Enemy Within: A heart-wrenching medical mystery (British Military Thriller Series Book 3)

by Nathan Burrows

  Next, Eleanor turned her attention to the images. After organising them into their own folder, she started a slideshow to scroll through them all. They made a bit more sense than the spreadsheets in that Eleanor could see colourful bar charts and graphs, but the legends made no sense.

  “What on earth does DQ217792 mean?” she muttered under her breath, shaking her head as she did so. After closing down the images, Eleanor started on the text documents. She opened one titled Executive Summary - Second Study, hoping it had been written for a layperson to understand, and squinted at the opening paragraph.

  The second study further suggests that the interaction of the viral protein μ2 with the splicing factor SRSF2 in nuclear speckles is responsible for the modulation of cellular AS. The μ2 protein is an important structural protein that is located in the nucleus during infection and can bind RNA.

  “Bloody hell,” Eleanor said. “It might as well be in Greek.”

  Staring at the computer for so long and trying to concentrate on stuff she didn’t understand was giving Eleanor a headache, so she closed the screen of the laptop and reached for her phone.

  “Hey, Beth,” Eleanor said a few moments later when her friend answered the call. “You okay?”

  “Er, yeah, all good,” Beth replied. “You?”

  “You sound out of breath. You been out running or something?”

  “No, I just ran to get the phone, that’s all.” In the background, Eleanor heard a male voice laughing before it was quickly stifled.

  “I can call back if now’s not a good time?”

  “Honestly, it’s fine,” Beth replied. “It’s just Michael being daft, that’s all.” Eleanor paused for a few seconds at the mention of his name before continuing.

  “I was wondering if you could have a look at some more stuff for me?”

  “What, pictures and that?”

  “There’s some video footage, but I’ve also got some text documents and charts that I don’t understand.”

  “Where did you get them from?” Beth’s voice had changed, and she sounded on edge, but Eleanor was ready for the question.

  “An anonymous source, Beth,” she said. “You know I can’t tell you.”

  “Oh, right?” Eleanor’s friend didn’t sound convinced.

  “Please, could you just have a quick look and tell me what you think?”

  “Is it urgent?” Beth asked. “Only me and Michael are on a short break in the Lakes. I didn’t even bring a laptop with me.” Eleanor pressed her lips together in frustration. “I wanted to, but Michael said I would just have my face stuck in a laptop and he would rather spend the time, um…” Beth’s voice tailed away, and Eleanor realised why she had been out of breath when she’d answered the phone.

  “When do you think you might be able to have a look?” Eleanor heard Beth sighing down the phone and wanted to say something about how important it was. If there was something incriminating in the files, the longer it went undiscovered, the more time the Ascalon Institute had to hide things.

  “We’re here all weekend, but I’ll be back in Norwich on Sunday night. I’ll have a quick look on my iPad while Michael’s in the gym later, but I won’t be able to have a proper look until after work on Monday.”

  Eleanor did some calculations in her head. It was late Saturday afternoon now, so that would be two full days before she could get some sense out of the documents unless Beth found anything with a brief look. But she didn’t have any choice.

  “That would be great, Beth. Thank you,” Eleanor said reluctantly.

  “How about I call you when I’ve gone through them?”

  “Okay, no problem. I’ll e-mail you the link to the cloud storage where I’ve put them.”

  “Cool, I’ll talk to you then.”

  “Thanks Beth,” Eleanor said before she realised Beth had disconnected the call. “Say hello to Michael for me,” she whispered under her breath.

  Swearing to herself, Eleanor got to her feet and arched her back. She was aching and had a headache from poring over the screen for so long, but she’d not got any paracetamol with her. She could text Liam and ask him to bring some back with him when he came to the Airbnb after lunch, but Eleanor knew from experience if she didn’t get on top of it now, then she wouldn’t be able to.

  Resigned to having to wait over the weekend for anything meaningful, Eleanor put on her coat and walked out of the door into the bright sunshine. A few seconds later, she returned for her sunglasses. The sun was so bright it was hurting her eyes.

