The Lucifer Network

by Geoffrey Archer

  When Harris repeated the question, the reddening face nodded frantically, eyes pleading for the mask to be restored.

  Phipps pushed it back down, easing the rubber over the man’s chin and checking the seal on his neck. The Russian sucked in great gasps of filtered air before speaking again.

  As he talked, Willie Phipps met Sam’s look. They’d reached the same conclusion. For Koslov to be so terrified of exposure, the air around them had to be a soup of infection. They glanced at the bonfire and nodded to one another. The most lethal stuff could well be on it. Putting distance between themselves and the flames made sense. But as they prepared to move, Harris held up a hand.

  ‘Hang on. He’s describing the escape.’

  Sam listened hard. His knowledge of Russian was rusty but he understood Koslov to be talking about a ‘boy’.

  ‘My God.’ Harris sounded shaken by what he was hearing. ‘They used human guinea pigs to test their vaccines.’ His voice was flat. ‘It was the Croats’ job to keep the lab supplied.’ He pointed to the men on the ground a few feet away. ‘Says that when Chursin and Akimov needed someone to experiment on, the Croats took the boat to Split or Dubrovnik to look for people sleeping rough. Refugees – Bosnians, Kosovans. Or druggies. They’d kidnap them, bring them here and keep them chained up while trying out new viruses on them – the word he’s using is “mutated” viruses. I don’t know what that means exactly.’

  Sam knew precisely what it meant. And he knew of an Austrian doctor who was an expert on the subject.

  ‘The main aim of the research was to develop antidotes,’ Harris continued. ‘Most of their vaccines didn’t work, so the people died.’

  ‘How many, for God’s sake?’ Sam asked.

  ‘He thinks around thirty over the past year. He says the people themselves were rubbish. Refugees. Nobody missed them.’

  ‘Except their mums,’ Phipps suggested.

  ‘What about the escape?’ Sam prodded.

  ‘It was a few days ago. One of the prisoners had been infected with a new smallpox variant. He says it’s a strain which the world’s stock of vaccine can’t touch.’

  ‘And they lost him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Jesus . . .’

  The man was a walking timebomb.

  ‘By the time they’d discovered he was missing the boy had got to the farm and taken the farmer’s daughter hostage. The girl was mentally backward, Koslov says. The boy took her off in the farmer’s boat. To Lastovo, they think – they assumed he was heading for the ferry to the mainland. Chursin, Akimov and a couple of the Croats went over to Lastovo to look for him, but there was no sign. Chursin panicked. He feared the boy would contact the police and the game would be up. So he sent the Croats back with this man, with orders for the lab to be burned and the farmer and his family to be killed. All trace of what they’d been doing here to be removed or destroyed. That’s it. That’s what he said.’

  ‘And a vaccine for this new smallpox?’ Sam demanded. ‘They’d developed one?’

  Harris checked. The Russian shrugged again.

  ‘That’s what they were testing on the boy. He says find him and we’ll know if it works.’

  ‘Christ,’ Sam whistled. ‘If it doesn’t, we’ve got a lunatic wandering around infecting people with an untreatable plague.’ He posed the most crucial question of all. ‘Who were they doing this for, Arthur?’

  Harris asked the Russian, but the man just shrugged. His own confidence growing, Harris himself threatened to remove the man’s mask and throw it into the fire. But the answer remained the same.

  ‘He says he doesn’t know,’ Harris translated. ‘Chursin never told him.’ Phipps grabbed at the mask again, but Harris put out a hand to stop him. ‘No. I really think he’s telling the truth.’

  ‘Course he bloody knows . . .’ Phipps insisted. He clamped his hands round the Russian’s neck and squeezed. ‘See if a lack of air helps him remember.’

  There were two more key questions Sam still wanted answers to. The rabies-like virus used against the two EU officials in Brussels – had it been produced here? And had a Mr Harry Jackman supplied the scientists with their raw materials?

  He decided to wait a moment before asking them. To see if the onset of suffocation would persuade the man to name his employers.

  They watched for some sign of a readiness to co-operate, but all they saw through the steaming up lenses of his mask was some unexplained horror in his eyes. Eyes which stared past them, looking at a point high up on the wall of the old monastery.

