Bite

by Nick Louth

  ‘I don’t know which company. Only Henry Waterson knows and he is sworn to secrecy. Quite simply, if we don’t pay it, we don’t get it.’

  ‘Can we make it? Surely it can’t be too hard.’

  ‘Assuming there is no patent violation we could get a generic drug manufacturer to produce it within six months, probably. But think for a moment, Cornelis. To set up a production line would initially cost even more than buying it from the supplier. It would still have to be covert because this is an unapproved drug with no test data. Not the least consideration would be the hundreds or possibly thousands who might die of Van Diemen fever in those six months. I don’t see we have any choice.’

  ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘Simple. Get Dijkstra to find the money. To treat ten thousand cases we will need about ten million dollars. And in dollars, too, not euros. Paid into a Dutch Antilles account. Waterson says it’s the only way they will agree to supply us.’

  ‘Not a chance, Jürgen. You’ve spent too long in Africa, and it’s cooked your brain. European governments don’t work like that, as you well know. Even if Dijkstra agrees to this, which she will not, she has to account for every damn paper clip and notepad to the Health Committee. No, I’ve got a better idea. We’ll try Pharmstar Corporation. Apparently they can raise billions in just a few hours without being accountable to anyone. Their chief executive was the first big name victim, so what would be more poetic?’

  ‘Fine,’ said Friederikson. ‘But we need the money quickly, secretly and with no strings attached.’

  Two jets have just swept low over us! There was a huge screaming noise which shot over from west to east. The roof is still humming from their noise. The vultures are frightened, I can hear their claws scratching the zinc roof as they scramble into the air.

  Here they come again!

  Wow, there goes one. Here’s the other. I can hear Rambo-Rambo’s gun, blasting in retaliation. I hope he knows how much more dangerous this is than massacring a family of wild boar. This is scary. We are sitting ducks if the fighters retaliate. Crocodile can escape from his hut. We can’t.

  We have been waiting an hour, but the jets didn’t come back. Maybe they were just letting Crocodile know that the government knows exactly where we are. He should be delighted to be taken so seriously. But in fact I suspect this will just make everyone very jumpy.

  (Erica’s Diary 1992)

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Professor Cornelis van Diemen called a secret meeting in his tiny office for ten the next morning. It gave him a frisson of pleasure to neither invite Betsy Dijkstra, nor to let the health minister know what was happening. This time he was running his own show.

  Everyone he had invited was essential in some way: Professor Jürgen Friederikson, cantankerous of course but still the most respected malarial authority on earth, Dr Henry Waterson, who had made the connection with the suppliers of the new drug, Saskia Sivali whose skill in identifying the new parasite under the microscope was unmatched, and finally Penny Ryan who Waterson assured him would be the best person to persuade Pharmstar to part with ten million dollars.

  ‘I think Henry should start by telling us how he found out about the drug,’ Van Diemen said.

  ‘That’s simple enough.’ Waterson, sitting on a desk, adjusted his bow tie. ‘Waterson Consultants received an e-mail ten days ago saying a company called Xenix Molecular Systems had sent us a sample of a compound which could kill Plasmodium five. Sure enough a bottle of twenty tablets arrived, posted in Rotterdam, but no documentation whatever. As everyone here knows, this is not the way promising new drugs are brought to market, so I assumed it was a hoax. I e-mailed Xenix requesting documentation, and passed on some of the tablets to Professor Friederikson for analysis. In the meantime I traced Xenix Molecular to a small and apparently abandoned office in the port of Rotterdam. The place just yelled ‘fraud’ at me.’

  ‘He was astounded when I told him the drug worked,’ smiled Friederikson.

  ‘I was, absolutely,’ Waterson said. ‘So I again e-mailed Xenix, but this time I told them the drug didn’t work.’

  ‘Why did you do that, Henry?’ Van Diemen said.

  ‘I wanted to flush out any proof they had, to see how extensive the testing was. Besides, the first rule of purchase negotiation is to play down your interest in the product. Keeps the price low.’

  ‘That strategy was dramatically unsuccesful, wasn’t it?’ Friederikson said.

