‘I’m sorry about Suzie,’ Ben said. ‘And about your friend Joe Brewster. I did everything I could. I won’t fail again.’
‘I don’t understand why you’re involved in this,’ Miles said, and Ben gave him a quick summary of events since Jude’s arrest for the murder of Carter Duggan.
‘What’s Galliard to you?’
‘Nothing,’ Ben replied. ‘I’m interested in one thing only. Nailing the guilty man so that the innocent man can go free.’
‘How much do you know?’
‘Only what Brewster was able to tell me. If this whole thing is about botulinum toxin, then there’s a lot that I don’t understand. Such as what the hell the connection can be between a dodgy pharmaceutical company and a dead woman’s handwritten life story from the 1920s.’
Miles gave a bitter laugh. ‘I can’t tell you about that. But one thing I can assure you of is that Galliard’s crimes go well beyond what Joe might have told you. He didn’t know the half of it.’
‘Then I think you’d better fill me in on the rest,’ Ben said. ‘From the beginning.’
And so Miles did.
The first part of his story overlapped with what Brewster had already told Ben. He had been working as a laboratory chemist for the Galliard Group for a couple of years when he’d met Suzie Morton, a recent hire in the accounts department. After not too many weeks, they’d fallen deeply in love. Miles choked up every time he mentioned her name.
As well as being the best thing that had ever come into his life, Suzie had been a genius at accounts. She’d been the first to notice certain carefully concealed anomalies in the books, all of them mysteriously pertaining to shipments of Galliard’s own brand of botox to customers in particular parts of the Middle East and North Africa. When she shared her findings with Miles, he was at first hard-pressed to believe it, then intrigued, then horrified and angry.
‘I knew she was right. Before I knew it, I was fully on board. The deeper we dug, the more the anomalies didn’t add up.’ The pair had soon come to the conclusion that Galliard were selling highly suspiciously large quantities of botulinum toxin, under its own beauty skincare brand, to countries that didn’t normally have a great demand for beauty products. Payments were being deliberately obfuscated, straw man accounts created, shipping codes doctored.
‘We got even more suspicious when the leader of the opposition party of a certain African country that happened to have received a Galliard shipment a month earlier, along with his entire family and retinue, reportedly died of an unknown cause with symptoms that resembled botulism poisoning. We couldn’t find any solid connection, but what if Galliard was secretly supplying dictators and terrorists with deadly poisons under the guise of beauty products? We became fixated on the idea.’
Even more so, when Miles and Suzie found out through the grapevine that a senior supervisor called Joe Brewster had been let go after going around asking questions about similar concerns.
‘We met with Joe a couple of times outside work, but at that time he didn’t want to know. He’d had his big money payoff and was scared to get involved. Soon afterwards he bought a new house and moved away from the area. We were alone again, and determined to find concrete evidence that Galliard were committing crimes. Suspicions weren’t enough. Once we’d got some irrefutable proof under our belts, we’d be able to go to the authorities.’
‘So I’m guessing you never did,’ Ben said, ‘or you would have.’
‘I’m coming to that. Deep under the Galliard HQ building is a network of cellars where old archive documents are stored. We had a crazy idea that we might find something incriminating down there, and crazy ideas lead to crazy actions. One day we stayed behind after work, hiding until everyone had gone home. When it was night, dodging security patrols we sneaked down to the basement and broke into some safes.’
Miles went to slurp his tea, but it had gone cold. ‘We didn’t find what we were looking for. What we found instead was something far, far worse. Something that makes peddling botulinum toxin to terrorists look like petty crime.’
Ben guessed what was coming. ‘Achilles Fourteen?’
Miles peered at him curiously with narrowed eyes. ‘Achilles?’
‘That’s the name Joe Brewster gave to Duggan. I thought it looked like a code of some kind. Or a military designation. I sense that you know the real answer.’
‘I do,’ Miles replied. ‘But before I tell you, are you sure you want to go down this road? Because if you do, there’s no coming back. You should be careful what you wish for.’
