‘Patient Zero?’ The health secretary was looking at Khan as she asked this, but it was Holmes who answered.

‘Patient Zero, Secretary of State, is the name given to an individual who’s deemed to be the original source of an outbreak.’

‘Well, let’s not call it that just yet,’ the health secretary replied. ‘Do we have a name for this unfortunate individual?’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ resumed Khan. ‘He’s been identified as a Yevgeny Vasiliev.’

‘A Russian?’

‘Yes. A Russian national. That’s not unusual, given the proximity to their mining colony at Barentsburg. But, as you would expect, my Service is working flat out to determine what he was doing there and how he became infected.’

‘I think,’ interjected the foreign secretary, ‘that if this develops we may need an urgent paper from the Joint Intelligence Committee.’

But Jay Spelling, the recently promoted health secretary, was frowning intently. ‘Forgive me,’ she said archly, addressing the MI6 director, ‘but you are the Secret Intelligence Service. Shouldn’t you be sending someone up there straight away to investigate?’

Sid Khan, a veteran of such meetings, remained unruffled. He tipped his head in mock obedience. ‘Absolutely, Secretary of State. We have someone on the case right at this moment.’

14

Barentsburg, Svalbard

Tuesday, 8 March, 1048hrs GMT, 1148hrs local

LUKE CARLTON HAD several abiding memories from his early teenage years, growing up on his uncle’s farm on the windswept moors of Northumberland, and not all of them were happy. But one that always made him smile, even all these years later, was watching those old Laurel and Hardy slapstick comedies from the 1930s and 1940s. After yet another clumsy, cack-handed disaster, the larger of the comedy duo – was it Oliver Hardy? – would often complain: ‘Well, here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten me into!’ This, Luke decided, was exactly how he was feeling at this moment, but he wasn’t smiling now.

Luke was standing some distance back from the ice-encrusted window inside a small supermarket on a street in Barentsburg, watching the pandemonium unfold. Helicopters, police, ambulances, cordons being set up and people moving around dressed in full bio-hazard spacesuits. Jesus, what a mess, and it hadn’t even been him who’d fired the shot. This was supposed to be a quick and discreet operation, an in-and-out. Find Victor Skeet, isolate him and immediately interrogate him on why he’d chosen to flee from that infected hut straight to a Russian mining colony. What did Skeet know that the other two unfortunate Arctic scientists didn’t?

But Victor Skeet was not going to be giving up any answers now. Instead, Luke was watching a blood-soaked and highly infectious corpse getting double-zipped into a neoprene body bag, loaded into a sealed truck and taken off – probably to be incinerated at high temperature.