She shook her head, and handed him a piece of paper, her pale, frail hand gripping it tightly so it didn’t blow away in the wind. ‘He is my uncle. He says to meet him here, at this place, tonight. At ten fifteen. He will be there this time, he promises.’

Luke peered at the note. Ten Commandments Bar, it said, on Vilniaus g.39. He looked up to thank her, but the girl was already gone.

32

Royal Free Hospital, London

Thursday, 10 March, 1813hrs GMT

DR SHEILA MACKENZIE was feeling a whole lot better. She was still in the isolation tent at the Royal Free Hospital in north London, but now she was sitting up in bed, propped on pillows, the oxygen mask removed from her face. The broad-spectrum antibiotic they had pumped into her veins over the last few hours must be doing the trick, she reckoned, she was feeling better and the bleeding from her nose had stopped. A TV had been installed in her room and it was showing a news programme about a worsening shortfall in nurses recruited from the EU. She smiled to herself: this was a topic close to her heart.

Later, as her mood improved further, she thought of asking her own nursing team about possible visitors. She would request a full set of her medical notes when this was all over. As a patient who was on track to beat the mystery infection on Svalbard she must surely be making medical history. Briefly, she indulged herself with a future projection, an image of her delivering a ground-breaking lecture to a packed and attentive audience of the best and brightest of her profession at the Royal College of Physicians overlooking Regent’s Park. There would be talk-show interviews, maybe even a book deal …

It was only a short while later that her condition started to change, and it all happened with terrifying speed. Dr Sheila Mackenzie began to feel hot and unwell. Using the voice communicator beside her bed, she asked the nurses to turn down the temperature in the room. It was 19°C. When the tremors set in she could feel her body starting to ache all over, especially in the joints and muscles. Her heart was racing, she could tell, and her face was slick with sweat. By the time she heard a worried nurse tell her that her body temperature had risen to 40.7°C, or just over 105° Fahrenheit, and they were going to step up the dose of antibiotics, Dr Mackenzie was barely listening because the nausea was becoming unbearable. When she vomited, twice in quick succession, it did little to relieve the pain. Looking down at the front of her now-saturated hospital gown, she could see streaks of blood among the effluent. And she noticed something else. Where her arm had been punctured earlier to take samples for analysis at Porton Down, droplets of blood were forming, seeping from her skin and dripping slowly on to the sheet.