The Secret

ELEVEN

Steven and Macmillan exchanged glances while waiting for the Foreign Secretary to continue.

‘You have probably established that Dr Ricard was unhappy about the behaviour of certain of her colleagues in the field. She wanted to speak publicly about this at a meeting in Prague but was denied the opportunity. Your suspicion is that she was murdered in order to keep her quiet about her misgivings. Am I right?’

‘There have been two deaths,’ Steven reminded him.

‘Yes, thank you. Dr Lagarde. I will come to her later. This meeting has been convened to put you both in the picture. Dr Ricard was right to be concerned about the actions of the Children First team she came across and their apparent lack of expertise. I’m afraid — no, embarrassed — to tell you that they were not an aid team at all apart from one Pakistani doctor. They were a CIA intelligence-gathering unit.’

‘Masquerading as a medical aid team?’ exclaimed Macmillan. ‘That’s outrageous. It’s like using ambulances to cover troop movements. It’s just not on.’

‘I think the CIA has been made aware of the strength of feeling their actions have generated,’ said the Foreign Secretary, turning his head slightly towards the CIA chief.

‘Why do it in the first place?’

‘Abbottabad,’ said the CIA chief, speaking for the first time. ‘We were going after Bin Laden: we knew we were getting close but we had to be sure.’

‘So you put the health of God knows how many children at risk to get to one man,’ said Steven.

‘He wasn’t just one man, dammit,’ snapped the CIA man. ‘He was an icon, a figurehead. While he lived, 9/11 would never be avenged in the eyes of the American people. We had to take him out while we had the chance.’

‘Had the chance?’

‘Intelligence gained by the teams pointed us at the compound at Abbottabad but we still had to be sure Bin Laden was there. One of the vaccination teams gained access to the compound and brought away samples for DNA analysis. They were positive. We sent in the SEALS and the rest… you know.’

‘Well, that’s all right then,’ said Steven sourly. ‘Polio will remain endemic in the region and the vaccination teams will not be able to stop it because no one will trust them any more but hey, you got your man. John Wayne would have been very pleased.’

Macmillan put a hand on Steven’s arm to rein him in.

‘I know what we did… was perhaps wrong in a moral sense,’ began the CIA man, ‘but we’ve apologised to all the aid agencies involved and there is to be a major new initiative in the region funded by American sources…’

‘To keep everyone quiet,’ said Steven.

‘Look, we’ve put our hands up and apologised. I don’t see what more we can do.’

One of the people from the World Health Organisation decided to breach the ensuing uncomfortable silence. ‘As chance would have it, the international press tended to concentrate on the death of Bin Laden and, of course, the bravery of the military team involved. There was little reported about the use of fake aid teams. For our part, we saw there was nothing to be gained by focusing attention on this aspect so that is why we discouraged Dr Ricard from speaking at the Prague conference. It would have been… counter-productive.’

‘Dr Ricard’s death was an accident,’ said the Foreign Secretary. ‘There was no plot to keep her quiet.’

‘And Aline Lagarde?’

‘I’m afraid Dr Lagarde was not all that she seemed. During the course of their investigations the French police have established that she was involved in the transport of heroin from Afghanistan into France. They believe that she grew too ambitious and double-crossed those who were funding her… with fatal consequences.’

‘Jesus,’ murmured Steven.

‘Not good news, I’m sure, but I hope we have been able to put your minds at rest with regard to conspiracy theories.’

‘Did we know what the CIA were up to in Afghanistan?’ Steven asked the MI6 man.

‘Bits and pieces,’ came the guarded reply.

Steven and Macmillan walked back to the Home Office largely in silence, Steven intent on looking at the wet pavement, Macmillan gazing into the distance like a ship’s lookout. It wasn’t until they were in the lift that Macmillan asked, ‘Well, what d’you think?’

‘If Aline Lagarde was a drug runner, I’m about to be appointed principal ballerina with the Bolshoi Ballet.’

‘A possibility I’d rather not dwell on,’ said Macmillan, ‘but I agree. It did all sound terribly… unlikely.’

‘They definitely don’t want us poking around,’ said Steven. ‘So what are they hiding?’

