She turned back. ‘Look,’ she said, with an air of finality. ‘We won’t know exactly what we’re dealing with until all the lab results come in, but I did make a call to Porton Down yesterday. They’ve got live samples down there, from the patient brought in from Svalbard.’

‘You mean Dr Mackenzie?’

‘Yes. She’s a medical doctor attached to the Arctic Research Station up there. She must have known the risks, so for this virus to have infected her …’ Jenny left her sentence unfinished. Instead, she sighed and looked out of the window again. ‘Whatever this pathogen turns out to be, it’s Dr Mackenzie who holds the clue to the answers. That’s if – if – they can keep her alive for long enough.’

25

GCHQ, Cheltenham

Wednesday, 9 March, 1517hrs GMT

LANYARDS. ALWAYS THE coloured lanyards, thought Luke, with those hard plastic ID tags that indicated you were entering a government building with classified intelligence on the inside. A small reception committee was waiting for him and Jenny as they entered the outer ring of the Doughnut, the name given to the vast, circular, futuristic headquarters of GCHQ, the secret intelligence listening station on the outskirts of Cheltenham. A weak spring sun was doing its best to break through as they strode past the serried ranks of neatly parked cars, CCTV cameras on poles and razor-tipped perimeter wire. This place was huge: the biggest, the most expensive employer in the galaxy of Britain’s secret intelligence universe. In pictures taken from the air it looked as if a giant spacecraft had landed on the edge of Cheltenham; from ground level its green, sandstone and steel-grey walls soared into the pale sky of Gloucestershire, like some impregnable digital fortress.

A thin man in a navy-blue pullover and jeans stepped forward in the entrance lobby and introduced himself with the briefest of smiles. ‘Welcome, both! I’m Ian. I’m the senior operations officer on all this,’ he said, sweeping an arm towards the steel panels that stretched all the way up to the ceiling. ‘Let’s take you straight to the EMC to get you briefed. The Norwegians have only just got here too.’

‘The EMC?’ asked Luke. He was well used to a world of acronyms in the military, but in the three years he’d been with MI6 he’d discovered he’d only just turned the first few pages of a whole new lexicon.

‘Oh, yes, sorry,’ said Pullover. ‘It’s the Event Management Centre. Our ops room, if you like.’

Luke turned to Jenny as they walked and said quietly, ‘You didn’t know what EMC stood for either, did you?’

She looked straight ahead, pursing her lips. She didn’t reply.