given Jack a virus.’ Kate had to grab the back of a chair to stop herself from fainting.

Gaunt waved a hand dismissively. ‘Not just any virus. This is the crème de la crème of viruses. The Pandora virus. The culmination of many years of work. I’ve been working towards this for more than twenty years.’ A vein twitched in his forehead and his eyes glistened with excitement.

He touched a key on his computer keyboard and the PC sprang to life. On the screen was a computer representation of the virus, rotating slowly in 3D. Kate couldn’t help but be interested. She leaned forward for a better look. Like Gaunt, Kate found viruses awe-inspiring and fascinating; unlike him, though, she didn’t see them as beautiful. They were the enemy, and she had spent her entire life not only studying but fighting them; viruses like the one which had killed her parents. Sometimes, as she pored over test-tubes, she felt it was a very personal crusade.

‘
Perfect, isn’t it?’ said Dr Gaunt.

‘
It’s an influenza virus.’ Kate knew this instantly.

‘
How can you tell?’ asked Paul.

‘
See that?’ Kate pointed at the virus coating; its furry spikes of haemaglutinin. ‘Those are the proteins – they’re called H. And those things, on the edge of the virus, they’re the enzymes neuraminidase – N. Each type of flu virus has its own combination of H and N. Hence Swine Flu being H1N1, and Avian Flu was H5N1, and so on.’

‘
Yes, essentially this is a flu virus,’ said Dr. Gaunt. ‘But it’s been engineered to be unlike any other flu virus. It’s brand new, so that nobody in the world has any resistance to it. And it’s incredibly strong. It rushes through the body like a tidal wave, causing intense headaches, coughing fits, hallucinations, all the usual nasty flu symptoms, multiplied by ten, plus bleeding from the eyes, ears and skin. The way it kills is that it floods the lungs and causes cyanosis, your blood starved of oxygen which makes you turn blue. Basically, you drown in your own fluids.’

He spoke as if he were describing an interesting natural phenomenon like the mating habits of some exotic species. ‘The Spanish Flu – another H5N1 virus, as we now know - that swept through the world after the First World War killed one in twenty of the people who caught it. That was impressive enough. Pandora will kill eighteen out of twenty. Conservatively speaking.’

‘
And you have just infected my son, my Jack...’ Kate’s throat felt so tight that she could barely get the words out. She thought she was going to vomit as the enormity of it all swept over her.

Gaunt gazed dispassionately at Kate, continuing as if she hadn’t even spoken: ‘One of the most remarkable things about this virus, a little characteristic that we borrowed from some Asian friends of ours, is that it has a safe period of fifteen hours before it becomes contagious. That allows us to move carriers where we want them without endangering ourselves. We know that your ex-husband is planning to take Jack out of the country because he headed straight towards the airport after he took the boy from your sister’s place. Fortunately, that time Sampson was able to intercept them. This time, we don’t want to stop him.’

‘
When did you give it to Jack?’ Kate’s voice trembled.

Gaunt checked his watch. ‘Eleven hours ago.’

‘
Is...is there an antidote?’

Gaunt smiled. ‘Oh yes. We developed that in tandem. Although to be safe, you have to be given the anti-virus during the safe period. But there’s no point in holding out any hope for Jack. It’s too late for him, and for your ex-husband. They’re both going to die. Jack is only one child. He’s not important in the great scheme of…’

Kate snatched up the gold chain that Gaunt had been playing with and leapt onto the desk, skidding across it on her knees and crashing into Gaunt. They fell to the floor and as he tried to right himself, she wrapped the gold chain around his neck and pulled it tight.

‘
Tell me where the antidote is.’

Gaunt gasped. ‘Sampson…!’

Paul tried to block Sampson, but Sampson aimed a low punch at his solar plexus, making Paul bend double, then brushed him aside. He grabbed the desk and shoved it back, throwing it halfway across the room as if it were made of plywood, not oak. Kate pulled more tightly on the chain, wanting to choke the life out of this monster, this sick little man who went against everything she believed in, who had described Jack, her precious Jack, as only one child. If Gaunt was telling the truth, and if she couldn’t get the antidote and get out of here within the next three and a half hours, Gaunt had murdered her son. She pulled even tighter, making him croak.

She felt strong hands on her wrists. Sampson squeezed, and the pain made her loosen her grip on the chain. Gaunt slumped forward, rubbing his throat and wheezing. Sampson wrapped his right arm around her, pinning her arms at her sides.

Gaunt climbed to his feet. ‘Put them in a cell. Separate cells.’ He pointed a shaking hand at Kate. ‘You’ll be seeing your son very soon, Kate. I’ll let you hold his body.’

CHAPTER 42

Kate sat on the bare bunk in one of the empty rooms she had seen on her way in, and tried to control her thoughts, to stop them rushing in every direction. Her wrists still throbbed from where Sampson had squeezed them, but that was the least of her concerns. She checked her watch every ten seconds; every moment stabbing her. Jack, oh Jack. She had to get out of here; had to get the antidote. Suddenly, she remembered her phone, and making sure no-one was looking through the window, pulled it out of her pocket. How lax of them not to take it. But she soon realised why they hadn’t bothered: there was no signal in these cellar depths. ‘No network coverage’.