The Victoria Vanishes

∨ The Victoria Vanishes ∧

46

Guerrilla Tactics

“We unwittingly opposed a government project,” whispered May, waiting while the nurse finished attending to Mrs Quinten. “What did you expect to happen?”

“I expected a desire to trace culpability,” snapped his partner, looking around at the sleeping hospital ward.

After a boozy night with his emphatic detectives, Land had agreed to try and have the charges against them temporarily suspended on cognisance of their exemplary records, and their willingness to abide by instructions issued from HO Internal Security. It was nothing more than they expected and demanded, but while they were cooling their heels at home for the remainder of the night, scouring Internet reports for any news of the case, they discovered that the managing director of Theseus Research had already been assigned to another post, this time in Atlanta, Georgia.

“There are others who know, you may be assured of that,” said Bryant, burying himself inside his tweed coat. “Containment on this scale never works. I’ve no doubt both the birth mothers and the remaining fosterers would have their credibility destroyed should any choose to come forward, but there are others who must have seen what they saw.”

“Inadmissible hearsay, not empirical data. How thoroughly has all the proof been destroyed? Our one hope now is that Jackie – ah, Mrs Quinten.” May sat forward in his chair and studied her sleepy eyes. “Not in too much pain, I hope?”

“Some bruising, a few scratches, nothing a child couldn’t handle,” the nurse told them. “But she’ll have a very sore throat for a while. You two shouldn’t be here, you know. The other patients aren’t awake yet.” She adjusted the curtains around them and left.

“I’ve been wondering about Harold Masters,” said Jackie Quinten softly. “I thought I understood him. I can’t imagine why any man would have done what he did. He wasn’t interested in making money.”

“It was less about money than pride,” said Bryant. “The museum had reduced his workload and was in the process of letting him go. He’d worked for the MOD before, and knew how far Theseus would go to cover up a mistake, because at the end of the day that’s all it was. Remember those British volunteers who participated in the anti-inflammatory drugs trial conducted by the German pharmaceutical company TeGenero AG? Their heads swelled up and they nearly died. The drug was designed to treat rheumatoid arthritis, leukaemia and multiple sclerosis. The Theseus drug trial was conducted for an even more altruistic reason: to prevent innocents from dying on the streets of London.”

“They showed us the paperwork,” said Jackie Quinten. “All of the babies had been signed over to the state by their mothers. One was an orphan whose parents had died travelling to Britain from Ethiopia. Another was abandoned in a McDonald’s bag by heroin addicts. Everyone I spoke to at Theseus was committed to helping the children. They told us it would just be one safe short-term drug trial. I saw them every day. Harold Masters saw me with the little Ethiopian boy and said, ‘You could always adopt him when he leaves here.’ But I couldn’t, you see. I’d been turned down before, after some trouble with my stepson. And Jocelyn had faced problems with alcoholism. None of us thought we could truly adopt, not for a minute, but we grabbed at the opportunity to look after the babies during the day, and were paid a little extra.

“It was Carol’s baby that got sick first. He started crying and couldn’t stop, until he could barely draw breath. It all happened so quickly, on the third and fourth days of the test. One after the other they went blue – cyanosis, the doctor said – and their little hearts just stopped. They held a single funeral on the Friday, just hours after the last autopsy. A terrible afternoon. It didn’t stop raining, and the graves couldn’t be filled in because of flooding. We were never told what had gone wrong. We were paid our bonuses, reminded of our loyalties to the company, and that was that.

“But I couldn’t stop thinking about my little boy. I had to talk to someone, and so I called Jocelyn. One time we persuaded Carol and Joanne to join us, and shortly after that we began holding regular meetings in different pubs.”

“It got back to Theseus that you had re-formed your group of friends,” said May. “It looks like Masters sold you out for a contract to fix the security leak.”

“But we wouldn’t have gone to the press,” said Jackie miserably. “We just needed the comfort of conversation, some assurance that we weren’t responsible for what had happened. What I don’t understand is, how could they take such drastic action against us?”

“Well, I’m afraid even we can’t tell you that,” said Bryant, rising to leave. “I’ll call on you again.”

“I’ll be going home in a while,” said Jackie. “If you like, I can cook you a meal and help you answer any other questions you might have.”

“Thank you, no.” Bryant smiled sadly. “Our work is not quite finished.”

♦

“She doesn’t understand how anyone can conceive of killing witnesses to what amounted to a humanitarian defence project,” said May as they left University College Hospital, “because she doesn’t know who commissioned it. Masters said it went all the way to the top. I can guess whose signature was on the order to test the anti-toxin. Did you know Theseus is an Anglo-American operation? There’s a chap called Senator Nathan Maddock who fits the bill very nicely. A hard-line right-winger with the ear of both the President and the Prime Minister, the man who tells British Defence what to do. But I don’t think even he would have agreed to act without Masters’s assurance that the remedy was completely untraceable.”

“What level of panic would induce a company used to handling state defence contracts to hire the services of a mental patient?” Bryant wondered as they walked through falling rain toward May’s car. “Didn’t they stop to consider how many things could go wrong in that scenario?”

“You can look at it this way,” said May. “Theseus survives.”

“Only because we’ll never be allowed to go public with the story. We don’t even have a unit anymore.”

“And we can’t go public, Arthur, because nobody there will ever acknowledge what happened, even if any one person had possession of all the facts.”

“They know, John. And we could let them know that we know. We could get in there.”

“No, no, no.” May shook his head in vehemence. “We have nothing left, Arthur. As of this minute, we have no official status. What are you going to do, kick the door down and blast everyone with a shotgun?”

“You just said we have no official status. We’re off the radar.” Bryant was forced to shout in order to compete with the traffic on Euston Road. “This may require guerrilla tactics.”

“Don’t you think you’re a little too old to be thinking about bringing down the government?” asked May.

“I’ve been thinking about it all my life,” said Bryant with a twinkle in his eye. “Might as well go out with a bang.”