Scorpion Trail

by Archer, Jeffrey

  After what I've been through, I can't think of any good reason for helping you out again.'

  'Well, I can think of two, actually,' Chadwick retorted. 'One - gratitude for the very considerable resources devoted by your countrymen to keeping you alive for the past two decades.'

  'What?'

  'And two - because you like the excitement.'

  'I don't believe this,' Alex breathed.

  'Come on, Alex! You are by nature a chancer, you know that. Taking risks - you love it. Let's cast our minds back to Belfast for a moment.'

  Alex flinched.

  'Nineteen-seventy-three. There you were, an electrical engineer with a good degree and several years of success in industry behind you, and you'd chucked it all up to become a sound recordist with a television news team.1

  Why? Because the idea of running round Ulster dodging bricks, bottles and bullets gave you a big stiffy.'

  'Now hang on...'

  'And that wasn't the only thing that got your willy all hard, was it?

  Remember the lovely Catherine?' One of Chadwick's eyebrows arched alarmingly. 'Now, she wasn't one of those old Belfast bangers the TV crews used to pick up to nuzzle between riots. No. Tou had to choose someone really special, didn't you? Someone so dangerous that every time you bonked her you risked a kneecapping! Catherine McNulty, the bored wife of one of the IRA's most powerful godfathers. . .'

  'Okay, okay. But I didn't know that, did I? Not at the start . . .'

  Alex felt the ground shifting beneath his feet.

  'And then, when your old flame Lorna Donohue turns up, instead of ditching Catherine, you were screwing them both on alternate nights! Talk about walking a bloody tightrope!'

  'Oh, shut up!'

  He had been pretty wild in those days, but he didn't need reminding of it.

  Chadwick raised his hands in a truce.

  'Sorry. I didn't mean to rake all that up. Come on, I'm not getting at you. I'm not putting the squeeze on. Not on an old friend. I mean, sod it Alex, we were at school together . . .'

  He pulled an avuncular grin,

  Chadwick had be(-n senior to him and they'd hardly known each other as pupils. By the time Alex left school, Chadwick had already graduated from Cambridge and joined M15.

  Excitement? He couldn't deny it was why he'd gone along with Chadwick at first. Any impressionable eighteen-year-old, asked to help his country flush out hotheads bent on destroying democracy would have got a thrill from it.

  Just thought you'd be interested in helping to get a mass murderer locked up,' Chadwick continued, pithily. 'The last twenty years have been bloody hard for you. Particularly the boredom.'

  'It hasn't been boring,' Alex protested. However much Chadwick had kept an eye on him, he could have no idea how full his life had been.

  'But that's all over,' Chadwick went on. 'The Scottish chapter is closed.

  Tragic circumstances of course ... but you're ready to put a bit of a thrill back into your life, no?'

  Alex was startled at his bluntness.

  'I mean, no one goes to Bosnia for a quiet life. . .' he added in exasperation.

  'No. Okay,' Alex answered defensively. 'But I'm going because I want to do something useful, to help those poor sods out there.'

  He regretted the words as he spoke them, knowing they'd propelled him into Chadwick's trap.

  For a moment Chadwick's gaze focused above Alex's head, as if searching for a halo.

  'Doing something to help, Alex? Don't you see, that's exactly what I'm proposing? Look. Delivering parcels for Bosnia Emergency may stop people dying from cold and hunger. But by delivering up Milan Pravic to justice you'll help stop the revenge killings that are fuelling the whole war. If you do this little thing for us you could be helping millions of people, not just a few hundred.'

  This was the way it had always been.

  Give us the names of the anarchy Units or you'll speed the death of democracy.

  Betray Loma's secreb or have the deaths of more soldiers on your conscience.

  And now -- help us find a mass killer or you'll be prolonging the bloodshed in Bosnia.

  Chadwick smiled confidently. He knew he'd won.

  'But I'm way out of my depth,'Alex protested. 'I don't know the language, the country, the people, the issues. . . nothing.'

  'Don't need to. Have a matter with the Colonel when you get there. We'll let him know that you're more than just an aid worker. And then chat to people as you do your rounds. See what comes up. Keep in touch with us.

