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disinfectant that destroyed any virus by oxidizing its protein.
    Toni watched, aware that every second’s delay made it less likely that Michael would survive, knowing that the decontamination procedure had to be followed rigorously to prevent other deaths. She felt distraught that a deadly virus had escaped from her laboratory. It had never occurred before in the history of Oxenford Medical. The fact that she had been right to make such a fuss about the missing drugs, and her colleagues had been wrong to play it down, was small consolation. Her job was to prevent this happening, and she had failed. Would poor Michael die in consequence? Would others die?
    The paramedics loaded the stretcher into the ambulance. Dr. Solomonsjumped into the back with the patient. They slammed the doors and roared off into the night.
    Toni said, “Let me know what happens, Ruth. You can phone me on this headset.”
    Ruth’s voice was already weakening with distance. “He’s gone into a coma,” she said. She added something else, but she was out of range, and her words became indistinguishable, then faded away altogether.
    Toni shook herself to get rid of her gloomy torpor. There was work to be done. “Let’s clean up,” she said.
    One of the men took a roll of yellow tape that read “Biohazard—Do Not Cross Line” and began to run it around the entire property, house and shed and garden, and around Michael’s car. Luckily there were no other houses near enough to worry about. If Michael had lived in a block of flats with communal air vents, it would already have been too late for decontamination.
    The others got out rolls of garbage bags, plastic garden sprayers already filled with disinfectant, boxes of cleaning cloths, and large white plastic drums. Every surface had to be sprayed and wiped down. Hard objects and precious possessions such as jewelry would be sealed in the drums and taken to the Kremlin to be sterilized by high-pressure steam in an autoclave. Everything else would be double-bagged and destroyed in the medical incinerator underneath the BSL4 lab.
    Toni got one of the men to help her wipe Michael’s black vomit off her suit and spray her. She had to repress an urge to tear the defiled suit off her body.
    While the men cleaned up, she looked around, searching for clues as to why this had happened. As she had feared, Michael had stolen the experimental drug because he knew or suspected he had been infected with Madoba-2. But what had he done to expose himself to the virus?
    In the shed there was a glass case with an air extractor, rather like an improvised biosafety cabinet. She had hardly looked at it before, because she was concentrating on Michael, but now she saw that there was a dead rabbit in the case. It looked as if it had died of the illness that had infected Michael. Had it come from the laboratory?
    Beside it was a water bowl labeled “Joe.” That was significant. Laboratory staff rarely named the creatures they worked with. They were kind to the subjects of their experiments, but they did not allow themselves to become attached to animals that were going to be killed. However, Michael had given this creature an identity, and treated it as a pet. Did he feel guilty about his work?
    She stepped outside. A police patrol car was drawing up alongside the biohazard van. Toni had been expecting them. In accordance with the Critical Incident Response Plan that Toni herself had devised, the security guards at the Kremlin had automatically phoned regional police headquarters at Inverburn to notify them of a red alert. Now they were coming to find out how real the crisis was.
    Toni had been a police officer herself, all her working life, until two years ago. For most of her career, she had been a golden girl—promoted rapidly, shown off to the media as the new style of modern cop, and tipped to be Scotland’s first woman chief constable. Then she had clashed