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Chapter 36

Dr Clive Gaunt punched the code number into the panel and waited for the door to slide open. As he stepped inside he felt that familiar tingle, the thrill he got from his toes to the few hairs remaining on his scalp. It happened whenever he entered this cool, brightly-lit room. Only he and one other were allowed in here. This was his space, where his life’s work resided, where his most treasured possessions dwelled in suspended animation, waiting to be brought to life.

He walked around, running a gloved finger over the dull metal surfaces of the freezer units, surrounded by state of the art lab equipment. He didn’t need to label the units; he knew by memory what was in each one. When he closed his eyes he could see inside – no, more than that. In his mind’s eye he could picture the viruses as magnified by an electron microscope. So beautiful. For example, the human papillamovirus, like a bright cluster of sea anemones swimming in a warm sea. Or the herpes viruses, each like some exotic flower, their capsids blooming in vivid colour. HIV was another favourite, bringing to mind an alien species from the dark edges of the universe.

His father had collected fine wines, and when Clive was a boy, Gaunt senior would very occasionally allow him to accompany him into the wine cellar. He wasn’t allowed to speak during these worshipful visits, which usually happened on a Sunday, when father would return from church (or rather, his post-church visit to the pub). ‘Come with me,’ he’d say, and he would lead Clive down the stairs and switch on the low-hanging light. The bottles, shining darkly in the dimness, were racked from floor to ceiling. His father would trace their labels with his finger, pick them up and cradle them, murmur sweet nothings before replacing them. On very special occasions, a bottle would be taken upstairs, opened, sniffed, savoured, sipped. And Clive would sometimes be allowed a small glass, given a clip round the ear if he didn’t pull an adequately appreciative face as he tasted it.

When his father died, he sold off the entire collection and had the cellar of their huge country house converted. He wondered what Father would say if he’d known what the great fortune he had left his only child would be used for; or if he’d known that one day his house would be the headquarters of the British cell of a worldwide network of very special scientific researchers; that what was once his wine cellar would house what was arguably the world’s finest collection of viruses, rivalled only by those of Ryu Koizumi in Japan and Charles Mangold in Utah. Though Koizumi was merely a rich collector – he didn’t do anything with his viruses – and Mangold had become a recluse since the demise of his business. Years before, when his father was still alive and Gaunt was not so wealthy, Mangold – who had run a pharma company in Utah – had been a useful ally, secretly funding much of the research that went on behind the scenes at the CRU.

Gaunt sat down in a chair that allowed him full view of his collection, and rubbed his aching knees. He was an old man now, a long way past his physical prime. Over the last few years he had developed a sense of time running out, his brain getting slower, his memory less reliable, his bones stiffer. After years of slow, painstaking research, this sense of life’s hourglass running empty had spurred him on, made him work harder and faster. Now, at seventy-eight years old, he was exhausted. But – thank science! – he was almost there now. He could see the finishing line. Could taste victory.

He sometimes dreamt of writing an autobiography to tell the full story of his life and work. How the chattering classes would gasp. It was a shame that the world would die without hearing the truth.

After the frustrations of his early life as a scientist, when he worked for the Ministry of Defence, the Cold Research Unit, where he had led the lab team, had allowed him to do what he loved most: experimenting with viruses new and old. Under cover of the official research into the common cold – tedious snot-studying work which he left mostly to the junior virologists – Gaunt had pursued his true passion, work that had begun in that glorious post-war period before being stamped on by meddling politicians.

His international contacts, made during those MoD days, had given Gaunt both the impetus and the means to pursue his virological passions. Although his chief private benefactor, dear old Mangold, would have had a fit if he’d known that Gaunt in fact had two paymasters. If Gaunt ever revealed the truth about the involvement of the British Government in his activities, it would have given conspiracy theorists multiple orgasms and caused an international scandal.

But those days were long behind him. He’d had no contact with the secret services or the MoD for years, and he had fallen out with Mangold. For a decade and a half, since the fire that destroyed the CRU, he had been on his own, living off the money his father – who had conveniently died shortly before the destruction of the CRU – had begrudgingly left him. He had built his own lab, filling it with state of the art equipment. And this freedom, far from the prying eyes of do-gooders like Leonard Bainbridge, had allowed Gaunt to make great strides. Sometimes he even amazed himself with his own genius.

He stood up and strolled proudly around the chamber. In these cabinets, below the ground in an English country house, were some of the most dangerous and hazardous organisms on earth. Here was stored the variola virus, which caused smallpox, last seen rampaging through Somalia in 1977. After the initial symptoms – vomiting, fever, delirium – it turned the body into a patchwork of lesions before it destroyed the immune system. Officially, smallpox only existed in two facilities in the world, in Georgia and Siberia, but Gaunt had managed to acquire some from a terrorist group in the Middle East.

Here too were Ebola and Marburg, and a range of VHFs, viral haemorrhagic fevers, like Lassa Fever and Rift Valley Fever from Africa and Machupo from South America. Another favourite was SARS, a coronavirus, the same kind of virus as that which caused the common cold. SARS, of course, came from Asia. This was a truly cosmopolitan collection.

In the corner of the room, to which he made his way now, were the jewels in his crown. The influenza viruses. The 1957 vintage Asian Flu, H2N2. From 1968, here was H3N2, or Hong Kong Flu. There was the lesser-known H9N2 flu, plus H7N7, which hit Holland in 2003, leading to the slaughter of 30 million chickens.

And here was one of the most interesting and exciting viruses, which had cost him many favours and a small fortune to acquire: H1N1, aka the Great Influenza, aka the Spanish Flu, which devastated populations in 1918, killing somewhere between 20 and 40 million people. H1N1 turned people blue as their lungs became clogged and their blood was deprived of oxygen. Their lungs filled with fluid and they suffocated, drowned from the inside. H1N1 made the medieval Black Death look like, well, the common cold. Dr Gaunt stroked the surface of the unit that stored it, wondering what the Americans who had recreated it through reverse engineering just a few years ago would think, if they had known that Gaunt would be able to copy their experiments and create his own stocks of the virus.

Finally, Dr Gaunt stopped in front of the furthest cabinet, the one with its own double combination lock, secured by a code only he and his little helper knew. Inside was Avian Flu, H5N1, plus the virus they had acquired from the young Vietnamese woman. Here too were the goodies that Sampson, who was on his way now, had taken from the lab in Oxford.

And on the top shelf, like a bottle of 1787 Château Lafite – the most expensive wine in the world, the one his father would have killed to own – was the virus that made him want to bow down before it like a serf. The culmination of his, and numerous others’, life’s work. For thirty years he had been moving towards this moment. There had been disasters along the way. Setbacks and many unfortunate but necessary deaths. Many of his closest colleagues and friends had died. He had sacrificed everything – family, mainstream scientific acceptance, wealth – for this. But now he knew that at last, with just one more test to complete and one more obstacle to remove, it was nearly time to unpop the cork.

Here she waited: the Pandora Virus.

Gaunt and his underground team had been working on it for years. In fact, research stretched back to the days of the CRU, when Gaunt had first started to experiment with flu strains. It had become his obsession. Now, after many years of sculpting this work of beautiful art, the final piece of the puzzle was in place, the breakthrough coming after Sampson liberated the AG-769 virus from Dr Twigger’s lab. AG-769 performed a clever trick, the protein in which the virus was wrapped effectively turning off the immune response of the host’s cells. Gaunt was able to emulate this effect in Pandora, massively increasing the fatality rate. Now she was complete. She was perfect.

And when she made herself known, the world of science – no, the entire world – would gasp in awe.

Just before they drew their last breath.