  76

  George Rimpler looked at the man in front of him and tried to look confident. It was difficult under the other man’s gaze. He was evil, pure evil, and coming from someone like George, that really was saying something. But George preferred to deliver what he delivered at arm’s length, not up close and personal. In this case, that wasn’t possible.

  The man, who was known as Marty, had to be six feet three inches tall. He was broad-shouldered, heavily built, and none of it was fat. Marty didn’t share George’s political views, but that wasn’t why George employed him. He employed Marty because he was very good at what he did, which was dish out extreme violence. George nodded at him, and Marty turned and brought his hand round with an open palm to slap the face of the man tied to a chair in front of them. The resounding thwack echoed around the otherwise empty warehouse building.

  “I asked you a question, Jimmy,” George said, remaining behind the light which he knew hid him from Jimmy’s view. He looked at the man tied to the chair. His former security guard didn’t look particularly threatening at the moment. “Where is the girl?”

  “I told you, I don’t know,” Jimmy replied, his teeth blood-stained from his earlier beating. It had taken Marty almost half an hour to extract a confession that it had been Jimmy who had wiped the security cameras. Despite two broken fingers, he had denied doing anything with the footage other than deleting it, and George was inclined to believe him. But he was proving far more stubborn with the location of the administration assistant.

  “You do, Jimmy,” George said, “and you’re going to tell me.” Another nod in Marty’s direction was followed by another slap, this time to the other cheek. It was so hard it almost toppled him from his chair, and the scream that followed the slap was blood-curdling. Slaps were far more effective than punches in these types of situations, in George’s opinion. You could slap a man hard across the face for hours. You couldn’t do that with punches. But George was already getting bored.

  In his pocket, George’s phone started trilling.

  “Give him some water,” George said to Marty as he turned away to take the call. “Charlotte?”

  “George,” Charlotte replied. “Any news?”

  “We’re with him now. He deleted the footage, but hasn’t yet given up the girl.” To George’s irritation, he heard Charlotte chuckling down the line. “And why are you laughing?”

  “No reason,” Charlotte said. “It’s just you’re normally so persuasive.”

  “It’s not that type of persuasion, Charlotte, and you know that.” He looked across at Marty, who was holding a plastic cup of water to Jimmy’s mouth in a surprisingly tender gesture. Tender, considering not that long ago he’d broken two of the man’s fingers with a hammer. “I’ve got someone in.”

  “Does it really matter, George?” Charlotte replied. “We’re almost at the last stage. We could probably go live with the project now.”

  “We could, but you know me, Charlotte. I like to be thorough.” George walked away from the centre of the warehouse and into the darkness in the corners. He wanted to be out of Marty’s earshot. “When this hits, it’s going to hit hard. I don’t want there to be any mistakes.”

  “I know, George, and there won’t be.”

  “So just finish the third study.”

  “Okay, I will. Is Norwich clean?”

  “It’s ready to be cleaned, yes.”

  George had employed a firm that usually cleaned up
crime scenes to go through the Ascalon Institute with a fine-toothed comb to ensure that every inch of the building was forensically clean. It had cost him a pretty penny, as the complex was so large, and then that price had doubled to ensure their secrecy. But in George’s opinion, it was money well spent. There wouldn’t be a fingerprint or eyelash left to be found. Then a second, slightly more specialist team had gone in to do some more work for him.

  “Have you heard from our friend, Hunter?” Charlotte asked. George grimaced before replying.

  “Not yet, no,” he replied. Hunter had taken the concept of hiding to the extreme. “Wherever he’s hidden, he’s hidden well.”

  “He’s not been in touch at all?”

  “Not yet, no,” George said. “I told him only to get in touch when he felt safe, and he obviously doesn’t.”

  “I’m not surprised with his face on the front page of every newspaper in the country.”