  I'll give you some numbers to ring here. You can use the army's communications, I'll arrange that.'

  Alex had been suckered again, and he knew it. There was always something addictive about Chadwick's offers. The chance to be at the heart of things.

  Chadwick beckoned and the waiter appeared at the table.

  'Large espresso and a Grappa, suit you?' Chadwick asked.

  Alex shrugged. He pulled out his cigarettes.

  'Why not?'

  It was a double answer. To that question and the unspoken one.

  Chadwick had tickled him like a trout.

  Six

  Thursday 24th March, 06.35 hrs Leipzig, Geizz

  The security guard on night duty rubbed his eyes and stepped out of his warm, smoke-fugged office for a last tour of the Faculty for Veterinary Medicine before handing over to the (lay shift. A light dusting of snow had fallen; he hoped it wouldn't settle because the weekend was coming and he had his in-laws to visit two hours' drive away.

  Most of Leipzig's University had seen better days. This faculty of drab, turn-of-the-century laboratory blocks and ramshackle animal shelters had the look of a rundown farm.

  Rounding a corner by the Department of Hygiene, the guard stopped in his tracks.

  'Scheisse!'

  Lights, in the Infectious Diseases Laboratory. Could have sworn he'd switched them off. Certain of it.

  He reached the door and tried the handle. Locked. He fumbled with the huge ring attached to his belt, screwing up his eyes to identify the key he needed. He'd left his reading glasses in the office.

  He opened up and crept along the corridor.

  'Aahh,' he sighed, reaching the lab's glass-panelled door. 'Should've guessed.'

  Chief Technician Kernmer. Not yet seven a.m. and the man was there, in his white coat, busy as a rat in a treadmill. The guard shook his head and stomped back along the corridor to the exit.

  Poor old Kemmer! Turned up here at all hours, even weekends. They said his wife had died the day before German unification and he'd hardly known what to do with himself ever since.

  Siegfried Kemmer's world consisted of pipettes, glass flasks and gas burners, the equipment of a microbiological kitchen. In it, the art of brewing lethal substances had become, to the initiated like him, a matter of routine.

  Kernmer opened the incubator and peeked through the inner glass panel at a single Petri dish a few centimetres across. Hands sheathed in surgical gloves, nose and mouth masked, he eased open the panel, extracted the dish and carried it to a safety cabinet, Setting it down beside five flasks of yellow liquid, he closed the cover and switched on the internal fans that kept the bacteria from escaping.

  Then he froze. Footsteps in the corridor. His head craned round.

  The wheeze of a dry spring and the bang as the front door closed. He turned to the window, terrified someone else had come in early.

  He saw the guard walk into view. The man waved. Kernmer acknowledged him, then sat on a stool to let his heart recover.

  Siegfried Kernmer had been at Leipzig University for as long as anyone could remember. A pale, bespectacled man, hair the colour of wet sand, his closest colleagues would have found it hard to describe him, if asked.

  None of the students or lecturers lie served was sure of his age. Few cared. If they had, they'd have discovered he was approaching his pension.

  The unification of Germany in 1990 had brought him little joy. His wife was dying and so w
ere all the tenets he'd been taught to believe in.

  In 1945, when Hitler shot himself', Kemmer had been a frightened ten-year-old, his mind etched with memories of the suffering Fascism had brought upon Germany. Easy meat for the conquerors from the East who told the vanquished that socialism was their salvation.

  He'd accepted its deficiencies and its corruption as the price for living in peace. Until the day the Wall tumbled in 1989, the day that became known as die Wende - the change. Then, all the people he'd once respected as knowing what was what, had stood up one after another and announced that the world he'd been taught to believe in was a chimera.

  Sweat trickled down Kernmer's forehead. He pushed the spectacles back up his nose. His hands shook.

  Setting the chair in front of the safety cabinet, he slipped his hands inio the rubber gloves which projected inside like dead men's arms.

  He picked up the Petri dish, removed its lid and tilted it towards him.

