The Chosen Dead

by M. R. Hall

  She glanced at the locked gates. ‘Oh, are we too late?’

  ‘I’ve a key.’ He reached into his jeans pockets. ‘I’m one of the “friends”, a trustee, actually.’ He unfastened the padlock. ‘Don’t tell any of my colleagues – they’ll think I’ve lost my edge.’ He led her through the gate and carefully locked it after them. ‘I was advising on the medicinal plants collection and discovered a premature interest in horticulture. It’s funny how things take you.’

  Jenny smiled, sensing that he was nervous of her. The anxious mention of his colleagues told her he was wary of being seen with her, too. A deserted garden was one of the few safe places to meet.

  They set off along the gravel path between immaculately striped lawns planted with specimen trees and shrubs towards a circular ornamental pond.

  ‘Are you fond of gardens?’ Blake said stiffly. Small talk didn’t seem to come naturally.

  ‘I’ve a patch of wilderness I occasionally try to tame,’ she answered, ‘but it doesn’t seem to like me interfering with it. I think of it that way – like it has a life of its own.’

  The corners of Blake’s mouth twitched into a hint of a smile. Jenny felt him relax a little. She had been in his presence only a minute or two, and could already be sure that his marriage to Sonia would have been short on frivolity.

  ‘Would you like me to tell you what brought me to your ex-wife?’ Jenny asked.

  Blake glanced across at her with an expression that told her he half-suspected the answer.

  ‘I can’t say I want to hear it, but I suppose I had better.’

  For the second time in the space of a few hours, Jenny recounted the story of Adam Jordan’s violent death and his secretive trip to Oxford two days beforehand. She told him how she had arrived at the cafe in Oxford Castle and been led first to Alex Forster, then to Sonia Blake, and then to a world of which she had little or no understanding. Obeying an instinct to keep some of the pieces to herself, she stopped short of telling him about the African girl and the meeting at Great Shefford, and skipped on to her second visit to Sonia’s rooms. She described the events immediately after her death, the fragments of information she had collected the following day, and her visit to Jason Kwan at the Diamond Light Source.

  Blake had been listening in silence as he paced evenly along the path, but mention of the Diamond Light Source brought him abruptly to attention.

  ‘Sonia visited the synchrotron? You’re sure?’

  ‘She’s on the visitor log.’

  ‘Do you have any idea why?’

  ‘Curiosity, Kwan said. Though I can’t put my hand on my heart and say I believe he was telling the whole truth. They’ve got some pretty stiff security policing that place. He didn’t seem altogether at ease.’

  Blake shook his head. ‘I thought she’d got over all that.’

  ‘All what?’ Jenny asked.

  He sighed heavily, as if a great burden had been placed on his shoulders. ‘Do you know about her father?’

  ‘I know he was a geneticist who was murdered thirty years ago. I read an article about the discovery of his remains.’

  ‘That was about the last straw for our marriage.’

  They had arrived at a second small pond surrounded by large slabs of tiered rock carpeted with alpine plants. A nearby pine tree carried the scent of mountains in summer. Blake stopped and sat on one of the granite shelves. Jenny sat near, though not close, allowing him the space to be alone with his thoughts.

  ‘One thing you have to understand about Sonia is that she was driven, completely consumed, by the obsession to find out what happened to her father. She was seven years old when he vanished. One moment he was watching her play softball, the next he’d disappeared with some guy in a suit. That’s all we ever knew for certain.’ Jenny could see he was having to wring the story out of himself. ‘What you won’t read on the Internet is that straight after he went missing, his wife was given the third degree and ended up having a breakdown. Sonia lived most of her childhood with an alcoholic grandmother in New Jersey. I guess the memory of her dead father was all she had to cling on to.’

  ‘Who was it harassing her mother?’ Jenny asked.