  “Yes, I’m not surprised, either. I didn’t think he’d get away so easily and I didn’t think the police would release his details so soon.”

  “How will you activate him?” Charlotte asked.

  “I don’t think I’ll need to,” George replied with a smile. “I think he’ll activate himself when the time is right.”

  “It’s your last chance, Jimmy,” George said, leaning forward to whisper in the security guard’s ear. Marty had, at George’s instruction, upgraded the slaps to punches. Jimmy’s face was a mass of red and purple bruises. His left eye was closed shut from the swelling, and his right could only open a slit. “Tell me where she is, and I’ll let you go.”

  Jimmy, perhaps realising that the moment George stepped out from behind the shadows and shown him his face that his fate was sealed, just whispered something in reply.

  “What was that?” George said, leaning forward to put his ear closer to Jimmy’s mouth.

  “I said,” Jimmy whispered, a bubble of blood-stained saliva coming out of his mouth before popping. “I said I don’t know. Please, I’m begging you, just let me go.”

  George took a step back and regarded the broken man in front of him for a few moments. Jimmy’s head had lolled down and was swaying slowly from side to side. He either didn’t know where the girl was, which is what he was claiming, or he did know but wasn’t giving her up out of some sort of misplaced chivalry. Either way, George was not getting anywhere with the idiot.

  “Clean him up, Marty,” George said finally.

  “You serious, boss?” Marty replied, his voice unusually high for such a large man. “That’ll cost a bit more on top of what we agreed.”

  “I don’t care how much it costs, Marty,” George replied. “Just clean him up.”

  George turned around and walked away, making his way toward a rectangle of light that led to the outside world.

  He was just stepping through the threshold into the fresh air outside the warehouse when he heard the gunshot.

  77

  “Sixty-five systolic,” Adams said loudly enough for Raj to hear him over the bustle of the resuscitation room.

  “I know, Adams,” Raj replied through gritted teeth. “I know.”

  Adams looked down at the broken body on the trolley in front of him. The woman was a pitiful sight, and Adams didn’t think she had much longer for this world. The only saving grace for the poor thing was that she had been unconscious since she had been brought into the department. Her Glasgow Coma Score had deteriorated during the journey to the hospital, and she had been almost unresponsive since she’d arrived.

  “How much blood has she had?” Raj asked.

  “Four units of O-neg,” Adams replied tersely. “We’ve sent for some more from the blood bank. Now sixty-two and dropping.” He looked down at the woman whose pale face was contrasted by the bright blue of the endotracheal tube that was securing her airway. She was bleeding to death in front of their eyes without spilling a single drop of blood on the floor.

  Raj shot Adams a warning look and nodded at the orthopaedic registrar who was fumbling about on the trolley, trying to screw metal pins into the woman’s pelvis. One of his colleagues was trying to help him, the others having disappeared when they realised they weren’t required.

  “We should be doing this in theatre,” the registrar muttered. If it weren’t for the fact that all the operating theatres were full, they would be. The registrar was attempting to externally fix the unstable pelvic fracture to try to stop, or at least reduce, the bleeding into her abdomen.

  Adams pressed his lips together and took a few steps away from the trolley to join Raj by the x-ray viewing screen. Until the registrar had done his work, there was little they could do. On the screen was an x-ray of the woman’s shattered pelvis, her chest, and her skull. Raj traced his finger over the skull x-ray.

  “See, there’s a fracture here across the pterion,” he said, running his fingertip over an area where four bones in the skull were joined together. Adams could see a faint jagged white line that shouldn’t be there.

  “You think she’s got a bleed?” Adams asked.

  “Almost certainly,” Raj replied with a faraway look on his face. “She’s probably ruptured her middle meningeal artery.” He traced his finger in a circle around the area. “There’ll be an extradural haematoma here which at some point will exert enough pressure on her brain to cause some real problems.” Adams lowered his voice before he replied.

  “Raj, she’s not going to live long enough to cone,” he said, referring to the phenomenon of the brain stem being forced down through the base of the skull and into the hole the spinal cord came through. “She’s almost bled out. Are we going to jump on her?”

