The Pandemic Plot

by Scott Mariani

  It was a deal only an idiot would have offered, full of holes, no less of an open invitation to disaster than whatever Carter Duggan might have presented them with. Clarkson would be very much aware of that. Ben wanted the lure to be as irresistible as he could make it.

  Clarkson was quiet for another long moment. Ben heard a muted exchange of voices in the background, as he conferred with someone standing nearby. Then Clarkson came back on the line and said, ‘Very well, we have a deal. Give me your GPS location.’

  Chapter 45

  ‘He won’t come,’ McAllister said the instant Ben put the phone down.

  ‘He will, because he has to,’ Ben said. ‘Because we’re sitting ducks out here and this is too good a thing to pass up. And because we’re so deep under his skin now that he’s going to want to see us dead with his own eyes.’

  ‘See us dead? I’m not sure I like the sound of that.’

  ‘Don’t be such a wimp, McAllister. What do you think I brought you here for? I said I needed the backup, remember?’

  ‘Yeah, right. Two eedjits are better than one.’

  ‘Three,’ Jude said. ‘I’m here too. I want to help.’

  Ben shook his head. ‘I know you do. But it’s not what I want.’

  ‘How many do you think he’ll bring with him?’ McAllister asked.

  ‘As many as he can get on board a fast helicopter,’ Ben said.

  ‘And I suppose they’ll be armed to the teeth.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have it any other way,’ Ben said.

  McAllister looked at him. ‘What I said before, about you being crazy? I take it back. I was wrong. Crazy’s not the word for what you are. You’re a bona fide raving frigging mental case. How the hell does one man on his own tackle a bunch of gun-toting maniacs, without killing anyone?’

  ‘What about broken arms and legs, are they allowed?’

  ‘I’ll already have enough explaining to do when this is over. Can we lay off the fractures?’

  ‘What about concussion, bruising, loose teeth?’

  ‘Please don’t mention teeth to me. Can you spell “reasonable force”?’

  ‘I promise to be as gentle as I can,’ Ben said.

  Now all they could do was go back to waiting. They had a guaranteed time window of at least two hours before anything would happen. Ben went into the kitchen, hunted through cupboards and found a bag of rice and a tin of beef stew. He set a pan of water to boil on the stove. Dumped the contents of the can into a smaller cast-iron pot and started gently heating it up. As he searched the drawers for cutlery he came across a pair of walkie-talkies. They were old and scuffed, but the batteries still had juice in them. Interesting. Ben set them aside.

  As he was preparing his meal, Jude joined him in the kitchen. Ben pointed at the walkie-talkies. ‘What are those for?’

  ‘Oh, those go back years. When Robbie and some of the gang used to have major parties where there were drugs going around, he used to get someone to keep watch on the driveway in case Meadow and Bertie turned up. They never did, though.’

  Ben just nodded. Jude leaned on the counter, watching him with a rueful expression. ‘Listen, I don’t know what to say. You did all this for me. If I hadn’t run, you wouldn’t be taking this risk.’

  ‘Whichever way it went, it was always going to boil down to me and Clarkson,’ Ben said. ‘Maybe this is for the better.’

  ‘What if the police get here first, looking for me?’

  ‘We’ll cross that bridge if we come to it,’ Ben said. He stirred his warming stew. It reminded him of army rations.

  Jude chewed his lip and frowned. ‘I can’t believe how calm you are.’

  ‘If running around in a panic could help me,’ Ben said, ‘I’d do that instead.’ He dipped a spoon into the rice, tasted a grain, added some salt to the water, tasted another. ‘This is nearly done. There’s too much for me. You want some?’

  ‘I couldn’t eat another bite,’ Jude said, shaking his head. ‘My stomach feels all knotted up and I can’t sit down. How can you eat at a time like this?’

  Ben smiled. ‘It’s like I always used to tell my troopers. There’s nothing like a good warm meal before going into battle.’ The rice was done. He strained it off, ladled a pile of it into a bowl and dumped the meat stew on top, then pulled up a chair at the table to eat.

