Rattlesnake

by Andy Maslen

  He didn’t wait for her to answer. Instead he turned to the children who were looking up at him with a mixture of surprise and curiosity.

  “Hello!” he said in a cracked voice. “Who likes to run?”

  He offered his hands and four children rushed forwards to grab hold, two to a side.

  “Ready, steady, go!” he shouted and took off back towards the orphanage’s main building.

  Behind him he heard Phuong shouting to the other eight children, and soon he heard their footsteps catch him up. Phuong’s face was streaked with tears but she was holding on tight to the two children beside her. The other six, who Gabriel estimated were aged between five and eight, ran happily alongside.

  They were closing in on the building.

  Gabriel looked up. In the distance, he could see the unmistakable form of an approaching plane. Not big, so not a bomber. Probably a single-seater. It was losing altitude. Looking up was a mistake. His foot caught in a protruding root, and he staggered for a couple of wild paces before losing his balance and falling into an untidy sprawling forward roll. His hands opened in a reflex action that at least meant the four children running with him weren’t dragged to the ground. But they’d stopped and were hurrying back to him, faces creased with worry, to help him to his feet.

  “No, no!” he screamed at them. “Run! With Phuong!”

  He’d frightened them. He could tell from their startled expressions. But that was good. It wasn’t a game anymore. They streaked after Phuong who was almost at the play area. The main building was just fifty yards away from them.

  He’d twisted his right ankle as he went down but was still able to stagger after them. Adrenaline was numbing the pain, and he contrived a half-run-half-hop that would have been comical in any other situation. Ahead of him, he watched with relief as Phuong and the twelve children reached the door of the dining room, which opened inwards as they arrived, then slammed shut.

  Behind him, he heard a pulsing drone. A single-prop fighter. Old. The sort of rust-bucket revolutionary armies kept flying with wire and duct-tape. The dining room was too far away. He swerved to his left towards the office where he’d found the orphanage’s manager or headmistress or whatever she called herself.

  Arriving at the open front gate of the orphanage, Hubert told her driver to pull over. Her clothes and jewellery were a part of her personal style, but she liked to arrive on foot for her visits, even if the discreetly parked, chauffeur-driven Lexus was a non-too-subtle reminder of her wealth and the reality of her existence.

  She strode through the gates and into the central play area. Immediately she noticed that something was wrong. Où sont les enfants? she wondered. Yes, where were the children? They were supposed to be everywhere – playing. Innocent victims of some virulent outbreak of disease, along with the entire staff of Flowers of Hope.

  She knocked on the front door to Beth Sun’s office and entered the sparsely furnished office. At exactly that moment the back door burst open and she found herself confronted by a muddy, dusty, bloody human being with wild eyes, a shock of black hair standing up in sweat-soaked spikes and a tattered black bandage trailing from his right upper arm, from beneath which a steady trickle of blood was flowing.

  “Who are you?” she asked, placing her hands on her hips, the hitch in her plan momentarily forgotten.

  The pilot rested his thumb on the steel toggle switch. He watched the altimeter carefully, flicking his gaze back and forth between the white-on-black dial and the fast-approaching ground. Smashing this antiquated crate into the ground at a hundred and fifty miles an hour played no part in his vision of the future. He wanted to inject more heroin. To try and get laid a few more times. To drink a decent bottle of wine before he died.

  The white needle abruptly returned to zero.

  “Merde!” he shouted. No time for a second circuit. He estimated the altitude as best he could and at one hundred feet flicked the toggle up.

  Cables, levers and wires engaged, and two feet beneath his seat, the claws gripping the two bombs opened. The bombs fell away from the fuselage, and as they did so, the pilot pulled back on the stick. In a fraction of a second, the spools of wire emptied, and at their fullest extent, the wires jerked the pins out of the fuses. Eight, pencil-thin shaped charges detonated with a rattle like rifle-fire, bursting each nose cone into four splayed petals.

  “Who are you?” the woman who had to be Marie-Louise Hubert asked.

