The Chosen Dead

by M. R. Hall

  ‘What did she want from you?’

  ‘God knows. I fobbed her off, to be honest. I told her she couldn’t trust me now I had a daughter – my child would always come first.’

  ‘Did she give you any clue as to who this person might have been?’

  ‘I told you, I cut her off before she got me involved.’

  Suddenly and without warning, Blake got down from his stool. ‘That’s all I’ve got. Time’s up.’ He tapped his wristwatch and headed off back along the corridor.

  The elevator seemed forever stuck on the lower floors, so Jenny took the stairs down to the ground. As she stepped out into the main concourse, her mind churning with questions, she spotted a man standing with his back to her at the reception desk. He turned his head a fraction, and a glimpse of the side of his face was enough: it was him, and right behind him a second man with the same close-cropped hair. Jenny ducked back around the corner and caught her breath at the foot of the stairs. She felt her legs wanting to give way beneath her.

  You’re OK. He didn’t see you.

  A sign to her left pointed towards Accident and Emergency. She moved off, eyes fixed on the corridor ahead. Ten, fifteen paces and still no hand on her shoulder. She glanced back and saw the second man jogging up the stairs to the first floor, a phone pressed to his ear, eyes registering the faces of those coming down. She hurried on, moving as fast as she could without drawing attention to herself. What would happen to Blake? Would he tell them everything? Or was it he who had alerted them to her presence?

  She arrived in the hectic waiting area of Accident and Emergency, headed for the exit and ran for the first taxi in the rank. She didn’t know who or what to trust any more.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  THE CAR-HIRE CONCESSION was in a quiet street behind Oxford station, but it took Jenny a tortuous half-hour to complete the rigmarole of form-filling before she finally got her hands on the keys.

  It wasn’t much of a plan, but having failed to secure a lead on Sonia Blake’s missing papers, it was the only option she had left: she was going to track down Jason Kwan, the beamline scientist, and force him to cough up whatever he had failed to tell her in his office at the Diamond Light Source. Denied the use of her phone, she would have to use the Internet to locate his home address and number. But where to get online at 6 p.m. on a Saturday evening?

  She arrived at the junction at the end of Abbey Road. It was left to the city, or right to head out of town on the Botley Road. Even in a hire car, driving back into town felt like too big a risk, but she was certain she wouldn’t find an Internet cafe between Oxford and Bristol. She felt the tempting pull of the dormant phone in her pocket – surely a few seconds online wouldn’t betray her? Her fingers dipped into her jacket pocket and closed around it, ready to take a chance, when it occurred to her that if she took out the SIM card and managed to hook up to a Wi-Fi signal, she could use the Internet without being traced. It was a criminal’s trick she’d heard Alison talk about: clever paedophiles never used their own Wi-Fi to get online if they could help it, but hijacked someone else’s. It was a ploy that had led to a number of false arrests.

  She turned right, and then right again into the next residential street, pulled over to take out the SIM, then crept along at kerb-crawler’s speed, waiting for an unsecured wireless signal to appear on her screen. She picked one up within two hundred yards. Pulling over, she searched Kwan’s name in an online phone directory and came up with his home number in Reading within seconds. It was too easy. She flicked by reflex to her emails, cringing as they flooded into her inbox: endless reminders of cases she had neglected, pleas from relatives of the dead she had kept waiting for weeks, and in amongst them a message from Ross.

  ‘Mum, where are you? I thought we were coming over today. Michael’s been calling asking if you’ve been touch. Should we be worried??? Ross.’

  She started to type in a reply, but dried up after ‘I’m fine’. She wasn’t fine, and he was right to be worried. She pressed delete and wrote simply: ‘Back later. Sorry. I’ll call. Mum x.’ She switched off and fought against a sensation of panic. She could have been with him, she could be at home being a proper mother, but instead she was chasing around the country being pursued like a criminal. It was time to move on.

