Miasma

Five

Steven sat down at the table at home and spread out the information Jean had provided for him. He rearranged it in small, neat piles in a row, one for each of the murder victims, sub-divided further into personal and professional details. He already knew that there was no obvious or likely personal connection between the five so he wanted to see if he could forge any kind of professional one, something that might suggest why five people who had never met or communicated directly might be working towards the same goal.

He had the latest publications from the two Englishmen but nothing for Petrov as yet, apart from the fact that he was a microbiologist who had decided to opt out of the academic rat race and apply to become an Israeli citizen working at a small university in the middle of the Negev desert. The estate agent, Lang, whom everyone seemed to know was laundering money for Russian expats by helping them convert dodgy roubles into desirable London properties was less of a problem. The appearance of the dead Englishmen’s names on his books suggested strongly that Russian expat money had been used to pay them and he had been tasked with cleaning it up. Although no clear link had as yet been established between Lang and the dead French investment banker, Marcel Giroud, Steven felt confident it might still appear. He got up to make coffee.

He thought it reasonable to dismiss Lang and Giroud as just two money-men and to exclude them from consideration for major roles in whatever was going on. He downed the espresso and approached the slim file on the World Health man, Phillipe Lagarde. Steven wasn’t sure what his job description as ‘vaccine strategist co-ordinator’ meant, but, as he read, it became clear that he had played an important role in the WHO’s ambition to wipe out infectious disease from the planet. They had already succeeded in eliminating the scourge of Smallpox and were coming close to wiping out Polio if they could clear the final difficult areas where it was still clinging on — the Afghan/Pakistan border country being the most challenging and where Lagarde had been working in the months leading up to his death. He had been engaged in the geographical mapping out of vaccination plans and in dealing diplomatically with the fears and concerns of the locals. Lagarde’s former foreign postings before working the wild country of the Afghan border had been to Uganda and formulating protection of the Democratic Republic of Congo during the 2014-16 Ebola outbreak.

‘Respect,’ Steven muttered, feeling the kind of admiration he had felt for Simone and all those who dedicated their lives to the fight against disease under the most demanding of conditions There was nothing in the file as yet about Lagarde’s financial status.

Some more information arrived by encrypted messaging from Jean. Steven scanned through it for anything more on Samuel Petrov and was happy to find that there was. He had been a well-respected scientist with several publications on vaccine design using the techniques offered by molecular biology to alter the genetic composition of microbes. His decision to move to Israel had come as a complete surprise to his colleagues who could only come up with vague suggestions about the strong pull Israel had for Jewish people. He himself had offered no reason. There was a lack of recent published work because of his employment at CDC Atlanta where secrecy was always a factor, but his reputation had been good enough to attract WHO support. There was no information about how his work at the University of the Negev had been going at the time of his death.

Steven acknowledged the fact that he had been ignoring the suspected Chinese element in all of this. All he had to go on, of course, was MI6’s suspicion that the killers had been Chinese — possibly with official backing. If they were right, the implication was that whatever the five victims had been involved in was more than a little annoying. Were there more murders to come?

Steven was toying with this thought when the house phone rang. It was his daughter, Jenny.

‘Hello, nutkin, what a nice surprise, I usually have to wait for boyfriends to get off the line before I get to speak to you.’

‘Oh, come on, Dad, it’s not that bad,’ Jenny insisted in a tone that made Steven smile to hear her sounding so grown-up... and giving him distinct echoes of her mother, Lisa.

Steven had met and married Jenny’s mother Lisa many years before when she had been a nurse at a Glasgow hospital and he had been working on an investigation up there. Jenny had been born a year later but Lisa had developed a brain tumour shortly afterwards and died before Jenny had had the chance to remember her. After much heart-searching, Lisa’s sister, Sue had persuaded him that the sensible option would be that Jenny be brought up as one of her family along with her own two children who were only slightly older. Her husband Richard — who had readily agreed — was a country solicitor and the family lived in the village of, Glenvane, in Dumfriesshire, an area of great natural beauty in Scotland. It had worked out well.

‘So, tell me all your news,’ Steven encouraged.

‘I wanted to ask you something, Dad.’

‘Uh huh.’

‘Well, it’s been a while since we chatted about what I might do when I left school.’

‘And you’ve come to a decision?’

‘I’d really like to be a nurse...’

‘I think that’s wonderful.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes really, why do you sound so surprised?’

‘My teachers say I should be going to medical school with my grades and you would be disappointed if I didn’t.’

‘Nothing could be further from the truth, Jenny. I’m delighted, as long as you realise what you’re taking on. Being a nurse often means seeing people at their worst; it can be far from glamourous.’

‘I think I realise all that, Dad and I think I really do want to train as a nurse.’

‘That’s exactly the way you should feel, nutkin, I couldn’t be more pleased.’

‘Jenny wants to be a nurse,’ Steven announced without turning when Tally arrived home.

‘I know,’ whispered Tally, coming up behind him and placing her hands on his shoulders. ‘She called me a couple of days ago to ask how I thought you would take it.’

‘What a sneaky pair,’ Steven exclaimed, ‘what did you say?’

