Steven decided not to go in to the Home Office in the morning; lack of sleep and hovering feelings of depression over what people were prepared to do to each other induced a need in him to seek out signs of normality for a while. He wanted to see people going about their daily business, women pushing prams, men delivering parcels, clerks carrying briefcases, people arguing with traffic wardens — anything to reassure him that people planning to cause thousands of deaths by triggering off epidemics of killer viruses was far from the norm.
The warmth of the sun on his face and dappled light coming through leafy trees helped provide a healing balm that allowed him, after a couple of hours, to start thinking about his investigation again. The fact that the awful people behind it were not lunatics should now be viewed as something in his favour, he decided. As any detective knew, killers without reason or purpose were always the hardest to catch. He was dealing with focused, intelligent people and he was convinced the motive was money.
Steven’s logical start to analysis was interrupted by dark clouds rolling in from the west and the threat of rain becoming imminent. He had no desire to get soaked so he hailed the first cab he saw.
‘Just in time,’ said the driver as the clouds started delivering their load, riveting the roof of the cab. ‘Where to, mate?’
Steven told him and hoped for silence, but it was not to be. The driver offered up a stream of opinions. ‘What d’you think of all this Brexit crap, then?’ he asked.
‘Beyond me,’ Steven replied.
‘The world’s going crazy, mate, it’s just one crazy thing after another. We want to leave Europe; the Scots want to leave us. Why can’t we all just get along?’
‘Mm.’
‘And there’s another thing,’ said the driver as the traffic slowed to a halt. ‘Another one, look at him, a bloody electric car run out of charge.’
Steven saw an embarrassed man attempting to push his lifeless little car with its electric credentials emblazoned on its door, into the side of the road.
‘Good luck with that, mate,’ said the driver. ‘Christ knows where he’ll find a charge point round here... and if he does, it’ll be hours before his car will move. Bloody politicians have got no idea, they just don’t think before they announce their big plans and strut around on the world stage leaving us with no choice — we all gotta be green.’
‘Mm.’
‘What kind of car have you got then?’
‘A Porsche.’
‘Good man!’ exclaimed the driver with a guffaw. ‘What we need is someone like Jeremy Clarkson in parliament if you ask me, talk a bit of sense he would. Here we are, mate,’ he announced as they drew up outside Marlborough Court.
‘Nice talking with you,’ said the driver, acknowledging the tip with a smile and not appreciating that he’d done all of the talking.
Steven slumped down into his chair by the window and embraced the silence. He wasn’t absolutely sure, but he thought he might just have had enough normality for one day. After a few minutes, he acknowledged hunger pangs and got up to search through cupboards and the fridge for something to eat, but had to face up to the fact that he hadn’t bothered to do any shopping for quite a while and didn’t feel like going out. Cheese on toast would do.
Steven returned to his analysis and concentrated on DRC. How could a relatively small group of people make a lot of money out of causing an epidemic — no, successive epidemics — in a poor African country, riven by civil war and disease? The fact that they were a small number ruled out any kind of attempted coup. Even the rebels in Kivu Province seem to have given up on taking over government: robbery with violence was easier.
Mineral extraction, particularly diamonds, had been plagued by competition coming from the setting up of illegal mines in difficult areas of the country and copper and cobalt mining revenues had been subject to the attention of dishonest politicians, although Steven remembered reading in the material he had gathered on DRC when Tally first went there that elections had been promised and investment had cautiously started appearing again.
Steven dug out this material again and after a few minutes was glad he had. He latched on to two hugely interesting facts. Investment in cobalt mining was coming in almost exclusively from China and secondly, DRC was the source of sixty percent of the world’s cobalt.
Steven paused when he felt that there was something really important about this that he wasn’t seeing... but should be... The taxi driver! His tirade about electric vehicles and how politicians were determined to force everyone out of petrol and diesel-driven cars into electric ones. This was happening all over the world in response to growing concerns over climate change. Electric vehicles needed big, powerful batteries and battery production needed... cobalt... lots and lots of cobalt.
Steven felt a surge of excitement. Were Russian crooks creating the conditions for a take-over of cobalt stocks in DRC? He felt sure he was on to something; this was a breakthrough, but not quite the whole story.
He went back to reading about cobalt mining. DRC was the number one producer in the world with sixty percent. Number two was Russia, oh, you beauty, yielding forty percent of the world’s current supplies...
‘And demand for cobalt is about to go through the roof,’ murmured Steven, feeling he was almost there.
Biologist, Samuel Petrov, who had prepared the killer implants, had a father, Dimitry, a hugely wealthy Russian expat living in London whose money came from mining interests all over the Russian Federation. Sergei Malenkov, the Russian mastermind behind the whole affair, who had carried out the specialised recruitment for the enterprise and who had visited Petrov senior in London, was also hugely wealthy — again due to mining interests across the Russian Federation. Steven felt it safe to predict that these two would hold most if not all the rights to Russian cobalt supplies. They had not been mounting an aggressive take-over bid for the DRC rights held mainly by Chinese investors, they had gone a big step further, the Russians had deliberately set out to destroy DRC cobalt mining completely through continually initiating epidemics of killer disease in the country. No wonder the Chinese investors were furious.
Miners from abroad would be deterred from coming to work in DRC and local labour would succumb to disease or the fear of it. The cobalt mines would be rendered inert. Malenkov and Petrov senior along with a few London-based Russian expat investors would step up production and effectively control the world’s supply of cobalt. In the coming era of electric vehicles, America would no longer be the controlling influence of the world’s automotive industry, nor would China... a small cabal of Russians would.
Steven felt the adrenaline surge he’d been running on slip away to be replaced by a feeling of calm, He knew however, that he had little time to savour it: the feeling would soon be replaced by exhaustion, and the need to sleep — but not before he spoke to John Macmillan and asked him to set up the mother of all meetings. It was finally time to unburden himself and tell all.
‘There has been a change of plan,’ said John Macmillan when Steven arrived at the Home Office in the morning, ‘the meeting has been changed from Downing Street to MI6 headquarters.’
Steven, whose hopes for a good night’s sleep had been constantly interrupted by implications of his discovery vying for his attention, could only raise an eyebrow.
‘The PM feels that anything you have to say should be heard in the first instance well away from the notice of the press. COBRA meetings always attract their interest.’