  Three miles out of the city she turned off the main road in search of a phone box and found herself in the village of Cumnor. Driving along its narrow lanes past ancient thatched cottages, it would have been easy to believe that the outside world was as peaceful and benign as this tranquil backwater. She passed the post office and found an open-sided phone kiosk next to a bus stop. There were ponies grazing in the field behind, children on a trampoline in a neighbouring garden. She dialled Kwan’s number.

  Any more than seven rings and you were certain to get a machine. She counted three, four, five . . . He picked up on six, wary of an unexpected caller.

  ‘Dr Kwan, it’s Jenny Cooper. We met at the Diamond Light Source.’

  He didn’t answer her.

  ‘Please don’t hang up. I need to talk to you.’

  Still no response.

  ‘Dr Kwan, this is very urgent. I can come to your home.’

  ‘No, no. I’ll call you back.’

  The line went dead. Seconds passed and the payphone remained silent. She glanced up and down the lane, expecting to see the thugs she had escaped twice appear at any moment.

  Call, damn you!

  More than a minute had passed and she was ready to risk calling back when the old-fashioned bell sounded its double ring. Jenny grabbed the receiver in a palm slippery with sweat.

  ‘Dr Kwan?’

  ‘You’re in a payphone, yes?’ His voice was distorted. He had switched from a landline to a mobile phone.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Alone?’

  ‘Completely.’

  ‘OK.’ He sounded calmer now. ‘How can I help you?’

  ‘I haven’t time to be anything less than frank. Sonia Blake, the woman who visited you, has more than likely been murdered.’ He made an involuntary sound, a muted exclamation of shock, or was it fear? ‘Her death was somehow connected with a recombinant strain of meningitis that has just claimed two lives. There can’t be any more secrets, Dr Kwan. If you know something, you either talk to me, and I’ll promise to protect you as best I can, or you can take your chances with whoever gets to you first. I know I’m biased, but I think I may be the safer option.’

  ‘I don’t have anything to tell you.’

  ‘I don’t want to have to, but I could always summon you to court.’

  She waited, sensing she’d pinned him down.

  ‘You can’t come here, not to my home.’

  ‘You’re being watched?’

  ‘I have a girlfriend. She’s pregnant. I don’t want her involved.’

  Jenny tried to come up with a meeting place in this unfamiliar stretch of the country, and could think of only one. ‘There’s a village called Great Shefford not far from you. I’ll be in the lay-by behind the filling station in one hour.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘We talk for a while, then I leave you to get on with your life. Isn’t that what you want?’

  He hesitated, threatening to baulk at the last.

  ‘You have my word, Dr Kwan.’

  ‘All right. I’ll be there.’

  Jenny climbed into the car with the sense that one way or another things were about to play out. She delved into her bag for a second Xanax: she’d climb back on the wagon when this was all over.

  The pill made her feel how she imagined brave people must feel most of the time. She was aware of her fear but able to step away and see it from the outside as something vaguely absurd. It was a powerful sensation. From her parking space behind the filling station at Great Shefford she scanned the passing traffic with a cool detachment. If her two pursuers from the hospital arrived before Kwan, so be it. She wouldn’t go without a fight. She had found Sonia Blake’s razor necklace in he
r jacket pocket and slipped it around her neck: an innocuous silver ring on a chain that only a woman would notice was unusually hefty.

  Nine fifteen. The sun had dipped behind the hill and all she could see of the approaching traffic were headlights. Kwan was late, but she had expected that. He had a girlfriend to deal with, then, if he had any sense, a few turns around the block to make sure he wasn’t being followed. Ten minutes later, a car approaching from the west slowed, then indicated left. It came to a stop in the middle of the road, the driver making sure of the ground ahead before he committed himself. Jenny flicked her lights. It was the signal Kwan needed. He turned in and silently reversed his Prius alongside her VW, making sure his front end was pointing out towards the road.

  Jenny wound down her passenger window and called across. ‘My car or yours?’

