The Ebola Conspiracy

by Mark Furness

  “Can you answer my question about GBC?”

  East said: “On the record? The letter is a fake. Off the record? Remember what happened to Humpty Dumpty.”

  I paused for a second or two. “Thank you for taking my call, Mr Dumpty.”

  After my story was published, Charles and his PR team publicly denounced the letter as a fraud, and I did not have the original to prove otherwise, but he did not sue us for defamation. A few weeks later his ‘Made in Australia’ syndicate withdrew from the bidding for Mirror News Group, saying the price had gone too high. I empathised with Charles in a way; his wasn’t the only house perched upon the nob hills of the city inside which ethics were as popular as bottled water from a Mumbai sewer.

  In a lowlands street, I purchased a new tape recorder with a cord to link it to my phone.

  I TUCKED THE NEWS CLIPPING back in the box to the sound of fierce chopping coming from the kitchen. Fish led me down the hallway. Alice was stony-faced, slicing tomato and cucumber salad. Fish nudged her leg and licked her hand when she patted him. She smiled. That was his job in our house. Dr Fix-it.

  I turned the oven on, got ready-made pizza bases out of the fridge, along with a block of cheese, and started grating. Alice went to her room with Fish.

  The smell of cooking pizza drew Hugo from his room. He shuffled into the kitchen roughing up the mop of dark hair on top of his lanky body. His skin rarely saw sunlight. I made him take vitamin D tablets. He was barefoot, wearing skinny black jeans and an old white tee-shirt of mine which made me a little dizzy: its front was printed with a red hypnotic wheel. The words Look into your Morning Sun were printed in an arc above the wheel. The tee-shirt was a gift from my wife’s father, Malcolm, who had owned The Morning Sun newspaper in Brighton for decades.

  I called Alice and Fish down for dinner. My phone rang as we sat at the long kitchen table. The handset was face-up beside my plate. Alice saw the Shanghai phone code and the caller’s name on the screen: Jack Darling.

  “I’ll be five minutes,” I said.

  Alice shook her head in silence, staring at her plate. Hugo fed Fish his pizza crust. I walked down the hall towards my office.

  Jack said: “I just read about Henry East’s suicide attempt on the wires. What do you know?”

  “He might be a victim, not suicide. You remember what I overheard in that café near the courtroom? The kid was shitting himself about people coming after him if he went to prison.”

  “Go back at it hard,” said Jack. “Charles East has just partnered in China with a former British Prime Minister, Tim Winter. They announced it today in Beijing. There’s a smell about Winter in London, suggestions he took bribes to get the kids of Communist Party bigwigs into top UK schools and flash finance jobs in the city.”

  “While he was PM?”

  “He’s not quite that stupid. It was when he knew he was on his way out. Talk is that the Chinese bought his wife a holiday house in the Bahamas, and then good old Timmy returned ball by pressing the puffy flesh of his chums in the city for old favours to be repaid.”

  “Hard evidence of this?”

  “Not a cracker.”

  “Excellent start.”

  “I tell you what,” said Jack. “Get Claire to help you. You need to give her more to do. We’ll have another nose around East’s businesses here at the China end.”

  Claire Styler was a recent arrival at The Citizen’s Sydney office from our London headquarters. She came with a freshly minted Master of Business Administration in her briefcase and a husband-come-public-relations-flak on her arm. I didn’t like that combination, a journalist and a PR. I’d seen it before, with the PR feeding his spouse spin about his high-paying clients. It was especially shifty when they went by different names in public like Claire Styler and Carl Cousins did. I reckoned their type did the dual-name thing so casual observers wouldn’t connect them. They had the potential to be what Charles East tried to turn me into: an independent journalist on one hand, a corporate spin doctor on the other. I knew reporters who were in on this racket, taking backhanders of cash or kind from people they wrote nicely about. Jack reckoned I was reading too much into the Styler-Cousins name thing. So I’d decided to let Claire’s work do the talking. It had spoken in monosyllables so far.

