05

Skipton House, London, England

November 27

William Carey stubbed his toe on a concrete barrier, and his coffee promptly dumped itself all over the sidewalk. It took him a moment or two to fully process what he’d done, by which point the hot liquid was well on its way to searing his hand, which made him throw it away in a hurry, cursing quietly under his breath.

“’Morning, Mr Carey,” said a patrolman, tight rubber mask hiding a warm smile. “Trouble with your beverage, sir?”

Carey smiled pathetically, shrugged.

“I seem to lose them daily, don’t I, Claude?”

“That you do, sir.”

Carey wiped his trousers off with his free hand, his leather briefcase barely counterbalancing the effort. He stood up, sighed loudly, and pushed his wire-rimmed glasses up his nose. Luckily, there was no one else in the area to see his disaster.

Somewhere off in the distance, a lone motorbike zipped down another empty street, piercing the morning quiet and sending a storm of pigeons off the rooftops all around Skipton House.

“One day I’ll make it to my desk without tripping over things.”

Claude shrugged, then caught sight of a young woman in a grey skirt and a yellow wrap-around mask on her way to work. She ably flashed him an ID badge as she passed, and took no notice of Carey at all. The two men watched her card-swipe her way through the front doors and disappear inside.

Carey’s coffee-soaked clothes were starting to give him a chill. He wiped at them some more.

“It’s a waste of a good drink, is what it is,” he grumbled.

“You’d have to dump it out at the first checkpoint anyway, sir,” Claude said, checking down the street this way and that, like he was waiting to get on with more important business.

“No. Really?”

“Yes sir. No outside substances past checkpoint A.”

“Oh dear. I… I guess I never got far enough to find out about that rule.”

“Yes sir.”

Carey began staring at the ground, embarrassed, started shifting the briefcase to his other hand and back. He refused to meet Claude’s eyes, though Claude wasn’t paying attention anyway.

“Well, have a good day, then!” Carey said with a deflated kind of cheer.

“And you, sir.”

Carey hopped onto the street, crossed over to the other side, and caught sight of himself in the polished brass of the ‘Containment Office’ sign: he looked like a fool, and he wanted desperately to go home.

The coffee machine at Skipton House was deep inside the building, in a hallway where the lights barely functioned and stacks of boxes overflowed dot-matrix pages all over the floor. A patchwork system of notices on the wall instructed employees how not to brew coffee, complete with a warning that two scoops of the Colombian Dark from the mini-fridge on the left might very well constitute a biohazard.

Carey kept his briefcase perched between two fingers on each hand, waiting patiently while the ‘quick brew’ light died a meandering death.

The fluorescent bars above him, which had been no brighter than a candle to start, gave out midway through the process, leaving Carey in utter darkness for a few minutes while he tried to tap it back to life with the heel of his shoe. A woman with a black skirt and a white cotton mask stared uncertainly as the light came back on, him standing there on his toes, his worn leather loafer in his fingertips, madly swatting at the ceiling.

After a moment of awkward silence, he stepped aside so she could pass.

His coffee still wasn’t done.

Down the hall, in the great sea of cubicles that made up the first floor of the Client Service Department, he heard the chatter of a few dozen workers speaking in calm, soothing tones to the panicked masses.

“No sir,” said one woman, her northern accent cutting through the rest. “we have not absorbed the Immigration Office. You still need to clear things with them before filing papers with us. No, no sir, I won’t be able to transfer your file. They gather rather different information there. Did you… oh you have? And they still told you to… Right, let me save you some time, then. You’re going to have to fill out a BCO-193 form and mail it in to our Liverpool branch, and they’ll… yes, that’s right, four months. I wish I could, sir, but as you can imagine, there’s a substantial backlog of late…”

The coffee machine beeped gently, bringing Carey back to the task at hand. He picked up his cup and turned round, carefully navigating the crowded hallways to his office in the Corporate Accountability (Foreign Affairs) section. Off to his left spread a large room filled haphazardly with desks, stacked thick with wires, papers and dossiers.

Each of the thirty-odd employees there looked up to him as he came through, nodding respectfully and muttering their ‘Good morning, Inspector’s in a way that was not entirely convincing.

Carey tried waving to them, but the motion spilt coffee on his hand. His eyes twitched at the heat, and he smiled weakly and darted into his office.

He set the cup down on his desk, sloshing even more around, sucking the drops of coffee off his hand, then clasped it tightly and tried to contain himself.  

His flailing was interrupted by a sharp knock at the door that sent him scrambling for tissues, scrap paper, anything to soak up the mess. He got things reasonably tidy, leaned back in his chair, faking an expression that only half-resembled authority.

“Come in,” he called, picking up a pen and searching his desk for a paper to be writing on, though all such papers were now in the trash.  

“Excuse me, sir,” said a woman, leaning in the cracked-open door. “I wish this could wait. We seem to have a very serious problem on our hands, and we need your help.”

“What kind of problem?” Carey squeaked, motioning her to come in.

