Whiteout - Ken Follett [93]
“Thanks, Steve,” Toni said.
Mother said, “He’d make a nice boyfriend for you.”
“He’s married,” Toni replied.
“That doesn’t seem to make much difference, nowadays.”
“It does to me.” Toni turned to Steve. “Where’s Carl Osborne?”
“Men’s room.”
Toni nodded and took out her phone. It was time to call the police.
She recalled what Steve Tremlett had told her about the duty staff at Inverburn regional headquarters tonight: an inspector, two sergeants, and six constables, plus a superintendent on call. It was nowhere near enough to deal with a crisis of this magnitude. She knew what she would do, if she were in charge. She would call in twenty or thirty officers. She would commandeer snowplows, set up roadblocks, and ready a squad of armed officers to make the arrest. And she would do it fast.
She felt invigorated. The horror of what had happened began to fade from her mind as she concentrated on what had to be done. Action always bucked her up, and police work was the best sort of action.
She got David Reid again. When she identified herself, he said, “We sent you a car, but they turned back. The weather—”
She was horrified. She had thought a police car was on its way. “Are you serious?” she said, raising her voice.
“Have you looked at the roads? There are abandoned cars everywhere. No point in a patrol getting stuck in the snow.”
“Christ! What kind of wimps are the police recruiting nowadays?”
“There’s no need for that kind of talk, madam.”
Toni got herself under control. “You’re right, I’m sorry.” She recalled, from her training, that when the police response to a crisis went badly amiss, it was often due to wrong identification of the hazard in the first few minutes, when someone inexperienced like P.C. Reid was dealing with the initial report. Her first task was to make sure he had the key information to pass to his superior. “Here’s the situation. One: the thieves stole a significant quantity of a virus called Madoba-2 which is lethal to humans, so this is a biohazard emergency.”
“Biohazard,” he said, obviously writing it down.
“Two: the perpetrators are three men—two white and one black—and a white woman. They’re driving a van marked ‘Hibernian Telecom.’ ”
“Can you give me fuller descriptions?”
“I’ll get the guard supervisor to call you with that information in a minute—he saw them, I didn’t. Three: we have two injured people here, one who has been coshed and the other kicked in the head.”
“How serious would you say the injuries are?”
She thought she had already told him that, but he seemed to be asking questions from a list. “The guard who has been coshed should see a doctor.”
“Right.”
“Four: the intruders were armed.”
“What sort of weapons?”
Toni turned to Steve, who was a gun buff. “Did you get a look at their firearms?”
Steve nodded. “Nine-millimeter Browning automatic pistols, all three of them—the kind that take a thirteen-round magazine. They looked like ex-army stock to me.” Toni repeated the description to Reid.
“Armed robbery, then,” he said.
“Yes—but the important thing is that they can’t be far away, and that van is easy to identify. If we move quickly, we can catch them.”
“Nobody can move quickly tonight.”
“Obviously you need snowplows.”
“The police force doesn’t have snowplows.”
“There must be several in the area; we have to clear the roads most winters.”
“Clearing snow from roads is not a police function; it’s a local authority responsibility.”
Toni was ready to scream with frustration, but she bit her tongue. “Is Frank Hackett there?”
“Superintendent Hackett is not available.”
She knew that Frank was on call—Steve had told her. “If you won’t wake him up, I will,” she said. She broke the connection and dialed his home number. He was a conscientious officer; he would be sleeping by the phone.
He picked it up. “Hackett.”
“Toni. Oxenford Medical has been robbed of a quantity of Madoba-2, the virus that killed Michael Ross.”
“How did you let that happen?”
It was the question she was asking herself, but it stung when it came from