  Sam suddenly understood. But too late. As the warning yell took shape in his lungs, the head that Willie Phipps was so forcefully gripping burst apart like a rotten fruit. He twisted his face away in horror, catching a glimpse of smoke at the upstairs window from where the shot had been fired.

  Sam’s stomach rebelled but he managed to swallow back the vomit before it filled the mouthpiece of his mask. Harris scrabbled frenetically across the stony ground, desperate to get away from the appalling sight of the Russian’s brains spread across Willie Phipps’s torso. Ignoring the gore, the lieutenant raised the MP5 and loosed off rounds towards the monastery window.

  Sam flung himself sideways, rolling away from the line of fire, then got to his knees to run for cover. Arthur Harris was nowhere to be seen. He darted for the corner of the monastery, crouched, looked again and saw the translator lying prostrate a few feet away, his hands clamped to his head.

  ‘Arthur!’ Sam shouted. ‘Over here! Quick!’

  But Harris didn’t move. There was blood oozing through his fingers.

  ‘Jesus . . .’

  Sam peered out from the shelter of the wall. From the upstairs window came the thunder of a grenade. As suddenly as the shooting had started, it came to an end. There was a gruff shout from inside the building.

  ‘Secure!’

  Sam ran over to the translator and dropped to his knees.

  ‘Arthur . . .’

  Harris didn’t move.

  ‘Shit!’ In the firelight he could see two wounds. The back of the head and the shoulder. ‘Willie!’

  Phipps joined him, wiping off the Russian’s brains with a fistful of dry grass. He bent to listen, to see if Harris was still breathing. Mouth to mouth would be impossible with the masks on.

  ‘Dressings,’ he breathed. ‘Pouch on my belt.’

  As Sam tugged at the Velcro flap, Phipps lifted Harris’s hands from his head.

  ‘Bad?’ Sam asked, peeling the wrapper from a dressing.

  ‘Can’t tell. But anything to the head’s bad.’ He took the sterile wad and pressed it on the wound. ‘Rip his suit open at the shoulder while I tie this on. Got a knife?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘There’s one strapped to my ankle.’

  Sam found it and cut the blood-clogged, rubberised cloth away from Harris’s shoulder. ‘Flesh wound,’ he announced.

  ‘Then he may have been lucky. Know how to do it?’

  ‘Yes.’ He opened another pack, and pressed the dressing on hard.

  ‘Have to get him to the surgeon,’ Phipps mumbled.

  They both looked up as one of the soldiers dropped down beside them.

  ‘The building’s clear, boss.’

  ‘Who was that fucker?’

  ‘Some Croat with a name with no vowels in it. Found a driving licence in his pocket.’

  ‘How come you missed him?’

  ‘Hadn’t cleared that far, boss. Simple as that. We’d checked downstairs first. We were on the way upstairs when he opened up. Sorry.’

  Phipps slipped fingers under Harris’s respirator to feel for the carotid pulse.

  ‘Still there,’ he whispered.

  Sam stared helplessly at the translator. That head wound needed a specialist. And they were a long way from any. He visualised a wife and kids for Harris. Elderly parents. The whole damn agony of grief.

  Phipps stood up and detailed three of his men to get Harris to the jetty. ‘Take
one of the boats back to the sub. Tell ’em the rest of us’ll be out of here in twenty minutes.’ Then he strode towards the house.

  Sam followed a few paces behind, shaken that Harris had been hit – he’d told the man he’d watch his back. But he told himself not to dwell on it. There was still work to do.

  The former monastery was L-shaped, a main block with a long extension at one side. As Sam stepped through the door he found a high-ceilinged hall running from front to back, its floor taken up by refectory tables with benches for a couple of dozen people. One of the tables was stacked with supplies – drinking water in plastic bottles, boxes of tinned food. Another had been used for work. A laptop computer sat with its screen up and Sam recognised the bulky black box beside it as a satellite phone. He made a mental note to take the PC with him.

  Willie Phipps was being briefed by one of his sergeants. Sam listened in.

  ‘Upstairs in the wing, two rooms used as bedrooms, three others empty. Downstairs two rooms are laboratories, three others are like cells. Bare beds and fixings in the walls with chains attached.’