  ‘First of all it was the company he’d worked for. It was the Wild West days in the biotech industry and his outfit was in a race for patents. Millions of dollars were at stake. It was natural enough to assume he’d vanished somewhere with the company secrets. And then came the intelligence agencies. As a young guy he’d worked for a few years in the US military. Apparently there was a lot of bioweaponry stuff being explored back in the late sixties. Not the most ethical work, but for three years’ service the Army would pay off your student loan. His dad worked in a steel mill, so it was a hard offer to resist. Anyway, he did his time at some facility in Georgia called Cornmill Creek – I don’t believe Sonia ever found out exactly what it was he was doing there – and when he vanished fifteen years later, they thought he might have been turned by the Soviets all those years ago and finally jumped ship.’

  Blake picked at a loose crumb of rock and tossed it into the pond. ‘I think on some level Sonia had bought into that version. She wanted to believe he was still alive. I used to think that perhaps her studying politics had just been one huge, lifelong attempt to understand how principles could lead a man to abandon his family. When his body turned up it was more than she could handle. Turns out the most likely explanation was a rival company had simply had him killed – just business. So what do you do when the mystery you’ve built your life around solving is effectively solved?’

  ‘Ditch your husband?’

  ‘That came later.’ He looked at her. ‘I tried to coax her back to normality, but she still wouldn’t let the Soviet thing go. I told her it was crazy, but she got it into her head that her father had some knowledge, some Cold War secret they wanted that he wouldn’t give them. If he hadn’t joined them, he must have been killed by them – that was how she rationalized it.’

  ‘Hence her interest in Roman Slavsky.’

  ‘Mmm,’ Blake said with resignation.

  ‘What’s his story? I can’t find much about him.’

  ‘He was in my business – immunology. Apparently he worked until his late thirties on the Soviet biological weapons programme. Anthrax, smallpox and God knows how many hybrid viruses and bacteria. He came across to the West in eighty-nine. According to the myth, he brought the results of ten years’ work with him as well as a vial of recombinant bubonic plague. He ended up at Porton Down for the next ten years – the same work, but for our side. But of course, when it’s us building bioweapons it’s purely for defensive purposes.’

  ‘Do you know what happened to him?’

  ‘Not long after the turn of the century he set up his own business. He stopped publishing when he went commercial, of course, but I gather he was working on gene-specific drugs. I heard his principal interest was in post-transcriptional gene silencing.’

  ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to explain.’

  ‘Think of a woman carrying a breast-cancer gene. If you can isolate the sequence that codes for malignant cells, your next task is finding out how to disable it. That sequence will be repeated in every strand of DNA in the nucleus of every cell in the body. DNA is like a zip – two long strips of code that join in the centre. An enzyme travels along its length transcribing it, literally reading the code and translating it into a single-stranded copy – RNA – that carries the data to the parts of the cell that make proteins. RNA is also involved with gene expression – in other words, a sequence in the RNA will be responsible for turning the basic DNA code into actual cancer cells.

  ‘Slavsky’s commercial work was concerned with introducing modified RNA into human cells that would silence the undesirable bits. It was the beginnings of personalized medicine. Give it another fifty years and we’ll have machines that’ll decode your specific gene sequences and manufacture drugs that will operate only on your individual genetics. We’re already developing
a lot of the theory, the big challenge is in turning highly specialized laboratory processes into something that can be done on an industrial scale. Slavksy was trying to patent the fundamental techniques that everyone who follows in the next twenty years will have to license.’

  ‘Did he succeed?’

  ‘His company’s still running.’ Blake gave a philosophical smile. ‘But from what I can gather he worked himself into an early grave. He died of a pulmonary embolism in 2008. According to Sonia, of course, he was cunningly murdered by Russian agents using his own creations against him.’

  ‘Did she have any basis for this? Did she know him?’

  ‘From what I could work out, he did his very best to avoid her. She finally cornered him at a conference in Munich in 2007, not long after her father’s body had been found. All she got out of him was the fact that he had been aware of the work going on at Cornmill Creek back in the sixties and all the way through the seventies. Apparently someone on the US side had been leaking secrets. Slavsky maintained the Americans continued their programme long after the Biological Weapons Convention which came into effect in 1975 and that his work in the USSR was largely intended to counter that. She came home depressed and disappointed, of course, but it seemed she had managed to stir something in his conscience. About three months later he sent her a copy of an article published in the Washington Post in November 1981. It was a full three columns written by a staff journalist claiming to have spoken to anonymous sources who’d worked on the US Army’s biological weapons programme based at Cornmill Creek. It dismissed the Army’s claim that their work was purely defensive and spoke about live experiments carried out in the late 1960s. Apparently the aim had been to create a bioweapon that would only affect the Vietcong. The idea was to spray anthrax from the air and to give US troops drugs to render them immune from infection. Fortunately, it seems, the tests went badly. A lot of people died and it never made it to the battlefield.’

