Richmond Park, London
LUKE CARLTON HATED himself. Or, more accurately, he hated his own weakness. Second circuit around Richmond Park on his Carrera Hellcat mountain bike and already he was flagging, running out of puff. What the hell was this? He pushed his polarized cycling glasses up onto his forehead, wiped the back of his gloved hand across his face and peered down at the tachometer. Just twenty kilometres covered since he had begun his circuits and he hadn’t even expected to break a sweat. Twelve years in the Royal Marines, the last four spent in the elite Special Boat Service, and now a rising star as a case officer in MI6. Yet here he was, on the cusp of forty, wheezing like an old man and taking in great gulps of air as if his life depended on it. He didn’t even recognize these limitations on his own body. The body that he had pushed and pulled through the gruelling endurance course down at the Commando Training Centre at Lympstone in Devon years ago as a ‘nod’, a raw recruit. The body that had survived on less than a thousand calories a day on escape-and-evasion exercises on some godforsaken, windswept Hebridean island, only to be pegged out sleepless and half naked in the wind and rain by sadistic paratroopers as he underwent the dreaded part of Special Forces Selection known as TQ – Tactical Questioning.
But there was no escaping the truth: the contamination was to blame. He knew that, but it still didn’t make it any easier to accept. The bald fact was that at the climax of an earlier operation he had come face to face with a lethal pathogen hidden inside an explosive device in an Essex warehouse, placed there by a far-right extremist group. He had been lucky to escape with his life; others had not been so fortunate.
Laid low, weak and supine, confined for months to a hospital bed in an isolation unit, being treated night and day by people masked up in full PPE, Luke’s convalescence had been without question the worst period of his life and he was trying hard to put it behind him. More than once he had wondered if he was going to make it. In all, seven people had been infected with Agent X when he and the police counter-terrorist specialist firearms officers had burst into a booby-trapped warehouse on that industrial estate. Five had later succumbed. Luke and a police sergeant only survived after weeks in intensive care undergoing experimental treatment with a desperate, last-resort drug therapy. ‘Your immune system will probably be compromised now for the rest of your life,’ they had warned him on discharge. ‘We’re taking you off active operations,’ they had told him, once he returned to duty at Vauxhall Cross.
‘Sod that,’ Luke had responded, as he beasted himself over and over in the gym, for weeks on end, yearning to get his body back into peak condition. Yet here he was now, catching his breath as he gripped the handlebars, pounded the pedals and looked reality straight in its ugly face. The fact was that Agent X had nearly killed him. He was lucky to be alive, so whatever his fitness levels were now, he would just have to live with them.
When his phone went off in his breast pocket he jammed on the brakes and pulled off the track. It was Angela Scott, his line manager at VX, as those who worked at Vauxhall Cross sometimes referred to it.
‘So … listen, Luke, we’ve got a situation,’ she told him. ‘I need you here as soon as possible. The Chief’s called a crisis meeting and I want you there.’
At this, he felt an overwhelming sense of déjà vu. How many operations had begun with those self-same words? Missions in Colombia … Armenia … Iran … Lithuania … Assignments that he would never be able to talk about, not even to his partner, not that he had one at the moment. These were places and names he would likely take with him all the way to the grave.
‘Taiwan?’ he asked. ‘Is that what this is about? Because it’s not looking good, is it?’
‘We’ll discuss that when you get in,’ Angela replied. ‘Oh, and I should add, April’s going to be there.’
‘Shit. So it’s serious.’
‘You could say that. So forget about your day off and just get in here ASAP.’ She hung up.
A meeting attended by ‘April’ was a rare and unwelcome thing. It usually meant something, somewhere in the world, had gone badly wrong. Felix Schauer was MI6’s Director Critical, tasked with overall responsibility for crisis management. With the Service’s in-house fondness for nicknames, it had not taken long for him to get called ‘April Schauer’. Although not to his face.
Luke pulled back the sleeve of his jacket to check the time. If he cycled straight there he reckoned he could make it to VX in just under forty minutes. Shoulders braced, head down, he took off at speed. Exactly thirty-eight minutes later he was walking through the electronic security doors, past the uniformed guards, into the foyer of Vauxhall Cross, with its royal coat of arms, then straight down the corridor, with its framed photos of the building taken at twilight, and into one of the cramped, boxy, windowless meeting rooms on the ground floor. Luke squeezed himself through the narrow gap between the wall and those already seated as others were still filing in. There had been a time, not so long ago, when his Lycra cycle gear would have caused a few disapproving raised eyebrows from the suits or, worse still, he might have been ordered by some senior Bufton-Tufton to go away and change. Not any more. Still, the room seemed tense: almost no one was talking. He spotted Angela at the far end of the table – she had saved him a seat. Calm, dependable Angela, his rock of support in this place where he knew that not everyone was his ally. ‘Well done,’ she whispered, as he sat down. ‘You just made it.’