  Waterson grinned. ‘Anyhow, within an hour of that message, my hotel room had been broken into and my briefcase smashed open.’

  ‘How frightening,’ Saskia said.

  ‘No kidding. They took back a handful of the tablets, so I guess it was just a warning that they knew I was trying to screw them. It was then I figured I was dealing with the underworld somehow. You just don’t expect to meet those kind of guys in pharmaceuticals. It’s not like garbage hauling or something.’

  Penny Ryan spoke up. ‘When Henry told me about that I showed him the postcard that Jack Erskine had received. It seemed like a kind of threat to unleash this Plasmodium five.’

  Friederikson laughed: ‘What clever mafiosi they are. Like God, they can create an entirely new species of malaria one minute, then pff! A little scientific magic and they have devised a cure too.’

  Van Diemen held up his hand. ‘Hold your horses, Jürgen. Henry, did Xenix ever send you any documentation.’

  ‘No. The e-mail just let me know the price and how it should be paid.’

  ‘It’s nothing more than blackmail is it? ‘Give us the money or an epidemic kills thousands’.’ Saskia said. ‘How can we give in to that?’

  ‘You were happy enough to have the drug for Caroline,’ Friederikson said tartly. ‘Now she’s no longer in danger I see you have suddenly developed strong ethical principles.’

  ‘No, that’s not how it happened. You asked me…’

  ‘Please, everybody.’ Van Diemen held up his hands. ‘Let us stick to facts. Penny, have you spoken to Pharmstar?’

  ‘Yes. Finance director Don Quiggan is acting CEO. He laughed when I reminded him of his words about investing money for a cure. He pointed out that he said that while Erskine was still alive. But finally he came around to it. I did throw in a couple of white lies. I told him that the money would be spent on research here at the hospital, and we’d get sponsor’s plaques and all that kind of thing. I’m certain if he knew it was going to buy another company’s product he wouldn’t fund it.’

  ‘Alright, Penny,’ Van Diemen said. ‘Let us assume that Pharmstar keeps its word about the money, and let us further assume we manage to keep the Health Ministry in the dark, how long before other countries want to know what we’re using?’

  ‘Obviously, not long at all,’ Friederikson said. ‘There could soon be hundreds of thousands of people needing this drug. I would be surprised if we could keep the lid on it for a month. Besides, even Pharmstar’s grant would not pay the bills for long.’

  ‘We must find out more about Xenix,’ Saskia said. ‘If they discovered the drug legitimately, then why would they not go public and make a fortune? If, as I suspect, the drug patent belongs to someone else, then we should alert them to its use for malaria.’

  ‘I would agree with one caveat,’ Waterson said. ‘Make sure we get enough of the drug for a month before we go public or call the cops. The first thing criminals would do is destroy the evidence, and if we run out of the drug hundreds could die.’

  ‘Alright everybody,’ Van Diemen said. ‘Let’s allocate tasks. Penny, I want you to find out who it was that offered a malaria cure to Pharmstar, and what the compound was. Henry, I want you to find out everything you can about Xenix Molecular and who is behind it. Jürgen, I want you to trawl every patent database you can. I want to find out if any firm, faculty or scientist has ever patented that compound. My job is to keep the press and the Health Ministry off everyone’s backs as much as possible. Saskia, I want to hand over to you the da
y-to-day clinical responsibility for administering the drug to our patients. Any questions?’

  ‘Not so much a question, more a suggestion,’ said Waterson. ‘Has anyone thought how this ties in with Erica Stroud-Jones disappearance? She supposedly has made a breakthrough against malaria. And a breakthrough is being offered to us by Xenix. It can hardly be a coincidence.’

  ‘You are not suggesting that she’s behind Xenix, surely?’ Van Diemen asked. ‘To throw away a Nobel prize and all the recognition? I think not.’

  ‘But what about the boyfriend, Max Carver.’ Waterson flourished a newspaper article. ‘The police are looking for him.’

  Professor Friederikson snorted with disdain. ‘You are all going down a blind alley. I don’t know anything about this Carver fellow, but I can tell you the compound we have been offered by Xenix is nothing to do with Stroud-Jones’ discovery.’