  ‘Sometimes I realise how different we are,’ Jude said, watching him. ‘I know I’ve got into a few scrapes, but I was always terrified. I’m terrified now. But you, you enjoy this kind of thing, don’t you? You’re actually looking forward to having a showdown with these people.’

  ‘What I look forward to the most is going home afterwards,’ Ben said. ‘And you’ll be going with me, when the time comes.’

  ‘Home,’ Jude reflected sadly. ‘I was thinking about home. When this is all over one day, I don’t think I can ever return to that house.’

  ‘You grew up there. Your mother and Simeon loved it.’

  Jude shook his head. ‘There are nothing but bad memories there for me now. I’ll always see Duggan lying there. I was thinking I should sell it, but I wanted to ask you first. I know how much you love the place, too.’

  ‘It’s your choice, Jude. You don’t have to rush into anything.’

  ‘Yeah, I’ll have plenty of time to mull over it while I’m back in bloody prison again,’ Jude said bitterly. ‘Christ, I can’t stand this waiting around. I’m going for a walk.’

  Alone, Ben quietly finished his meal. He washed it down with the last of the beer, and then took out his cigarettes and lighter. He was down to his last Gauloise. As he lit up, he thought about what was coming in a couple of hours’ time. This might really be his last Gauloise.

  Ben spent a few minutes pondering what arrangements he needed to make, in the event of things turning out badly. In addition to various other assets there was a respectable sum of money in a secret personal account that he never touched, which would become Jude’s and would – as long as he didn’t go crazy with it – last him a good long while. Ben took out the small notebook that he carried, cleared aside his plate and wrote a short note to Jeff Dekker to instruct him to do the necessary, by whatever means were required. Even if Jude were still a criminal suspect on the run, Jeff would find a way to get the money to him.

  He found McAllister in the living room, still pacing restlessly up and down and pressing his hand against his cheek with a soft groan of pain, a recumbent Radar watching him from a sofa. With Jude out of the way Ben said, ‘Listen, Tom, when this kicks off things might get a little hot around here. I need you and Jude to be far from the action. If anything happens to me, take off and keep going.’ He handed him the note. ‘I’ll also need you to send this. I’ve written the address on the back.’

  McAllister took the note gravely. He asked, ‘If I’m far from the action, how will I know what’s happening?’

  ‘With one of these,’ Ben replied, giving him a walkie-talkie. ‘I’ll radio at five-minute intervals from when they arrive. If six minutes go by and you haven’t heard from me, it means I’m dead.’

  McAllister accepted the radio, but he didn’t look happy. ‘If anything happens to you, and if I’m not around to arrest them, the bad guys get away with it. And I suppose if I tried, they’d kill me too. Either way they’re home free.’

  ‘Unless the police could make the connection with Achlys-14, the botulinum and Duggan.’

  ‘Without any real proof to go on. Good luck with that,’ McAllister said. ‘In which case it’s bye-bye for the mitigating evidence that would exonerate Jude. He’d still have the murder charge hanging over him, on top of the escape. Come the trial, he could be looking at twenty years.’

  Ben nodded. There was no avoiding that possibility.

  ‘In which case,’ McAllister said, ‘I was never here, and I never laid eyes on him. I’ll let him run, and he can take his chances out there. I won’t let an innocent man spend his life in prison.’

  Ben shook McAllister’s h
and. ‘You’re a decent guy, Tom. Even if you are a cop.’

  ‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’

  They waited. Time seemed to have slowed to a crawl. Going out of his mind with frustration, Jude skulked off to nap on the threadbare living room sofa. As four p.m. dragged closer, Ben did a reconnoitre of Black Rock Farm and its various long-disused agricultural features, barns, pens and storerooms. Once upon a time, many years ago, Bertie and Meadow Brocklebank had made a half-hearted stab at quitting their townie existence and becoming proper smallholders. All that remained of their failed attempt was a mouldering store of organic fertiliser and a variety of shovels and picks and hoes, never used, now speckled with rust. In another corner was a weathered heap of building timber for some outbuilding renovation project that had never happened.

