‘Lay it out for me. Worst-case scenario. How many of them will die?’
‘From what we know now, there is an eighty percent probability that everyone who was vaccinated will acculturate—’
‘Spare me the bullshit. How many will die?’
‘All of them.’
He did not blink. ‘Time frame?’
I spread my hands. ‘No way to be sure. My team was kicked out of Nigeria, so we have no more monitoring on the ground, but I’d say within five to twenty years.’
‘That’s a heck of a lot of variation there.’
‘There are a heck of a lot of variables. In Kreektown conditions, they’ll be dead in a couple of years. If they had access to teaching hospitals, they’d live longer. If they got the best medicine money can buy . . .’ I shrugged.
He spun his chair away from me and looked out onto his valley. The beauty of the scene did nothing for his mood. ‘Call this a vaccine? I’d take my chances with the virus!’
‘It happens with the best! With Thalidomide . . .’
‘Well, excuse me! I didn’t realise we hired the Thalidomide professor!’
I began to reply, then I shut up. We had been down this street before. There was a reason why he was working himself up all over again. I folded my arms and waited.
‘So what’s the way out?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know.’
‘That’s what I like to hear,’ he said snidely, ‘for a professor to confess those three lovely words of ignorance.’ He leaned back and crossed his legs, holding my eyes in a glare. It wasn’t just the Menai problem that was riling him. It was the way I had rolled up into the AGM three months back and his puppet directors had tossed his proposed director aside and postponed the board elections to qualify me. I had not expected to return to the board, but I wasn’t just a director, I was chief executive of Trevi once again. To be fair, Jan Brill had not opposed my candidature, but this was our first one-on-one meeting since then. It was time to see whether the CEO of Trevi and the CEO of Megatum could agree on a way forward. ‘This is what we are going to do,’ he began.
I cleared my throat. ‘How about some of your estate wine?’
* * *
THE STEWARD had poured the wine, but Jan Brill had been talking for five minutes, and I just stared at it. ‘This is crazy, Jan,’ I whispered.
‘It is survival. Right now, Bhopal is chipping a tombstone for Union Carbide. Menai won’t do that for Megatum. We’re gonna bite the bullet.’
I turned my joystick and rolled away, but the farthest I could go from Jan Brill was fifteen feet, up close to the only other window in the room, a small four-foot-square hatch that opened to the greenish blue runway shielded from the road by the designer stand of trees. A Lear jet sat at the near end, waiting, anxious to be in another of a half-dozen patches around the world where Jan Brill had his business hubs. Beyond the wings of the jet, the sun reflected off the surface of Lake Geneva.
I told myself I was not like this, driven by an insatiable greed. I had established it for myself, beyond all doubt, when Laura gave birth to the Negro bastards. I had liquidated all my assets into one card account, called up Raven, talked him into it, and legally lost everything I owned in two nights at the casinos, just to frustrate Laura’s divorce lawyers. Plus, I had done it all without an XP9 high. I had a different type of passion, perhaps not so much passion as vanity, the same vanity that drove every scientist that ever lusted after fame in his field. But it had a limit. I took a deep breath and turned to him. ‘I want no part of it.’
‘I know.’ He was speaking fast, avoiding my eyes. ‘That’s why I got this Dalminda fellow.’
‘Dalminda? Who’s he?’
‘He’s a footloose chap I use from time to time. He’s burnt his boats in the West. He’s game, that’s all you need to know. He’ll sting Tobin, he’ll get close to him, gain his confidence, and find out what he knows about us; and if I sign the cheques, he’s game to be planted in Nigeria . . .’
‘Game for what? Does he know the details of your plan?’
‘Don’t take that tone with me!’ he snapped. ‘Just who do you think you are? Your hands are redder than mine! You made the vaccine! You injected them! I’m only trying to clean up your mess.’
‘My “mess” was accidental, Jan. I was shaving years off drug-development time in the course of business and the public interest. This is planned genocide—’
‘Don’t play word games with me, Felix. Save that for your jury in heaven. Business or genocide, you gave them the death sentence. You were happy to use them as rhesus monkeys and now you’re pulling conscience rank on me?’
