Читать книгу The Sons of Scarlatti - John McNally - Страница 12

FIVE

“Mr President.”

“Commander King.”

“Prime Minister.”

“King. Mr President.”

“Prime Minister.”

“Guten Tag, Frau Chancellor…”

King went through the introductory motions.

Finn thought, I’m supposed to be in double geography right now.

The President of the USA was in shirtsleeves – the Oval Office in the background familiar, if a little less tidy than in its TV incarnations. The British Prime Minister was in a large, book-lined room – not the smooth PM of news bulletins, but an alarmed posh little man. The German Chancellor settled herself into a reclaimed pine ‘ergonomische stuhl’ as the President of France came online from the gilt and ornate Élysée Palace.

“Is Allenby there?” said the US President.

Al leant into shot and waved so that the leaders of the free world could see him.

“Guys,” said Al.

Guys? Finn thought.

“So. What have we got, Commander King?” asked Al.

The room fell silent. The lights dimmed.

“Slide,” ordered King.

A digital projection lit up a wall-sized screen and showed… nothing.

Or at least nothing but a blank whiteness with a black dot in the middle.

King snapped, “Bring it up to scale.”

The lens zoomed in on the dot and suddenly the creature exploded across the screen.

Projected to the size of a man, a vile black, yellow and red-flecked monster, fresh and newborn-slick from its final moult. Its exoskeleton was extended, exaggerated; its thorax like a clutch of girders; its head a felt and fang atrocity; its silver-black wings still plastered against its abdomen which, cruelly coloured, scaled and distended, hung bulbous from its thorax like a great droplet of buzz-fresh poison. And, at its end, an ugly cluster of three barbed, glossy harpoon stings.

Finn froze and the hairs on the back of his neck prickled. For a moment he tasted his own fear. The fear of death he sometimes got when he thought about his mother. A sense of something terrible, unstoppable and unknowable. He gulped it back.

A mouse click and the next image flashed up. A rear shot of the insect with a better view of the array of stings emerging from the bulbous abdomen.

Click. The underside, amour-plated and beetle-black. How does this thing fly? Finn thought.

Click. In the next image, the answer: silver-black wings fully extended, as long as a dragonfly’s, but broader.

Wow.

Click. The head and mouthparts, feelers and proboscis. Finn felt his stomach turn. He didn’t want to look, yet couldn’t tear his eyes away.

Click. The egg pouch and reproductive organ.

The six legs.

The black and yellow and red-tinged whole, like some vile bullet that in flight must look like… Who only knew what.

And the sound? thought Finn. What evil bass buzz would those wings make?

Al watched, face frozen, King pleasantly surprised to observe that even he was stilled by the sight.

“Meet Scarlatti,” said King. “Named after the eighteenth-century Italian composer noted for writing five hundred and fifty-five piano sonatas, because it registers a score of five hundred and fifty-five on the Porton Scale: that used to measure the lethal potential of weaponised organisms. A single Scarlatti could theoretically kill five hundred and fifty-five human beings.”

“Sacré bleu…” said the French President, without a hint of irony.

“During the Cold War, all sides developed and produced biological weapons. One of the main branches of study at our research institute at Porton Down was entomology, the study of insects, and how they could be adapted to carry and spread disease. In 1983 a geneticist accidentally developed a whole new genotype of insect by exposing the embryo of a highly engineered smallpox-carrying wasp – phenotype Vespula cruoris – to gamma radiation. The result was… Scarlatti.”

An old video recording came up onscreen of live Scarlattis being studied in a laboratory.

“Scarlatti is an asexual self-multiplier that, given a sufficient supply of simple protein – the body of a dead mammal say – can lay up to fifty eggs. It’s pesticide resistant, seventy-five millimetres long (the size of a hummingbird or a human thumb) and is all but physically indestructible. It nurtures supplies of a unique and fatal strain of smallpox in the poison sacs of its abdomen. Accelerated development means a single egg can become a viable flying insect in four days. Therefore a single insect can produce a fifty-strong swarm in four days. And swarm they do – given how much protein is required during their nymph, or rapid hemimetabolic, phase. Each swarm produces many new colonies, each swarming every four days, and so on ad infinitum. Or until the supply of protein dries up.”

Finn could taste something sickening.

He means people by ‘the supply of protein’. He means… us.

Onscreen, the video turned nasty. White mice were introduced to the test chamber and seized upon by frenzied Scarlattis. They seemed to relish the kill, whipping their stings into the poor creatures long after they were disabled or dead.

“This hideous project was immediately discontinued, the remaining nymphs first being frozen and then incinerated at the end of the Cold War under the Biological Weapons Convention.

“However, two specimens remained. One was sent to the United States under the Hixton-Fardale Shared Research Agreement, and has presumably been destroyed.. A second was secretly frozen and stored at Porton Down by the government of the day ‘just in case’ or, as we like to put it more formally, for ‘Reasons of National Security’.”

Commander King allowed his eyelids to close so as to avoid the righteous glares of the other committee members. Then he took a deep breath.

“One of our Porton Down research fellows, a Dr Cooper-Hastings, seems to have lost all reason, found a way to access the secure cold store and… has released the last remaining Scarlatti.”

There were gasps.

“He did what?” asked the US President.

King turned to his screen. “Dr Cooper-Hastings released the specimen into the atmosphere, sir.”

A staff-card mugshot of a middle-aged scientist flashed up. Thick glasses. Dull eyes.

“He stayed late at work, leaving at 10pm. A search was initiated six minutes later when an algorithm discovered an access control code override on his staff card. An empty cryogenic support cylinder was eventually found outside his abandoned car at 03:32 this morning near the village of Hazelbrook, thirty-six miles north of here.”

A map of Hazelbrook flashed up onscreen and a photo of the abandoned car.

“The area around the village has been declared a biohazard zone and evacuated. We’re conducting a full investigation and every available officer from every agency is involved in the manhunt for Cooper-Hastings.”

“Cut to the chase. What exactly are we talking about here – worst case?” asked the US President.

King and Professor Channing exchanged looks. The Professor stood up to deliver the bad news.

“Worst case: we estimate that with a first swarm in four days national contamination will be total within four to six weeks, continental within three months, global-temperate within six months.”

“Global-temperate?” repeated the US President.

“Nearly all of Western Europe, a good two-thirds of North America, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, most of South America, Australia. Only cold air and altitude offer any protection. In total, two-thirds of the land mass of the earth.”

There was a pause.

“Nearly six billion people,” said King.

DAY ONE 13:38 (BST). English Channel

Dr Miles Cooper-Hastings opened his eyes. They stung. Blackness and stars swam before him. His throat was so dry he half retched to bring forth some saliva. He could see nothing, but he could feel his head pressed up against something wooden. He was freezing. For a waking moment of pure terror, he wondered if he was buried alive. But, as his body repulsed and kicked out at these thoughts, the lid of the sea chest he had been locked in for eight hours or so leapt up as far as its lock and clasp would allow and for a split second let in a strip of daylight.

He kicked out again. He saw light flash again. And he realised he could taste the freezing sea.

“Where is it?” Cooper-Hastings yelled into the blackness, fear filling his lungs. “What have you done?”