  While Ben was doing his round of the property, McAllister headed off down the track to move the car away from its conspicuous position by the gate. He parked it in an agreed spot quarter of a mile the other side of a small hill, behind some trees where it was less likely to be noticed from the air. Nearby was the ruin of a stone barn, predating the farm by a century or more, where he and Jude would take cover when the showdown began. While McAllister was in position he and Ben tested their radios to make sure they would be in range of one another.

  McAllister returned to the farm on foot. He and Ben shared a mug of coffee in silence. They waited. The police didn’t come. The hour drew nearer. And nearer. Ben still felt calm. He climbed the stairs to the top floor attic room and positioned the astronomical telescope to scan the horizon to the north-east, the direction from which he expected the enemy to approach. Land-spotting optics showed their images the right way up, but their stargazing counterparts produced an upside-down view: the picture Ben could see in the eyepiece was of the inverted hills weirdly suspended above a sky now almost completely clear of cloud cover. A fine day for a high-speed helicopter journey halfway across England, to rid yourself of your enemy at the end of it.

  Three-thirty p.m. came and went. Three-forty-five. Ben returned downstairs to send Jude and McAllister away.

  ‘I don’t want to leave you alone here,’ Jude said, visibly emotional.

  ‘Don’t you worry about me,’ Ben assured him.

  McAllister wished him luck, and then they were gone, making the quarter-mile trek over rough ground to the ruined barn. Ben headed back up to the attic room and resumed watching the sky.

  Four o’clock ticked by. Clarkson didn’t come.

  Ten past. Quarter past.

  Clarkson still didn’t come.

  Then at last, Ben spotted the tiny dark speck over the hills. He watched intently as it grew into the shape of an approaching helicopter, heading out of the north-east straight for the farm. As it got closer, he could see in the upside-down image that it definitely wasn’t a police aircraft. The pale sunshine glittered off its red fuselage. The distant thud of rotors became a roaring clatter.

  They were coming.

  The helicopter settled down to land on a patch of open ground a hundred yards from the edge of the farm property, flattening a wide circle of long grass with its downdraught. The pilot shut down the turbine and its howling note dropped in pitch. The side hatches opened. Ben watched as the pilot and passengers all got out. The diminishing hurricane from the rotors tore at their hair and clothes as they hurried away from the aircraft, heads low.

  There were seven men. Two of them were distinctive from the others: one a tall, slim, authoritative-looking middle-aged man in a long and elegant black coat. Gregory Clarkson had met the challenge to make a personal appearance at this showdown. Scurrying along at his side was a smaller, younger man who from his appearance was obviously another company executive, incongruous out here in his suit and shiny shoes.

  Exactly as Ben had expected, there was no sign of a nice shiny leather attaché case filled with money, let alone the several cases it would take to accommodate five million pounds. Clarkson was never going to bring the cash. And exactly as Ben had also expected, what Clarkson had brought instead were the five large, powerfully built and heavily armed companions who fell into formation like bodyguards around their boss as the group hurried away from the chopper and started walking purposefully towards the farm.

  The five looked much more in their element than Clarkson and his corporate colleague. They were dressed for combat in boots, fatigues and tactical vests, and they clutched their automatic weapons in gloved fists. Serious, gruff, grim-faced professionals, none under thirty-five. One of them, the pilot, had the walk, the attitude, the buzz-cut look of an ex-military operative and he held his weapon like a trained man. Ben had no doubt that the other four could handle themselves pretty well, too, whether Clarkson had picked his team from the private security industry or from other, less kosher, sources of manpower.

  Ben stepped away from the telescope and headed for the door. He knew what he had to do next. He was ready for them.

  Game on.

  Chapter 46

  Jasper Hogan, Gregory Clarkson’s right-hand man, partner in crime and highly-paid company vice-director, was extremely nervous. He felt queasy from the chopper ride and his mouth was dry as he hurried in his boss’s wake through the long grass. His handmade John Lobb Oxford brogues weren’t made for this kind of terrain. There wasn’t a molecule of his being that belonged for a single second in this godforsaken wilderness. He deeply resented having been pressured into leaving his comfortable office for this reckless, in his opinion wildly misguided, cod-military expedition to sodding Cornwall and a confrontation with the man who’d already laid waste to a good number of their hired hands. Hogan was afraid of the surly heavies with guns, who towered over him and barely spoke, acting like they were mercenaries in some foreign war zone. He was afraid of Gregory Clarkson. But most of all he was afraid of Ben Hope.

