Fuelling the Fire

by Roland Ladley

It was the unmitigated horror of watching two of his friends being executed whilst he drank tea that tormented him. No, he couldn’t think about it. And he certainly couldn’t talk about it.

  He had made it across his cell floor as far as the plate with the meat and bread. He noticed that there were also a couple of tablets. They were the same colour as the ones the doctor had prescribed yesterday. He’d take those. Pills to make him better. Better than Ted and Sandy.

  As he lifted them to his mouth he realised that he was crying.

  Just like a child. Like the child he had become.

  Saint Thomas’s Hospital, Waterloo, London

  Consultant Freddie Pilming called them to order.

  “Settle down, please. Where are we with Jennings?”

  He had four doctors and the ward sister in his office. Two of the doctors were registrars, who monitored the ICU patients on a twelve-hour shift. The third was the senior anaesthetist, whose job it was to keep a check on all of the patients’ vitals and had ultimate responsibility for keeping them alive. The fourth was a visiting toxicologist, who, he hoped, had some news on what had actually caused David Jennings’s liturgy of symptoms.

  The anaesthetist spoke first.

  “We’ve got the kidney failure under control with dialysis. He has partial liver failure, a result of the toxic shock, and yesterday he had three minor heart attacks, all of which we managed. I’m now waiting for pneumonia, which, with the state of his lungs, is next on the list.”

  “He’s still on a ventilator?”

  “Yes. Note, this morning we stuck in a trachi-tube. Oxygen saturation levels are at 80 per cent, which is fine for now. But we will try to get those down if his lungs stay fit. Which I doubt.”

  “And the liver?”

  “Holding out at the moment. The drugs are what’s causing the partial failure. It would be good to get something prescribed that actually dealt with the cause of all of this, rather than dealing with the symptoms. We’re running out of choices of suitable antibiotics.”

  “OK. Some of you may not know Doctor Badger, our visiting toxicologist. I’m hoping he has some news from the lab. Jimmie—what have you got?”

  “Thanks, Freddie. First, I think I’d like to talk to you alone about this. If I may? Maybe Stephen”—he gestured to the senior anaesthetist—“could stay. But other than that, just the three of us. Please.”

  Freddie raised his eyebrows and put his arm out in the direction of the door. The ward sister and the two registrars shuffled out.

  “Close the door!” Freddie yelled. The ward sister turned and pulled the door closed.

  Born in a bloody barn.

  He settled himself. Patience wasn’t a virtue of his, but when you’re in the business of saving lives that are on the very edge of living, he didn’t think it was a virtue he should worry about.

  “What’s this about, Jimmie?”

  “I’ve had to take Home Office advice on the findings of the toxicology report. That’s one reason it’s taken a little longer to sort this out, although getting to the bottom of the cause was unlike anything I’ve come across before. There were so many false trails. We only had the light-bulb moment yesterday afternoon.” The toxicologist waited as if preparing for a statement of some magnitude.

  “And?”

  “David Jennings was injected with a combination of Clostridium botulinum and ricin.” He paused. Freddie rocked back in his chair. “About eight to ten milligrams of each, although I can’t be sure.”

  The toxicologist reached into his black leather folder and got out a pink file. Freddie noticed the word “Secret” printed in scarlet letters on the top and bottom of the file.

  “It was really difficult to separate the two to begin with. It was made more complicated by the fact that, as soon as I realised we might be dealing with a biological agent, I had to clear the building. That wasn’t for contamination purposes, although that was a consideration. It’s the usual procedure in the case of a designated list of biological agents. Clostridium botulinum and ricin are at the top of that list.”

  “Blow me down.” Freddie was still rocking in his chair. As he did so, he breathed out strongly.

  Jimmie continued.

  “The Security Services are aware, and I have been given very strict instructions as to whom I can tell. I’m afraid you’ve both got to sign the Official Secrets Act. Today. I have copies with me prepared earlier by MI5.” He pointed to the pink file. “Once they have your details, someone, apparently, will come around and brief you.”

