Skipton House, London, England
November 28
“I didn’t expect to see you here so soon, Will,” said the Director as Carey shuffled in the door, a pack of papers under his arm. He smiled weakly, made his way to the chair opposite his boss’ giant throne of a seat, and almost fell into it. Janice trailed him like an impressive shadow; the kind that outshines its owner.
The room was like a photo gallery, a shrine to people the Director knew (or had been photographed with). Carey could see former Prime Ministers, rock stars, athletes and famous scientists. One picture of the current Prime Minister had a message scrawled across the front in silver ink: ‘We’ll beat this together!’ — the slogan he’d won on.
Everything about the room was ‘old school.’ The desk looked to be over a hundred years old, the lamps and general decor smelled of Victorian spit and polish. There was a large map on the back wall — the biggest single space in the room not yet turned into a mosaic of tiny frames — showing the British Empire sometime before the First World War.
The Director was a man who loved glory, who killed and mounted it on his walls to show his dominion over it.
“Sorry to barge in like this, sir,” Carey said, trying to gather some of the papers back into something resembling a pile. He knocked an ink blotter off the edge of the desk and ducked down after it, smacking his head against the desk on the way. He came back up holding his head and the blotter, and his papers drifted out of his hands and onto the floor. Janice sighed loudly.
“Sorry, sorry…” Carey said again.
“Not at all, Will, not at all!” boomed the Director, apparently enjoying how his office intimidated people. “Listen, would you like a drink? And you, miss?”
“No, sir. Thank you, sir,” said Janice flawlessly.
“Um, if you don’t—” Carey began, before Janice kicked his shin so subtly she nearly didn’t move. “I mean no sir, I’m good, thanks.”
The Director nodded at this, leaned back in his chair, started spinning an ornate letter opener on his desk in a way that made Carey sweat. He grabbed the top paper from his pile and nervously, shakily, handed it over.
“We’ve found something, sir,” he said, and tapped the paper lightly. “Something that could be quite bad.”
The Director took the paper lightly, nudged his reading glasses on his long pointed nose and sniffed loudly, like he was jarring his brain into gear. He smacked his lips once or twice, squinted, and then started to read it, because his face hardened abruptly. He looked up, and Carey immediately looked away.
“What is this?” the Director asked, his voice low.
“Um… Janice?” Carey invited.
Janice cleared her throat to speak, but the Director leaned forward suddenly, with a low growl to his voice.
“This is a senior level meeting, my dear. You’re excused.”
“But sir,” protested Carey. “Janice is—”
“Not a part of this conversation, Will. You are excused, miss.”
Janice blinked, confused, but then put on her more composed face, and carefully backed out of the room without a word. Carey was left alone with the stone-faced man with the old colonial empire at his back, and he felt horribly alone.
“You were stationed in Madrid, weren’t you, Will?” the Director said, creaking back in his chair.
“Yes. Yes sir. Eight years.”
“So you’re a team player. You know what’s at stake here. I don’t need to go over how a little information can do a lot of wrong.”
Carey shook his head slowly.
“No, sir.”
“Excellent. So tell me about these papers, Will.”
“It’s… it’s… well, it’s the transmission logs for Zemus Pharmaceuticals, sir. It seems that they’re… uh… they seem to be integrating vaccines into their booster shot programme without… er… testing them.”
“Are we sure about this?” said the Director, his voice dispassionate but somehow accusing.
“Yes, sir, we are. And we… we think we’ve found out why.”
Carey handed over the next set of papers in the stack, a listing of communications in excruciating detail, complete with timestamps and origin addresses.
“It… at first we thought Zemus had been… well, maybe compromised by some malicious persons. Trying to… you know… well…”
“Spread a virus through a booster shot,” said the Director, obviously quicker than Carey had been.
“But… well… as you can see, sir, the bypass orders all came from a single person, a registered person, and we have good reason to believe he was the one making the inputs himself.”
The Director looked up from the paper, bore into Carey.
“Is this who I think it is?”
“Yes, sir, I’m afraid so.”
The Director laid the paper down on his desk, folded his hands above it, closed his eyes. His jowls trembled as he breathed, and he looked like a beast from a nature video, so unreal you wouldn’t have believed it existed. The Director’s brow furrowed slightly. He was thinking, and Carey felt like he was intruding on a private moment.