‘I never sat down and planned to kill anyone.’
‘I did ask you for a way out.’
I rolled back slowly. I lowered my voice. ‘There is another way.’
‘Let’s hear it.’
‘Let’s negotiate with them.’
He drained his wine glass. ‘Negotiate with whom exactly? Those NGOs are sharks. The poor villagers are going to die anyway; guess who’s going to be stuck with all that money?’
‘If they sue in Nigeria, we can control the legal process, dictate the outcome, and set the level of damages awarded.’
‘Great, but they have sued in London . . .’
‘They haven’t. Those people are villagers. They don’t do Lagos; how much more London? Some do-gooders have sued for them. We can dummy up a Menai NGO of our own and fund it at arm’s length. We can find a dozen compliant Menais to sign on. They’ll sue in Nigeria, class action or whatever. We’ll roll over, pay a fraction of our UK legal fees in damages, and that will be a bullet in the head of the London case . . .’
‘Hmm. What kind of damages are you thinking?’
I shrugged. ‘Last year, a high court in Lagos gave the equivalent of five hundred pounds in damages for an unlawful killing case. You do the numbers. Life is cheap in their courts. There’s a judicial enquiry, under Justice Omakasa or something. We can spread the money around, judges, ministries . . . then, all your UK lawyers have to do is stall, until the Nigerian case is done.’
‘Sounds too Perry Mason, Felix. Lawsuits take time. You’ve lost your spirit; maybe you should retire for good.’
‘And you’re a loose cannon. I’m a shareholder, and I don’t appreciate the kind of political risks you’re taking with my money and my company.’
‘Look, we are working with a window of opportunity here. Your plan would close that window.’
My heart raced. ‘What window? What opportunity?’
‘They’re all there in one place right now, sitting ducks. The health boffins are trying to spread them out into cities where dialysis machines are available. When that happens, the Dalminda option disappears.’
‘Tell me about this Dalminda option.’
He took that for acquiescence and relaxed. I saw then that his foul mood had come from the fear that I would not go along with his plan.
‘It’s what I said: very basic, really. There are always crises in that neck of woods anyway; it’s just a matter of spending some judicious pennies, like tossing weapons into a playground to ratchet up the body count. There’s no smoking gun, no traceback . . .’ He leaned over and pulled out a file from a cabinet recessed into the wall. Newspaper cuttings spilled out. Border clashes, armed robberies, family feuds, fuel riots, it went on and on. ‘I’m talking attrition. Wildcat action. Nothing new to Nigeria. Nothing that wouldn’t have happened without us.’
I cleared my throat. ‘I understand they’re rather peaceful people. There’s no theft, little violence. There’s never been a police station in the village. Ever.’
He was confused. ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’
I raised the file. ‘This is irrelevant to the Menai problem. I boned up on their profile. They didn’t fight in the Nigerian Civil War. They don’t have feuds. If you toss guns into this particular playground, they might use it to make hoes.’
He laughed mirth
lessly. ‘Go back to your test tubes, Professor, and leave human nature to me.’ He sat up and rubbed his hands briskly. Our meeting appeared to be over as far as he was concerned; he seemed anxious to be rid of me. He yawned and put a grey attaché case on the desk. He pushed it across. ‘I got the eighteen-day notice. You need to build up your antidote numbers for . . . what?’
I stared helplessly. Every couple of months we used to meet up for the sort of transactions that could only happen face to face. But the climate had changed! ‘You want to continue the MoD programme? Now?’
He waved his hands. ‘What game did you come back to join? Monopoly?’
‘But . . . the Menai case—’
‘—ends the business of war? Right?’ he sneered. ‘Listen, the course of history was determined by the lab that first built the atomic bomb. Labs still control history. Germ power is nothing without control. We need antidotes . . .’
‘The climate is wrong. The only history we can write now is the history of our own imprisonment.’