  “Sure, sure.” Freddie’s impatience had hit the surface again. To hell with all the security bullshit. “What about treatment?”

  “There is none. There is no reliable antidote for either. I have a concoction of drugs, none of which will be a surprise to either of you, or your staff. We just need to keep him steady and see if his body can fight this.”

  “What do we put on top of his notes?” the anaesthetist asked.

  “You choose. But not Clostridium botulinum. And not ricin.”

  Terminal 1, Heathrow Airport, London

  Wolfgang wasn’t a discerning passenger. He thought people made much too much fuss about where they sat and what they ate.

  At over six feet tall, he struggled with some coaches where the solid seat back in front of him crushed his knees. And he often bit his tongue on an aircraft when the passenger in the row ahead reclined the seat so that his legs became entangled with the safety instructions and in-flight magazines. What he’d never got a grip of was how the food tray still managed to remain horizontal whatever the angle of the chair. The person who had invented that was a clever chap.

  The BA flight had taken an hour and three-quarters. The staff had looked after him really well—even in cattle class, and, thankfully, he had sat next to a man who was neither fat nor fidgety. It had been a stress-free couple of hours.

  He didn’t have that much to think about, other than to wistfully imagine what on earth he was doing travelling to the UK to see Sam Green, a woman he had met briefly on a mountainside. It was clinically bizarre—the whole episode. And he was compounding all this oddness by flying to London to meet up with someone he hardly knew, to talk about something that was well off the rational scale. Life could not get much more unfathomable.

  Wolfgang had taken his laptop on board and played around with his Lattice database. He’d looked again at the passenger manifests of a number of the air crashes, trying to make connections between those who had died and why someone might want to kill them.

  His view was that nearly everyone wanted someone dead at some point in their lives, even if it were only a result of a fleeting surge of rage. He reckoned that every flight had at least three adulterers among the passengers, as well as one person who might have stolen from this or her company or embezzled money from some other hapless soul. Someone would probably want all of those dead. But they probably wouldn’t bring down the whole aircraft just to make that happen.

  He was looking for a reason to kill a single passenger on each of the flights he had chosen. Those passengers would all be linked by a collective motive, a motive so fundamental, so critical—and so secret—that the only way to maintain control was to hide the deaths of those chosen among the bodies of hundreds more.

  It had all started with a teenage fascination with aircraft—how they managed to get airborne, stay up in the sky, and land at the right place without breaking apart. It was true that his main passion was music. But his teenage hobby had been aerodynamics. Lift, created by the separation of airflow over a wing. Stability and control in the air. Lightweight materials. Fly-by-wire.

  And, as a typical teenage boy, he couldn’t stop himself from exploring the macabre side of flight: near misses; crashes; disasters.

  People thought air travel was safe. That all depended how you interpreted “safe.” Around one hundred and twenty thousand passengers and crew had been killed in air accidents since the Second World War. Historically, 2001 was the worst y
ear, with over four thousand deaths, although that did include 195 passengers and hijackers on the three US internal flights that created their own piece of history: 9/11. In comparison, 2013 killed the least number of people, with just 265 deaths. But that’s still a lot of people when you recall the old adage that “air travel is safer than driving a car.” The worst single air crash was a Japan Airlines 747 that went down in 1985, with the loss of 520 souls, although the Tenerife crash between two jumbos on the apron had a higher casualty figure—but that included two planes. Whichever way you looked at it, it was a lot of dead people.

  It was clear to him that flying was always accompanied by an element of mortal danger, an irony not lost on him as he walked through the terminal toward the baggage return.

  His interest in air disasters became more forensic when he was thinking about committing the “perfect crime.” He liked to tell himself that the notion of hiding the murder of someone by killing the individual with a whole load of other people came to him when he was trying to think of a foolproof way to eliminate Josh Baxter. This was a thug of a boy in his fifth form class, who picked on anyone who was smaller than he was. Baxter’s list didn’t include Wolfgang, who, even as a sixteen-year-old, was nearing six foot. In addition, his Teutonic thick skin and casual acceptance of pain meant he didn’t take any rubbish from the likes of Baxter. The boy knew this and, as with any bully, only fought battles where success was not only guaranteed, but didn’t hurt. He gave Wolfgang a wide steer.