‘You’re damn right I’m sure,’ Ben said.
So Miles told him. ‘What we found in a safe down in that basement were old photographs of documents dating back to the time of the First World War, over a hundred years ago.’
Chapter 34
The revelation made Ben’s mind start to whir. The historical connection linked back to the time period of Violet’s memoir and the subject of Carter Duggan’s research for Emily Bowman. ‘Keep talking. I want it all.’
Miles Redfield asked, ‘What do you know about mustard gas?’
Ben’s heart was thumping. ‘Only that it was a pretty damned nasty chemical weapon, back in the day, and it had nothing to do with mustard.’
Miles nodded. ‘Its chemical name is bis(2-chloroethyl) sulfide. It’s colourless in pure liquid form but in the First World War a more impure form was used that had a mustard colour and an odour similar to horseradish or garlic, hence the name – like you say, it had nothing to do with mustard. It was a powerful irritant that caused chemical burns and severe blistering on contact. Initial exposure was symptomless but by the time the skin infection showed itself, it was too late to take preventative measures. The mortality rate was only around two to three per cent, but those who suffered burns from it faced a long hospitalisation, plus a greatly increased chance of developing cancer in later life.’
Ben said nothing. He was remembering that Wilfred Grey had served in World War One. Had he been one of those long-term victims of the gas? Maybe; but it didn’t address the question of what he’d found inside the hollow book Violet had stolen from the London apartment.
Miles went on, ‘In other words it was nasty, but it wasn’t a great battlefield weapon because its effects were too limited and slow. What do you care if the enemy soldier who’s trying to blow your brains out gets cancer twenty years later? You want him dead now, so he can’t pull a trigger. Right?’
Ben couldn’t argue with that logic. ‘Go on.’
Miles said, ‘Officially, the Brits didn’t deploy mustard gas until as late as 1917, but the Germans had been using it fairly extensively. His Majesty’s Government was under pressure to fight fire with fire. The idea of spraying chemical agents on the enemy was appealing but they wanted something better, more effective, that could not only take out enemy troops but bring a rapid end to a conflict that everyone had thought would be over in a matter of months but seemed to be dragging on with no end in sight. So the British War Office set up a secret department within MI1, Military Intelligence, with the remit to develop more effective chemical weapons that could help to win the war quickly and decisively. In early 1915 a lucrative government contract was handed to a private British company called Clarkson Chemicals, which had been founded in 1908 by its owner Elliot Clarkson. Their top secret objective, officially classified to this day, was to create a more potent, faster-acting form of mustard gas. It wasn’t until decades later, in the Second World War, that they’d realise you could boost the gas’s lethal properties by distilling it in its liquid form. At that stage, they were still searching.
‘Clarkson put together a small team of chemists, named Ivor Holloway, Alf Liddell and Cecil Watson, and set them to work in a closed lab environment with orders not to come out until they’d cracked it. All were young, single men who’d been spared from the draft in order to serve their country in a different way. The team spent several fruitless months working around the clock on a whole serie
s of dead ends. But then they made a chance discovery that yielded results far beyond what they could have imagined.
‘The first tests were carried out on rats at the Clarkson laboratory. The enhanced mustard gas they were developing produced the same relatively low instant death rate among the rats, until it was observed that some of the rats succumbed much more quickly. This was potentially exciting news, but the scientists discovered to their disappointment that the higher death rate among these rats wasn’t due to the gas, but to an influenza-like viral illness that had spread among some of the lab rat population. In itself, the virus wasn’t especially harmful to them, only affecting the older and weaker ones, and nor was it communicable to humans. Healthy rats were largely unaffected by it, even if infected. So, no great shakes. Back to the drawing board they went.’
‘Hold on,’ Ben cut in. ‘Just how do you know all this?’ The more he listened, the more he wondered how a semi-employed former lab chemist and blogger could get their hands on classified Military Intelligence files from a hundred years ago.
