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Paris?’
    ‘Soon, I hope. We’ll have dinner.’

THREE
     
     
    Steven arrived for the 7.30 p.m. briefing at the Foreign Office at 7.20 and found more than fifty people already there. Some he knew, many he didn’t. One of those he did was Fred Cummings; a consultant microbiologist attached to the London Public Health Service. Fred tended to stand out in a crowd because of his sparse but bright-red hair and a liking for loud sports jackets.
    ‘Big turn-out,’ said Steven, coming up at his elbow.
    ‘Porton wanted to speak to everyone concerned at the same time, rather than have a series of meetings with health chiefs and local authorities,’ said Cummings.
    ‘So they’ve identified it?’
    ‘Let’s hope so,’ said Cummings. ‘They’ve taken long enough about it. A fiver says it’s Ebola.’
    ‘Ebola fever in the Old Kent Road – now there’s a thought to conjure with,’ said Steven, ignoring the bet.
    ‘Tell me about it.’ Cummings smiled. ‘I haven’t needed All Bran since that bloody plane landed.’
    A distinguished-looking man, whom Steven took to be a Foreign Office official, appealed for quiet and the hubbub died down. Four people mounted the platform and were introduced jointly as the investigating team from Porton Down. Their leader, Dr Clive Phelps, a tall, gangly man with bushy grey hair and a straggly beard, took the Foreign Office man’s place at the microphone and tapped it twice unnecessarily before speaking. Steven wondered idly how he would get his beard inside a surgical mask.
    ‘Good evening,’ said Phelps. ‘I understand that everyone here – apart from Foreign Office personnel, who have their own reasons for requiring information – is a health professional so I won’t beat about the bush. It’s a filovirus.’
    ‘Surprise, surprise,’muttered Cummings. ‘The Daily Mail ’s been telling us that for weeks.’
    ‘But, contrary to popular reports and rumour, it isn’t Ebola,’ continued Phelps.
    ‘So it has to be Marburg,’ whispered Cummings. ‘There only are two filoviruses.’
    ‘And it isn’t Marburg disease either.’
    ‘Bloody hell,’ breathed Cummings. He felt like the straight man in a comedy double act. ‘Then how can you call it a filovirus?’ he asked out loud, as hubbub again filled the room.
    ‘Under the electron microscope the virus appears filamentous, forming branched filaments of up to fourteen thousand nanometres in length. In other words, it looks like a filovirus and, of course, it causes a haemorrhagic fever very similar to Ebola, if not identical. The victims suffer high temperature, stomach cramps and nausea, and bleed profusely from just about everywhere.’
    ‘So why do you say it isn’t Ebola?’
    ‘The four subtypes of Ebola that we know about and have characterised in the past all have a uniform diameter of eighty nanometres. This virus has a diameter of a hundred and twenty nanometres.’
    ‘It could be a new subtype,’ suggested Cummings.
    ‘That’s possible,’ conceded Phelps with an uncomfortable shrug, ‘but we think not. We’ve carried out an investigation of the nucleic acid content of the virus – that’s what’s been taking the time – and there are significant differences. That’s why we think it’s a new virus.’
    ‘All we need,’ whispered Cummings to Steven. ‘Another bloody African virus.’
    ‘Any ideas about source?’ asked someone else.
    ‘None at all,’ replied Phelps. ‘But if the truth be told, we still have no idea about the source of Ebola either, and we’ve known about that disease for over thirty years. Ebola’s natural reservoir is as much a mystery today as it was when the disease was first reported.’
    ‘Would it be fair to say that this new virus is not as potent as Ebola, in view of the way it was so easily contained? I seem to remember people dropping like flies during the Ebola outbreaks in Zaire a few years back.’
    ‘No, that’s an entirely false impression,’ replied