She slipped into the room, and Carey immediately remembered her name: Janice. She was possibly the most gorgeous subordinate in the entire government. Carey knew her name thanks to the ID tag she wore on her too-tight sweaters, which oddly reminded him of the actress in the sexual harassment video he’d been shown as part of orientation.  

“It’s something we caught last night,” she said, sitting cautiously across from him. “It might be nothing, but—”

“But then you wouldn’t be in here with that look on your face,” Carey interrupted, and Janice’s expression went as blank as she could manage.

“Quite right,” she conceded. “It’s urgent.”

“Where’s that David fellow? He’s your manager, isn’t he? Shouldn’t he be here too? I mean, not that I mind. I’m sure you’re capable.”

Janice’s eyebrow twitched.

“I’m sorry, sir, didn’t you hear? David had a cough last night. He’s under house arrest till spring.”

“Spring?” Carey gasped. “For a cough? What do we do here in flu season?”

“Honestly, sir, we lose half the workforce through the winter. I only clocked six months of time last year. The Department takes it very seriously.”

Carey nodded uncertainly.

“Well then,” he said. “Lacking David, I guess you’ll have to walk me through this.”

“My pleasure, sir,” she said, handing him a block of pages from deep inside the stack of folders. He scanned it quickly to try and gather context, but got nowhere. It was filled with columns of numbers and codes, none of which made sense to him. All he recognized was the subject line at the top.

“Zemus Pharmaceuticals,” he said. “Are we… I wasn’t aware Zemus used foreign workers.”

“Oh, they don’t, sir,” Janice said. “This was sent to us by Revenue, actually. A bit outside our usual scope. They had some questions and thought we should take a look.”

“Oh, I see,” Carey said, nodding broadly. “Co-operation among the branches of government. Good to see.” He flipped to the second page, then the third, frowned. “I’m still not following, I think,” he said.

Janice’s face lit up, and she quickly dashed round the desk, her perfume strong. She pointed to the first of the highlighted entries on the second page, following the line across with her pen, resting on the code ‘EAB’, in the ‘Testing/Approval’ column.

“These are the additions to the next Zemus booster shot, due for manufacture in December,” she said. “You see there are nearly twenty cases of Executive Approval Bypass already. Revenue was wondering if that’s normal.”

“And… um… is it?” Carey smiled nervously.

Janice pointed to one of the other entries, its ‘Testing/Approval’ column full of letter codes.

“The average patch in a booster release is based on a live virus,” she said. “Zemus researchers crack a strain and put it into the testing process, working their way along until the vaccine is proven to be safe for general consumption.”

“Ah,” sighed Carey. “so they’re bypassing all the testing. Um. Executively.”

“They have a process built specifically to let them bypass testing,” Janice said, her eyes twinkling as she avoided looking at him. “It’s supposed to be used when they make a deal with another certified British company, so they can pass their treatments back and forth without reinvesting in the testing that’s supposedly taken place. It saves time and money, and keeps all boosters as up-to-date as possible.”

Carey nodded.

“I’m following,” he said. “But… er… why is this a problem, exactly?”

Janice pointed to one of the highlighted entries, tapped it gravely.

“None of these strains have been identified within Britain,” she said. “They’re all continental.”

“Right!” he said. “Continental is certainly no good. So should we… should I assign someone to start the paperwork on… I mean… discipline or somesuch? Is that what we’d do here?”

Janice shook her head, and it was increasingly obvious to both who was better suited for the chair Carey now occupied. She closed the folder, crouched next to his chair, spoke in a near-whisper.

“This needs careful handling, sir,” she said. “I’d like permission to bring it to the Director, if you don’t mind.”

“The Director?” Carey gasped. “Janice, listen, I’ve been here almost a month and I’ve only met the man once. I don’t think we should be… you know… bothering him about some import violations.”

“Sir, Zemus hasn’t been importing anything,” she whispered urgently. “There would be stacks of paperwork as tall as this room for each one of these entries. There would be hundreds of man hours dedicated to confirming them. And more importantly, there would be some evidence that there are actually Continental companies behind each of these cures in the first place. We’ve looked, and there aren’t any. Half of the strains here aren’t even registered with EU Health.”

“Maybe they’re from the Chinese…?” Carey offered meekly.

“The Chinese use a whole other system. They go through the government first, trickle down to the corporations at the end of testing. And anyway, Zemus puts so much effort into dodging Chinese vaccines, it’s highly unlikely they’d suddenly start adopting them under the table like this.

“No sir, these bypasses are being implemented blindly. There’s a concerted effort here to add new elements to the Zemus boosters in such a way as to dodge the usual inspections… and we have no idea what’s actually in them. It’s not a matter of regulations. This is true public safety on the line.”

“Oh,” said Carey meekly. “All right then, we’ll go see the Director straight away. And you’ll do the talking.”

Janice smiled, stood up and almost immediately changed her composure: she stood taller, held her face more sharply, reeked of middle management.

“Just… what are you planning to say?” Carey asked, and she stared down at him with intense focus, her jaw set.

“I’m going to explain that someone could very well be using Zemus’ booster shot project to distribute viruses globally. And unchecked.”