The Secret

EIGHTEEN

Steven hadn’t seen that coming. When he could think clearly again his initial thought was to put Khan at the top of the suspect list for the death of Tom North, but he reined in his imagination. It just wasn’t possible to believe that the combined intelligence services of the UK, the US, France and Pakistan had colluded in the murders of two French medics and a prominent English scientist. That’s what it looked like, but there had to be another explanation. Please God there was.

Steven pondered his next move with heightened feelings of apprehension. He’d been sure he’d identified the bad guys and was making progress, but Khan's coming to London after leaving Paris and the possibility — which still remained — of his having murdered Tom North was throwing him. He understood only too well that the less you knew or understood about your enemy the more vulnerable you became. It was an uncomfortable feeling. One thing was for sure, Khan’s presence in London was enough to make him call a code red. He went back through to see Macmillan, who acceded to the request without question after hearing what Steven had learned from Le Grice.

The code red status entitled him not only to be armed but to have on call a range of other operational back-up services ranging from credit cards to forensic laboratory expertise. A number of consultants in a wide range of specialties under Home Office retainers could be called upon to give opinions. There would be a dedicated duty officer at the end of a phone twenty-four hours a day ready to deal with his every request without question and, not least, he would have Home Office authority to call on police assistance whenever and wherever he felt the need. Under normal conditions a request could be made for police assistance; under code red UK police forces were obliged to comply. As always, Steven hoped that he would not have to use or call on any of these things but it was a comfort to know they were there.

He paid a visit to the armourer and left with a Glock 23 pistol nestling in a shoulder holster under his left arm and a supply of .40 ammunition in his briefcase. He did so with a heavy heart. Walking the streets of London knowing he was armed always seemed like a betrayal of everything he believed in. He took great pride in living in a country where the police didn’t carry guns; it suggested a degree of civilisation that set the UK apart.

There was also the question of how Tally would see it. His assertions about the largely routine nature of his investigations now seemed more like lies than the reassurances they were meant to be. He decided not to go back to the Home Office, returning instead to Marlborough Court where he got out the relevant files again and started looking for inspiration.

He took a sheet of A4 paper from the paper tray of his printer in the corner of the room and laid it on the table next to the files. ‘Tabula rasa,’ he murmured. ‘A clean sheet… a new beginning.’ He wrote the word Afghanistan at the top and dropped a vertical line to where he added Prague.

He put Simone and Aline at the head of the list: they had set the ball rolling. Simone felt something had gone badly wrong with the vaccination effort against polio in north west Pakistan and wanted to make her fears public. She’d been denied the chance in Prague by, among others, her own bosses, who knew about the presence of fake aid teams but had conspired to keep quiet because of the CIA’s apology and a promise to put much more in the way of aid into the region.

All this, however, was political: it wasn’t a reason for anyone to murder Simone and Aline, so there was something else, something to do with people falling sick in a remote Afghan village and blood samples that ended up in Porton Down.

A number of big players in the world of science and medicine had met in the Czech Republic to discuss their failure to wipe out polio in Pakistan’s north-west frontier region. He wrote the names of these players next to Prague. Their involvement in the proceedings ended here. They had all agreed to keep quiet about the CIA’s action in the belief that they were preventing a backlash against aid teams in general. It was understandable. These people had to live in the real world and act with pragmatism. To them, Simone would have been seen as a nuisance but nothing more. To others, she must have constituted a real threat.

Steven drew a short line down from Prague and pencilled in Bill Andrews and Ranjit Khan, adding in brackets after their names CIA and Pakistani intelligence respectively. They had a different reason for wanting to keep Simone quiet. She either knew something… or possessed something that they wanted? This was a new thought and one inspired by what had happened to Tom North. Had he been killed because Andrews and Khan had failed to get what they were looking for from Simone or Aline?

Steven drew a line down from Prague to Paris and wrote in Aline’s name before moving on down to London. The only link between Simone and London was the series of blood samples she’d taken in the village and sent there. She’d posted them to the North lab but they had been redirected to Porton Down by Dan Hausman. Steven pencilled Fort Detrick, CIA and Reeman Losch against Hausman's name before drawing a line that looped out back up to Prague and the delegate attending from Porton, Neville Henson.

He took a moment before he wrote Ranjit Khan’s name against London. Why had Khan come to London? It couldn’t have been to stop the blood samples going anywhere for analysis: it was too late for that, and why would he need to do it anyway? Hausman, who was almost certainly CIA, was already in the North lab and had been able to divert them away from the diagnostic investigation that Simone had requested. He’d simply passed them on to Henson at Porton. When questioned, his explanation for redirecting the samples had been that they were obliged to forward samples from patients with undiagnosed conditions to a lab equipped to do diagnostic work. That was true, but he’d lied about where he’d actually sent them.

Tom North’s torture and murder was still a puzzle, in terms of both who had done it and why. What did the killer want from him? He might have twigged what Hausman was involved in and threatened to expose him, or perhaps he had known nothing of what was going on in Afghanistan but had stumbled across something that had made him suspicious.… but what was that something? And why the torture element?

Steven acknowledged for the first time that he had been underestimating Hausman’s role in all of this. He’d been so pleased to get Jean’s findings linking him with Fort Detrick and the CIA that he hadn’t given much thought to what he might actually be doing in the North lab in the first place. He’d just been thinking of him as the person who’d sent on some blood samples to Porton and lied about it. There had to be more to Hausman than that. The fact that he had sent them to a named individual at Porton suggested a personal connection which in turn suggested a possible link between the North lab and Fort Detrick and Porton and maybe even CDC Atlanta, considering the presence of one of their people at the Prague meeting.

