The Secret

THIRTY THREE

‘Ladies and Gentlemen, you summoned Sci-Med to appear before you some weeks ago. The purpose of that meeting was to assure us that the death of Dr Simone Ricard of Médecins Sans Frontières had been an accident and that the murder of her colleague, Dr Aline Lagarde had been connected to Dr Lagarde’s involvement in drug trafficking. My colleague and Sci-Med’s chief investigator, Dr Steven Dunbar, did not believe you and neither did I. We were both right.’

Macmillan had to pause to allow a hubbub of protest to die down. He looked around calmly at the angry faces and expressions of outrage as if he were auditioning actors for an amateur dramatics production. ‘I am going to read you a statement outlining what we have since discovered and I would be grateful if you would allow me to do so without interruption.’

‘Dr Daniel Hausman, an American research scientist with CIA credentials, working at Fort Detrick in the USA made a very significant discovery. He discovered that the condition known as ME or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome if you prefer was caused by a virus, not by a new virus but by a virus that has been under the noses of researchers for years but whose presence would be dismissed as “normal”. The virus was the attenuated strain of polio virus used in the Sabin sugar lump vaccine to protect many thousands if not millions of people across the globe against the scourge of polio.

Hausman showed that the virus, alive and present in all individuals who’d received the sugar lump vaccine and also in those who’d subsequently been infected by it due to its excretion, could mutate under certain conditions and in response to certain triggers to cause the illness known as ME.

In the belief that this finding would cause widespread panic among the many who’d received this vaccine, a cloak of secrecy was drawn over the findings by the US and UK governments and several others until such times as a method of inactivating this virus could be devised.

Dr Hausman was seconded to Dr Tom North’s lab in London to work on this — Dr North was an acknowledged world expert on the polio virus — and we believe scientists at the top secret establishments of Fort Detrick and Porton Down have also been working on this.

The fear that some other researchers might stumble across the real cause of ME and announce it to the world led to a somewhat ludicrous MI5 operation designed to harass researchers in the field and discourage others from joining them. One of their stunts led to the death of the eminent microbiologist, Professor Maurice Langley.

Finding a way to inactivate the attenuated polio virus was considered so urgent that the governments of the UK and the USA in collusion with certain elements of the Pakistani government agreed that experiments to test possible inactivators be carried out directly on human beings, to wit the population living in remote areas of the Afghan/Pakistan border.

It was inevitable that research establishments like Fort Detrick and Porton Down would also be interested in what might activate the latent virus as well as inactivate it. If this process could be controlled, they would have a weapon which could be used to render enemies weak and defenceless without the need for killing and destruction. Dr Mark McAllister, working at Fort Detrick was successful in designing both an activator and an inactivator for the virus. He was due to meet with British and Pakistani colleagues in the Afghan border region to report his findings when fate took a hand in the form of Dr Ranjit Khan.

Khan, believed by the UK and US to be working with them as a member of Pakistani Intelligence had been collaborating with the CIA in the setting up of fake aid teams in order to carry out experiments but he had an agenda of his own. He knew that the USA would be unlikely to share McAllister’s findings surrounding an activator so he set up an ambush in the mountains to steal the information. Khan’s true allegiance was to a Pakistani extremist faction dedicated to the overthrow of Indian interests in the long running dispute over territory in the north. Dr McAllister along with others died in the ambush and the disk containing the data along with a memory card designed to decrypt the disk was taken to a remote village and left for Khan to collect at a later date.

Before he could do so however, Dr Simone Ricard of Médecins San Frontières and her vaccination team came across the remote village by accident and were disturbed by the numbers of sick people they found there. They took blood samples for analysis and also removed a computer disk and memory card with them when they left, believing them to contain evidence of shoddy polio vaccination schedules on the village children. She wanted to speak about this at a scientific meeting in Prague but was denied by the organisers who believed they were acting in the best interests of aid to the region by covering up the use of a fake vaccination team put in by the CIA to gather information about the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden.

Khan followed Dr Ricard to Prague, hoping to recover the disk and card but, by that time, she no longer had them. Khan killed her to keep her quiet about his interest and later her colleague, Dr Aline Lagarde in Paris — a good woman and dedicated aid worker whose reputation you trashed with the aid of French Intelligence in order to stop any further investigation into the deaths of the two women, although by that time — the time you called us before you to warn us off — you must have known that something was gravely wrong.

Khan’s hunt for the information brought him to London where he murdered three more people, Dr Tom North, Dr Dan Hausman and a young PhD student, Liam Kelly. He obtained the disk but not the card which would make sense of it; however, he did discover that Dr Ricard had posted it to her friend and my colleague, Dr Steven Dunbar.

It was Dr Dunbar’s conviction that Simone Ricard and Aline Lagarde had been murdered that led him and Sci-Med to uncover this. Khan’s final gambit was to kidnap Dr Dunbar’s daughter in an attempt to make him hand over the card. Happily, he failed in this and paid with his life.

I leave it to you, ladies and gentlemen, to decide how proud you should feel of your actions. I am reminded of an old adage that says two can keep a secret if one of them is dead.

We at Sci-Med have no further comment to make although we do request that the restoration of Dr Lagarde’s reputation be carried out as a matter of some urgency. We currently hold both the McAllister disk and memory card. We presume that the US intended to share all aspects of it with the UK and will hand it over to the relevant UK authorities so that work on deactivation of the latent virus can proceed at pace without interruption. Our evidence that MI5 were complicit in discouraging biological research on ME will remain in our hands for the time being. We at Sci-Med value our independence from all tiers of government greatly. Thank you for your attention. We will not be taking questions.’

‘Just a moment, Macmillan,’ demanded a loud voice. ‘What do you intend doing with this information?’

Macmillan, who was gathering up his papers, did not bother to look up to see who had asked the question. ‘Nothing,’ he replied. ‘Our files will not be made public… unless of course, any of us should take our own life in the woods.’

Macmillan, followed by Steven, Scott Jamieson and Lukas Neubauer left the meeting leaving a stunned silence behind them.

‘I’m glad you got your knighthood before you said all that,’ said Steven in an attempt to lighten the atmosphere as they walked back to the Home Office.

Macmillan managed a smile. ‘You’re not usually so sanguine at the end of an investigation.’

‘It’s an odd situation,’ said Steven. ‘Everyone thinks they did the right thing; everyone thinks they were acting in the best public interest and yet so many people ended up losing their lives.’

‘I suppose no one could have anticipated Khan appearing on the scene,’ said Scott Jamieson.

There was silent agreement but Steven wondered out loud when the CIA first realised that Khan had gone rogue.

‘Wasn’t it their man Andrews who told you?’ asked Macmillan.

‘I was holding a gun on him at the time,’ said Steven.

‘Surely you don’t think the CIA were complicit in all these deaths?’ said Scott Jamieson.

‘No, I don’t but I think it may have suited their purpose not to let on to Khan that they knew who he was really working for until he’d tidied things up for them. I think Andrews let him see my file in the hope that he would remove the problem of Sci-Med’s interest in what they’d been up to.’

After a few moments silence, Macmillan said, ‘The first one to say, oh what a tangled web we weave, pays for lunch.’

No one did.

‘All right, I’ll pay,’ said Macmillan. ‘Let’s collect Jean first.’

Steven’s mobile rang during the meal and he excused himself. It was Tally. ‘How did it go?’

‘John was brilliant. I’ll tell you all about it later.’

‘Then you’re coming up tonight?’

‘You bet.’

‘It’s something you won’t have to do for much longer,’ said Tally.

‘You mean?’ exclaimed Steven.

‘Yep, I got the job.’