  Wolfgang also had the Neuenburgs’ pacifistic approach to life: never pick a fight, and bring people together where you can. So whilst he wouldn’t be bullied by Baxter, neither did he wish to use his own violence to stop Baxter from bullying others. It wasn’t in his nature.

  However, what if Baxter just disappeared? Now that was a completely different thing.

  Wolfgang had considered widening the perfect crime to include trains, coaches, and buses, or major fires in big buildings. In a more grown-up moment and away from the fantasy of eliminating Baxter, he felt that the people targeted for murder would be high achievers in their field: great intellects, senior politicians, or substantial businessmen. They wouldn’t travel by coach; they would fly. And, even if they did get on a bus, one couldn’t guarantee to kill everyone in a coach crash. It didn’t happen that way. The beauty about planes was that when they fell out of the sky from forty thousand feet, the chances of survival were pretty slim.

  Wolfgang first looked in depth at a crash in 2002 when, still thinking of Baxter and the perfect crime, he read about the KLM plane that was lost over the Atlantic. It was all over the news. The aircraft was an Airbus A330 carrying 217 passengers from Buenos Aires to Amsterdam. It dropped out of the sky an hour into its flight. At that point, the Atlantic Ocean is pretty deep; whilst they eventually discovered some wreckage, the black boxes were never found. The transcript of the last radio exchange between the cockpit and the air-traffic control was short. The pilot swore in Dutch, and then the airways went quiet. Even now, some thirteen years later, no one knew for sure why the aircraft crashed into the sea.

  Out of the 217 passengers on the KLM flight, five made it onto Wolfgang’s fledgling list of “noteworthies.” He remembered the names as if he had written them down yesterday: Victor Hammenbeck—CEO of Hammenbeck Industries, makers of beef-processing plants; Bishop Miguel Mendoza—the bishop of La Plata; Doctor Frenz Haggitude—senior vascular consultant at Ziekenhuis Hospital in The Hague; Professor Simone Candoza—senior partner and research chief at Modetta Solar Industries; and Major General Hans DeGuie—chief of staff of the Dutch Marine Corps. They were all very senior individuals, at the top of their game. Doctor Haggitude had just perfected human elephant-trunking for aortic aneurysms. Professor Candoza was close to industrialising a solar furnace, where huge mirrors reflected sunlight onto a solar array the size of Wolfgang’s suitcase—which he’d just spotted on the carousel. The array was photovoltaic, and the electrical energy harnessed in the process was five times that of normal solar panels laid out on the same acreage of land. It was genius.

  Wolfgang was about to rehearse the talents of the other three when his phone pinged. He opened up his mail. The new message had the title “Read this please.” There was no body to the e-mail, just an Adobe pdf attachment. He knew pdfs were inherently free from viruses, so he opened it.

  What he saw made him miss his suitcase. It rattled past him and back down toward the hole in the wall.

  The attachment was a single piece of paper carrying a message. The message was made up of letters cut from newspaper cuttings, straight out of The Blackmailer’s Handbook. The letters were large, and his phone’s screen wasn’t big enough to show all of it. He had to scroll down.

  It read:

  Stop. Right now. Or you, or somebody close to you, will get hurt. We know where your family live. Check the local news to see that we don’t mess around.

  That was it. Stop. Or someone will get hurt.

  Wolfgang felt the blood drain from his cheeks. He closed his eyes and had to think about closing his mouth when he realised it was hanging open.

  Which local news? Munich? Dresden? Where?

  If they could get his e-mail address, they could find any of his family’s residences.

  Mother!

  No. Wait. It says, “Or you, or somebody close to you.” The or was important. So maybe no one’s been hurt. Yet.