  “You were going to gas the children!” he shouted, closing the distance between them in a couple of long strides and grabbing her by the shoulders. “You monster!”

  “I don’t know what—”

  “Don’t bother lying,” he said. “I met Christie. He told me everything.”

  Her face changed in a split second. Her previously smooth features shifted into a scowl.

  “Then you’re as good as dead. He is with the CIA. This is all their idea. Theirs, and Clark Orton’s.”

  “And yours.”

  She shrugged.

  “Cambodia is awash with orphans. What does it matter if a few more of them die? They can’t all be adopted by film stars.”

  Gabriel was so stunned by the woman’s callousness that his grip slackened. She reacted immediately, backing up then slapping him hard.

  “Cochon!” she screamed at him, winding up for another strike.

  Gabriel lunged for her, but she turned and fled, wrenching open the office door and racing out into the open air, slamming it behind her.

  He was about to follow her when he heard two muffled explosions. He stopped himself from opening the door. Instead he looked around, rushed to the window and ripped down the curtains. He saw a sink in the corner of the room and turned the taps on full, soaking the thin floral material before spinning it into thick, lumpy ropes and wedging it into the cracks at the foot of both the front and back doors.

  One point five seconds after the shaped charges split the bomb casings apart, the central charges detonated, shattering the thin-walled glass vessels and dispersing the powdered EboMalX34. The white powder, as fine as flour, drifted out and down through the still air, carrying with it Orton Biotech’s latest and deadliest iteration of its malaria-Ebola hybrid pathogen.

  Owing to the pilot’s miscalculation over the correct altitude for release, the bombs exploded closer to the ground than planned, meaning the drift was confined to the playground only.

  Hubert ran out of the office just as the two bombs exploded. She stopped short of the cloud, but with her chest heaving she drew some of the particles deep into her lungs. There, the pathogens began their final, rapid mutation. Tightly-spiralled microscopic filaments unwound, pulling the viral cells – virions, the Orton Biotech scientists called them – through the porous mucus membranes lining the alveoli and into her bloodstream. Within seconds, the virions began binding to receptors located on the cell surfaces of Hubert’s internal organs, muscles, blood vessels and skin.

  Phone to his ear, Gabriel watched Hubert collapse, coughing and retching.

  Lina answered.

  “Gabriel, what’s happening? Are the children safe?”

  “Yes. You need to stay away until we can get some sort of decontamination team out here. The playground is covered in some kind of biological agent. Marie-Louise Hubert’s out there. She took a full dose.”

  “OK. I have a contact in the National Institute of Public Health. I’ll call him now. Oh. What shall I tell him?”

  Gabriel’s mind raced as he thought through the options.

  “Tell him an American bomb packed with some kind of chemical agent detonated. Left over from the Vietnam War. Say you know a British ex-soldier volunteering at Flowers of Hope who recognised the signs. They need to damp the whole place down and get the kids out. Hazmat suits, the works.”

  He ended the call and rang Visna Chey, Davey Flynn and Jack Hunter.

  He gave them all the same message. Stand down. Return to base. Kids safe. Mission aborted.

  The
n he sat, heavily, in Beth Sun’s office chair. He scanned the desk in front of him. A wooden box carved with simple diamond cutouts held a stack of business cards. He pulled one off the top and called the mobile number.

  “Hello?”

  “Beth, it’s Gabriel Wolfe. The man who just burst into your office.”

  “Oh, my goodness. What just happened? Are you OK? Is Madame Hubert OK? I can see her in the playground.”

  “There’s a lot to explain. Right now, the most important thing is that you keep everyone in the dining hall. Are all the windows and doors closed? Are there any gaps?”

  “No. It was only built last year. Before that we had an open-sided building. This is very modern. Everything to the best specifications.”

  “OK, good. Help’s coming soon. Can you keep the children happy?”

  She laughed,

  “Oh, they’re always happy. We’ll give them their lunch and then sing songs and read. We’ll be fine.”

  Marvelling at Sun’s optimism in the wake of possibly the first biological weapons attack in Cambodia’s history, Gabriel poured a glass of water from a jug on the desk, drained it, then settled in for the wait.