‘On top of everything else, you mean. What the combined intelligence services of the UK and our American cousins are hiding doesn’t bear too much thinking about.’ They’d reached Macmillan’s office. Steven watched while his boss poured two large sherries and handed him one. ‘Once again the fickle finger of fate has put us on a collision course with HMG.’

Steven chose to sip his drink rather than reply.

‘The question is, what do we do now? The bright thing… the clever thing… the dutiful thing… would be to walk away and leave it. After all, what they’re up to in far-off places is hardly a matter for Sci-Med.’

‘I’m still convinced Simone and Aline Lagarde were murdered for the same reason,’ said Steven.

‘I thought you’d see it that way,’ said Macmillan, sounding less than overjoyed. ‘The odds against our being able to do anything against the combined opposition of MI6, the CIA, and possibly even the French intelligence services if they were responsible for setting Dr Lagarde up, are overwhelming.’

‘True,’ Steven conceded. ‘But that doesn’t stop us thinking about it, probing where we can, and working out what they’re up to and why someone thought Simone and Aline had to be killed.’

‘The very first time you ask a question of anyone they’ll know we didn’t buy their version of events,’ Macmillan warned him.

‘Yes,’ said Steven flatly.

Macmillan smiled. ‘Have a care,’ he said, ‘and keep me informed.’

Steven left Macmillan’s office and paused to speak to Jean Roberts. He produced a copy of the participant list for the Prague meeting and asked her to check affiliations.

‘What am I looking for?’

‘Anything that doesn’t match up. Check out the stated university connections. Anyone listed as being attached to a university which turns out to have never heard of them I’d like to know about. Anyone with known connections to the intelligence community… anyone known to the police… and perhaps more importantly, anyone who looks dodgy to you, Jean.’

Jean smiled, pleased as always to be credited with the capacity to spot pieces that didn’t belong in the jigsaw — a talent developed through many years with Sci-Med. She’d been with John Macmillan since its inception. ‘Will do. Anything else?’

‘I’d like a contact number for a man named Bill Andrews: he’s on the list as the man who deals with American charity money.’

Steven was about to leave when Jean reached into her desk drawer and withdrew a folder which she handed to him. ‘Sir John thought you might like to look this over at your leisure, just to keep you up to speed with what’s going on in the world of ME.’

Steven accepted the file with a small smile but without comment and went to his office. He was wondering what it would be like right now along the north Pakistan border, an area he knew reasonably well, having visited it on more than one occasion in his Special Forces past. He remembered the feeling at the time that he could have been on the moon, so lonely and desolate was the region. It also had a history of being bad news for any country stupid enough to imagine they could control and bring stability to it — not that that had ever stopped them trying.

The current situation there was worse than ever. The legacy of Bush’s war on terror had left Afghanistan without any credible government save for a bunch of puppets who were being assassinated on a regular basis by the Taleban, and on the other side of the border the Pakistani government was so corrupt that it made a corkscrew look like a spirit level thanks to an ill-advised release from prison of more than nine thousand crooks in an amnesty in 2007. Against that background, attempting to find out why two young doctors whose only ambition had been to help and protect children had been murdered was not going to be easy, but he would give it his best shot.

His starting hypothesis had to be that Simone and Aline had come across something other than the fact that one of the aid teams on the ground — probably more — were fake. They were American intelligence-gathering units but in imitation of genuine teams they had a Pakistani element to them. The CIA man at the meeting he’d just attended had mentioned a Pakistani doctor in the team whose work Simone and Aline had come across and there would probably have been an interpreter too.

According to Aline, the team had come across a village where people were falling ill and children’s polio vaccination schedules hadn’t been completed. This had alarmed Simone… wait. What had? He, like the others, had been assuming that it was the problem with the children’s vaccinations that had given her cause for concern, but it could have been the fact that people in the village were ill. What was wrong with them? Had they contracted polio? Simone and Aline would have known if that had been the case, but Aline had just said that people were ill… and that she and Simone had taken blood samples!

This could be the break he was looking for. They had taken blood samples for lab analysis but what had they done with them? Where had they sent them? The lab reports might answer a whole lot of questions.