  ‘How on earth do you know?’ Van Diemen asked. ‘Her paper’s kept under lock and key and only three people have read it. I’ve tried each of them and they aren’t talking.’

  ‘Well, I won’t disclose my sources, but I have been privileged to read it. It’s quite brilliant I have to admit. For decades we have doggedly fought malaria inside the human body. Every single drug from chloroquine to the newest artemisinins use the same tired battlefield, and hardened our enemy. And so does the compound offered by Xenix, even though I can’t yet identify from what source it is derived.’

  ‘So how is the Stroud-Jones discovery different?’ Penny asked.

  ‘It opens up a second front against parasites,’ Friederikson said. ‘It takes the war inside the mosquito, to the stages in the malarial life cycle where it has never before been attacked, and where its defences are weakest. She has identified a series of compounds which prevent the malarial parasite from attaching to the gut of the mosquito, breaking the life cycle completely.’

  ‘How do you get the mosquitoes to take their medicine, professor?’ Waterson asked. ‘Seems to me a kind of big practical drawback.’

  ‘Simple. They take it with their food. Vaccinate people, or pigs or goats, and wait for them to be bitten by mosquitoes. Most brilliant of all the compound finds its way into the eggs with the ingested blood, so the first generation mosquito offspring – hundreds of them – are also vaccinated.’

  ‘Lucky us,’ said Waterson. ‘A week ago we couldn’t do anything about this Plasmodium five strain, now we have two cures.’

  Friederikson nodded. ‘Now it begins to make sense. Whoever is behind Xenix had laboriously made Plasmodium five resistant to every known anti-malarial except his own by gradually exposing the parasites to them and building up resistance. Then along come rumours that Stroud-Jones has cracked the whole malaria problem. No wonder he needed her out of the way before she could present her paper. The blackmail scam won’t work for long otherwise.’

  ‘So the chances are whoever got rid of her, whoever is behind Xenix, was among us at the conference,’ Waterson said. ‘I just can’t believe anyone who has dedicated themselves to fighting this disease could be so twisted.’

  ‘I can,’ said Friederikson. ‘And I have my suspicions who.’

  It was about two hours after the jets flew over when Jarman and I were dragged from our cells by Gaptooth, Rambo-Rambo and Dakka. We were taken a few hundred yards into the bush to a clearing. There were pickaxes, heavy spades and buckets in a heap near the remains of a recent camp fire. We were shown a plot of ground and told to start digging. Jarman asked why.

  ‘Dis your grave,’ Gaptooth said, smiling.

  Jarman and I exchanged glances. So this is it, finally. We can forget thoughts of release, returning to our home countries, the celebratory meal, seeing family and friends. It all stops here, in a squalid clearing in central Africa. After the first kick, we started to dig. Neither of us had any strength, and we worked on our knees. The ground was soft and yielding so we didn’t need the pickaxes. After an awful and exhausting hour I had dug down only two feet. Jarman had done a little better, but we were both faint with the effort.

  Brigadier Crocodile walked up to us at the head of a group of four riflemen. All were in their best uniforms, the Brigadier wearing a peaked cap and medals. We were blindfolded and made to stand in the holes we had dug. I searched out for Jarman’s fingers and squeezed his hand. We were both shaking uncontrollably.

  We heard the rifles being cocked and the shouts as they aimed at us. The next few seconds were the longest of my life.

  Then the shots came, echoing across the bush.

  I felt nothing. Is this what being shot feels like?

  I could hear birds flapping from the trees, and moaning from Jarman. It sounded like he was still standing. The blindfolds were removed.

  ‘Government don’t want to deal with me. They have gone back on their word.’ Crocodile was angrily stabbing a finger towards us. ‘You are useless to me. Your governments must put pressure on Kinshasa. You must think how we can do this. Or next time will be the real execution.’

  (Erica’s Diary 1992)

  Max sat on a bench overlooking a quiet canal, well wrapped in the raincoat over his bloodstained trousers and shirt and watched the ducks quack at each other. The ring was closing around him. Not just Anvil, but Voos and Stokenbrand. They would be desperate to nail him, Max, the one person always conveniently near the carnage.

