By the time the dazed driver had managed to do a body count, he was twelve primates down. A dozen vervet monkeys had escaped into the snowbound streets of this Moscow suburb – cold, hungry and frightened. There was no way the driver could raise the alarm. He’d broken strict quarantine laws. He, Kalenko and Centrium would be in the shit if the cops were alerted.
The monkeys would have to fend for themselves.
The truck happened to have deposited the primates on a road running along the Moskva river. Forming themselves into a makeshift troop, they gathered on the riverbank, huddling together for warmth.
An old woman was hurrying along the riverside. She spied the monkeys and, fearing she was seeing things, started to run. As she skidded on the icy surface and tumbled, the fresh bread stuffed in her shopping bag was strewn across the path. The famished monkeys were upon it in a flash. The woman – dazed and confused – tried to beat them off with her gloved hands.
A vervet snarled. The woman didn’t heed the warning. It struck with its canines, ripping through her gloves and raking a bloodied track across the upper surface of her hand. The woman screamed, monkey saliva mixed with the thick red blood dripping from her wound.
At a cry from the troop’s self-proclaimed leader, the vervets grabbed what bread they could and set off into the busy night – running, climbing and hunting for more food.
A few hundred yards along the river, an after-school club was coming to an end. Moscow kids were learning Sambo, a Soviet-era martial art originally perfected by the KGB but now increasingly popular with the mainstream.
The monkeys were drawn to the noise and the warmth. After a moment’s hesitation, the leader took the troop through an open window. A blow heater propelled currents of hot air into the hall, where the youths were busy with their final bouts of the evening.
One of the monkeys sneezed. Tiny droplets were propelled into the atmosphere, and were wafted with the heat into the hall. Sweaty, panting fighters breathed hard, gasping for air.
Across a city of some eleven million unsuspecting souls, the evil was spreading.
70
Peter Miles stood up to speak. Bearing in mind the intense pressure they were all under, he appeared remarkably calm. Right now, Jaeger wasn’t feeling that way at all. The challenge was to drive from his mind that terrible image of his wife and child – DADDY – HELP US – so that he could focus on what was coming.
At least this time he had gleaned something potentially useful from the image; something that might help him track down his family and their captors.
‘Welcome, everyone,’ Miles began. ‘And especially a returning William Jaeger and Irina Narov. There are several new faces in the room. Rest assured, all are trusted members of our network. I will introduce them as we go, and feel free to fire in any questions.’
He spent a few minutes summarising Jaeger and Narov’s discoveries, both at the Katavi Reserve and in the Nairobi slums, before reaching the crux of the matter.
‘Falk Konig revealed that his father, Hank Kammler, runs a highly secretive primate export business – Katavi Reserve Primates – from an island off the coast of East Africa. The primates are air-freighted around the world for medical research purposes. The level of secrecy surrounding this island operation is unprecedented.
‘So, how likely is it that this monkey export facility doubles as Kammler’s bio-warfare lab? Highly likely, as it happens. During the war, Kurt Blome – the godfather of the Gottvirus – set up his germ warfare testing facility off Germany’s Baltic coast, on the island of Riems. Reason being, you can test a pathogen on an island with a reasonable likelihood that it won’t escape. In short, an island is the perfect isolated incubator.’
‘But we still don’t know what Kammler intends to do with the virus,’ a voice cut in. It was Hiro Kamishi, as ever the voice of measured reason.
‘We don’t,’ Miles confirmed. ‘But with the Gottvirus in Kammler’s hands, we have the architect of a conspiracy to bring back Hitler’s Reich possessing the world’s most fearful weapon. That alone is an utterly terrifying scenario, regardless of what exact use he intends to make of it.’
‘Do we have any better idea what the Gottvirus is?’ a voice cut in. It was Joe James. ‘Where it came from? How to stop it?’
Miles shook his head. ‘Unfortunately not. From all our research, there is no record anywhere of it ever having existed. Officially, the two SS officers who discovered it – Lieutenants Herman Wirth and Otto Rahn – are both recorded as deceased due to “death by misadventure”. According to official records, the pair went hiking in the German Alps, got lost and froze to death in the snow. Yet by Blome’s own account, those two men were the discoverers of the Gottvirus, and finding it killed them. In short, the Nazis had the Gottvirus purged from all official records.’
‘So, the million-dollar question,’ Jaeger ventured. ‘Where is Kammler’s island? I understand we may have a fix on it?’
‘You don’t need a great deal of land for this kind of work,’ Miles replied, by way of an answer. ‘Working on the basis of a landmass the size of Riems, there are approximately a thousand possible candidates off the coast of East Africa – which did make finding it something of a challenge. That is, until…’
He cast around his audience until his gaze came to rest upon one distinctive individual. ‘At this stage I’ll hand over to Jules Holland. He is his own best introduction.’
A dishevelled figure shuffled forwards. Overweight, scruffily dressed and with his greying hair tied back in a straggly ponytail, he looked somewhat out of place in the former nuclear command bunker of the Soviet Union.
He turned to face the audience and smiled his snaggle-toothed smile. ‘Jules Holland, but to all who know me well, the Ratcatcher. The Rat for short. Computer hacker, working for the good guys. Mostly. Quite an effective one too, if I might say so. And usually rather expensive.
‘It’s via Will Jaeger’s good offices that I’m here.’ He gave a slight bow. ‘And I must say, I’m very glad to be of service.’
The Rat glanced at Peter Miles. ‘This gentleman gave me the gen. Not a lot to go on: find me an island of anything more than postage-stamp size where this Nazi lunatic may have sited his germ warfare laboratory.’ He paused. ‘I’ve had easier briefs. Took a bit of lateral thinking. Whether or not it’s a germ warfare lab, the one thing we do know is that it’s a monkey export facility. And that is what cracked it. The monkeys were the key.’
Holland brushed back his lank hair, wisps of which were falling free. ‘The monkeys are captured in and around the Katavi Reserve, and flown from there to the island. Now, every flight leaves a trace. Numerous flights leave numerous traces. So I… erm… paid an unauthorised visit to the Tanzanian Air Traffic Control computer. It proved most accommodating.
‘I found three dozen KRP flights of interest over the past few years, all to the same location.’ He paused. ‘Around one hundred miles off the coast of Tanzania lies Mafia Island. Yes, “Mafia” as in the Sicilian bad guys. Mafia Island is a popular high-end tourist resort. It is part of an island chain; an archipelago. On the far southern end of that chain lies tiny, isolated Little Mafia Island.
‘Until two decades or so, Little Mafia was uninhabited. The only visitors were the local fishermen, who stopped there to repair their wooden boats. It is heavily forested – jungle, obviously – but it has no natural water source, so no one could afford to stay for long.