“Go ahead,” Kaplan said, “the full dossier is already lodged with the appropriate authorities in half-a-dozen countries. They are simply waiting for the signal to begin prosecution.”
“And why don’t you give the signal?”
Kaplan knew that the initiative had passed into his hands.
“Because, my dear Count, your illegal trade in endangered species concerns me only indirectly.”
“What does concern you?” The Count had retreated to an armchair in the corner of his library. He sat, lowering angrily at the intruder.
“I want to know precisely where the green monkeys have been coming from. How long have you been shipping them? From where? To whom?”
“And if I tell you what I know?” Philippe Vincennes spoke quietly, hopefully. Astute businessman that he was, he seemed to sense the possibility of compromise.
“If you tell me what I need to know, I may be able to persuade people not to act on this dossier. You are a revered man in Belgium and indeed internationally, Monsieur le Comte. The scandal would be great if the story came out. You would not, of course,” he added quickly, “resume any of your previous activities where this trade is concerned. Nor will you inform your ‘contacts’ about my visit. We shall know about it if you do.”
The Count was silent for a few moments. “Very well. I agree to your terms. I will tell you what I know.”
At last Kaplan himself sat down. They faced each other, warily, across the library. Kaplan looked at his watch. He hoped the old man would not take too long. Every minute counted.
But Count Philippe Vincennes was not to be hurried. He had had things his own way the whole of his very long life and he did not propose to change the pattern now.
He began almost casually. “You know, I was severely reprimanded for my actions that day. They threatened to cancel the contract altogether. They said that I had acted on my own initiative, without orders, and that I could have caused the gravest confusion. Apparently, they had people all lined up to feed you the wrong information, and then suddenly I try to have you rubbed out on the road between here and Brussels.”
The old man laughed — it was an almost obscene sound. “Of course I apologized profusely. You see I was concerned with the whole of my trading operation and the threat which you and your people might pose to it.” He paused. “You were not the first. I knew about the girl. About the dossier. I had no idea that she had been so persistent and so successful in obtaining information about our activities.”
“Did you have anything to do with her death?”
“No. Absolutely not.” The Count was quite emphatic. “I heard about it, of course. I believe it was an accident.”
“So there was a sick monkey in the cargo shed at Brussels.”
“Yes. And it was destroyed. That was all true. As far as I understood it from what they told me later, the man you met at the airport lied only about the origin of the consignment. He told you it was Zaire, when of course it was Burundi.”
“Ah!” Kaplan uttered a sharp exclamation. Here was the confirmation he had been seeking.
“Where in Burundi?”
The old man took a long pull at his drink.
“I don’t know, I’m afraid. My son Louis does most of the travelling nowadays. He could tell you. He has actually visited the site several times.”
“And where is Louis now? Can I speak to him?” Kaplan could barely conceal his impatience.
Count Philippe Vincennes shook his head: “Louis is still in Africa somewhere, but I’m not sure exactly where. He may even be in Burundi at this moment. He has not been in touch for a week.”
Kaplan walked over to the other man. He spoke in icy tones. “If you are not telling me all you know, and I mean all, Monsieur le Comte, I shall personally see to it by one means or another that you are a broken man.”
“My dear Kaplan,” the Count gave a short laugh. “There is no need to resort to such crude threats. I have told you that I don’t know precisely where the monkeys come from in Burundi. But I do know the original colony numbered some five hundred. For the last six months, we have been shipping them out at the rate of twenty a month. So the total population of green monkeys which remains on site is probably something under four hundred at the present time.”
“Where have you been shipping them to?” Kaplan thought he knew the answer without having to ask the question but it was as well to have the reply in the Count’s own words.
“To Moscow, of course. Where else?” The old man looked alarmed. “Don’t misunderstand me, Kaplan. I’m not a spy. I’m just a businessman. As long as people pay the bill, I’ll provide the goods.”
“That’s one of the problems.” Kaplan could not keep the scorn from his voice. “There are too many people who think like you do, Count. And other people, innocent people, suffer for it.”