  Kwan nodded at her to come across, too frightened to let go of his steering wheel.

  Jenny strolled around the front of the Toyota, letting him see that she wasn’t afraid, and climbed into the passenger seat.

  ‘Sorry to disturb your weekend.’

  Kwan shook his head as if to say he had found himself in a situation beyond his comprehension.

  ‘Did that woman from security debrief you after I called? What was her name? Leyton.’

  He nodded. ‘Not just her.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Two other guys turned up. Said they worked for military intelligence. They took me over to some Army base in Salisbury. Had me there most of the day. No lawyer, nothing.’

  ‘Were they asking about me?’

  ‘You, Sonia Blake, and some guy called Adam Jordan.’

  Jenny could smell the sweat leaching out of his pores. He wiped his forehead with his wrist.

  ‘What did you tell them?’

  ‘The same as I told you.’

  ‘Did they give you a punch in the ribs?’

  He looked at her, startled. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘They did the same to a friend of mine.’ She gave him a sympathetic smile. ‘I’m sorry. It could have been a lot worse.’

  He turned away again, his eyes scanning the road neurotically. ‘I read Sonia collapsed with a heart condition.’

  ‘She had Q fever. A recombinant strain. I’m told it’s a favoured candidate for biological weapons.’

  ‘Shit,’ Kwan whispered.

  ‘Does that make any sense to you?’

  ‘Those guys kept asking me who killed her. I told them all I knew is what I read in the news, but they wouldn’t have it. They kept on saying she was killed, who killed her, what did she know?’

  ‘And you stuck to the line that she’d just come to see you to learn how the beamline works.’

  ‘Yeah.’ He glanced across at her, lips pressed together, facial muscles contracted, as much as he could do not to tip over the edge and start to sob.

  ‘You know what comes next, don’t you?’ Jenny said. ‘Tell me what was going on, Jason,’ she used his Christian name for the first time, ‘and we’ll see what we can do.’

  ‘I don’t see what you can do.’

  ‘Organize police protection for one thing.’

  ‘From military intelligence?’

  Jenny had only a sketchy recollection of the law of habeas corpus, but she knew that even government agents or military intelligence had no lawful right to spirit civilians away without charge. ‘Have you committed any criminal offence?’

  ‘No.’ He corrected himself. ‘I don’t think so . . . I don’t know.’

  Jenny looked at him. ‘Tell me, Jason.’

  He had started to weep. How he had survived a lengthy interrogation Jenny couldn’t begin to imagine.

  ‘Do you need a moment?’

  He shook his head.

  She fished a clean but crumpled paper tissue from her pocket and handed it to him, struggling to feel sympathetic towards a crying man. She wouldn’t have made much of a nurse.

  ‘Tell me what you know.’

  Drying his eyes, Kwan started to talk. He had worked as a beamline scientist for nearly five years, he said, having joined the Diamond Light Source immediately after completing his PhD at Imperial College, London. His job was to operate the machinery and assist the research teams who hired it to get the clearest possible data. He didn’t usually concern himself with the end-point of his clients’ research, but often picked up details from their conversations. The publicly funded teams had no problem talking about their work – free use of the synchrotron automatically placed their results in the public domain – but the commercial ones tended to be highly secretive, and with good reason. Often they were developing pharmacological products in direct competition with other companies: the first across the line secured the patent.

  A little over a year ago he’d been at a meeting of the European Crystallographic Association in Potsdam, Germany. Sonia Blake approached him in a hotel lobby after a seminar in which he’d been speaking on developments in protein-imaging techniques. It wasn’t a subject you’d expect to excite the attention of an attractive woman, but they had ended up having dinner and spending the night together in her hotel room. It was to be the first of four or five such encounters with her over the course of the next twelve months. Twice they met at conferences, and on other occasions in Oxfordshire hotels. Sonia would initiate their meetings, call to say she was feeling lonely and would he like to spend the evening together? She was always relaxed, friendly, and – unlike any other woman he had ever been involved with – intrigued by his work. At their first meeting in Potsdam she told him she was writing a paper on the political implications of gene-based medicine. It wasn’t so much the hard science that interested her as what it would mean for medicine to be tailored to the individual. Would our genomes be owned by private companies? How would knowledge of our every genetic flaw affect our rights?

