Bad Intentions Page 17

  The Chairman smiled indulgently at his PR man. 'I think our colleagues need a little more explanation,' he said.

  Wheeler swept a hand through what remained of his hair. 'The media love a good story. That is the key to dealing with the press. Journalists are often smart and dedicated people, but spin a good yam and they are absolute suckers. They will believe anything.'

  'So we spin a good yam?' said Fuller.

  'Absolutely, my dear,' replied Wheeler. 'I have arranged for a close contact of mine at the Ministry of Defence press office to leak some papers to a chap from the Observer, probably later on today. For some strange reason any leak from the MoD is automatically believed by the chaps in the media, and reprinted more or less verbatim. Never seems to occur to them that it might not be true.' Wheeler opened up his briefcase and pulled out a sheaf of papers. He gave one set to the Chairman and deposited the rest on the coffee-table. 'I think we should all look through this before I press the button.'

  The Chairman took a sip of his drink and sat down before casting his eyes down at the document. He read slowly, drinking in the words, and a thin smile started to spread over his lips as he neared the end. Carefully, he put the document down. 'Is it credible?' he asked.

  'The police have already bought it,' said Wheeler. 'We have already prepared documents, routed through the Bangkok office, showing Borrodin was first involved in counterfeiting there. We have plenty of evidence here in the UK of him handing over formulae, and, of course, infiltrating fake drugs into our warehouse. His fingerprints are everywhere.'

  'And Ling?'

  'We have prepared evidence that the real Tara Ling was assassinated about eight months ago by the racketeers, and replaced with this impostor, who works for them. For example, the DNA records taken of all employees at the National Institutes have been changed. That should prove pretty conclusively that she is not who she says she is.'

  Finer looked doubtful. 'We need actual fingerprints.'

  Wheeler fished inside his case, pulling out a photograph. He handed a copy to the Chairman, who passed it on to the other people in the room. It showed a man lying face in the dirt, blood trickling from his head. Shane took the picture, gazed down at it, and allowed a smile to spread across his lips.

  'I have already seen this,' said the Chairman.

  'Look closely,' replied Wheeler. 'You see something is in his breast pocket.'

  Shane passed the picture back, and the Chairman squinted, trying to make out the image. 'Just,' he replied.

  'The picture, of course, can be blown up,' continued Wheeler. He looked again inside his case, pulling out a negative, this time eight inches by ten. He passed it across to the Chairman. The negative had been enlarged twenty times, showing just the area around his breast pocket. This time the image was quite clear. Sticking from his pocket was a pair of documents, and a photo graph. The picture was instantly recognisable to everyone in the room. Same long black hair, same eyes, same features; Tara Ling.

  'The originals are being held by the Thai police, who would of course be happy to co-operate with the authorities here in Britain,' continued Wheeler. 'The documentation suggests the dead man was investigating on behalf of the World Pharmaceuticals Forum, when he discovered the links between the counterfeiters and the spread of Ator. He was looking for Miss Ling, but he knew too much, and was executed by the counterfeiters. It is plausible evidence.'

  'Quite so,' said the Chairman. 'And this story can be in the papers on Sunday?'

  'Certainly sir,' replied Wheeler. 'In the Observer on Sunday morning, followed up by the TV and radio people all day, and it will be in all the papers on Monday morning. We will have our PR agency working on it. We haven't told them the truth, of course. They don't expect it.'

  'And the spin on the bid is prepared?' asked the Chairman.

  'We will reveal nothing that contradicts the case for taking over Ocher,' replied Wheeler. 'The counterfeiting will be portrayed as a minor problem, which the excellence of our internal controls has uncovered. I think we can make that a plus-point for the company. And the revelations about the Ator virus will only improve our case for creating an organisation large enough to bring the vaccine to the market as rapidly as possible.'

  'I see just one problem,' said Shane.

  The three other people in the room turned to face him. 'Which is?' said the Chairman.

  'Borrodin and Ling turn up to deny everything,' he stated bluntly.