  The vision of Lisbeth, hanging on the door kept coming back to him. Just when they felt safe, Anvil had taken her. The fear came again like a wave of nausea when Max considered how incredibly quickly they had been tracked down, how two people had lost their lives in the few minutes it took to make a phone call and bandage his hand.

  Max got out the laptop, powered it up and tried once again to get into the e-mail program. It was useless. What he needed was a computer hacker. The sort of person Alex would keep on staff.

  As if on cue, the mobile rang. It was Alex.

  ‘What happened Max?’

  ‘Lisbeth’s dead.’

  ‘Jesus. How?’

  ‘Strangled. D’Anville found us somehow. The very moment I was talking to you on the phone…’ Max suddenly stopped speaking, a horrible fear in his throat. ‘I’m suddenly not trusting you any more.’

  There was no reply.

  ‘I’ve never seen your face, Alex and I don’t know anything about you,’ Max said. ‘Maybe I just fell for a bunch of bullshit.’

  ‘Suspicion is a fine trait, keeps you alive. But there’s a time and a place for it. Everything I told you is true. It may not have been everything I could tell you, but that’s a different matter.’

  ‘This is a GPS phone isn’t it? There’s a bug in the phone, isn’t there Alex? That’s how he found us. He was wearing an earpiece.’

  ‘No. Let me level with you. We always know roughly where you are, but never exactly.’

  ‘So there is a bug in the phone.’

  ‘No, it’s a normal phone. We could have got you a GPS phone, but maybe that would have made you a little suspicious. We were pretty sure you weren’t a geek, but we wouldn’t want to take the chance. However, we don’t need anything in the phone to know roughly where you are, who you are talking to and what you are saying. We just have abnormal powers, courtesy of some high-level security clearances. We got a little piece of software grafted on to the front end of the telecommunications switch for the service provider. Our software compares all mobile account numbers in use to our ‘wanted’ list. When there’s a match it grabs the identity of the radio cell antennae which is handling the call, and dumps a digital copy of the call into a file where we can decrypt it later. Most cells only have a kilometre radius in big cities, so we only know where you are to that degree. Of course if you move and your signal is handed off to another transmitter then we know more precisely where you are, the border between two cells.’

  ‘And you knew where Lisbeth was from her phone?’

  ‘Only roughly. She was somewhere in Utrecht this morning. Believe me Max, it’s not as m
uch help as you would imagine. Utrecht is a big place. This afternoon we just knew you were somewhere in central Amsterdam, south of Central Station, north of Leidseplein, we couldn’t have directed someone right to you, no way.’

  ‘Anvil must have a phone, any ideas where he is?’

  ‘He has lots of phones, usually stolen and used for a week or less. We never know which number he’s on. Now stop telling me how to do my job and listen. These latest killings have basically blown it for us.’

  ‘Lisbeth and the barman?’

  ‘And your friend the powerlifter, Janus Pretzik.’

  ‘Him too? Jesus Christ.’

  ‘Yeah. Used a blowtorch on his head until it exploded. Four murders in a week is more than anyone can keep under wraps. I tell you Max, the Dutch cops were already going crazy, called in their biggest political allies. There’s a meeting at noon tomorrow between the Dutch prime minister, his security advisers and the Amsterdam police chief. After Lisbeth, I just know we’re going to lose. At noon tomorrow Voos and company will get free rein on Anvil, and we will just disappear into the sunset.’

  ‘What’s the problem if Voos nails him?’

  ‘The problem is she won’t. Anvil’s a professional at disappearing. He will slip away again, take his diamonds and pop up somewhere else. The Dutch cops will forget about him and it’ll be back in my lap, round and round again until I’m an old man or until I’m fired.’

  ‘So what are you going to do?’

  ‘It’s what we are going to do, Max.’

  ‘Count me out, Alex. If you couldn’t save Lisbeth you can’t save me. I’m not too stupid to see your game. Lisbeth was the best bait to lure Anvil out of hiding, but he got her and left you holding an empty hook. Now you’re gonna do the same with me. If I succeed in finding Erica, you follow and get Anvil. Your dirty work gets done at arms length, if I fail I’m just a crazy loner and nothing to do with you. Disposable and deniable. Am I wrong?’