‘Get in,’ he said. ‘I want to talk to you.’
He drove for a good five minutes before saying anything. ‘Something is going on here, Styles. Something I can’t get my head round. Never seen anything like it all the time I’ve been on the force. So, tell me straight: what’s going on?’
‘Beats me.’
‘Cut the crap. Let’s start with you.’
‘Me?’ said Styles. ‘I don’t get it. What do you mean?’
‘Do you think I’m going senile too? I’ve been in this business far too long to have the wool pulled over my eyes. You get transferred to my unit out of the blue from the Met. No real reason given. I say I don’t want you, Maloney tells me I’ve got to have you. Crucial to the case, he says. Still don’t need you, I say. Don’t argue, I’m told.’
Styles’ fingers drummed on his thigh and he watched the world shoot by in a blur. ‘It’s only forty miles an hour speed limit here, sir,’ he observed.
‘So I take you,’ he resumed, pressing his foot harder on the accelerator. ‘And I soon sniff out that this isn’t your usual beat. Little things stand out, irritating little things that get me wondering. I even get one of my men coming up to me to say something similar. So, I says to myself, who is it exactly that I have here? Why is he here? Well I still have contacts in the Met so I did a little digging. Got a few people to pass on what they knew.’
‘Which, of course, is strictly illegal’ he said. ‘So what did they know?’
‘Surprise, surprise, what do I find? You never really came from the Met, did you? OK, Styles, spill the beans once and for all, who are you, where are you from, and what the fuck is going on here?’
‘Maybe you’d best pull over,’ he said. ‘You’re going to kill someone if you don’t cool down.’
‘Too fucking right I am!’ he thundered, then sighed, indicated and pulled over to the side of the road. Someone honked belligerently behind him and he threw up a middle finger. ‘Right, start talking, because there’s some weird shit going down here that I’m not party to.’ He killed the engine, sat back and folded his arms.
Styles closed his eyes briefly, sucked in a calming breath. ‘You’re right; I’m not with the Met. I’m with Special Operations; Counter Terrorism Command.’
‘SO15? Bollocks!’ scoffed Stafford.
‘Straight up,’ said Styles. He reached into his pocket, whipped out ID which he handed to Stafford, who read it, shaking his head.
‘What the fuck has this case got to do with you guys?’ He thought about it. ‘Maloney’s obviously in on this. I see lots of things starting to fall into place. Right, Nobby, tell me the rest.’
‘I’d have to kill you if I did,’ he said lightly.
‘I’ll kill you if you don’t, you little tosser. The fact nobody tells me any of this really fucks me off!’
‘Understandable,’ Styles agreed with a nod. ‘But all done for good reason.’
‘And the good reason being?’
‘We got wind of a major terrorist threat to mainland UK about a year ago. That threat level has since been raised to substantial.’
‘An attack is a strong possibility…’ said Stafford.
‘In the jargon, yes.’
‘A threat from whom, from where?’
‘MI6 have been receiving reports of a group, going under the guise of the Church of Everlasting Bliss. Doradus appears to be the name of its spiritual leader.’
‘The same Doradus that Carl Wood was fearful of?’
‘The very same.’
‘So you think they murdered him? Why?’
‘What the doctor who pronounced Wood dead from a heart attack didn’t notice was the additional injection puncture wound. Didn’t notice because the man had Type 1 diabetes who injected insulin daily. Wood had quite simply been injected with a dose of a chemical that was most likely digithiamine dianthisyde that stopped his heart. A substance very effective and almost impossible to detect. It’s a favourite of theirs. Yes, most definitely he was murdered.’
‘Let me guess, because he obviously knew too much about them and they didn’t want it broadcasting. You reckon they silenced him because they knew he made contact with us, had arranged a meeting?’ Styles nodded emphatically. ‘How’d they know about the meeting?’
‘Trust me, they know. Walls have ears and all that. You don’t know who you can trust. I believe it was the same too for the other professor, Baxter. What he’d been about to publish — A Return to Eden — was something that apparently lifted the veil on the hitherto secret existence of the Church and their activities. How he came across the details we’ll never know, but he paid with his life. It wasn’t suicide, I can say that much.’
‘So what exactly is this Church?’ Stafford asked. ‘Never heard of it.’
‘Hardly surprising. But its operations are global and it has some loose affiliation with more prominent, established terrorist factions, operating mainly, as far as we can tell, from roving cells in the Middle East and in Europe. But Intel’s been patchy to say the least. Trying to pin it down has been hampered by the fact that it seems to have all the right friends in all the right places. Trails go stone cold, barriers go up, and just as we think we have got a bite the line goes slack, or snaps altogether. However, in the last six months we uncovered a plan to use more extreme terrorist measures…’
‘Planes into buildings extreme?’
Styles looked at him thoughtfully and shook his head. ‘Similar in that it’s driven by religious extremism, but different approach. The threat’s biological, we think.’
‘What type of biological?’
‘Let’s say a very nasty kind. In truth we’re still unsure. It could all be a smokescreen to hide something else. Our sources have been flashing red lights for quite a while, but it’s been all but impossible to pin down where or when, and what’s more, why. Even the most extreme of terrorist organisations have a defined goal, a reason, no matter how twisted. But with the Church — or CEB, as we call it in the trade — it’s different. It’s almost as though it’s killing for killing’s sake. Mass killing being the operative words here. What’s driving the killing isn’t clear. But if there really is a genuine biological threat to the UK, then it could be murder on a scale never seen before. Forget world wars; this could produce the same body count in a matter of weeks, not years. Then there’s the organisation’s involvement with the Chinese. The country has been buying up or heavily investing in resource rights the world over — water, oil, gas, copper, iron — particularly in third world and developing countries. In part they say it’s to work with these countries, aid development, but cynics would say it’s to get a foothold in acquiring the resources that at some time in the not too distant future will become precious to every country the world over. They’d have immense control. Now what we want to know is how could CEB benefit from all this? Why are they enmeshed with the Chinese? One theory is that, at its most extreme, the CEB orthodoxy seeks to wipe out every person on the entire planet except for a chosen few, return it to a pre-industrial, pre-Fall, Eden-like state. Think about it; if you have access to most of the planet’s valuable resources — resources that made and mark out the modern world they so despise and want to bring to its knees — you can ensure no one uses it again. Destroy it, pollute it, whatever. There would be no returning to the modern world as we know it.’
‘That’s sheer bloody lunacy!’
‘In their minds it’s entirely logical. That’s a worse-case scenario, of course.’
Stafford grunted. ‘Why is it I’m not reassured? OK, so the murdered Polish woman, where does she fit into all this?’
‘It’s not necessarily about the woman; it’s the symbol. It’s mediaeval in origin and has been strongly associated with CEB. We were routinely monitoring terrorist activity in Pakistan when video surveillance threw up the same symbol painted onto a wall that also turns up out of the blue in a Manchester flat. So naturally we make a connection. Given that we’re already monitoring embryonic cells based in Manchester it made sense to have someone inside, on the case. For your information Maloney doesn’t know who I am. His actions today, the way the case is being closed down is highly suspicious, don’t you think? Part of the reason I’m here.’