  The Chairman shook his head. 'I think we know how to cover that eventuality,' he whispered.

  'There is something more to be done?' asked Fuller.

  'Quite so,' replied the Chairman. 'The police are looking for them. So too are our friends at the Ministry. We have evidence against them, of course. All of you have done your work very well. But although it will be enough to explain the situation away, it might not be enough to survive a full-blown trial. Those things are very public. People have rights. Disclosure and so on. Also, I don't think our friends in government can be relied upon to support us all the way through such a thing. When the heat is turned up those people have a tendency to get out of the kitchen.' Shane smiled. 'He wants us to kill them. The police will do that if necessary, but I wouldn't guarantee their boys can shoot straight. And the Ministry can't give an explicit order to shoot to kill. Too risky.'

  'Quite so,' whispered the Chairman. 'I think that would be better for all of us, don't you. If this matter were handled primarily by company staff. People we can rely on.'

  Shane squeezed his hands together. 'It only takes a couple of seconds.'

  The Chairman turned away from his audience, his expression downcast. 'It is time to wipe the slate absolutely clean,' he said.

  SIXTEEN

  Jack sat back on the bed and buried his face in his hands. He was tired and confused. And the story Tara had just outlined to him was frightening and disturbing. He needed to rest his mind for a moment and rearrange his thoughts.

  He had suspected, of course. Tara had already aired her theories, and he had felt in his heart that she might well be right. But now it all appeared inevitable; a conspiracy that was unfolding like clockwork before them. There could be no doubt.

  For the first time, everything became very clear to Jack. 'We must make them pay,' he said firmly.

  Tara shook her head. 'Perhaps,' she replied. 'But we must look after ourselves as well.'

  After breakfast, they had gone back up to the hotel room. They had given false names at the desk, and Jack figured they could at least stay there until check-out time with little risk of detection or of questions being asked. They needed somewhere they could talk. Somewhere they could be sure their conversation would not be overheard.

  Jack lay back on the bed, staring up at the ceiling, and at the single light bulb that shone dimly from the centre of the room. 'How much do we know?' he asked.

  'Too much,' answered Tara. 'And not enough.'

  Jack smiled. She was right, of course, he realised. 'Start at the beginning,' he said. 'Tell me everything.'

  'It was an older doctor who started me on what I now realise was the right path,' Tara began. 'His name was Samuel Toboto, a Nigerian, who had been working for years in different medical camps around the African continent. He was almost sixty, with white hair, and his long exposure to every disease on the continent appeared to have left him immune to every virus and bacteria it could throw at him. It was he who sat with me through David's last hours, trying to coax some water into his body and comforting me as his life slipped away. Some hours later, having given me most of the rum that he always carried in a flask in his jacket pocket, he said something that has remained with me ever since. He said that it looked to him as if David had died of leprosy.'

  Tara hesitated, running her fingers through her hair before continuing. 'I objected, of course. Leprosy takes years and years to develop, incubating in the body, and only becoming visible once it reaches its final stages. Even then, it would be still more years before the patient would
die. Dr Toboto agreed. It was certainly nothing like any of the cases of leprosy he had treated before. Even so, the symptoms seemed eerily reminiscent of what was still one of the most feared diseases on the continent. It was just a hunch he had.'

  Tara explained how she had thrown herself into her studies, as a way of escaping her grief. Soon afterwards she had joined the National Institutes. She specialised in viruses. In particular, she specialised in leprosy. 'There were already plenty of people around the world researching Ator,' she said sadly. 'Most were treating it as an entirely new disease, or else as some kind of mutation. I was treating it as a form of leprosy.'

  'You knew all along?' asked Jack.