‘From the lab reports of the time, which were among the papers that Suzie and I found buried in the basement,’ Miles replied. ‘Now listen, because this is where it gets interesting. Then the miracle happened, at least as far as the Clarkson team were concerned. Within days of the sick rats dying from the mustard gas exposure, Ivor Holloway came into the lab early one morning during Christmas 1915 to find every single rat dead. Not just dead, but showing all kinds of horrible symptoms: blistering, blackened flesh that looked burnt, destroyed organs. Their cages were filled with blood from where they’d been haemorrhaging from the nose, mouth, ears and even eyes. Their skin was covered in dark blotches that almost resembled the classic buboes of the Black Death. It was wildly more severe than anything the scientists had seen in their previous testing. Holloway summoned his team members Cecil Watson and Alf Liddell, and showed them what had happened. Clarkson, enjoying Christmas with relatives in Scotland, was notified by phone. At first, none of the scientists could understand what the hell had happened, though they knew they were definitely onto something. What nobody had reckoned on at the time, now much better understood, was that mustard gas has strong mutagenic effects.’
‘Explain “mutagenic”,’ Ben said.
‘It means that the exposure to the gas can induce mutations to the DNA of the host,’ Miles replied. ‘You see, unlike cells, viruses can’t replicate by themselves. They need to take over the protein synthesis factory in a living cell and reprogram it to make copies of the virus. At the same time, different types of virus work in different ways. An RNA virus like the flu has an extremely high rate of genetic mutation, thousands of times higher than a DNA virus like, say smallpox or herpes, changing so fast that the immune system can’t build up a resistance to it.’
‘Which is why you can’t vaccinate against it so easily,’ Ben said, working hard to keep up with the science.
‘Correct, because it’s always changing. It’s called hypermutability. Now, combine that effect with the mutagenic properties of mustard gas, and you have an explosive mixture. It turned out that exposure to the mustard gas agent had caused a completely unpredicted mutation to the footprint of the comparatively innocuous RNA virus that had affected the initial batch of sick rats, with lethal results. Autopsies on the dead rats showed extensive damage to the lungs, similar to the effects of mustard gas, but much more devastating, and also to the heart and the brain. The scientists clearly had managed, by chance, to stumble on a very deadly pathogen.’
Miles continued, ‘But the effect went further than that. In addition to its supercharged virulence, at the same time the mutated virus had now acquired the ability to affect individuals of a different species. It had gone zoonotic, able to infect not just rats but humans too, with just as high a fatality rate. The team found this out for themselves the hard way. Very soon after the discovery of the dead rats, Ivor Holloway fell severely ill. He was twenty-four years old and had been a college boxing champion and a competitive runner. Immune system like a tank, you’d imagine, but he was dead in two days, and was soon followed by his two colleagues. Liddell was the last to go. Before his death he was able to note the details of the others’ symptoms, and some of his own, in the lab reports. The effects of the disease agent were horrific, producing all the same symptoms as the infected rats. Holloway died in excruciating pain all over his body. After his death his skin was so discoloured that the corpse could have been taken for that of a black man. Watson bled to death from the ears, eyes and nose, and his lungs had turned to mush.’
Ben said nothing. He was getting a bad feeling about this.
‘Rushing back from Scotland on hearing of the disaster, Clarkson had the lab decontaminated by scientists in the 1915 equivalent of hazmat suits. The bodies of the rodent and human victims were put in isolation. As Clarkson discovered more about what had happened, he began to realise that he had stumbled on something incredible. He’d been hired to deliver a military biotechnology that could stamp out the enemy hard and fast and bring the war to an end. And that was exactly what he now had. They called the weapon Achlys-14.’
Chapter 35
‘Achlys,’ Ben said. ‘Not Achilles?’
Miles Redfield shook his head. ‘No, not Achilles. I’m guessing that Duggan misheard the name while he was talking to Joe. I suppose it was an easy mistake to make. They kind of sound alike.’