  Blake paused, and looked up at a noisy flock of starlings that twisted in a dramatic spiral against the clear sky and swooped as one to land in the branches of a large beech tree. Jenny watched the way he observed them, as curious and analytical as he was captivated.

  ‘What was the significance of this article?’ Jenny asked.

  ‘Sonia became convinced the unnamed source was her father, and that he was killed by his own government. That’s when the paranoia took over.’

  ‘Did she find any evidence to support her theory?’

  ‘No – and for the obvious reason. Her father was about to make his fortune, for God’s sake. Why would he have done anything as stupid as talk to a journalist?’

  ‘A guilty conscience?’

  Blake shook his head. ‘Most scientists aren’t big-picture people. We spend our lives looking down microscopes. Sonia never got that. She was trying to create this grand conspiracy that simply didn’t exist.’

  They fell into silence for a long moment as Blake seemed to draw away from the painful memories. ‘Do you know much about her interest in Africa?’ Jenny said.

  ‘I’m not really the man to ask. We had only spoken a handful of times in the last two years. As far as Sonia was concerned, you were either with her or against her, and I’d been placed squarely in the latter camp.’

  He gazed off along the path as if keen to move on and draw the conversation to a close.

  ‘I think she was interested in the politics of the African aid business. Adam Jordan may have been talking to her about how drugs are used, or withheld, as a political tool.’

  Blake nodded. ‘That was Sonia’s kind of territory. The man you should talk to is Alex Forster. I gather they’d been together off and on for a while.’

  ‘Really?’ Jenny recalled Forster’s reaction to the news of her death – the way he had sat silently on the stairs, showing no outward emotion – and thought how unlike a lover he had seemed.

  Blake eased himself off the shelf of rock and onto his feet. ‘I should be getting back.’ Mention of Forster had carried unhappy associations. He set off towards the gates, forcing Jenny to follow at his heels.

  ‘Just a couple more things, Dr Blake. Does the name “Gina” mean anything to you? It was written on a piece of paper I found under Sonia’s desk.’

  ‘No,’ he answered abruptly.

  ‘Can you think of any reason why she might have been visiting the Diamond Light Source?’

  ‘I don’t know. But it wouldn’t surprise me if she was still worrying away at the Slavsky connection. What you have to understand is that she was sane enough to hold down her job, but when it came to her father, mad enough to believe anything.’ He shot her a guilty, sideways glance. ‘I tried to help her out of it, I really did.’

  They walked on in silence, Jenny detecting that Blake’s feelings towards his wife were more ambiguous and complex than he had admitted.

  She pushed on into even more uncomfortable ground. ‘The manner of your wife’s death – endocarditis – are you satisfied with that?’

  Blake quickened his pace, the sharp gravel crunching beneath his shoes.

  Jenny persisted. ‘I know it can be caused by stress, but she was a very fit woman.’

  They were fast approaching the locked gates and Blake seemed anxious to seek the sanctuary of the busy street beyond. Jenny stepped in front of him as he reached for the keys to the padlock. She could see it rushing to the surface now: any moment his angry eyes would be filling with tears.

  ‘Tell me, Dr Blake?’ she challenged him.

  He met her gaze, his face tight with the effort of holding back feelings too painful to articulate.

  ‘There’s something more, isn’t there?’

  ‘I’m a rational man, Mrs Cooper, a scientist. I don’t—’ He choked on his words and looked down and away, ashamed of letting the mask slip.

  ‘You don’t believe—?’ she prompted. ‘You don’t believe in what? In conspiracies? That your ex-wife died from a heart infection?’

  ‘She did. That was the immediate cause,’ he answered sharply. ‘I know the pathologist. We studied together.’

  ‘But? There is more, isn’t there?’