  'That the disease was related to leprosy, yes,' replied Tara. 'Not that Kizog had anything else to do with it. But that is why I was so intrigued when Dr Scott said the company believed Ator was related to leprosy. I thought they might be taking the same path as me, and exploring whether it was some sort of mutation.' There were two main forms of leprosy, Tara explained carefully; lepromatous and tuberculoid. Because of the symptoms she had observed in David, she assumed that it was tuberculoid that she needed to investigate, and it was that which consumed her time for the next few years. Leprosy is a cunning and elusive condition, she explained. Relatively little is known about the transmission mechanism, except that it can be communicated through both skin contact with the broken sores that appear on a leper's body and inhalation; it is breathed out through the nose. In both cases prolonged contact is usually needed for the virus to be transmitted from one person to the next.

  The irony of leprosy, she went on, is that it is the body's re action rather than the virus itself which causes the damage. After invading the body, the virus seeps into the victim's bloodstream. Body cells rush into the infected area in an attempt to seal it. This intense cellular reaction soon makes itself visible in a hardening of the skin surface above the infected area; underneath the tissues, sweat glands and nerve fibrils are thickened by the rush of cells. On the skin, a round, dry spot appears where the victim has no sense of heat, cold or touch; the senses are all gone. The cellular reaction then continues along the main trunk of the nerve, strangling it, causing a loss of all power in the infected area, since the brain can no longer transmit any signals through the nerve. Blood can no longer circulate through the area. In time, it will simply wither and die, like a dead branch on a tree, and one day it will just fall off. All of these reactions are caused by the ultimately futile attempt by the body to defend itself against the infection.

  Tara finished the science lesson. She walked across the hotel room, and towards the sports bag she had brought with her. It had no clothes in it. Just papers. 'I was planning to show you these when I came over,' she explained.

  Jack glanced down at the sheaves of photocopied papers. There were endless series of small scribbled notes and scientific equations. It made no sense to him, but he knew at once what they were. The private research papers of Josef Zmitt. 'Do they get us any further?' Jack asked.

  'Much,' Tara replied. She started to explain. The private papers had been in a terrible mess and it had taken her several days just to sort them out. There could be little doubt that leprosy had the potential at least to be a very effective battlefield weapon. The key was in its effectiveness on the nerve system. By inducing paralysis it had the ability to render men unfit for any form of combat very quickly. And unlike nerve gases it did not have be delivered by rocket or other risky means of delivery. A handful of special forces working behind enemy lines could trigger the virus. Once planted it would do all the work needed by natural processes. After the button was pressed, the rest went like clockwork.

  There were two flaws. One was that leprosy worked very slowly. The time it took to damage the body was too long for any kind of military effectiveness. And the transmission mechanism was too weak. Tara started looking through the paperwork. She reached a page she wanted and pointed at a list of formulae. It meant nothing to Jack. Here, she said, is the molecular structure of tuberculoid leprosy. She turned the pages until she reached the next page she wanted. When she found it she pointed at the new formula. 'He found a way to speed it up,' she said.

  'He added something to the virus?' asked Jack.

  Tara shook her head. 'He subtracted from it. It's quite brilliant really.'

  Jack was still confused. Tara explained that a virus is a living creature, and its instinct is to stay alive as long as possible. The last thing it wants to do is kill off the host body. As it evolved, probably thousands of years ago, it got slower and slower. That was the best way to stay alive as long as possible. Here, she said, pointing to another page, is the identification of the enzyme that governs the rate of replication; the slice of genetic code that dictates when and why it reproduces. It is programmed to move very slowly. As far as Tara knew that was the first time anyone had identified that enzyme; it was a fantastically advanced piece of research for the late sixties, less than a decade after the discovery of genetic code. 'If you could extract this one enzyme then you would have a virus that replicated itself at a dramatic rate, doubling itself at roughly twenty-four-hour intervals. The victim would not survive more than a few days.'

  'Zmitt took it out?' Jack asked.