Which suddenly changed everything. It made sense that Duggan might have made that simple error, trying to glean information from his contact inside a noisy pub with a party going on. And it also explained Joe Brewster’s initial look of confusion when asked about ‘Achilles-14’. Now Ben’s memory kicked in sharply and he remembered what he’d long ago read about the name Achlys, back in the dim and distant days when he’d studied theology. They hadn’t just been taught about the monotheistic gods of the mainstream religions.
He said, ‘Achlys was the Greek goddess who symbolised the mist of death.’
Miles nodded. ‘Yeah, I looked her up too. She was also the goddess of deadly poisons, who distilled toxic drugs made from flowers and used them to turn humans into beasts. Quite appropriate, don’t you think? I imagine that some classical-minded ex-public-school boffin in the War Department probably came up with the name. The number fourteen represents the fourteen attempts it took to refine the mustard gas agent into something altogether more lethal.’
How the War Department had first gone about deploying Clarkson’s weapon was unknown, Miles explained. But just weeks afterwards, German troops in France had begun to come down with a mysterious and unprecedented illness that quickly ravaged their ranks. Within a terrifyingly short space of time, the strange disease had become the scourge of the Imperial German army and its allies on the front. The intelligence reports that filtered back home delighted the British government and especially Military Intelligence, who were privy to secrets that were probably withheld from the vast majority of elected politicians, including the Prime Minister Herbert Asquith. Their plan to devastate the enemy forces was working beautifully.
‘And then it all started to go terribly wrong,’ Miles said. ‘In retrospect, the most horrible thing about it was that Clarkson and his Intelligence cronies could have been so naive they didn’t see it coming. Or that they could have been so utterly cynical that they could let something so awful happen. Either way, their wonder weapon was soon totally out of control.’
World War One, ‘the war to end all wars’, had mushroomed from a relatively minor diplomatic flap to becoming almost the most horrendous and murderous military conflict in history, at that time second only to the Mongol conquests of the thirteenth century and eclipsing even the bloodbath of the Napoleonic Wars. It had torn Europe completely apart both physically and geopolitically, affected virtually every corner of the planet and involved some sixty million combatants. But something even deadlier and more powerful was brewing in the background.
‘It was no wonder,’ Miles
reflected, ‘how easily the disease spread from the enemy forces it had been meant for, and ripped through our own troops. As horrific as the death tolls from the sausage grinder of the battlefields might have been, the numbers of fatalities from the infection were often five or six times higher. In September, October and November of 1918 alone, allied troop hospitals in Europe recorded over 300,000 casualties of the disease, many of whom died. It affected so many soldiers on all sides so quickly and aggressively that things got to the point where nurses in field hospitals were wrapping up still-living men in bodybags and putting death tags on them, to save time. There’s no telling how many more thousands of bodies left rotting in the trenches, presumed to have been casualties of war, were actually victims of the disease.
‘But the battlefields were just the beginning. The transport of troops from so many countries to and from the battlefields was the biggest movement of people that the world had ever seen. Soldiers brought it home to their respective countries when they went on leave or were invalided out of the army, and at the end of the war when they all flooded home. The virus spread on ocean liners, it spread by rail. Across all of Europe, into America, Russia, China, India and South East Asia. It was a true global pandemic.’
‘You’re talking about the Spanish flu,’ Ben said. ‘I’d heard about it. I had no idea it was this bad.’
‘You and most folks,’ Miles replied. ‘One of the most incredible things about it is that it’s been largely forgotten today. But as for the name “Spanish flu”, forget it. It was only given that label because the world press didn’t start taking it seriously until around the time it was hitting Spain. There could also have been a bit of media disinformation going on, to hide the real origin of the disease. It certainly wasn’t Spanish. And I don’t think it was flu, either. It was something else. Something nobody had ever seen before, and for good reason.’
The Pandemic Plot Page 21