  I phoned Claire at home and briefed her about Henry East. I asked her to gather some background on the former British PM and to review the transcripts and news clippings of Henry’s court case to bring her up to speed. As we were talking, Alice appeared in my office doorway and waved. She had a bulging bag over her shoulder. I watched through the front window as she climbed into a taxi. I guessed she was going to her boyfriend’s.

  After ending the call with Claire, Hugo and I finished packing his bags in readiness for his early morning take-off. Then he sat on his bed and fired up his laptop. I saw he now had three bolts on his door.

  “Wasn’t one bolt enough?” I said. “What if there’s a fire?”

  “I’ve got a window.”

  “I’ll miss you.”

  “I’ll call you when I land.”

  I went to bed. Fish whimpered until I lifted him up. He put his head on the pillow beside me and was snoring within minutes. I closed my eyes but there were too many weird shapes moving in there. I slid out of bed. Fish is great at unaided descent and followed me down to my office. I kept the light off. The streetlamps shining through the part-closed window shutters covered us in zebra prints. I fired up my laptop and sent Steele a text by phone: “You awake?”

  My laptop clock said 2:17am. In the nearby streets, night clubs were spewing out their customers. Sirens howled. I can never tell the difference between police, firemen, ambulances. Not from the sounds alone. They just remind me of the myriads of shit humans get into. Fish has a beautiful voice and howled in tune with the sirens, like he was singing in a choir with his mates. That bucked me up.

  My phone rang. Steele.

  “So was he attacked?” I said.

  “Everyone’s clammed up again. Coppers are sticking with the attempted suicide line.”

  “How about the sources who tipped you off. Can I talk to one of them?”

  “Now?”

  “Sure.”

  “You’re obsessed.”

  “How about downgrading that charge to tenacious? Anyway, what else am I going to do at this hour?”

  “Have a drink, abuse yourself, or nip around the corner to the Scarlet Garter if your memory of the female form is impaired.”

  “And in the morning?”

  “Get a proper job, something useful like a golfer. In the meantime, I’ll come back to you if one of my snouts is prepared to break cover.”

  I dozed off sitting at my office table. Fish’s furious yapping woke me; he was front paws-up on the edge of the table, balancing on his back leg, barking at the window. The leafy branches of a tree backlit by streetlights were moving shadows around the room. Wind rattled the window glass. I looked outside into a haze of rain and could see neither human nor animal. Fish relaxed; whatever had unsettled him, he had chased away.

  I checked that the front and back doors were locked, and climbed the stairs to bed. It was almost 3:30am when I put my head down. Fish was unusually restless.

  V

  THE WIRY man sat alone in the front seat of a parked four-wheel drive, working under the dull glow of streetlights through the car’s rain-spotted windows. Using a small towel, he wiped fresh blood off the blade of a hunting knife.

  He glanced in the rear view mirror, then the wings. He checked the car’s clock. Why hadn’t she returned his calls?

  He inserted the blade of his knife into a leather sheath that was strapped to his chest, over which he wore a business shirt and jacket. He sniffed his fingers, enjoying the salty, ammonia smell of what he had just killed. He wiped his fingers with the towel and tapped the screen on an encrypted phone that sat in a cradle on the dashboard. The handset speed dialled.

  Leave a message, said a computer-generated
voice - again.

  He admired the girl’s craftiness, but it infuriated him too. “When I call, I expect you to answer,” he barked. “I’ve made my delivery. Call me. Now!”

  He hit the ignition button and motored away, fighting the urge to drive past the scene of his very funny crime.

  THE GIRL HAD RECOGNISED the incoming caller’s number. Six times. He could wait. She was busy. Her assignment may take hours to complete.

  She looked around the sitting room of the Hong Kong high-rise apartment. Coloured lights blinked outside in the towering Kowloon cityscape. She crossed to a glass screen that was fixed to the wall near the entrance door. With her hands protected by wafer-thin, white leather designer gloves, she used an e-stick to tap the screen: floor-to-ceiling curtains began closing across all of the room’s windows. She turned up the luminosity of the ceiling lights so she could get a better look at a dozing, plump, grey-haired Englishman sitting slouched on a three-seat sofa in the middle of the room. A red tie was loose around the unbuttoned collar of his white shirt; his hairy belly was exposed, and his trousers and underpants were piled around his calves.

