‘Perhaps you have some information for me?’ Steven suggested.
C smiled and said, ‘US Intelligence have been making progress with their investigation into world-aid authorities. They have discovered a network of some highly placed individuals who they believe are involved in a very high-level conspiracy, although they don’t know or aren’t giving details about at the moment. Phillipe Lagarde, you know about, I’ll give you the names of some of the others in case you should come across them.’ He handed over a memory stick. ‘It’s encrypted, but I’ve made you the addressee: you can open it with your log-in details. Read and make any notes you want to within thirty minutes. After that it will self-destruct.’
‘Thanks.’
‘When I exchanged a few words with Jane this morning, I mentioned I would be seeing you. She said to tell you, “Macallan”. That’s all, I’ve no idea what she meant...’
‘Our little secret,’ said Steven.
‘Cheers,’ said C, making Steven smile at his choice of word.
With two miniatures of Macallan malt delivered to Jane Sherman along with a warning to wait until her antibiotic course was finished, Steven went back to the Home Office and brought John Macmillan up to speed, telling him that C had been wondering about the apparent sharing of information between himself and Jane Sherman.
‘He knew about the Marburg problem at Porton, so I told him about the capsules after he assured me that the mole at Six had been dealt with. In exchange, he gave me some information about the progress US Intelligence has been making into infiltration of organised crime in world-aid organisations.’ Steven took out the memory stick he’d been given. ‘He gave me some new names, they think there is some big conspiracy currently active.’
‘Endless bad news,’ sighed Macmillan, ‘When it came to good versus evil in the world, I always used to think that good had the upper hand, now I’m not so sure.’
‘Then us good guys will just have to work harder,’ said Steven, noticing that he’d managed to make Macmillan smile.
‘Well,’ said Macmillan, ‘In that capacity, I am off to a meeting to discuss Brexit and its effect on security matters at the Foreign Office.’
‘Good luck with that.’
Steven sat down at his computer and inserted the memory stick C had given him. There were six names on it. Apart from Phillipe Lagarde — who had a little cross next to him — Steven only had eyes for one other and it brought him no comfort at all, Marcus Altman.
He knew that Altman was the WHO manager of the region in DRC where Tally was working and that he was currently checking the region for any last-minute problems before okaying a withdrawal. Tally had mentioned his name from time to time, suggesting that he was one of the more experienced and helpful people she had come across, a long-term employee of WHO, who had worked all over the world, often in dangerous situations, but then he remembered feeling much the same about Phillipe Lagarde without ever having met the man.
Altman’s name had come up again when he had insisted on paying for food and drink for Tally’s get-together for her area volunteers when the outbreak was declared over — although he remembered Tally saying that he had been nervous about any suggestion of throwing a party for fear of adverse press coverage. That might suggest he was aware of heightened scrutiny of aid organisations.
He muttered a series of expletives under his breath as he struggled to understand what was going on. To say that Altman’s name popping up and appearing to forge a connection between his investigation and Tally’s work was unwelcome would be a huge understatement.
Steven tried thinking of any other occasion when Tally had mentioned Altman’s name, but couldn’t come up with anything concrete, then he remembered an official WHO report, which Tally had asked him to check out for her. When he pointed out that she had already seen the report — she had requested it from the WHO manager, planning to check the spread of the Ebola outbreak back in 2014-16, Tally had agreed that that was the case, but she’d returned it and didn’t want to ask for it again. She had been reluctant to discuss her reasons, preferring instead to ask him to check for her. On that occasion she had been seeking reassurance that the vaccine used at the time had not harmed anyone. Was there something else in the report she had been concerned about?
Steven had read through that report too and recalled feeling appalled at the huge numbers of people who had been killed or affected through loss of family and friends. It had been a tragedy on a monumental scale. He hadn’t read the report in minute detail, but he did remember the graph charting the spread of the disease — the one that Tally would have been most interested in. It charted a normal spread until, at a certain point... the disease appeared to pop up everywhere at once. Did that catch Tally’s eye too? In a few hours he could ask her.
In the meantime, he went back to thinking about Phillipe Lagarde, brave, selfless Phillipe, who, according to US Intelligence was involved in high-level crime. Had he conned them all with his apparent care and concern in DRC at the height of an Ebola outbreak, and in Afghanistan when tackling persistent Polio outbreaks... and in Uganda... during an eruption of Marburg disease... Brave Phillipe followed disease around the globe... or did he really? was the thought that nailed Steven to his chair. Was it conceivable that it was the other way around... that disease followed Phillipe around the globe?
The familiar feeling of ice on his spine and a hollow in his stomach appeared as he steeled himself to think things through. He found himself beckoned into a world of absolute horror. The capsules were not one-offs, they were versatile — Steven backed off; what a word to use, but he couldn’t find a suitable alternative, adaptable? multifaceted? These words were kind and complimentary — how could they possible be used to describe a vehicle made to deliver a killer disease of choice? Marburg, Polio, Ebola, Lassa Fever... That’s what Petrov had been doing in the lab at Beer Sheva before sending them off to Lagarde to re-direct at will. The capsules were not designed as, or being used as, any kind of direct weapon, they were implants! Implants to be inserted under the skin of selected groups of people under the pretence of vaccinating them. At any time after that, the implants could be triggered by exposing the carriers to appropriate sound waves, causing the implants to rupture and epidemic disease to break out in the population.
Steven’s imagination was under severe challenge when it came to estimating the amount of damage that could be done in the world. It seemed limitless.
What kind of a sick mind would... Steven had to apply the brakes again; it couldn’t be that simple. This was a very long way from being the action of one sick individual... there were lots of people involved, rich people, clever people, brilliant people, successful people... there was still so much more to this.
Nineteen
There was no need for any more staring at the night skies or the undefined realms of the middle distance while he worked his way through a seemingly endless parade of unconnected puzzles. So much of it now made sense. The high number of Ebola outbreaks in DRC were first in line for scrutiny. The blame could not all be put on diets involving fruit bats, outbreaks were being caused deliberately and the perfect example were the deaths of Tally’s friend, Monique’s family and friends: they hadn’t been vaccinated against Ebola at all, they had been given implants of capsules containing Ebola virus. Three weeks later, Lagarde and his team had come back and triggered them off. They had been testing Petrov’s latest capsules and they had worked ‘perfectly’. All ten people had died, but not before infecting a further twenty-seven people in the village — an entirely artificial outbreak executed with all the cold objectivity of a laboratory experiment.