‘Nonsense. Remember Agent Orange? Twelve million gallons of the chemical dumped on Vietnam, maiming and killing millions, but the American finger that pulled the trigger was also poisoned: millions were affected. Why? Inadequate, incompetent testing. You’ll be a war hero, not a jailbird, Felix. Every death abroad saves thousands of lives at home.’
‘Agent Orange was a sixties mistake. This is now.’
‘If North Korea launches a germ pod now, your research will make you the hero of the free world. Focus on that. We’ll take precautions, of course. We’ll use the Dutch company—and you’ll only monitor the tests remotely. You’re tainted now, Professor. No more fieldwork for you. They’ll send the field samples to your lab in—’
‘No!’
He was exasperated. ‘What’s your problem now? You wrote the Blind Outsource Policy. These things are contracted years in advance. The outbreaks will happen. Somebody is out there as we speak, doing his work. We have no control over that. Now, will you do yours? Will you try to save lives or just cross your legs and play chicken?’
I was silent. He was saying all the right words. I knew why I had come back. After my foolishness at the casinos, I had taken a job at a French research institute and stuck at it for a couple of years before I quit. The research was uninspiring, the supervising chemists dinosaurs. That was when I realised that unless I controlled my own work I would have to retire from research altogether. Then the foolishness with Tobin Rani happened and I got myself a wheelchair. Raven’s foresight had preserved my shares in Megatum and Trevi, and although I was appalled by Jan, consumer drug research was a bore. I could not deny my excitement at the possibility of trialling our labs’ latest research on weaponised germs. The wheelchair had ended my years of fieldwork, but a good lab was a universe of its own. An outbreak was going to happen somewhere in the underpoliced half of the world within eighteen days, with a severity that would get even the liberal press to harass governments to authorise experimental drugs . . .
I took my glasses off and wiped them carefully. My fingers trembled, the consequence of twenty years of XP9 doping. Or the pure, elemental excitement of the scientist. I had used my own body for medical research as well. I was not doing to anyone something I wasn’t ready to try on myself. My shaking hands decided me.
I reached for the case.
HUMPHREY CHOW
Abidjan | 14th April, 2005
The next morning we sat on a two-hour-long queue to see le député de directeur at SOCAR. He had a massive office at the Plateau and met us halfway between the door and his desk, by which time he had lost the official frown he reserved for business callers. He steered us to a comfortable suite of sofas. ‘Bienvenue,’ he said with a laugh and rang a small bell. ‘So you are our runaway husband?’
‘This is Izak,’ she said as we shook hands.
‘Humphrey Chow,’ I supplemented, ‘short story writer.’
‘Surely you should know your husband’s name!’ roared our uncle Stephane. His laughter was explosive and infectious—except for those at the receiving end. Even Estelle was looking slightly miffed. Not yet regretting the visit, but getting there.
A uniformed messenger answered his bell and took our orders for soft drinks.
Estelle’s second cousin had lately become his second wife. He was considered a good catch by the in-laws for his potential patronage value, and that was before his recent posting to Abidjan. This was Estelle’s first opportunity to sample the quality of his connections. He was only six weeks old in his new office, but he had been speaking of himself in the plural—and the third person—since. He was expansive and willing to impress.
He asked after six relations by name and Estelle asked after eight. Fifteen minutes passed. Three telephone calls were taken and three declined. I became alarmed at being the cause of the haemorrhage of so much official time, but Estelle and Stephane were quite relaxed. He laughed again. ‘This life is a war,’ he observed as we sipped our drinks. ‘So how can we help you today?’
That was Estelle’s cue, and she took it. He looked at me with more interest when she was through. ‘No wonder your accent is as blunt as an envelope opener,’ he mused, kissing his mobile phone speculatively. I was encouraged to witness the reappearance of his serious frown. He thumbed the trackball on his phone impatiently. ‘So who do we want right now? a very good psychiatrist, a very good neurologist, or a very good—’
‘—policeman. A very good policeman.’ Estelle sniffed, and I was startled to hear a sob break out from her. ‘Someone has been trying to kill my husband, and we want to know why.’