  By their third meeting she had told him about her father’s involvement in the early years of the industry and the questions surrounding his murder. The next time they hooked up, she talked about Professor Roman Slavsky. She claimed to have information about work his company was doing which pushed way beyond all established ethical barriers and which was probably illegal in the UK and most Western jurisdictions.

  ‘Did she say what kind of work?’

  ‘Not directly. I just remember she started asking me questions about my scientific ethics. Did it matter to me whether I was working on public-domain or commercial research? Did I think it was acceptable for knowledge about the human genome to be exclusively owned by businessmen? And one strange question that always stuck in my mind: would I assist a project to create an influenza vaccine that would only work on blond people?’

  ‘That was her pillow talk?’

  ‘I know. I should have guessed she wasn’t after me for my body.’ He almost smiled. ‘The fifth time we met – the very last time – we went to a hotel. She told me she’d been in touch with someone working for a biotech company that was doing some deeply unethical research. She said this guy was too frightened to talk to her, but he was going to be at Diamond for a couple of weeks and could I get to know him, maybe drop her name into the conversation to see how he reacted.’

  ‘Who was he?’

  ‘I can give you an email, that’s all.’

  ‘Because . . . ?’

  ‘Because I have a duty of confidentiality.’ He struck the wheel with the heel of his palm in frustration at the unfairness of his predicament.

  ‘What about the name of the company?’

  ‘Confidential.’

  ‘No problem,’ Jenny said calmly. ‘What happened then?’

  ‘Nothing. I told her I wasn’t going to spy for her. It was too dangerous for me.’

  ‘Let me guess – she wasn’t content with that?’

  ‘Emails, phone calls, she wouldn’t let it go. I told her I wanted nothing more to do with her. But the next thing I knew, she turned up at Diamond. She called me in my office and said if I didn’t let her in, there was go
ing to be trouble. I didn’t have a choice. As soon as I closed the door she started threatening me – either I handed over the company’s research data or she’d phone my girlfriend and tell her about our affair. I told her I didn’t have access to it, but she wouldn’t believe me. She was like a mad person. Obsessed.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I got a USB and saved some public-domain stuff onto it. There was no way she was going to understand it, and one protein molecule looks pretty much like any other.’

  ‘Did you hear from her again?’

  ‘No. Nothing till I read she’d died.’

  Jenny said, ‘Did you get the feeling that she’d spent a whole year working up to that one moment?’

  ‘I slept with Sonia Blake five times and I still don’t know who or what she was. I guess that was the idea.’ Kwan slowly shook his head. The confession had exhausted him.

  Jenny watched as Kwan’s tail lights disappeared around the bend. It was getting late. The traffic had all but vanished from the road. The lights on the filling-station forecourt flickered and went out, leaving her staring into darkness. All she had left was the anonymous email address Kwan had left her – agct0997@hotmail.com – and a decision to make: whether to trust him. She turned the key in the ignition and headed out onto the road, not sure where she was going or what to do next. A mile or so passed in a blur of indecision, her thoughts ricocheting between the equally forbidding prospects of appealing to Simon Moreton for help and protection, and continuing to act alone. Her courage was beginning to fail when the dim light of a phone box in a layby up ahead seemed to summon her. Williams. She needed to speak to Williams.

  Performing the same trick she had in Oxford, Jenny took the SIM card from her phone and checked Williams’s number in the contacts file. The air had turned cold under a cloudless sky, and she stood shivering in the roadside booth as she waited for what felt like minutes for her call to connect.