  47

  Visiting Hours

  OPERATIVES from the Cambodian government’s National Institute of Public Health took three hours to arrive. But when they did, Gabriel was forced to give them credit. A convoy of Land Rovers, armoured personnel carriers and Mercedes ambulances sped through the open gates of the orphanage and pulled up in a circle, which oddly put him in mind of settlers in the Old West circling the wagons.

  Figures clad in white head-to-toe hazmat suits emerged from the vehicles, wielding handheld detectors with short, stubby aerials. Several headed for the dining hall, pausing briefly to hammer on the doors before gaining admittance. Others were striding out in a fan from the leading vehicle of the convoy, waving their detectors in arcs in front of them. Behind them a second team had emerged from the trucks, lugging silver cylinders on their backs. They began systematically spraying the ground, wielding long lances connected by tubes to the bottoms of the tanks.

  Gabriel watched carefully as they approached the crumpled figure of Marie-Louise Hubert. Two of the suited figures bent to haul her back to one of the ambulances, dragging her, face up, while holding her beneath the armpits.

  One of the others appeared to be consulting the device in its right hand. Though the face wasn’t visible through the plastic visor sewn into the hood of its suit, Gabriel thought he detected a momentary relief in the way the head lifted away from the device’s screen. His intuition was confirmed when the white-sleeved arms went up and behind the hood, undid catches of some kind and lifted the cumbersome construction clear of – her – head.

  Gender reasserted after the asexual, almost alien nature of the hazmat suits, the woman signalled to the other suited figures with a thumbs-up. In perfect synchrony, they reached up and unclipped the seals fastening their hoods to their suits.

  Within minutes, larger trucks rolled up to the orphanage gates. Khaki-clad soldiers dismounted and began spraying the ground with liquid from twin tanks mounted on their backs. After half an hour, the soldiers switched from spraying to herding the children and staff into the backs of the trucks.

  After watching the last of the children clambering into the back of a truck, Gabriel went through the front door of the office and walked over to the remaining soldiers. On hearing him speaking English, they shouted over to an officer who strode towards Gabriel from the rear of a truck.

  “Vous êtes anglais?” he asked.

  I’ve heard it all now, Gabriel thought. A Cambodian army officer asking me in French if I’m English.

  In his service with the SAS, he’d been the linguist in his patrol. French was one of the seven or so languages he spoke. He spoke it now.

  “Oui. Anglais. C’était une attaque biologique. De l’air. Un avion de La Guerre Vietnam.”

  Having told the officer of his suspicions that someone had mounted a biological attack from the air using a Vietnam-era plane, Gabriel was overcome with fatigue. The fight with Christie seemed to have happened a lifetime ago, as had the breakneck motorcycle ride from Lenh Bat Nam to the orphanage. He followed the beckoning officer and climbed into the back of one of the trucks. To his left and right, smiling children, their faces still plastered with improvised yellow sunblock, snuggled against him, whispering to each other and giggling, before reaching out to hold his hands. He closed his eyes and let their murmurs of “hello, hello” fill his ears. At some point, he fell asleep.

  You did good, boss, Smudge said.

  I did, didn’t I?

  Top man. Saved those kids, the staff, even that evil bitch looks like she might at least make the hospital.

  I’m sorry I couldn’t save you, though, Smudge. You know that, don’t you?

  Boss, we’ve been over this, what, a million times? You went back to get me. Took me back to Nat and Melody. Gave me a decent burial. Can’t ask for more than that, can I?

  His former comrade smiled. Though Smudge’s body had been scavenged from the tree deep in the Mozambican forest where militia fighters had crucified him, Gabriel had retrieved his skull and a neck bone to bury back in Peckham, South London.

  I guess not, mate.