‘I told her you would be delighted to see her follow in her mother’s footsteps and that she’d make a great nurse. Was I right?’

‘As always.'

Tally ruffled his hair as she turned to take her coat off and go put her bag away. ‘Another of life’s milestones as you like to call them.’

‘She’s obviously put a lot of thought into it and knows her own mind. I was quite impressed... and proud’

‘And is therefore about to do the right thing...’ said Tally in a tone that alerted Steven to something else coming. ‘Give me a moment,’ she said in response to Steven’s look.

When she returned Tally sat down beside him and took his right hand in both of hers. ‘I’ve made a bit of a decision,’ she said.

Steven felt a hollow appear in his stomach. He couldn’t find words to voice his unease.

‘I’m going to go to the DRC.’

Steven was stunned. ‘That’s crazy.’

‘No... no, it isn’t, I’ve thought it through and I think it’s the right thing to do. It’s become clear they have money and resources, but they are sadly lacking in managers who know what they’re doing and what needs doing.’

‘And that’s you?’

‘Yes.’

Steven struggled to find the right questions to ask. ‘Did you volunteer or were you asked?’

‘I was approached after one of the Ebola meetings by someone who feels like me that our best, and maybe our only line of defence against an outbreak in the UK is to stop it coming here in the first place. The new investment programme for dealing with the threat of pandemics involves the recruitment of area managers to assist experienced regional managers. This should speed up response times and make sure volunteers are in the right place at the right time. Vaccination teams will be primed and ready to round up contacts of every Ebola case reported and vaccinate them quickly. They already have the personnel for the teams, but they need direction and good management. Intelligence centres will be set up in different regions of the country to corelate area reports and direct resources accordingly.’

‘Why you?’

‘I’m good at seeing the big picture and I’m fed up with my country looking the other way. I can see what needs doing and, on a personal level, I think it’s the right thing for me to do. I’ve sailed through life on a sea of middle-class niceness, protected at every twist and turn from anything resembling danger or hardship — a bit like the audience at a book festival — they know there’s something foul and nasty out there: it’s intriguing — even exciting, but the closest they’ll ever come to it is reading about it. My journey has brought me to a senior post at a top London hospital with everything I need at my fingertips, being praised and thanked routinely on an almost daily basis. I really feel the need to do my bit properly.’

Steven looked around the room as if searching for inspiration and the words to express it. ‘I really want to shake you,’ he said. ‘You get thanks and praise because you’ve earned it and you deserve it. You get it, not because you’re a pop star or a member of the royal family, but because you’re a bloody brilliant doctor and many children are alive because of you. It wasn’t luck that brought you to Great Ormond Street, it was sheer ability, a case of giving the best tools to the best practitioners.’

‘Thanks for that,’ said Tally in a small voice. ‘The hospital is prepared to give me leave and have assured me of their support...’

‘I suppose there’s nothing more to say...’ said Steven feeling helpless.

‘Yes, there is... I need your support too.’

The lump in Steven’s throat prevented him from saying anything. He Took Tally in his arms and held her tight for a long while. When he finally found words he whispered, ‘You have it, of course you do... if I can’t change your mind.’

Tally’s squeeze on his arm as she let go of him told him that wasn’t going to happen.

Worry over what Tally was about to do played a significant role in intruding on Steven’s thinking on the following few days. He found himself working on auto-pilot, moving names around on sheets of paper, altering the order, playing around with dates but a central pattern stubbornly refused to appear.

After three days, he took a mental step back and examined what working hypothesis he had come up with. A number of highly successful people who had no apparent connection with each other had been paid a great deal of money to use their expertise in order to design or do... what? Whatever it was, it had upset other people — possibly Chinese — greatly and they had responded with extreme violence. Was it over? Had they finished?

Steven acknowledged that the sense of frustration he felt was almost certainly due to a “cell network” being used. This was common in intelligence operations where individuals involved in secret operations were only told what they absolutely needed to know. This protected others in the network should one of them be captured and tortured. The ideal network would comprise people who didn’t know each other at all. Such a network however, might work well for operations like carrying out attacks on targets in occupied territories in times of war, but whether it could be scaled up in complexity, demanding the contributions of highly technical experts, but in different specialities, to work together without ever meeting, was another question. But maybe he was looking at the answer.

There would have to be at least one person who knew everything, but getting to that person seemed a long way off right now. Perhaps the way to tackle the problem of the “cell” was to think from the bottom upwards instead of top down. In Steven’s experience the driving force behind almost everything was either money or political ideology. The fact that Russian ex pat money was behind what he was looking for suggested that it was the former. These people were all very rich and had given up on politics. It could be argued that they didn’t need any more money, but, again, in his experience, people with money always wanted more. Millionaires wanted to become billionaires. Billionaires, trillionaires and so on. These people however, would be investors in the project, not world leading experts in science and medicine like Field and Pashley, but big successes in business and making money, mostly in oil, gas, mining, shipping, who had been persuaded to part with a fortune in order to make a bigger one.