  She caught another spark from the blue eyes beneath the fringe. She read disbelief in them; amazement.

  ‘Please tell me,’ Jenny insisted. ‘It’s important.’

  She had won. She saw Blake bending to the inevitable, ready to confess what he had been holding back their entire meeting.

  ‘I spoke to him yesterday, off the record. He said there were indications of a more extensive infection but that the police told him to “keep his findings simple”. But they asked him to provide tissue samples. They didn’t say what for.’ He exhaled, eyes closed. Relieved at having shared his secret.

  ‘The police asked him for tissue samples?’

  ‘Yes. He gave them a number – blood and tissue from the major organs.’

  Jenny felt needles travel up her spine.

  ‘This infection he suspects – does he have an idea what it is?’

  ‘There are several possibilities.’ He ran his fingers agitatedly through his hair. ‘He offered me some samples. I accepted. A colleague and I are going to look at them this weekend.’

  Jenny said, ‘Are you telling me you suspect this was something given to her deliberately?’

  ‘I’ve already told you, Mrs Cooper. I don’t believe in conspiracies. I’m a scientist. I form my opinions based on evidence.’

  ‘But you’ll let me know what you find.’

  He nodded, and then, with all the effort of contradicting beliefs to which he had held fast for years, said, ‘Do you think I’m in any danger? I have a young child.’

  ‘I don’t know how to answer that question,’ Jenny said.

  He glanced towards the street, then stepped back out of sight of the passing pedestrians. ‘There’s another way out onto Rose Lane. It’s quieter. We should take that.’

  TWENTY-ONE

  HENRY BLAKE HAD TURNED LEFT out of the si
de exit of the Botanic Garden and vanished through another set of iron gates that led onto Merton Fields, leaving Jenny to make her way back along the narrow lane towards the High Street alone. During their final minutes together, he had revealed that in her more unstable moments, Sonia had instructed him that should she die an untimely death she wanted him to make sure he was satisfied of the reason. She had suffered from an acute phobia of being murdered like her father, which at times had become so intense that Blake had forced her to see a therapist. As they parted, Jenny had felt a need to answer his honesty with a confession of her own. She told him about Adam Jordan and the African girl, and her lingering suspicion that his death was connected to those of Sophie Freeman and Elena Lujan. He had listened but voiced no opinion, wondering, perhaps, if she was every bit as unhinged as Sonia had been.

  ‘But doesn’t it sound odd to you?’ Jenny had asked. ‘Why would only two people fall ill from such an aggressive strain? And doesn’t all that you’ve told me suggest that Sonia was being rather more rational than you’d thought?’

  ‘There is nothing I can say that would be in any way helpful or constructive,’ Blake had said. ‘If I went down the road of wild speculation, I’d no longer be a scientist.’

  Jenny brushed her fingers against the privet hedge at the side of the lane; the warm air drifting across from the Botanic Garden smelt of lavender and honeysuckle. Nowhere could have felt safer, more permanent and secure, nowhere more removed from the sinister world of biological weaponry. She stopped short of the High Street and dialled Alex Forster’s number. She connected to an answer message: ‘I’m unable to take your call. Please leave your details and I’ll get back to you.’ She sent him a text, but received no reply. He was keeping his head down, and perhaps with good reason: it occurred to her that she may have misread his reaction to Sonia’s death. His silence on the stairs might have been prompted by pure terror.

  Tintern Abbey stood luminescent beneath a moon brighter than a December sun. Jenny imagined the ghosts of its long-dead monks haunting its shadows, chanting their vespers to the silent valley. She shivered, her imagination running wild, conjuring malignant spirits in the hedgerows; every silhouetted tree a stooping monster. She pressed on up the lane to Melin Bach, anxious to escape the unnatural night. She swung left and right through the tight bends, the cow parsley erupting from the verges clawing at her car like outstretched hands. A rusted iron gate tied to stone posts with bailer twine signalled the final bend. She took it fast, the headlights sweeping left, but instead of picking out her cottage, they illuminated a stationary car parked outside. She stamped on the brakes, skidding to a halt inches from impact as the driver’s door flew open and an angry male figure jumped out.