The tears brought an edge of focus to his trackball thumb, and his frown became a gladiatorial sneer. ‘And who is this assassin?’
‘Dalminda Roco,’ she asserted. I began to equivocate, but she stopped me with a look.
He procured the spelling of the name on a busy notepad. He called someone on the phone and asked after four acquaintances before relating the health of another five. Then he got down to the business at hand. The name Dalminda Roco was spelt and pronounced, as were Izak Baptiste and Humphrey Chow. After another round of acquaintance enquiries, he was back with us.
‘Stephane Ousmane will get a response by evening,’ he said. ‘You must visit us tonight, we absolutely insist.’
* * *
4:00 p.m.
Estelle had to buy some software for a new workstation she was setting up at the café, so we stopped at the Marche de Treichville. There was a tattoo parlour next door, and I wandered into it to pass the time. Then there was the moment of disaster when I turned to her from a DVD stall and accidentally called her ‘Grace.’ She took it well.
‘Tell me about Grace,’ she said, adding, ‘and don’t start slagging her off. I don’t want you bad-mouthing me, either, to your third wife. How old is she?’
‘She’ll be thirty-eight in June. She was my agent, helped me publish my first book.’ I paused, then said, ‘Her mother was my psychiatrist as well. She was treating me when I first got in from Abidjan . . .’
‘It was all business, then.’ She grinned. ‘Just like me.’
* * *
5:10 p.m.
Stephane’s wife, Bintou, was on hand, making it impossible to talk business. We were pressed into an impromptu barbecue with steaming bowls of kedjenou on the side. His visiting children seemed older than the new wife, but she acted older than her husband. The atmosphere was friendly, and the jokes were adult and rollicking.
At 6:20 p.m., a steward let in a senior uniformed policeman, who refused to meet my eyes. Stephane retrieved a little of the formality of the earlier day as he received his guest, introduced him around the company, and disappeared into a private study with him.
They were away for thirty minutes. When they emerged, it seemed that the policeman had shared some of his gravity with our host. Stephane saw off his guest and took Estelle and me into his study. It was a regular room but cramped in comparison with his office. His own chai
r was draped with a lion skin. As soon as I was seated, he spirited Estelle into yet another room.
They were gone for less than ten minutes, and she returned alone, shaken. ‘We have to go now,’ she whispered.
The whispers continued throughout the house. It was as though a storm had washed out the party atmosphere of the hour before. We said curt goodbyes, there were no greetings sent to aunts and nieces, and we were suddenly kerbside, waiting for a taxi on rue de Samba. I shivered in a wind pregnant with storm.
‘Dee, what happened in there?’
‘You can stop whispering now,’ she said. ‘They haven’t heard back from Interpol on Dalminda Roco, but the local police have plenty on my husband! Guess who also thinks your amnesia is fake? You’re prime suspect for the murder of a prisoner. He died the day you disappeared. During the war they had more pressing problems than the death of a prisoner, but things are settling down now and their file is still open.’
‘Bamou.’
‘Thank God you remember,’ she said icily. She pulled some pictures from her bag, averting her eyes while I looked. ‘What was the quarrel, Izak? They said it could only have been a drug quarrel. You were a drug lord on top of everything?’
‘Of course not!’
‘So he was your boyfriend? Are you like that, Izak?’
‘Estelle!’
‘Well, they said you were always alone with him in your office. You had your own code language. It was either business or love.’
‘It was neither! He did this to himself, Dee, you’ve got to believe me. He got a letter from a sister, Rubi . . . I have a story based on it in the next Balding Wolf! He just jumped up and brained himself!’
‘And suddenly you forgot me, forgot everything, and took off for a brand new life with a brand new wife in London? Izak! I’m not a fool!’ The taxi pulled up, and she turned abruptly and walked towards it. When I started after her, she turned, a single, angry finger pointing at me. ‘Don’t follow me.’
‘I’m innocent . . . Dee.’
‘And don’t call me that.’
‘I am. I really am.’
The Extinction of Menai Page 32