  “What do you think?” Raj replied. “Do you think we should?”

  “Not really,” Adams replied. “Let’s give her a bit of dignity if we can.”

  “I agree,” Raj said, glancing at the screen where the trace from the arterial line in the casualty’s right radial artery was flattening. “I’ll talk to the rest of the team. Is anyone with her? We should get them in if they’re family.”

  “No,” Adams replied. “It’s just the police.” He looked at the screen where, unnoticed by the orthopaedic registrar who was still struggling with the external fixators, every line bar the heart rate was flat. “You think she’s in PEA?”

  Adams watched as Raj sighed and walked over to the trolley, putting a hand on the registrar’s shoulder when he got there. The orthopaedic doctor looked up, and Raj shook his head slowly from side to side.

  “Are you here with the casualty from the Riverside apartments?” Adams asked the young police officer sitting in the crew room.

  “The jumper?” the police officer replied.

  “Bit much, mate,” Adams said, a touch of reprimand in his voice. “That’s someone’s daughter.”

  “Oh, sorry.” The police officer looked suitably chastened. Adams looked at him. Either he was getting old, or police officers were getting younger. This one didn’t look old enough to be out on his own without his mum. To Adams’s relief, the crew room door opened and a police sergeant walked in, causing the younger officer to jump to his feet. The badge across the sergeant’s uniform read Holmes, and Adams wondered how much stick the man had taken during his career. If he was called Holmes and he was a police officer, Adams knew he would have to be a detective, but he decided against offering that as an opinion. He got the feeling he wouldn’t be the first.

  “Any news?” Holmes asked, glancing at his colleague dismissively before looking at Adams.

  “Not good, I’m afraid,” Adams replied. “When I left a few moments ago she was on her way.”

  “On her way where?” Seeing the look on the sergeant’s face at the younger officer’s question, Adams stepped in quickly.

  “She’s dying, officer,” he said, not unkindly. For all Adams knew, this could be the young man’s first fatal.

  “Oh,” the officer said, his face paling. “Right, I see.”

  “Can you go and call it i
n, Mark?” Holmes said, perhaps picking up on Adams’s sympathy. “Let Control know it’s now a murder enquiry?”

  Adams waited until the young police officer left before continuing the conversation.

  “So she didn’t jump, then?” he asked Holmes.

  “Doesn’t look that way,” the sergeant replied, looking hopefully at the kettle. Adams got the hint and crossed to turn it on. “Neighbours said they heard a disturbance in the moments leading up to the incident. Raised voices, mostly hers. Then?” Holmes looked at Adams with a doleful expression. “Thud.”

  “Shit,” Adams replied. It didn’t make any difference to the emergency department personnel how people were injured. They all got treated the same, regardless. But Norwich wasn’t the sort of place where that sort of thing happened often, and this was the second murder of a young woman in a few days. “Have you got a next of kin or anything like that?”

  “No, sorry,” Holmes replied as Adams raised his eyebrows at the man. “Oh, white with none, please.”

  “Julie Andrews,” Adams said. Holmes laughed in response, and Adams looked at him with a smile. “You ex-service then?” Adams asked.

  “Fifteen years in REME before I buggered my knee.”

  “Combat?” Adams asked, knowing that the answer would probably be no.

  “Rugby.”

  “Combat then,” Adams replied. “Wouldn’t catch me playing that. No skill involved, just violence.”

  Adams finished making the tea and handed a mug to Holmes. A tea with milk and no sugar—a Julie Andrews—was a reference to the part she played in The Sound of Music. A white nun. If Holmes had asked for a cup of tea with no milk or sugar, he would have been given a Whoopi Goldberg. A black nun.

  “We’ve got someone looking for her next of kin, but they’re overseas, so it’s going to take a while,” Holmes said as he sipped his tea appreciatively. “Lovely cuppa, cheers.”