“Of course. I hope I have been of service.”
After he had left the Count, Kaplan stopped at a payphone on the motorway and put a collect call through to his office in Atlanta. Susan Wainwright sounded intensely relieved to hear him.
“Thank God you called, Lowell. I’ve been trying to reach you for the last two hours.”
“What’s the problem?”
“A call came through for you from Burundi.”
“From Burundi?” Kaplan was amazed. “Who was it?”
“Stephanie Verusio. She said she had to speak to you urgently. It was a matter of life or death.”
“How can I get hold of her?”
“She gave me a number where she can be reached for the next few hours. She said she’ll stand by the phone.”
Three minutes later — for once the international connection worked perfectly — Lowell Kaplan was on the line to Bujumbura.
Stephanie had thought long and hard before finally deciding to call Lowell Kaplan. Any happy impressions she might have had of their time in Paris together had been obliterated by his participation in the Zaire massacre. She found it hard to reconcile the image of Kaplan — the epidemiologist — macabrely kitted out in pressure suit and helmet, with that of Kaplan — the man she had known — and made love to — a few weeks earlier.
But when she returned to Bujumbura from her visit to Mount Lwungi; when she reflected on what she had seen and heard at Frau Matthofer’s camp, Stephanie realized that she could no longer continue to act on her own. She did not understand all that was going on; but she understood enough. It was not a question of saving a tribe of monkeys — important though that might be. The whole future of humanity — or at least of the Western world — could be at stake. If she turned to Kaplan now, it was because she knew that this was the quickest and surest way of getting the authorities to act. Whatever his faults — and Stephanie was convinced that they were many — Kaplan would know how to set the wheels in motion.
So she sat by the telephone in her room at the Source du Nil hotel, biting her nails. When the call came through, she picked up the instrument on the first ring.
In spite of the thousands of miles that separated them, the transmission was perfect.
“Is that Stephanie Verusio?”
“It is.”
“This is Lowell Kaplan speaking.”
“Lowell. Thank God you called. I’ve got something important to tell you. Very important.”
“Go ahead, Stephanie.”
Now that her moment had come, Stephanie could barely get the words out. Somehow, the accumulated tension of the last few days seemed to overwhelm her.
At last she managed to say what she had to say.
“I’ve found the green monkeys. The real green monkeys.” The bitterness in her voice was only too apparent. “You and your team killed the wrong monkeys, Lowell. You know that, don’t you?”
The other end of the line Kaplan found himself blushing with shame.
“I know, Stephanie. I can’t tell you how sorry I am. I’ll have to talk to you about that later. We’ll find the time.”
“Believe me, Lowell. You’ll need time
to explain. I hated you then. I really hated you.” Stephanie sounded only slightly mollified.
For the next seven minutes, Kaplan listened while Stephanie told him what she had seen and heard over the last few days in Burundi. From time to time, he nodded. It all made sense now. Every aspect of the plot was clear to him, with all its horrendous implications.
At last, when she had finished, he said to her: “Stephanie, you’ve done a magnificent job. I don’t know that we can ever thank you enough.”
“It’s not over yet, is it?”
“No,” replied Lowell Kaplan. “But it soon will be.”
He put down the phone. A few seconds later, he dialled again. A Washington number. When the number answered, Kaplan explained who he was.
“I want to talk to John Shearer, please, on a secure line.”
“Mr Shearer is in with the President right now.”
Kaplan mustered all his patience. “Do me a favour, will you, and stop making difficulties. I want you to pass Shearer a message that we’ve found the green monkeys. He’ll understand.”
Thirty seconds later Kaplan found himself speaking to the President of the United States himself. The genial friendly voice was unmistakable, even at a range of five thousand miles.
“Lowell Kaplan? I’ve heard a lot about you. What do you have to tell us?”
Kaplan spoke for five minutes. His recommendations were clear and precise. He represented the operation as a “last chance” affair.
