First Horseman, The (19 page)

The guard said, ‘No problem, Mr Evans, that’s not necessary.’ The barrier went up.

‘That’s OK,’ said Jim. ‘Have it anyway.’

The guard took it from him. ‘That’s mighty generous of you, sir. The freakin’ control centre ain’t answering, as usual. Bozos!’

Jim acknowledged him with a grin then, buzzing up his window, drove under the raised barrier.

Will hadn’t spent many months in his own bed: his work with the US military took him from one place to another. Sometimes it was a hotspot, sometimes it was a backwater but wherever it was he would know he’d be on his way somewhere else in a few months.

Since his posting back to Virginia he had got used to the pleasures of home and family. He absolutely did not miss the action or excitement. On Sundays when the family went to church, he actually prayed he would never again be called away from home. It was a possible outcome and he did all he could to make it happen.

At home he let very little disturb him and his mobile took few calls after midnight. Only a dozen people jumped past silent mode and Jim Evans was one of them. In certain circles the Brit had become a legend and he was just the kind of close connection to make Will’s presence in Langley that little bit more sustainable. As he answered his mobile he hoped Jim wasn’t going to ask him about Jane.

‘Will, I’m in a bit of deep shit,’ came Jim’s voice. ‘I need your help. I take it I’ve still got plenty of good karma with you.’

‘A shedload.’

‘Good, because Howard McCloud, the satellite guy, is dead in his compound in South Carolina. He’s lying in about a million square feet of his own personal military arsenal – mortars, small artillery, machine-guns, Humvees, the lot. There’s more hardware under his mansion than it’d take to invade Cuba.’

Jim was talking fast and Will had to concentrate hard to understand his thick London accent.

‘OK,’ Jim went on, ‘so I’m exaggerating a little bit but not too much. His whole estate is some kind of survivalist wet dream.’

‘OK,’ said Will. ‘And?’

‘Well, you guys should get down there fast because McCloud’s got all sorts of connections and his set-up is going to make a lot of important people extremely embarrassed. No way is his shit legal. You might want to tidy it all up very fast.’

‘What’s your story?’

‘Let’s just say I’m alive while McCloud and one of his goons are brown bread.’

‘Brown bread?’

‘Brown bread, dead.’

Will was sat upright in bed, his wife turning restlessly next to him. ‘So what’s the narrative on this?’

‘Will,’ said Jim, suddenly sounding exhausted. ‘Get your people down there. If or when you need more from me, just call.’

‘You OK, Jim?’

‘In the circumstances I’d say very well indeed. Got to drive.’

Jim hung up. His next call was to Stafford. ‘Got to get out of here,’ he said. ‘I need to get back to the UK quick.’

Renton sat hunched forward, looking intently into the glass case. Catching a mosquito was no easy matter, even if it was feeding on a rat that he was holding down with his other hand. The blue rubber gloves, the gateway into the cage, were very thick and made the job yet more difficult, but the thick latex layer was what stood between him and the little flying syringes that, given the opportunity, would land on him and stick their feeding hoses through his skin.

Not that he would mind being fed on by a mosquito. It didn’t hurt and he had watched it many times on himself with a kind of fascination. Under magnification it was exciting to see his own blood being drawn up into the tiny mindless creature. These mosquitoes, though, were feeding on a reservoir of rat blood infected with disease. Each insect was a little bio-weapon, primed with a terrible payload. In this case the disease was Ebola, a haemorrhagic fever that killed at least half of all those infected.

He was looking forward now to when they were freed, to swarm and breed, infect and multiply, then pick up other blood-borne diseases that they would spread onwards wherever they flew. The range was important: there was no point in him and Cardini killing everyone, including themselves, with their creation. These mosquitoes would be unable to travel beyond the current malaria belt, leaving the northern world untouched. It would be the hot primitive lands of the developing world that were struck. They would again become the fallow lands of Earth, the lungs of the planet. These once pristine continents so nearly destroyed by man would return to nature, leaving the north the benefit of a cleansed environment, with three-quarters of humanity gone from the disfigured face of the globe.

The mosquito was crushed by the tweezers. Renton groaned in annoyance. He shifted his grip on the almost lifeless rat and lined up the tweezers to pluck another insect from its hairless pink skin. His hand trembled slightly as he grasped the specimen.

They were all males, engineered to be ferocious in their reproduction. They were bigger and stronger, selected from hundreds of generations for their reproductive proclivities, then engineered yet further to dominate their species. But on top of this, he and Cardini had laid a flaw, the weakness that made them the first horseman: a broken digestion. Cardini had copied the vector that had slain half the world in the Middle Ages, the mechanism of the Black Death.

The vomit of insects was pestilential.

The Mongol hordes had brought the Black Death from Mongolia. The marmots there had carried the disease from the beginning of time and fleas had jumped from animal to man, killing him with the sickness they carried. Unprepared for the Mongol or the Black Death, medieval Europe had reeled. The flea, sick itself with bubonic bacteria, regurgitated its last meal as it tried to feed and hence infected its host. In a world that was covered with a layer of filth, the fleas became tiny angels of death.

Cardini had applied that lesson to the mosquito, an animal with a defined range, yet unstoppable where it still lived. In a few short years it would leave the world a place worth living in, a planet with a future.

Renton slipped the insect into the square container with the other specimens. When he had thirteen in the box, he would stow it and move on to the other cases: glass tanks that contained rats infected with newly prepared West Nile virus and equine encephalitis, commonly known as sleeping sickness.

He smiled to himself. In a way, loading the mosquitoes was unnecessary: without the prepared diseases, they would pick up and spread all those that they and their offspring drank. Yet the more sparks there were on the haystack of humanity, the faster the blaze would take hold and the higher the inferno would flame.

If Jim could have seen himself pacing around the gate area of the small landing strip in North Carolina he would have advised himself to sit down and look less suspicious. His jet was heading towards the airstrip. No matter how agitated he got, it was not going to arrive a minute earlier.

On the one hand he wanted to stay behind and sort the situation out, but on the other, the prospect of sitting for months in a US jail while facts were untangled was unthinkable. He had enough friends in high places, but it was clear that he would be better off explaining what had to be explained from the UK side of the Atlantic.

Will hadn’t called him back and he wasn’t sure whether that was good or bad. His phone was on, so if Will wanted him picked up, his guys would know exactly where Jim was. That was enough for him not to feel too bad about getting directly out of Dodge: they could grab him if they wanted to.

Whenever he heard a vehicle, he expected a posse of police cars to sweep into sight and someone like Will to get out and arrest him. But they didn’t appear. Occasional light aircraft came and went, maintenance trucks mooched around on their day-to-day business, and that was all.

The sight of his G5 coming in to land was a huge relief, but he wouldn’t be happy until he was aboard. Even then he’d still be dreading the thought of what was to follow. At the very least there would be months or even years of trouble, a cycle of legal worries churning on without a conclusion in sight.

The choking rasp of the guy he had felled echoed in his head. He could feel McCloud shattering at the end of his fist. Those sounds and sensations would take a long time to fade.

He watched the jet taxi on the apron. What the hell had the fiasco been about? What was Cardini doing now? What had McCloud planned to do to him? Kill him? