Bite

by Nick Louth

  Behind Max, Alex was waving his arms around. ‘This place is chock full of bugs.’

  ‘Yeah. Mosquitoes.’ Max could hear whining by his ear. ‘No prizes for guessing what they are carrying.’

  Alex found a switch on the wall and strip lights flickered on down both sides of the gym. Only then did they see how dense the clouds of insects were. Already their clothes were peppered with thirsty insects, and there were thousands more swirling above them and speckling the white ceiling. Alex ripped off a couple of strips of the netting and wrapped one around his head. The other he offered to Max who ignored it.

  ‘Jesus!’ Alex swatted at his bare arms. ‘Let’s make it quick, okay?’

  ‘It takes as long as it takes,’ Max muttered, making his way forward towards the pool. He looked in it. The water was shallow and dirty. Dead insects littered the surface. ‘At least we know we got the right place.’

  From the deck above them they heard the creak of footsteps. ‘I’ll go up and get him,’ Alex volunteered. ‘You okay to search this level?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Max crept forward towards a bulkhead at the far end of the gym. He could hear tapping on the metal. He listened, then responded with a few knocks of his own. ‘Erica? Is that you?’

  The tapping became louder and frantic.

  ‘I’m coming for you. Just as soon as I find a goddamn door.’ He looked around, then noticed a metal ladder going up to the top of the bulkhead. He climbed right to the ceiling, where a sliding hatch door was set in the top of the bulkhead. It was held shut with a padlock and short chain. Max tapped on the door, and got a frantic volley of hammering back. He slipped the pistol through the chain and began to turn it around and around until the chain tightened into a knot. One final heave cracked a link, and Max slid the door open.

  The first things Max saw were the tears of joy on Erica’s face. She was bound and gagged, crammed into a shallow bunk space, but she was alive. Max leaned into the space and gently untied the gag.

  ‘Oh Max! Thank God.’ Erica breathed his name again and again, her words finally dissolving into sobs.

  ‘It is so good to see you. So good.’ Max squeezed into the tiny, stale locker and squeezed her tight in his arms, letting her tremble and shudder against him while he untied her. ‘I’m never letting you out of my sight again, never.’

  Outside, there was a noise and Max heard Alex call his name.

  ‘I’ve found her, Alex. She’s up here.’ Max stuck his head out of the bunk space. Alex had the kidnapper up against the wall of the gym at gunpoint, hands tied behind his back.

  ‘What’s his name?’ Max yelled.

  ‘He won’t say,’ Alex replied.

  Max turned to Erica. ‘Are you going to introduce me to your old friend?’

  She forced a thin smile. ‘Max, meet Dr Jarman Herrera.’

  The beach stretches away endlessly to the horizon at either side, and there is not a single cloud above the ocean to soften the equatorial light which dazzles and cleanses and bleaches all things. Everything is bright: My swimsuit, a soft towel, a table with a long drink. And in that drink, ice.

  As I swill my drink, the cage comes seeping back, despite all my efforts to keep that corner of my mind forever dark. In that last day, when the generator began its fearful coughing I was taken to the room which stank of vomit and fear and excrement. They stripped me, and chained me on a greasy metal table. Crocodile came to me and asked me again, as the copper clips were attached to my tongue, my breasts and my clitoris, would I take the punishment to save Jarman?

  ‘Is this electricity for you or for him?’

  I thought long and hard and whispered my answer.

  Afterwards, Crocodile took me to his room. This time I drank the gin and tonic, with plenty of freshly made ice from his new refrigerator, and showered and put on the new dress, and I even tried to smile when he asked me.

  For the next few hours Crocodile used my flesh for his own ends, forcing from me not just acquiescence but the mimicry of love and desire. Everything I did then, I did to punish myself, to burn away my guilt. Afterwards, when Crocodile wept for himself and his crimes, I found my arms around his body. Curiously, I could not cry at all.

  I was released that night, driven by Gaptooth along the rutted spine of a nightmare forest, and dizzy with hunger, dumped outside a government-controlled town. That was seven weeks ago. Physically, I’m healed, but my mind is numb. I know that the Erica who emerged from the cage is not the Erica Stroud-Jones who went into it. I know things about myself that no-one should ever know. Those secrets I can trust to paper, but to no person.

  Yesterday, I heard on the radio that that the KPLA has gained its place at national reconciliation talks and the last western hostage, Dr Jarman Herrera had been released. I could not bear to see him again, could not bear to ask for his forgiveness. In my mind his face will live always. In the end I am only flesh and blood and some burdens cannot be borne. Now I will bear always the expression I saw on Jarman’s face as we passed each other in the corridor of our gaol. Me, leaving the torture cell unscathed. Him arriving to suffer what I had not, at the uttermost end, the courage to face.

  The question always returns: ‘Is this electricity for you or for him?’

  I had replied just one word:

  ‘Him.’

  And the clever, evil Brigadier had smiled, knowing we were equal at last.

  (Erica’s Diary, Kinshasa 1992)

  Epilogue

  Max and I flew back to New York yesterday. Strangely enough we were allocated the same seats, 38B and 38C that he and Jarman had occupied on that fateful flight three months ago. And like Jarman, we too were taking our little orange tablets. They really do work. Max was lucky, he was never infected on the original flight, he was only bitten while rescuing me from the barge.

  Jarman had injected me with Plasmodium five infected blood the day he kidnapped me. Then I was tied to a bed in the middle of the barge while he released his mosquito colony on me. They were all Dutch Anopheles tigris, all malaria capable, all soon infected from my own blood. When I began to get fevers he cleared my infection with his tablets, and let me recover for two weeks in the locker while the mosquitoes laid their eggs in the barge’s swimming pool. The colony he now had was really huge, tens of thousands of insects. Max got there only one day before he was going to put me out in the hold again, for them all to feed on me. It would have been unbearable. Jarman was planning a mass release of the mosquitoes, to accelerate the epidemic before the summer ended.

  If I have any regrets in life it is that I allowed guilt to weigh too heavily upon me. Jarman’s e-mail, offering to meet me in Amsterdam, seemed such an opportunity for apology, to set right what I had done wrong all those years before. He promised me that his data would add to my thesis. In fact he wanted to remove all trace of my thesis. He wanted no alternative to the cure he was about to offer to the world.

  How had he come upon this cure? It was so simple. He knew that Fowler’s monkeys would get sick from malaria, and many in captivity died of it. However, when he got hold of the fruit of the gwuia trees in which the monkeys lived, and added it to their diet, they recovered. Fowler monkey malaria only affected Fowler’s monkeys so this was, at first, of only academic interest.

  It was Sophie’s death which proved that the Fowler monkey parasite could cross over to humans, and with rapid and devastating effect. It was years before Jarman returned to thinking about this. Perhaps the active ingredient in the fruit would work against other forms of malaria? He tried it in a hospital in Kinshasa and it worked. It was then that he turned to his employers for help.

  Jarman had plenty of time to tell me about the mental hospitals he had been in after he resigned from Pharmstar, and his final idea for taking Iron Jack Erskine at his word: find a disease that kills rich people, to make the world finally take malaria seriously. It was 1995 when he cashed in his savings and returned to the run-down laboratory in Kinshasa to scavenge what equipment he
could. It didn’t take long to realise that the faster life cycle of the monkey parasite lent itself to temperate infection, which could breed and mature during the European summer. While in Zaire, Jarman ran into a mercenary who he had met on the road to Zizunga. This was the dreadful Poul Stefan d’Anville who collected rebel ears for bounty and just before my capture by the KPLA had saved my life.

  In d’Anville, Jarman found someone who would listen to his crazy ideas. But it was d’Anville who added the money-making angle. Don’t just get Erskine, he suggested, release it on the world and then sell the cure. They set up Xenix Molecular Solutions together.

  While I could understand Jarman’s hatred for me, I couldn’t at first understand why he hated Pharmstar and Iron Jack Erskine so much. Jarman told me that it took two years to get his audience at Pharmstar’s Atlanta HQ. Erskine wasn’t interested in his discovery, and yet Pharmstar made sure it was patented in case they ever changed their minds or wanted to sell it. Jarman didn’t own his own discovery and couldn’t take it to anyone else. Frustrating and malicious yes, but an inspiration for mass murder?

  When I asked Jarman about this he recounted, word for word, a conversation in Pharmstar’s Atlanta headquarters with John Sanford Erskine III, the only informal talk they ever had. It was a few minutes after Erskine extinguished Jarman’s hopes for funding plans to cure malaria, and now the chief executive was trying to butter him up with small talk. The Pharmstar chief executive, canapés in hand, mentioned that he had visited Jarman’s part of Africa when he was a vice president.

  ‘Yeah, it’s pretty hard to get around out there, ain’t it?’ Erskine had said. ‘You know, a few years ago I was with Tetro-Meyer’s chief executive, stuck in the middle of nowhere at a little dump called Kisangani and I couldn’t get a damn plane to Kinshasa for love nor money. Jesus, the only one was going to some jungle airstrip first in the wrong damn direction. I got on it, but really couldn’t face the extra couple of hours in that God-forsaken country. You wouldn’t believe the size of the bribe I had to offer to get the pilot to forget the jungle strip and go straight to Kinshasa.’

  When Jarman asked him the date he was sure. Erskine had taken the plane that was on its way to save Sophie’s life. If that aircraft had appeared, and if Sophie had got the treatment she needed soon enough, everything that followed would have been different. All those lives would not have been lost. The pain, the anguish could have been avoided. None of it was necessary. Right from the start, all that was required was a bit of luck. At a monkey research station in one obscure corner of a forgotten African country, it all began with a mosquito. And one unlucky bite.

  Acknowledgments

  I owe a debt of gratitude to Professor P. A. Kager and his staff at the Academisch Medisch Centrum in Amsterdam, and to Willem Takken of the Laboratorium voor Entomologie in Wageningen whose knowledge of mosquitoes is beyond compare. I would like to thank Maria Eswald, the Dutch government’s policy advisor on public health, the Amsterdam Police who kindly (and at my request) imprisoned me in their modern cells, Lianna Janka at KLM, and my old Reuters colleague, Karel Luimes who helped organise some of this research.

  I would also like to thank Professor Chris Curtis of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and his staff for all their help and explanation, and the PR department at GlaxoSmithKline. Special thanks to Jackie and Katie for diligent proof-reading.

  Bite has been a work ten years in the making. Malaria is still a killer and there is still no effective vaccine. Nevertheless, where science has moved on since research was undertaken, or mistakes remain, the responsibility is mine alone.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters and companies are entirely invented, and any resemblence to real individuals, living or dead, or to existing businesses, past or present, is entirely coincidental. The only exceptions are two real pharmaceutical companies, and their chief executive officers who appear as background and as an intended contrast to the behaviour of the fictional firm Pharmstar.

  Nick Louth

  August 2007