  The stench of his breath and his searching, scum-coated tongue had made her want to vomit when he had tried to kiss her. She went to the sink in the open plan kitchen-living room and knocked the arm of a mixer tap with a gloved hand. She put her mouth into the stream of cool water and lapped it up, careful not to touch the stainless steel with her lips. She knocked the tap off and checked her black-haired wig in a kitchen wall-mirror. Her real hair was tucked inside it as carefully as a surgeons’ in an operating cap.

  The man murmured. She grimaced, hoping she had stuffed enough pink grains of heroin into the tip of the cigarette that sat smouldering in the ashtray beside a glass of Scotch whisky on the coffee table alongside the sofa. After two thirds of a bottle and a few tokes on the secretly loaded cigarette, he had now fallen upon his side with his face turned into the back of the sofa. He snorted and snored. She looked at the rectangular glass tank on a stand behind the sofa. The creatures inside it were as still and dozy as the man.

  She wiped her lips dry on the hairless skin of her foreman, huffed on it and sniffed, enjoying her odourless breath. That’s how she saw herself: as traceless as clean air, when she wanted to be. And tonight she wanted to be.

  She stepped to the sofa and pulled up the man’s trousers and underpants by rolling his bulky frame. She stuffed his shirt tails into his trousers, buttoned the waist with difficulty, tightened his belt and zipped up his fly. She considered removing his diamond-studded, gold cufflinks and rolling up his shirtsleeves, but decided to simply tug the cuff up a little on his left wrist to expose the puffy white flesh of his palm.

  The man’s liquid-sounding belch interrupted her. She chuckled. Porky might drown in his own vomit and save me a lot of time and effort. But that would not do, not really. This job must be performed with symbolism and ritualism; her employer liked that sort of thing. Moreover, she liked it.

  The fat man had bragged to her earlier in the Kowloon bar tonight about his snake collection. The Indian Cobra, a North American diamond-backed Rattler, and an Australian inland Taipan lived side-by-side in separate compartments of the display tank in his home for all his visitors to see. She guessed it was his superego speaking to those who might take him on in a fight. I’m a tough guy, the man was saying, a strange guy, so don’t fuck with me.

  This type of guy proved easy prey for the girl, playing the pretty young stranger in the bar who said she had a soft spot for trouser snakes in fancy apartments, and a thousand US dollars in cash. She did not tell him that she had learned to handle venomous snakes at a paramilitary training camp in South Africa. Nor did she tell him that his employer was also her employer.

  She lifted his metal snake-handling hook from a shelf under the tank and flipped open the lid of a compartment. The choice was obvious; a few drops of Taipan venom were enough to kill a hundred men. Its body felt heavy on the hook, but the animal was dozy and she soon had it gripped by the tail, its body dangling, its head swinging to and fro beside her calves

  “Wakey, wakey,” she said to the snake, the beast becoming angrier with each of her shakes and gentle knocks of its head against the legs of the coffee table.

  She turned her attention to the snoring blackmailer and said to him, “When you bite the hand that feeds you, you might get a dose of your own medicine in return.”

  She grinned at her mangled metaphors and tapped the snake’s head against the man’s bulbous, blue-veined thumb muscle. The snake bared its fangs and struck: once, twice, three times. At the third strike, the snake’s mouth stayed fixed upon the muscle. She wanted several strikes because the creatures are not fools. Often, they won’t waste venom on a first strike, using it as a warning shot for a foe to leave it alone or face the consequences. And the girl had to be sure of the consequences.

  When the man’s hand was dotted with weeping red spots, she laid the exhausted creature on the tiled floor and watched it muster enough energy to slither slowly under the skirt of a curtain that flanked the room’s main windows.

  The girl looked at her phone for the time. It could take hours to be sure this exercise had worked, or it may only take thirty minutes or so for the venom to shut down the man’s nervous system, for his muscles, including his heart, to become paralysed, and for internal bleeding to start.