“If the serum is still there in bottles,” he told the President, “we may be able to get hold of it. Or we may be able to come out with some ‘clean’ as opposed to infected monkeys and get serum that way. We have to try.”
The President agreed. “You’re right, Kaplan. We’ll get this one moving. Be careful all of you, won’t you? We don’t want a repetition of that Iran fiasco.”
The President was referring to the time when the American team sent in to rescue the hostages had met with disaster in the Iranian desert.
“We’ll be careful,” Kaplan replied.
Before the President hung up, he had a personal message for Kaplan. “By the way,” the warmth in the President’s voice was noticeable. “I’m truly grateful to you for your warning about the Pharmacorp vaccine. But I went up there anyway. They pumped me full of serum — the last of the supply, I’m told. So I guess I’ll survive. It would have caused a panic if I had pulled out at the last minute. That’s why the vaccination programme is going ahead as planned. We can’t cancel it now without creating all kinds of problems. What the hell” — amazingly the President was still able to find the situation funny — “they’re all going to get flu protection anyway. They may die of the Marburg virus, but they won’t die of flu!”
Ever since the hostage affair, the United States had kept a crack commando squad on permanent standby in Europe. They had learned the lesson the hard way. If you couldn’t intervene within the first few hours, it was better not to intervene at all. Even so, the departure of the Hercules from the U.S. Air Force base at Wiesbaden in Germany less than eight hours after Kaplan’s telephone conversation with the President had been a miracle of organization and logistics.
The plane droned on through the night. Yugoslavia, Greece, the Mediterranean. Kaplan could visualize the route in his mind’s eye. When they were somewhere over the Sudan and still heading south, Colonel McSharry, the tough crew-cut commander of the Special Squad of Green Berets detailed for the mission (they were called McSharry’s Raiders), asked him:
“What about the girl? Stephanie Verusio? Is she going to be on the ground?”
Kaplan shook his head. “Negative. I told her she had done a great job and to get the hell out of there. We have the coordinates now. We don’t need her to pathfind.”
“I hope she does what she’s told.”
It wasn’t until they were over the Congo basin with the sun just beginning to poke over the starboard wingtip that they finally received clearance to land at Bujumbura airport.
The pilot came back to tell them the news.
“We had difficulty raising anyone down there. And when we did finally get hold of someone to ask, they didn’t want to know. Jesus! We pump untold millions of dollars’ worth of aid into these tinpot countries, good US dollars. But just try asking them one tiny favour like permission to set down a C-52 transport in an emergency situation and suddenly they’re all looking the other way.” He swore and went back to his cockpit.
“Why ask permission?” Kaplan asked McSharry. “Why not just land anyway?”
McSharry smiled. “It’s more complex than you think, Kaplan. The other side probably knows we’ve got a C-52 in the air loaded with men and material. You can’t keep a thing like that quiet. Someone will have seen it take off from Wiesbaden and they will have been following it all the way down. We ask for permission to land at Bujumbura and they automatically suppose, since we have made no intermediary stops, that the C-52 transport will arrive with the same load it had on leaving Germany. If there is a reception party planned for us, it will be at Bujumbura airport. At least, that’s my guess.”
Kaplan was puzzled. “But aren’t we going to land there?”
“Oh, the aircraft is going to land there all right,” McSharry replied airily. “But we are not. We’re going to jump out right on top of the mountain. Right on top of those goddamn monkeys.”
“Me too?” Kaplan was more than anxious. He was positively alarmed.
“You too. I can’t tell a male monkey from a female one. Let alone a ‘clean’ one from a ‘dirty’ one. As of now, you’re part of McSharry’s Raiders. Just don’t get caught in the branches when you land. Some of those jungle trees are mighty high off the ground.”
Kaplan thought he saw a flaw in the plan.
“How do we get out of the jungle with the serum and the monkeys?”
“We’re going to rendez-vous with new transport about thirty miles down the road to Kigali, just over the Rwanda frontier.”
Kaplan was incredulous. “Is there an airstrip there?”