  Colonies of the bacillus that had developed overnight stood out as brown blobs against the jelly of a Jar and sheep's blood on which they'd fed.

  Dangerous pathogens were strictly controlled here, but as Chief Technician, Kernmer had unfettered access to the refrigerators where infected blood and tissue were stored. It was his job to provide the students with samples for their diagnosis experiments and to monitor safety.

  And the dangers were terrifying. The Institute was in a residential area next to Leipzig's International Trade Fair. A release of anthrax, borne on the wind, could kill thousands.

  Siegfried Kernmer was a man in whom the University's elders had put their trust.

  A trust which he was now in the process of breaking.

  One millilitre of infected cow's blood was all he'd taken. Too small a measure to be registered as missing. He'd done it last night, after the last student had left. Mixed the droplets with the agar and let them incubate overnight at blood heat.

  Two nights ago, the plodding predictability of Kemmer's life had been shattered. A man who called himself 'Herr Dunkel' had arrived unannounced and unbidden at his lonely apartment in Leipzig-Lindenau.

  Dunkel was a man from the past. A cold warrior who'd worked for the former communist nation's Ministry for State Security. An officer in the Stasi, whom Kernmer had expected and hoped never to see again.

  During those post-war years of national isolation, Kernmer had believed the Party's lies about the 'threat from the West'. Believed the capitalists were out to take away his guaranteed home, his guaranteed job and his free health care. So, when Herr Dunkel had first approached him a decade ago, wanting lethal potions to use against the enemies of the State, he'd obliged.

  His loyalty and support had been quietly recognized. The fourteen year wait for a new Trabant had been slashed miraculously to months.

  But then the world had changed. His countrymen smashed the chains of communism, Kernmer's own daughter joining the thousands cramming Saint Nikolai's Church for the Monday prayers for liberty. She'd been there too on the Leipzig Ring Road, clutching a candle in the procession that had brought down the regime in 1989. She'd wanted her father to join her, but he'd used the excuse of his wife's illness to stay at home. It was fear that kept him there, however. Fear of what would happen in the future to people like him who had supported the lies of the past.

  Hands steady in the thick gloves, he picked a bacterial cluster from the gel with a fine wire loop, then lowered it into the first of the flasks.

  He twizzled the wire to disperse the anthrax bacteria in the yellow liquid, then repeated the process until the growth medium in each bottle had been inoculated. Then he capped each flask with a loose lid of foil.

  He pulled his sweating hands from the cabinet-gloves and wiped them on his white lab-coat.

  Five flasks. Five flasks of death.

  Kernmer choked back a sob. How could he be doing this evil thing?

  He crossed the floor and lifted the lid on the shakerheater. Then one by one he took the flasks and placed them on the vibrator platform. He closed the lid and switched on.

  He removed his glasses and dabbed his eyes.

  Not too late to stop this monstrous process. Maybe Dunkel's threats had been bluff. Things were supposed to be different now.

  Not for Dunkel, though. He was still working, still murdering for 'someone up there'. Wouldn't say who. But no bullshit about 'ideology' this time.

  Blackmail had become his only weapon of persuasion.

  Kernmer had said 'no' at first. Refused the outrageous request. Then Dunkel had picked up the silver photoframe from the coffee-table, a picture of Kernmer's wife and daughter in happier days.

  'I saw Erika, yesterday. . .'

  The words had dribbled from his mouth.

  'A fine woman, your daughter. Fine baby too. Grandson is it?'

  'Erika?' he'd gasped. A chill finger had run up his spine. She'd moved West when the border opened in '89. Married an engineer in Heidelberg.

  'So vulnerable, babies of that age.' Dunkel's voice like slime. 'Accidents happen so easily. . .'

  Kernmer's resolve had crumbled. So little left in his life. just his daughter, his grandchild - nothing must be allowed to happen to them.

  Dunkel had promised it would be the last time he would trouble him.

  That, Kernmer had resolved, was a promise that one way or another Dunkel would be forced to keep.

