On the director’s orders, a large digital clock had been installed on the wall of the lobby in the main administration block, counting the minutes and hours since the virus had first erupted in Svalbard, just to keep everyone on their toes. To add to the pressure, TV crews and reporters had started to turn up outside the main entrance. RT, Russia’s Kremlin-backed satellite news channel, was taking a particularly keen interest.

In a side room on the second floor an emergency meeting was under way. The SSAs – the senior scientific advisers – sat hunched over their laptops alongside experts drafted in from around the country, a delegate from Norway and another from the WHO in Geneva. Hannah Blane and Colin Masters, the two virologists who had identified the genome sequence, were resting upstairs, after working straight fifteen-hour shifts. With Dr Clarissa Gall still up in London, it was left to her fellow scientist Gareth Banks to bring everyone up to speed.

‘In just under an hour,’ he told them, ‘this is going to be declared a “public health event of international concern” – something we all know as a PHEIC. What does that mean for us?’ He was standing up to address them, but resting the knuckles of his hands on the surface of the table, like a brooding silverback mountain gorilla, as he gazed around the room. ‘It means that whatever we discover here, in our own laboratories, we’re going to have to share it. Not just with our Five Eyes partners – the US, Canada and so on – but also with the GHSI, the Global Health Security Initiative.’

‘Hang on,’ interrupted one of the senior scientists, a notoriously prickly individual. ‘You mean we’re now sharing our findings with the Mexicans? Along with half the world? That means it’ll be with Moscow inside a day!’

‘We don’t know that, do we, Kevin?’ admonished Banks. ‘And we can only follow protocol here. These are international health regulations and that Health Security Initiative has been up and running since just after the 9/11 attacks and the anthrax packages in 2001. So I think we should give them some credit, don’t you? Given that they’ve spent the best part of twenty years working on responses to just such an outbreak as this.’

But the prickly scientist wasn’t giving up. ‘Right,’ he replied sarcastically, looking around the room for support. ‘So what this is really all about is testing our bureaucracy to see if it works, isn’t it? You don’t think it’s a bit late for that?’

He didn’t find the support he was after. In fact, a number of people were tut-tutting.