  ‘What’s in the labs?’ Sam asked.

  ‘Loads of equipment. Test gear, incubators, cabinets. The usual. Haven’t done a thorough check.’

  ‘Sounds a good place to start,’ Phipps decided.

  Sam strode with him into the wing. The two labs were very similar, although in the second the fridge had been emptied, its contents on the bonfire, he guessed. One of the lieutenant’s men produced a camera and snapped off some flash shots. Then they closed the doors. This place needed to be looked at by scientists. He wished Julie were here. She’d have an idea what monstrous diseases they’d been experimenting with.

  They walked further down the corridor peering into the bleak cells the sergeant had talked about. Sam ran upstairs to check the first floor, but there was nothing. Nothing whatsoever to link this place with Max Schenk, with Harry Jackman, or with the virus attacks in Brussels. They’d come too late. The Russians had covered their tracks. As he re-emerged into the hall, so did Willie Phipps.

  ‘We’re off,’ he announced. ‘All that shooting, someone’s bound to take an interest soon.’

  Sam zipped the computer into its case and tucked it under his arm, hoping against hope that its contents would reveal something. He looked round the long hall, staring into corners, looking for some last thing they might have overlooked.

  ‘Five more minutes,’ he pleaded.

  ‘No chance. If we’re not buttoned up inside the sub within half an hour she’ll leave without us. And there’s no way we’re going to stay the night here waiting for the Croat police to turn up.’

  They stepped out into the yard. The bonfire had collapsed into a heap of glowing ash. That’s where his proof had been, Sam told himself, ruefully.

  Phipps beckoned to Sam. ‘Come on. We’re going back to the boat.’

  At the far side of the yard amongst the scrub, marines were checking the ground with torches, picking up cartridge cases to eradicate evidence of their having been here.

  Sam had a long last look round. Suddenly he spotted something. ‘Hang on a minute.’

  ‘I said come on!’ Phipps was losing patience with this troublesome civilian. He grabbed for his arm.

  But Sam began to run, down to the far end of the small courtyard where an outhouse nestled against the windbreak of a wall. The door hung half open, its bottom hinge broken. Black as pitch inside. He dug in his pocket for a torch. The beam lit up an old wheelbarrow, spades and a pickaxe. He heard feet sprinting across the stony ground. Phipps was coming for him. Then the flashlight beam lit on something shiny. At the back, half covered by fragments of ply. He reached for the wood and pulled it clear.

  ‘Oh boy . . .’

  Containers. Five of them. Like small milk churns. Metal-cased with handles. Necks with screw tops wide enough to suspend samples inside.

  ‘Harry Jackman,’ he breathed. ‘You little devil. You gave yourself away . . .’

  Sam felt the lieutenant’s hands on his arm.

  ‘Come on, chum, for Pete’s sake.’

  ‘Look!’ Sam pointed gleefully at the storage flasks. ‘Like Ali Baba,’ he whispered. ‘Like bloody Ali Baba . . .’

  ‘What’re you on about?’

  ‘It’s how they got the viruses here, Willie. In liquid nitrogen.’

  ‘So?’

  Sam bent down. Something written on a piece of the plywood had caught his eye. He snatched it up. Blocky, stencilled lettering sprayed on when the wood had still been a packing case.

  ‘Willie . . .’

  ‘Come on, for fuck’s sake.’

  ‘But this is it, man. It’s what I came for.’

  Six simple words that told him everything he needed to know.

  Property of the Government of Zambia.

  21

  HMS Truculent

  Saturday, 05.40 hrs Zulu

  THE EASTERLY SKY was becoming uncomfortably bright as the hatches were sealed and the submarine slunk back to its deep water habitat. In the sick bay Arthur Harris had already been examined by the surgeon-lieutenant and pronounced not in immediate danger. The wound to his head was more superficial than it had looked to the amateur eyes of the Royal Marines lieutenant.

  Sam sat in the wardroom at one end of the dining table. Next to him was Willie Phipps. The notebook computer salvaged from the old monastery was open in front of them, plugged into the submarine’s mains supply. Sam pressed the power button. The drive purred into life and ‘Windows loading’ appeared on the screen.