Although Hausman had not volunteered much about what he was working on when Tom North had introduced them on his first visit to the lab, Steven remembered that North had told him that the American was working on post-polio syndrome, the puzzling condition developed in later years by some people who’d recovered from the disease in earlier life. Was that true? Or was it a cover for some giant conspiracy involving germ warfare labs on both sides of the Atlantic?

Steven turned his attention to Bill Andrews, the CIA-backed head of charity funding for aid teams in Afghanistan and Ranjit Khan’s suspected accomplice in the murder of Simone. According to what he’d learned from people from WHO and Médecins Sans Frontières, Andrews was about to preside over a huge new injection of funds into the region — many more aid teams with American funding were going to appear on the ground. Was this really just conscience money from the CIA or was there something else behind it?

Steven had a eureka moment. He suddenly had a frightening vision of what was going on. A new biological weapon had been devised. Scientists at Porton Down, Fort Detrick and at least Hausman in the North lab had been involved in its development and MI6, the CIA and probably French and Pakistani intelligence were, to varying extents, in the know. The fact that a fake aid team had been discovered helping in the hunt for Bin Laden was small beer and had been used as a useful diversion.

There were other fake teams in the area and about to be a lot more. They weren’t offering people protection; they were using the inhabitants of a remote, lawless region as experimental animals. That’s why people were sick in the village that Simone and her team had stumbled across. They had been deliberately infected with something but… they were sick, not dead, Steven reminded himself. His hypothesis came to a grinding, pen-tapping halt.

He couldn’t see a way round the problem. A few minutes ago he’d felt sure he’d cracked the mystery, but now… In the terrifying world of biological weaponry where tales of ‘weaponised’ anthrax and genetically altered smallpox conjured up visions of hell on earth with city streets filled with the dead and the dying, a weapon that made people sick didn’t seem to rate. Was he missing something or was he simply wrong?

He wasn’t prepared to abandon his line of thought just yet but he needed time — time without anyone rocking the boat was his next panic-driven thought He suddenly saw Macmillan’s plan to rattle cages in Whitehall by dropping Hausman’s name and background into a conversation with the director of MI5 as counter-productive in the extreme and hurriedly called the Home Office.

‘I’m sorry, he’s gone to lunch, Steven,’ said Jean Roberts.

Steven closed his eyes. That wasn’t what he wanted to hear. ‘How long ago did he leave?’

‘About ten minutes. He’s lunching at his club. He was walking over.’

Steven knew the walk across Green Park well enough: it took about ten minutes. ‘Jean, can you use his emergency pager. Tell him not to mention Hausman to the director.’

‘Not to mention Hausman… Consider it done.’

Steven smiled. Jean Roberts was never anything other than the epitome of efficiency. She confirmed a few minutes later that the message had been received and understood.

The relief Steven felt at having stopped Macmillan in time soon gave way to thoughts about what an alternative strategy might be. A more precise, clinical approach was called for but there seemed to be too many imponderables for that. He still felt that some sort of biological agent, developed in UK or US research labs, was key to the whole affair, but there was no obvious way of getting information about it. The important players were all scientists in top secret labs or members of the intelligence community — tough nuts to crack, but tough didn’t necessarily mean impossible.

There was no question of getting anything out of anyone at Porton, one of the most secretive labs on earth, but Dan Hausman didn’t work at Porton, he worked in a university lab, many of which were as secure as garden huts. He was CIA so it wouldn’t be possible to scare him into talking, especially as there was nothing to threaten him with. On the other hand, if he had been working on the agent during his time in the North lab there should be some record of it — notes, lab books, records, computer files — maybe not lying around but somewhere in the building.

Now that Steven had managed to stop Macmillan Hausman would have no reason to believe that he was the subject of any kind of investigation. That was the way it should stay for the moment, at least until Steven was sure that the risks involved in making an unauthorised entry into the North lab could be justified.

It still worried him that the proposed agent did not appear to be lethal and that he might be barking up the wrong tree, but considering the matter further brought to mind a conversation he’d had some years before with an expert on germ warfare. This particular professor had maintained that the time for the continual development of more and more lethal weapons had passed; there was a surfeit of them and the problem of infecting your own troops and population was still insurmountable. What was needed, the professor had asserted, were weapons that debilitated the enemy but could be reversed at a later stage. That way, military success could be achieved without lasting damage to property or personnel. Was this what he was dealing with here, the Holy Grail of bio-weaponry? It was something to bear in mind.

Steven turned his attention to Ranjit Khan but didn’t get far. Khan was Pakistani intelligence and a killer and that was about it, apart from the highly relevant fact that he was currently here in London and was responsible for Steven's carrying the weapon sitting in the shoulder holster he’d hung over the corner of the chair opposite.

Bill Andrews, Khan’s accomplice in the killing of Simone, was a different matter. He was American, CIA, and, with Khan, had probably been responsible for the introduction of fake teams in the first place. He was now about to use vastly increased funding to send in even more ‘aid teams’ to the region, ostensibly to step up the drive to eradicate polio but in reality — if Steven was right — to continue experiments with a new bio-weapon.

Steven remembered his earlier intention to ask Andrews about the dropped contact lens in the gallery of the Strahov library but that was before Jean had discovered his CIA connection and exposed his lies about not knowing Khan and his whereabouts after the Prague meeting. It occurred to Steven that it might be an idea to take a step backwards and do just that — call up Andrews and ask about the contact lens. He had nothing to lose. It would reveal that he was still investigating Simone’s death but nothing more than that and it might be interesting to hear what Andrews had to say. It might even tell him which one of the two had actually carried out the killing, not that they weren’t both equally guilty in his eyes.