Steven was pleased with this line of thought because, at a stroke, he had rid himself of the spectre of politics, something which had been lurking in the background ever since MI6’s suggestion that the Chinese government might be involved. But, why would the Chinese government get so upset about a bunch of Russians coming up with a scheme to make money? They wouldn’t... Unless, of course, it was their money they were stealing?

For some reason, Steven couldn’t see this being the answer. It was too simple. Whatever else they were, Russian oligarchs were not stupid and attempting to steal from the Chinese government would be a stupid thing to do. The Chinese element in this story was more likely to be based on private enterprise. Chinese money-makers were much more likely than Chinese politicians.

Steven rubbed his eyes and decided he needed a break from theorising; he made a small list of things he needed Jean’s help with. He remembered Special Branch saying at the initial meeting called by the Home Secretary that they had been interested in getting their hands on, Jeremy Lang’s “books”. They, of course, were looking for details about the Russian, money-laundering house purchases he had been involved in. If they had managed to lay hands on any such information, he would like to see it. It might contain the names and details of Russians who had used Lang’s services, but not to buy fancy London homes.

Secondly, and now that they had established just how much money their husbands had come into, it would be worth interviewing the widows of Martin Field and Simon Pashley to find out just how much they knew about it all. He didn’t want to do this himself — he had already spoken to one of them, but this was before the figure of ten million had come to light — he would suggest to John Macmillan that another Sci-Med agent be tasked with interviewing both women. The man he had in mind was Scott Jamieson if he wasn’t already too involved in something else — if he was, he wasn’t working under a code-red — Steven had just checked. Scott was not only a friend he trusted, he was an extremely skilled interviewer. If the ladies were hiding something, Scott would sense this and get the truth out of them. Faux outrage wouldn’t stand a chance.

The days passed with Steven and Tally being careful not to upset each other, but the DRC elephant was very much in the room. Steven’s head was constantly full of the stories Simone Ricard had told him about the realities of being caught up in an Ebola outbreak, but he felt agonisingly unable to share them with Tally. He recognised that they had had the argument and that he had lost. Tally had made up her mind to go and she wasn’t going to change it. Anything he said now would be rightly construed as him applying unfair pressure and this would only create a rift between them at what would be entirely the wrong time.

Tally, for her part, felt that she could not share the details of what she had been learning and doing at the preparatory course for fear of upsetting and alarming Steven even further. She couldn’t even share her fear that much of what he had said at the outset was probably right. Her planned role in DRC was that of organisation and management of medical teams and general resources in a relatively small area, but the dangers inherent in being so near the reality of what the virus from hell could do could not be ignored, especially after days like today when she and others about to travel to DRC had spent hour after hour practicing the donning of protective clothing, boots and visors and checking each other carefully for weak points before going through the rigmarole of disinfecting each other before removing contaminated clothing and starting all over again.

Tally could not help but feel that, in full gear, she and the others looked exactly like illustrations she’d seen of plague doctors of long ago. This led to the uncomfortable thought that, when it came to treating a disease like Ebola, modern medicine could not do much more than these practitioners of long ago. Vaccines could prevent humans from contracting viral diseases in the first place, but once the virus had struck and the disease had developed inside you, you were on your own. Good nursing care from brave, volunteer nurses might just help you stay on the right side of the line between life and death, but there was little medics could do to help.

‘Any side-effects from the vaccination yet?’ asked Steven. Tally had been given the Ebola vaccine three days before.

‘No,’ Tally replied, ‘and what do you mean, “yet”?’ she added, making it into a joke.

‘Sorry, I just thought with it being an experimental vaccine there might be problems.’

‘You’re right, there have been some reports,’ Tally admitted, ‘bur nothing serious, so fingers crossed.’

‘I take it they’ll monitor antibody levels to make sure you have a good level of protection?’ Steven asked.

‘Of course,’ said Tally.

‘Good. So, what’s on the cards for tomorrow?’

‘Oh, more of the same, I guess,’ Tally replied. ‘Lectures on safety, practical classes on the handling of equipment, question and answer sessions with people who were in West Africa during the 2014-16 outbreak, and who can provide useful local knowledge.’

Tally had given a broadly general reply. She had omitted to mention that the main topic for the following day would be the safe disposal of the dead.

‘Have you been given a date?’ Steven asked.

‘To be confirmed,’ said Tally, ‘but next Thursday seems likely.’

Steven nodded.

‘Your turn,’ said Tally, breaking the ensuing silence. ‘How’s your investigation going?’

‘Jean hopes to have some new information for me tomorrow. Hopefully it will help support my working hypothesis that a small group of brilliant people were paid a lot of money by Russian oligarchs living in London to come up with something that annoyed some Chinese people a lot.’

‘But you still have no idea of the nature of what they were doing?’

Steven shook his head. ‘Scott Jamieson is interviewing the widows of the two English victims to see if they might know more about their husbands’ big pay days than they care to admit and John Macmillan is asking the PM for a copy of Special Branch’s notes on the money-laundering estate agent.’

‘That sounds promising,’ said Tally, ‘depending on how many Russians he had on his books and whether all of them bought houses.’

‘Exactly,’ said Steven. ‘The ones who used his talents for putting money through the washing machine but not to buy houses are the exactly the ones I’m looking for.’