  Hogan’s boss was striding over the rough ground with a look of steely purpose, grimmer and more determined than the vice-director had ever seen him. Hogan had to jog to keep up. Speaking just loudly enough to be heard over the noise of the helicopter he pointed towards Black Rock Farm and asked Clarkson for the twentieth time, ‘How can we be so sure Hope is even here? This could be a trick.’

  ‘Oh, it’s a trick all right,’ Clarkson snapped back at him, eyes fixed on the distant farmhouse. ‘He might be a better bluffer than Duggan was, but he’s still a bluffer. He doesn’t have a thing on us.’

  ‘Then what are we even doing here?’ Hogan asked, again for the twentieth time. ‘Why take such a risk? With all respect, sir, I still think this is a bad strategy.’

  Clarkson turned towards him with a flash of venomous anger that made Hogan almost flinch. ‘Get this through your head, Hogan,’ Clarkson seethed at him. ‘When you have a rat in your house, you don’t just ignore it and hope it goes away. You make damn well sure the thing is as dead as dead can be. Then you pick it up by the tail and you fling its filthy little body into the fire. That’s what we’re doing here. I want that man out of my life for good, and I won’t settle for being told about it by some moronic underling who’s getting paid to tell me what I want to hear. Understand? Good. Now keep your fucking mouth shut.’

  Turning towards his men he said more loudly, ‘Spread out. I doubt you’ll find him in the house. He’ll use that as a decoy and be hiding in one of those outbuildings instead, so concentrate on those. Surround the property and shoot anything that moves. This man is dangerous and he can’t be allowed to get away. Remember the bonus for the one who takes him down. All right? Now get moving.’

  The fact was that, for all his outward confidence and commanding authority, Gregory Clarkson was every bit as nervous as Hogan. He’d never had too many scruples about following in the footsteps of his grandfather; ordering the elimination of troublesome individuals and being indirectly responsible for the deaths of many, many more, whose names and nationalities he’d never even know and didn’t much care about, gave him no moral qualms. Likewise, the actions he’d been f
orced to take over the Duggan affair hadn’t kept him awake at night for any reasons of conscience – no, what racked him with worry was the thought of the damage that could be done to him and his company by anyone getting too close to the secret of his clandestine operations. First it had been that blasted Canadian. Now it was Ben Hope, a more dangerous threat by far.

  These last few months had been a fraught time for Clarkson’s precious company. It had never aspired to become the biggest of its kind in Europe, far from it – the Galliard Group was dwarfed in size by many of its competitors, the Pfizers and GSKs of this world – but it had always punched well above its weight and share prices were up and up. Even so, it wasn’t so rich and powerful as to be impervious to ruin. Last October the company had been hit by a class-action lawsuit over the claimed side effects of one of his most profitable above-board pharmaceutical products, a diet pill that caused kidney damage to a small percentage of users. He’d been getting away with it for years, but after a particularly determined lawyer had produced enough clients and medical evidence to torpedo his business he’d eventually caved in and settled out of court for a crippling seven-figure sum that still made his eyes water when he thought about it.

  Clarkson had only narrowly dodged further injury by resorting to his usual means of bribery and intimidation to keep the fiasco from becoming public knowledge. The last thing his weakened company needed right now was another scandal. And the horrible truths that stood to be revealed by his enemies went way beyond the realms of the merely scandalous. If it came out that he had been raking in illicit fortunes from well-organised terror groups and UN-subsidised tin-pot regimes who were secretly stockpiling Galliard-produced botulinum for use in biological warfare, it would do more than sink him financially. He and his co-conspirator Jasper Hogan would probably spend the rest of their lives behind bars.

  For that reason, Ben Hope must die. He must die today. Right here, right now. And, Clarkson reflected with a smile, he couldn’t have picked a better location for his own demise. This was perfect.