30/10/07
8:45 AM
The Grid
It was Tuesday morning. They'd all had a long day yesterday, so Harry had pushed briefing back by fifteen minutes, for which Adam was grateful. Harry, as usual, didn't waste time with niceties; he sat down in his seat and immediately asked
"Ros, Adam, how confident are you that the location you were given was used by the mercenaries?"
"Reasonably." Ros said. "It had been stripped out effectively, we were too late, but the set up, or what was left of it, was strongly suggestive of detention and torture."
"Well the CD you found is more than suggestive." Malcolm said grimly. Everyone looked at him. "I put it on a firewalled, isolated laptop and had a look. It's not filled to a tenth of its capacity. It's a series of three to five second clips of different people struggling and screaming, interspersed with the words 'You will never find us' as white text on a black background. It's not enjoyable viewing. The subjects' faces are obscured in the video and voice recognition struggles immensely with screams. The video's format has been changed, so I can't edit it either, and it was done on just about the most popular video editing software in the world. There's nothing usable there." Adam sighed.
"All we had from the leak in the hospital," Jo started, "was that the man who asked her where Zaf was was the same man who turned up in Truro next day and attacked Adam, she picked him out of three."
"So it gives us nothing new." Harry surmised. "And neither did the CIA. They're denying all knowledge of Adam's assailant and the man we have here in cells. If they are or ever were CIA, they're not interested in protecting them."
"Those the CIA hired in the first place were probably five of the six bodies we found burning in an alley." Ros said. "We have good reason to suspect that Zaf was taken from there by a second group, the group we're now trying to catch."
"Malcolm," Harry said, "anything new about the two known members?"
"Well I managed to persuade the police to hand our prisoner's possessions over, there might be things in his wallet that can help me find out about him."
"Chase it up." Harry ordered. "What else do we have?"
"We still have our man downstairs." Connie said. "We have… five days before we have to hand him back to the police to be charged, or let him go."
"I promised the police they could have him back." Jo said. "If that means anything."
"Come on, we're not letting him go, whatever he gives us." Adam said.
"More than anything else," Connie said, "this looks like one group of remarkably well-informed mercenaries wiping out another group of deniable, dispensable mercenaries for possession of a Spook."
"Of course," Ros said calmly, "when Zaf was taken, he was infected with a weaponised virus. That's probably at least as valuable as anything Zaf could tell them if they were able to isolate and store it." Adam dropped his head on to his hands. He did not want to deal with that again.
"Malcolm, is that a realistic risk?" Harry asked.
"Ah… off the top of my head, it's an enveloped virus so survives poorly outside a living host, they'd need to take it directly from Zaf's tissues, I'm not sure how easy that would be."
"Watch for anything like it appearing for sale."
"But we know Zaf was exposed." Jo said. "So since he's still alive he must have had the vaccine. They must have got it from somewhere."
"And if the Russians are the only source…" Harry said.
"I'm not sure we can just ask them Harry." Connie said. "Given what we did to get the vaccine from them, I doubt they're best pleased with us at the moment." There was a long silence.
"I'm going to sanction this line of inquiry for another twenty-four hours." Harry said. "Unless we find anything significant before then, I am going to order you all to return to normal work."
"Harry, they tortured-" Adam started.
"You can't be- " Jo was also speaking.
Harry held up a hand to silence them. "I appreciate why you want to pursue this, but our priority is to protect the British public, not our own officers. The longer the interval, the less likely we are to catch the rest of the cell. There are rumblings in North Africa which we will only be able to ignore for so long."
Note: The virus shows definite traits of an enveloped virus (doesn't seem to contaminate the environment in any meaningful sense, they didn't have to bleach the streets where infected people had walked) and of a non-enveloped virus (sudden, severe symptoms). However, it should be noted that these are both general rules (Ebola is an enveloped virus which causes very severe symptoms), but no virus I am aware of (and I looked) has so predictable an incubation period. Norovirus, the virus with the shortest mean incubation period I can find, has an average incubation period of 33 hours, plus or minus fifteen. Also, the 'theraputic vaccine' as used in the episode, is sheer nonsense. A vaccine is by definition preventative, not therapeutic. If the writers were thinking of the post-exposure Rabies vaccine, this relies on treatment beginning before the onset of symptoms, so Adam could not have survived. If they were thinking of an antitoxin, such as that used to treat tetanus, they are implying that the 'virus' is actually a bacterium, which would make better sense in many ways. As such, applying real science to this 'weaponised virus' is challenging.