  Ninety-three minutes passed before he stopped grumbling and writhing, and his breathing ceased. His obesity, the girl calculated, had probably hastened a cardiac arrest. Blood trickled from his nose; pink foam bubbled from his lips. She speed-dialled the wiry man.

  “What if the shit had really hit the fan?” he yelled at her. “I’ve been in the dark here for over two hours. Not good enough.”

  “Take a pill,” she said. “I’ve got to clean up and get out of here before the hired help arrives with orange juice and the morning papers.”

  “What’s the headline going to read like in a day or two?”

  “Lone drunk smokes heroin and plays with killer snake. Something like that.”

  “I need you here.”

  “When?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “So the lawyer and that journalist are not for turning?”

  “I want to be set, in case we need to drop a bomb on the pricks.”

  VI

  MY RADIO alarm went off with the 5am news bulletin. I banged on Hugo’s bedroom door until he unbolted it, and let Fish in to finish the job of rousing him while I carried his bags downstairs and put them in the hallway, ready to pack in the car for the drive to the airport. When I opened the front door, the sight hit me first - the blood and guts - followed by the ammonia stink.

  An orange-and-white speckled carp as big as my forearm stared at me. The fish had a single steel hook through both its eyes. The hook was tied with green twine to the black-painted, steel frame of our security door. The carp’s gut had been slashed and its entrails dangled like glistening purple streamers, its blood pooled on the doorstep.

  I thought about calling the police, but then remembered my call to Charles East last night. Had we just been visited by the they Henry East feared, or by Mr Greyhound from courtroom 7C? That would take some explaining, and possibly inside a cop shop. Get Hugo out of here was my overriding thought. Get Hugo to the airport. And don’t frighten him. We were already behind schedule.

  I managed to cut the fish down and use a bucket of soapy water and a rag to clean away the evidence before a sleepy Hugo clumped down the internal stairs into the hallway, stuffing his earmuff-sized headset into a shoulder bag, Fish hopping alongside him.

  Fish could smell the carnage and snuffled madly around the door. I put him on his lead and knocked on our neighbour’s door. I apologised for the hour. Retired Sue Sinclair owned Fish’s four-legged brother, who bounced beside her. She took Fish in without question, as she often did.

  My old Land Rover Defender was parked in the street a few doors down. Hugo and I
threw his bags on the back seat and we jumped in the front. I phoned Alice. She didn’t answer. Why would she? It was 5.45am. My insides churned. I lifted my hand to press the car’s ignition button.

  “Mate,” I said to Hugo. “I think I left your passport on the kitchen bench. Can you get it?”

  He grumbled. I gave him the house key and he went inside. I looked in the rear view mirror and checked the rest of the street was clear. Surely these lunatics wouldn’t put a Baghdad Surprise under my bonnet? There were lots of ways for me to find out, but given my schedule, and a quick calculation of the odds, I chose the fastest.

  VII

  THE ENGINE coughed, then growled into life, but they’d got what they wanted: me thinking about the possibility of things.

  Hugo opened the passenger door. “There’s nothing on the kitchen bench.”

  I tapped my jacket pockets and pulled out his passport. “My mistake.”

  He shook his head like I was the village idiot, if further proof was needed.

  An hour later, we waved to each other and he disappeared behind the barriers into the passport checking hall of Sydney International Airport, en route to London Heathrow via Dubai.

  Standing in the airport hall, in a line of vacant-eyed people waiting for their take-away coffee, I phoned Steele.

  “Someone left a calling card on my door overnight. A dead fish.”

  “Serious?”

  “Incoming missile.” I forwarded him a photo I’d taken on my phone of the gutted carp and confessed to Steele that I’d tried to contact Charles East about Henry’s mutilation.

  “Mm,” said Steele, “making good use of your vast intellect as usual. My guess is that the carp is a note, telling you to keep your nose out of their business. Quite crudely written, though.”

  “Genius deduction,” I said, collecting my latte off the café counter and taking that glorious first sip, my taste buds telling me I’d been dudded with just a single shot of beans for a double-shot price.