  Tara shook her head. Not quite, she said. 'The technology of genetic engineering was still very primitive in those days; nothing like as advanced as it became during the eighties. Removing an enzyme is technically much simpler than inserting one, which must have been why Zmitt hit upon the route of subtraction from an already deadly virus rather than creating a new virus from scratch. It was the only scientifically feasible technique to use at the time. But all he had done so far was map out the task.' Tara turned a few more pages. The second problem with leprosy was the slow rate of transmission. To work as an effective weapon it would have to be speeded up. Zmitt had worked his way through this problem as well. His published work had established a link between the rate of transmission and the weight and complexity of the viral molecule. Hence a condition such as the common cold was very easily transmitted because of the relative simplicity of the virus. Fortunately it also did very little harm. Leprosy, by contrast, was a complex molecule. But not all of it was necessary to trigger the rush of cells towards the invader that created the paralysis in the victim. Zmitt's reasoning, outlined in his private papers, was that as the complexity of the molecule was stripped down, so the speed and rate of transmission of the virus would increase exponentially. His task, to which he appeared to have devoted several years of research and many hours of laborious experimentation, was how to strip down the molecule to a size that would speed up transmission without losing any of its deadly effectiveness.

  Tara turned forward through many pages of scribbled notes and diagrams until she found what she was looking for. She handed the sheet of paper across to Jack. 'It's Ator,' she said. 'A blueprint for the molecule that causes the disease.'

  'And you think that this is the blueprint that Zmitt gave to Kizog?'

  'Better,' replied Tara. 'I can prove it.'

  She stood up and walked back towards the sports bag, pulling out some more documentation. 'We know that Zmitt and Dr Scott worked together,' she said. 'We can prove that from the published work, and from the notes in Dr Scott's laboratory which make reference to Zmitt. All we need to know for sure is that they worked together on this.'

  She handed another sheet of paper to Jack. It was clearly an internal lab record from Kizog, and it had both Dr Scott's and Sir Kurt Helin's signatures on it. Apart from that the maze of diagrams and complex chemical formulae meant nothing to Jack. He glanced up at her, his eyes asking the question.

  'Zmitt did all the basic research,' said Tara, her voice cracking slightly as she spoke. 'And the Kizog laboratories did all the development. They created it. Ator is their molecule.'

  Geoff Wheeler introduced Shane as a consultant to Kizog on corporate security. Inspector Gilbert eyed the man suspiciously; he was well aware there were so
me rough elements working in the security business, and that multinationals often had to employ people to work for them in Third World countries that they would prefer not to have had on the head office payroll. But this was not the sort of man you expected to find lurking in the head office. Still, he had been told by his superiors to co-operate with the company. And he would do as he was told.

  'He has done invaluable work in investigating the conspiracy that Borrodin and Ling are mixed up in,' explained Wheeler, his hand reaching out towards Shane. 'If it were not for him I don't think we would have been in a position to stop them.'

  The police inspector nodded and cleared his throat. A thin, wiry man, with a tense energy about him, Wheeler noted that he appeared uncomfortable with his surroundings. 'We are very grateful for the information you have supplied,' he began. 'It was unfortunate that our efforts to collect Mr Borrodin for questioning did not work out as we had planned.'

  Shane grimaced. He knew, of course, why their efforts had failed. It had been his idea to have Fuller warn them of what was about to happen, and the trick had played out exactly as he hoped it would. After all, he reflected, the last thing they wanted was to see them captured by the police. 'We need them caught, you know,' he said.

  Wheeler leant across the table. 'The company is involved in a major acquisition,' he interrupted. 'I needn't tell you that this is one of Britain's largest companies, and it is of course vital for the country that the take-over is successful. I know the Government shares our view of how important this matter is, and I trust they have made their feelings known.'

  The Inspector nodded. 'We are treating it as a top priority,' he replied calmly. 'You may be certain of that.'

  'All we know so far is that they escaped some time on Friday evening,' said Shane. 'It is now Saturday morning, and we have no idea of where they are.'

  'They were last seen driving south through London,' said Gilbert. 'We don't know if they had a destination in mind, or whether they were just trying to shake us. I suspect the latter. Assuming they did not drive all night, they could be anywhere in the southern half of the country by now.'