“No. No airstrip. Just a nice straight stretch of over-engineered road cutting through the jungle. I’ve looked at the specs, Kaplan. That road can take a plane large enough to get us all out.”
With that, McSharry fell fast asleep.
During his time as an army doctor, Kaplan had undergone parachute training. So the experience of swinging in the darkness of the night beneath a billowing canopy while the ground came up to meet his feet was not entirely new to him. What was new was the fact that in this case the ground was mountainous and clad with some of the densest growths of primeval jungle that existed anywhere in the world.
In all, forty of them made the drop and forty of them arrived. They landed, most of them, on cleared ground about half-way up the mountain. Over the years the fields had pushed further and further up the slope and the tree-line had receded towards the crest. Slash-and-burn cultivation had made deep inroads into the rich stands of forest. Under other circumstances, Kaplan might have regretted the waste of resource which this represented — and the erosion which resulted, over a brief season or two, in the earth being scoured wholesale from the denuded hillside. As it was, he was grateful to find his feet firmly planted on a scruffy patch of maize, when he landed, rather than on the topmost branches of the towering canopy.
It was twenty minutes before the whole party had assembled. The dawn, which they had seen in the east at twenty thousand feet, was now beginning to break down below.
McSharry studied the terrain and consulted briefly with Kaplan.
“It’s time to move out,” he said. “You can carry your face masks for the time being. When I give the word, put them on and connect up the air supply. That means we’re in business.”
As they set off up the hill towards the summit, Kaplan wondered whether they had already been observed. Even though they had landed under cover of night, forty men dropping through the sky couldn’t easily escape notice if anyone happened to b
e looking in their direction. The question was: was anyone looking?
The jungle as they began to penetrate it, heading for the summit, seemed preternaturally quiet. Almost sinister. Kaplan was waiting for the dawn chorus as black turned to grey. But there was silence. Nothing seemed to stir in the forest. Kaplan shivered. He felt the first twinge of fear.
When Stephanie Verusio put down the telephone after her conversation with Lowell Kaplan, the manager at the Source du Nil Hotel in Bujumbura, who had been listening in, immediately informed Victor Mtaza of the substance of what had been said. Ever since her arrival in Burundi (first noted and reported to Mtaza by the apparently sleepy immigration officer at Bujumbura airport) Victor Mtaza had, by one means or another, been keeping track of Stephanie’s movements. Ngenzi’s driver, Charles, had throughout been an invaluable source of information. So had the hotel staff in Bujumbura. Victor Mtaza had soon realized that Stephanie’s concerns and his own were closely related.
When the boy arrived, panting, with the message about Stephanie’s talk with Kaplan, Victor Mtaza knew that his opportunity had come. For some time now, he had been looking for the spark that would ignite the dry tinder of revolution. That the Hutus were seething with suppressed anger after years of domination by the Tutsis was evident to anyone who had an ear to the talk of the beer-hut and market place. That this anger might one day explode into violence was, Victor Mtaza knew, highly probable if not certain. The problem was: how to control the anger, how to channel the violence so that it best served his ends. Mtaza believed that the affair of the green monkeys at last gave him the handle he was looking for.
It had not been too difficult for him to work out what was going on. For the last couple of years he had been Louis Vincennes’ principal partner in the illegal export of Burundi wildlife. The fact that a member of the President’s own family could participate in such activities was nothing new. What was new was the political aspect of the operation and its link with the big-power confrontation.
For the last several months Mtaza had realized that he was swimming in very murky water indeed. Together he and Vincennes had shipped out at least a hundred green monkeys from their sanctuary at the top of Mount Lwungi. The immediate destination had been Brussels but the ultimate destination was Moscow. Louis Vincennes had told him as much. In any case he was capable of putting two and two together. He knew that the monkeys on Lwungi carried a strange virus — anyone who lived in the area had heard legends to this effect, muddled up — of course — with stories about the ibigaribo and royal tombs. And he knew that one big power, namely the Soviet Union, was interested in obtaining this virus for its own ends.
The Virus Page 25