  Phipps had borrowed another PC from the First Lieutenant and while waiting to see what emerged from the Russians’ computer was preparing his mission report.

  ‘I’m going to have to tell it like it was, Sam,’ he announced, apologetically. ‘There’s no other way I can explain getting into a fire fight when the orders were to avoid one at all costs.’

  ‘Fine by me,’ Sam rumbled. ‘If your general wants to file a complaint to Vauxhall Cross, then I think we can handle that.’ As far as he was concerned, the mission had achieved its goal.

  The notebook computer from Palagra had a standard keyboard. He hadn’t noticed it back at the monastery and had been fearing having to cope with a Cyrillic text. He opened Windows Explorer and ‘My Documents’, then ran the cursor down the long list of files. Most were identified only by code letters. He double-clicked on the first to see what it contained. It loaded into Word. Three pages of scientific gobbledegook that appeared to be an analysis of a virus trial, something the brains at Porton Down would wet themselves over. What he needed, however, was something in plain language that showed a direct link between the laboratory and the rabies-like virus used on the two EU officials. And something that pointed to Max Schenk.

  Suddenly he saw it. One complete word standing out from the acronyms on the file list.

  VIENNA.

  He double-tapped. The file loaded in Internet Explorer. It was a download of a timetable, the schedule of flights between the Croatian coastal town of Split and the Austrian capital.

  ‘Brilliant! Bloody brilliant.’

  ‘What’ve you found?’ Willie Phipps leaned over.

  ‘Something that could prove to be a crucial piece of the jigsaw,’ Sam replied cryptically.

  On the deck above, Commander Talbot was dog tired. He’d been in the control room for the best part of eight hours. The special forces men were their own masters, but he’d felt a responsibility for them. On board, they’d kept track of the operation by listening in to the marines’ secure communications and had been intensely relieved to get them back on board without loss. Now the submarine was thirty metres down, heading south at fifteen knots for the channel between the rocks that would lead them into safer depths and international waters. Talbot crossed from his command seat to the chart table.

  ‘Four-point-three miles to the one hundred metre contour, sir,’ the navigator informed him. ‘About seventeen minutes.’

  ‘T
hanks, Vasco.’

  Beyond the hundred metre line the sea bed shelved away steeply. Once across the contour he would take the boat to sixty metres and, with the trawl-net danger passed, would push up the speed to eighteen knots. He stepped past the conning tower into the sound room. The waterfall screens showed thin herringbone traces of boats nearby.

  ‘There’s two fishing vessels to port and one to starboard, sir,’ Chief Smedley told him. ‘Small time, working the rocks. Nothing closer than fifteen cables.’

  ‘Any bio?’

  ‘A school of porpoises followed us when we dived, but they’ve given up and gone home.’

  ‘Let’s hope they weren’t working for the Croat Navy,’ Talbot quipped.

  ‘They sang “Rule Britannia” when they left us, so I think we’re in the clear, sir.’

  Talbot smiled and returned to the control room. As he rounded the periscope housing he saw Lieutenant Commander Hayes appear at the top of the companionway with the SIS man. Hayes introduced him to Talbot and they shook hands. It was the first time they’d met. Personal contact with the special forces team on board had been left to the First Lieutenant.

  ‘Mr Packer has a request to make, sir.’

  Talbot took quick stock of this man whose formerly secret life had been so thoroughly ventilated by the UK press.

  ‘Better come into my cabin and tell me what’s on your mind,’ he said. ‘Officer of the watch, you have the submarine.’

  ‘I have the submarine, sir,’ Styles responded.

  Talbot told Sam to sit on the small settee that doubled as his bunk. Hayes left them to it.

  ‘What’s your problem, Mr Packer?’

  ‘I’ve a very urgent need to speak to my controllers in London, Commander,’ Sam explained.

  ‘Well at this point that’s quite impossible, I’m afraid. We’re still well inside Croatian waters.’

  ‘They were experimenting with smallpox on that island,’ Sam stressed. ‘A new variant, for which there’s no vaccine. Stocks may already have been shipped to Europe to be used for mass murder. If I delay passing on the information, hundreds may die who might otherwise have lived.’