The Beijing conspiracy

CHAPTER 51

T he lights on the thirty-seventh floor of Halliwell Pharmaceuticals pierced the pre-dawn darkness surrounding Stone Mountain and Dekalb County. Dr Richard Halliwell had spent the night in the private wing of his opulent office suite. Simone was used to his odd hours and she was asleep in the main bedroom. Her perfume and the faint smell of sex still hung in the air.

Halliwell had risen at 3 a.m. and his waking thoughts had turned to his first critical experiment in his plan to counter the rising threat of China. In a little under an hour he was expecting the first delivery from the pound man. The security command centre had been warned to expect a pre-dawn arrival of urgently required chemicals for experiments that were ‘in the national interest’.

He smiled a cold, humourless smile. The dossiers on his guards always made interesting reading, and Halliwell was intimately acquainted with the contents of each of them. The personnel in the Halliwell security command centre were well paid and bonuses were tailored to meet individual needs. Some of those needs were way outside the norm and Halliwell, a master at latent blackmail, was very happy to facilitate them. As a result, even mundane and routine events like delivery schedules at Halliwell were never discussed outside the compound and Richard Halliwell was very confident that his security was much tighter than Washington where the beltway leaked like a sieve. His small but ruthlessly efficient team of security guards boasted more than a few ex-special forces and FBI officers among their number, all of whom for one reason or another had fallen foul of their previous employer. In a final hiring interview applicants would be confronted with how much the company knew about them. An unwritten requirement for being offered a job in Halliwell Security was a personal history or lifestyle that no applicant would ever want made public.

Halliwell sat down at his desk, deep in thought, but a siren wailing in the distance prompted him to look at his watch. 3.45 a.m. He unlocked a desk drawer and retrieved a dun-coloured envelope. Meticulous in attending to any detail, he double-checked the total of US$10,000 inside the envelope in used, unsequential $100 bills. This morning there would be two deliveries. The low-life pound man had done well, he thought, as he shrugged on his black leather jacket. Halliwell put the envelope in an inside pocket, walked across to his personal lift and pressed the button. It was programmed to remain stationary at his office when it wasn’t being used; the doors opened immediately. He inserted a key and pressed another recently installed button. Simone knew that it took the lift to a tunnel and the Level 4 laboratories, but Halliwell had told her that it was an area he didn’t want her exposed to, nor did he want the entrance discussed with anyone. Like many other secrets that she was very good at keeping, this one was safe. In Simone Carstair’s world, knowledge was power.

The lift descended swiftly and silently. Halliwell had personally designed the Level 4 complex and the small laboratory to which he was now headed was almost completely isolated from the main hot zone. A steel door, hidden behind a large cabinet, connected Halliwell’s lab to the main complex, but the door was permanently locked, and Richard Halliwell was the only one who knew of its existence. Even the rear loading dock had been carefully designed to blend in, shrouded with thick vegetation and sealed off by a razor-wire fence that looked as if it was part of the main perimeter fence.

Halliwell stepped out of the lift into a small basement. He deactivated the door alarm and punched in the combination to the lock that secured the steel entrance door to the tunnel. He flicked on the tunnel lights, locked the door behind him and strode toward the far end. The tunnel was nearly a kilometre long, and Halliwell’s footsteps echoed eerily on the polished concrete floor. Ten minutes later he punched another combination to unlock the access to the specially built receiving bay. A rush of cold air flooded in as he opened the loading dock. In the distance he could see the headlights of the city pound van as the driver picked his way over the dirt track that skirted the perimeter fence. Richard Halliwell picked up the red phone that connected directly to the security command centre.

‘Certainly, Mr Halliwell,’ was all the officer on duty said, and the heavy steel back gates moved silently and slowly.