  Seven

  Friday 25th March

  Italy

  Moray McFee was in the driving seat as they drove Bosnia Emergency's old bread van into the Italian port of Ancona. He pulled confidently at the wheel, hunched forward like a gorilla.

  Alex's trepidation at what lay ahead had eased during the journey, his mind distracted by the business of learning to be a truck-driver - nowhere near as simple as McFee had said. Now however, the Adriatic Sea stretched in front of him and the knowledge that war was being waged on the other side set his pulse racing.

  The port police waved them through onto the long, broad quay.

  'How's that for timing, eh?' McFee purred. 'Ferry leaves in a couple of hours.'

  Behind the docks the grey-pink walls of the medieval city rose up, glowing softly in the dying sunlight. To their left lay the terminals, two ferries and a container ship.

  They'd been driving for four days.

  'I'm bloody knackered,' Alex wheezed.

  'Wait 'til you see the road facing you on the other side,' McFee cautioned.

  He swung the wheel hard left and pulled into a space in front of the main terminal.

  'I'll just away in there and get the tickets. Will you keep a good eye on this lot? You know what Italians are like.'

  While McFee went inside, Alex climbed down from the cab to stretch his legs and smoke a cigarette, not straying far from their load of survival boxes.

  The journey south had been painfully slow. They'd ceased to be strangers, but Alex had come no closer to understanding what made his companion tick.

  McFee had talked a little about his life in Edinburgh, saying he'd reached fifty-five that summer, and taken early retirement. At the same time, he'd split from his wife. Their marriage had been a formality for years, he'd said.

  He'd joked about. the similarity of their situations, threatening to paint a sign on the side of the truck saying - Danger! Mid-life Crises Inside.

  Alex had begun to suspect there was a perfectly simple reason why he'd been asked along. McFee's life was a mess and having a companion in a similar state made hiin feel better. The Scotsman, however, made Alex feel uneasy.

  Something contrived about him. Not a man to confide in.

  'All hunky-dory!' McFee announced, clutching the tickets. 'We can drive straight on and start getting the beers down!'

  'Sounds good to me,' Alex concurred.

  McFee backed the van away from the terminal and drove it over some railway tracks to where the stern of the ferry Gloria loomed.

  A cursory check of the paperwork by the Italian customs - a
nd they were waved on board. The first vehicle to do so, the), drove the full length of the garage deck and parked by the bow doors. Then they climbed to the passenger decks and were allocated a two-berth cabin.

  'I hope you don't have any curious nocturnal habits . . .' Alex muttered as they walked down the corridor to deposit their bags. He'd never liked sharing rooms with other men.

  'Should have thought of that earlier...'

  A few minutes later they located the deserted bar. A harassed steward washing up glasses told them they'd have to wait another half-hour.

  Out on deck the air was pleasantly mild, compared with the icy March winds that had buffeted them in the English Channel. Alex hardly needed the thick, green pullover he'd put on.

  Behind them to the west, the memory of a sunset lingered on the horizon; ahead, the cathedral on its hill above the harbour floated like a floodlit phantom.

  Alex began worrying about Kirsty again. There was something about a sea crossing, about gazing back at the shore that made him think about what he'd left behind.

  Still that sense of guilt at leaving her, despite the certainty there was nothing he could have done to get her back. He resolved to phone her brother to see how things were. Maybe there'd be time on the other side.

  He shivered. The 'other side' was an unknown quantity.

  Diesel fumes rose from the quay as trucks bustled to board. Customs men glanced at their watches. Departure hour was near. 'rime for them to go home to their dinners.

  'A lot of heavy stuff down there,' McFee remarked. 'Some of it's aid, some just commercial. Thing is, life's pretty normal over in Split, as you'll see. Croatia's fine. It's only when you drive up into Bosnia that it gets shitty.'

  A bus pulled up on the quay and disgorged a stream of fair-haired men in mud-green uniforms.

  'Swedes probably. Or Danes. With the UN. They come over here for a bit of R and R,' McFee explained.

  'Does all the aid for Bosnia come through here?'

  'Oh no. Not at all. A lot of the NGOs drive down through Austria. And the UN brings stuff in by ship.'