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we won’t get the chance to compare it.’
    ‘And so say all of us,’ muttered the man behind Steven and Cummings.
    ‘I take it you have no idea how Barclay himself caught the disease?’ asked Fred Cummings.
    ‘None at all, I’m afraid. I understand there is no current outbreak of haemorrhagic fever in Ndanga or its immediate neighbours, so it’s all a bit of a mystery.’
    Steven left the meeting with Fred Cummings and they went for a drink. ‘So what’s your interest in all of this?’ asked Cummings as they sat down with their beer.
    ‘The foreign secretary’s due to visit Ndanga in the next couple of weeks. His people want to be sure there’s no outbreak of Ebola or anything like it in the country, so they asked Sci-Med if we could sniff around, see what we could come up with on the unofficial grapevine.’
    ‘And?’
    ‘It seems to be clear from all accounts but, like the man said, it’s a bit of a mystery how Barclay went down with it in the first place.’
    ‘Happily, it’s not my mystery,’ said Cummings. ‘Salmonella from dodgy restaurants I can cope with, the occasional pocket of TB, seasonal blips of meningitis, yes, but the thought of something like one of these African viruses on the streets of London makes my blood run cold.’
    ‘Or just run,’ said Steven. ‘From every orifice, I understand.’
    ‘The trouble is, it is going to happen one day. I’ve never been more sure of anything.’
    ‘You don’t think we’re prepared?’
    Cummings took a sip of his beer and thought for a moment. ‘There’s a real danger of complacency,’ he said. ‘The Heathrow people did a good job, but the fact is that their problem was confined to the inside of an aircraft. They had all the time in the world to surround the problem and contain it, and they did. All credit to them, but there’s a danger of people in my line of work thinking that it’s always going to be that easy, or that the virus really isn’t that dangerous when it is. The real lesson to be learned from this incident is the fact that a highly trained nurse, equipped with all the protective gear available, still managed to contaminate herself. Despite what Phelps said, it’s surprisingly difficult to avoid contact with body fluids, especially in a domestic situation where people tend not to have Racal suits with self-contained air supplies hanging in their wardrobes or boxes of surgical gloves sitting by the kitchen sink. Frankly, it’s damned nearly impossible. I think we’d see a very different picture if Ebola or Marburg broke out on a large housing estate instead of in an airliner at thirty-five thousand feet.’
    ‘Put that way, it doesn’t bear thinking about,’ said Steven.
    ‘And d’you know the worst thing? If it did, the whole medical profession put together couldn’t do a blind thing about it. We’d be completely powerless. It would be like the great plagues of the Middle Ages all over again. We’d have to resort to nosegays and prayer books.’
    ‘Then the solution must be to tackle the problem at source,’ said Steven. ‘Seek out the natural reservoirs of these viruses and destroy them before they spread into the community.’
    ‘Unfortunately their source, whatever it is, lies in Africa and nothing is ever easy in Africa. CDC Atlanta has been trying to establish the natural source of Ebola for decades without success. The Pasteur Institute in Paris is trying to get a handle on it by examining all the data ever logged about the disease, but records are less than scrupulous.’
    ‘I can imagine.’
    * * *
     

    When he got home, Steven poured himself a gin and tonic and put a CD on the stereo to fill the room with the soulful tenor sax of Stan Getz. He found two fax messages lying in the tray of the machine and sat down in his favourite chair by the window to read them. They were from two of his contacts in the medical charities, one working with the Red Cross and the other with a voluntary organisation