  He swiftly closed his mail, opened up the Dresden Fernsehen website, and scanned the latest news.

  And there it was: “Fire in Pillnitzer Strasse destroys top floor of apartment block. Police report that no one is hurt.”

  Scheiße! The bastards have burned down my flat! And probably Herr Doppner’s next door! He didn’t deserve that. Poor, poor man.

  Wolfgang was pacing now, his free hand on his forehead. His other squeezing his phone as if to strangle it.

  What gate of Hell have I opened?

  Sam had thought about making a sign. Maybe with “Wolfgang” on it. Or, how about, “Count Neuenburg II”? Then she thought better of it. Anyhow, she didn’t need a sign. There’d be only one person coming off the Munich plane looking like a model for a bespoke tailor.

  And there he was. Sure enough, Wolfgang as she remembered him. A multi-green checked woollen jacket—best worn on a day out at Sandringham. A light blue all-cotton shirt with a stiff collar, pinstriped mustard yellow cords, and a pair of sandy-coloured brothel creepers. Behind him, like an obedient black Labrador, he pulled a medium-size brown suitcase on a long leash.

  But he was also wearing something else. Something Sam had not seen before. A mournful face, one that didn’t look like it could be cheered up anytime soon.

  Sam raised her hand when he was a few metres out.

  “Hi, Wolfgang.”

  He smiled, but it was forced. He leaned over and kissed her on both cheeks.

  “Hello, Sam,” was his muffled response as his cheek touched hers.

  “You OK?”

  He took in a deep breath and exhaled loudly, looking left to right as if nervous that he might be being watched.

  “I need a drink. Please. Can we go somewhere noisy? Busy?”

  Sam frowned, nodding at the same time.

  “Sure. You don’t want to go to my place and drop your bag first?”

  Nothing came back. He stared over her shoulder.

  “Sorry?” He didn’t even look at her. At that point he was absent from the terminal building. Sam felt that she was on her own. It was not a good feeling. She was immediately frustrated. What had she let herself in for? This man was a different man from the one she remembered. He was distant, distracted.

  How long was he staying? How long would she have to put up with this?

  She needed to take control.

  “Follow me,” she said.

  At a pace quicker than Wolfgang expected, they headed through the concourse and onto the taxi rank. She hailed the first one available, the driver taking Wolfgang’s suitcas
e and putting it in the boot.

  “Colliers Green, please. The Rose and Crown.” It was her local. There was a darts match on a Thursday night. It would be busy and nosier than Wolfgang probably wanted. But just now she felt a little vindictive. It would serve him right if it were too noisy for him.

  They both sat in silence as West London sped past the taxi’s windows. She wasn’t going to say anything else. Not until he had made some effort to talk. She wasn’t sulking; she was just a bit tired. That’s all. What would it have been like if she had flown to Germany? At least here she had some control. Damn.

  Wolfgang was looking away from Sam, seemingly mesmerised by the London skyline at dusk. He had his chin in his hand, his elbow resting against the bottom of the taxi window. He held that position for ten or fifteen minutes, staring into the distance.

  Then, just as they hit the city centre, he reached into his pocket and dug out his phone. He played with it and opened a document.

  He passed it to Sam without a word.

  She read it. Then read it again. Her mind spinning.

  She was already looking for clues as to who may have sent the e-mail, having instantly forgiven Wolfgang for being distant.

  “Do you recognise the address?”

  He looked at her and his face softened, relief in his expression—a small smile. She had to admit that when he smiled, even a little, her legs went a bit wobbly.

  Get a grip, girl.

  “No. You can see it’s a Hotmail address, one probably made up on the hoof. I may be able to find out where it was sent from, within reason.”

  “But it will be a public library, or Internet cafe. Untraceable,” Sam added.

  His face now wore a frown as if to say, how do you understand all of these things?

  She ignored his look. “What about the document? You’re good with the web. Does it leave any trace, a hook?”

  He was smiling now. More relief, as though he was no longer alone in the world.

  “Thanks, Sam.”

  “For what?”