  Two gendarmes took Gabriel for a check-up at the Royal Phnom Penh Hospital, where a doctor stitched up the cut on his arm, dusting the sutured wound with sulfonamide powder and redressing it with a clean bandage. Told their charge was in the clear, the gendarmes politely but firmly led Gabriel by his undamaged arm to their car. Sirens blaring, they drove from the hospital to the Royal Gendarmerie headquarters. They escorted him to an eight-by-eight-foot interview room, painted matt green throughout, even the ceiling. Waiting for him were two detectives clad in olive-green dress uniforms. They welcomed him in French, then switched to Khmer. Sitting beside them was a short, dumpy woman in civilian clothing. She was clearly an interpreter, and spoke perfect, unaccented English. Gabriel wondered where she’d learned. London, perhaps, but just as easily Beijing or Moscow. He told them everything that had happened, from the perspective of an ex-British army captain volunteering at Flowers of Hope, and nothing of what he knew. Having run through the narrative of the attack from half a dozen different directions, the detectives suddenly appeared to lose interest. They closed their black plastic binders with a synchronised snap.

  “Saam phea sa ban banhchob,” the detective to Gabriel’s right said.

  “The interview is over,” the interpreter translated.

  “I can go?” Gabriel asked.

  She conferred briefly with the detectives.

  “Yes.”

  All four stood at the same time.

  The detectives offered their hands and shook. As Gabriel reached out to grasp the door handle, one spoke, in English this time.

  “Cambodia not bad place.”

  Gabriel turned and smiled.

  “No. Cambodia is a good place.” Then in a quieter voice, “It’s just the people are bad, like everywhere.”

  Back at his hotel, Gabriel took a long shower, standing under the jets and trying to wash himself clean of the corruption he felt had seeped into his pores. He leaned, palms outstretched, against the tiles in the cubicle and let his head hang down. As the hot water streamed from his eyebrows and the tip of his nose, he tried to think his way through the mess he had got himself into.

  A woman protected by corrupt cops and government officials had almost succeeded in murdering sixty children and their carers. Whatever had exploded out from the bombs had incapacitated her almost instantly. Thanks to him, she was now receiving medical care. But it was pretty clear that the plan for the children was to let them die. He’d come to Cambodia to follow the trail that would lead him to Vinnie’s killer, not to start righting all the wrongs of a country that had been a military playground since at least the 1960s. And yet. And yet. Was he really going to leave knowing she would recover, no doubt receiving the best
medical care in the country, only to start up again. Because wasn’t that what Visna had said? That if there were evil being done in his country, Marie-Louise Hubert would be sitting at the centre of the web “like a black widow spider.”

  Gabriel knew one thing. He hated spiders.

  He sat up until three thirty in the morning reading Visna’s dossier. He’d ordered room service, but the bowl of noodles and shrimp had grown cold by his side, uneaten. What he read in the dossier made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. Stills, clearly taken with a telephoto lens, showed Hubert pushing a small child into the back of a white Mercedes with blacked-out windows, then taking an envelope from the driver. Most disturbing were photos of dead children, bruised on their arms, legs and torsos, bloodied about the face but clearly recognisable as the same children in photos taken at the Flowers of Hope orphanage.

  He closed the folder. Tears were running freely over his cheeks and he roughly brushed them away with his knuckles. He refilled the glass at his elbow from the almost-empty gin bottle and took a long pull. He realised that for all Lina’s talk of exposing Hubert, the woman was bulletproof as long as she stayed in Cambodia. Even in terms of international courts, he suspected there wasn’t a whole lot anyone could do. She hadn’t committed war crimes or crimes against citizens of other countries. The drug trafficking might be an angle, but somehow he knew she’d not have been stupid or careless enough to leave a paper trail or even credible witnesses that would lead investigators back to her door. Then there was the small matter of her links to the CIA and their bioweapons programme with Orton Biotech. All he knew was he couldn’t let her go on.

  He closed his eyes and conjured up an image of his boss from The Department.

  “What would you say, Don?” he asked the empty room.

  Me, Old Sport? the voice in his head answered. Well, now. Imagine she was doing this not in Cambodia but in England. We could have her arrested, but if she had the same level of protection as she has over there, what point would there be? You know as well as me what we’d do.