“Will,” the Director said, opening his eyes, staring coldly at Carey. “Thank you for bringing this to my attention.”
He paused again, seemed to be thinking, sniffed, his face twitched. He licked his lips slowly, then leaned forward, his suit’s worn elbows pushing down on the scattered papers around the desk.
“Can I ask… what made you leave Madrid? Was it stress? Family?”
Carey looked at his hands.
“I was recalled, sir. The… uh… the Dominguez case, if you know it.”
“I don’t think I do.”
Carey continued to avoid eye contact.
“To be brief, sir: there was a woman named Rosa Dominguez who hadn’t made it back before the Containment Order went into force, and had since tested positive for P-150.”
“So the boys in Brighton would have refused to quarantine her, even if you let her back in.”
“Exactly. I was tasked with delivering her Notice of Exile, but her name made it extremely hard to pin her down. I eventually did, down in Alicante, at a spa there. She’d apparently saved for years for a vacation, and had decided to go through with it despite the border closing.”
“Foolish,” the Director said with a grunt. “Foolish and tragic.”
“Ms Dominguez was a rather stubborn woman, I’m afraid. She refused to come out of her full body mud pack session to meet me, so I was forced to go in and deliver her Notice against her wishes.”
“It was the right thing to do, Will. Absolutely the only call.”
“Yes sir. Well… Ms Dominguez didn’t see it that way. She filed suit against the Ministry for sexual harassment. Given the… uh… full-body nature of the mud pack.”
“Ah. I see.”
“They settled rather than suffer the publicity, and I was put behind a desk in your fine department, sir.”
“And what of Ms Dominguez?”
“She used the settlement money to buy the spa.”
“Good on everyone, then.”
Carey nodded unhappily.
“Yes, sir.”
“Well then,” the Director said, puffing up again. “How do you feel about working behind a desk?”
Carey was automatic and severely mechanical:
“Very good, sir. Most rewarding.”
“I don’t think you believe that, Will. I think you’re hating it. Papers and spreadsheets and kissing the right ass in the right way… it’s not who you are, is it?”
Carey honestly did not know what to say.
The Director took the papers he’d received, held them under his desk, and Carey heard the sound of a paper shredder eating the evidence. The Director didn’t take his eyes off Carey, just sat there as the sounds whirred below, like he wasn’t doing what he was doing, and anyone that indicated otherwise was mad.
The last of the papers disappeared and the Director put his hands back on his desk, interlocking his calloused fingers lightly.
“I am removing you from your position in the Department.”
“But sir—”
“You are now working as my chief investigator. You report to me, and me alone. I want you to use your experience on the Continent to keep things at home under better control. Starting with this Zemus mess. It must be dealt with quickly and quietly. No one but the two of us should hear of it, do you understand me?”
“Yes sir,” nodded Carey, then shuddered. “But sir! Janice knows! What should we—”
“Janice is replacing you as department head, of course. She’s got a good head on her shoulders, I can tell. But even still, what she knows — without the backing evidence — that’s inconsequential. From here on out, these secrets stay between us.”
“Yes sir.”
“Zemus have a new booster coming out in three weeks, and I don’t think anyone could stand the financial or political fallout if it were to be pulled over a scandal.”
“Sir…?”
The Director leaned in close, eyes narrow, his voice so quiet, Carey found himself leaning forward to hear.
“I’ve known this man my entire life. He is a good soul, Will, a very good fellow. And yet…” his gaze shifted, he was looking past Carey, but at nothing, “… yet, I can see this being true. I can see him doing this because he thinks it’s the best way to protect the public.”
Carey nodded.
“But it’s against the law,” said the Director, and Carey stopped nodding abruptly, frowned. “And he has to learn to accept it. So I need you to talk to him, Will, and let him know that we know, and unless he quits now, it’ll only be a matter of time before it gets out. You tell him — not for me, you understand — you tell him that he needs to submit those vaccines for proper testing, and to follow normal procedure from now on.”
Carey nodded weakly, understanding.
“He means well. But one mistake could…” he met Carey’s eyes, and he was sad, sad for his friend and the trouble this would be. “One mistake could gut our country, Will. You have to make him understand.”
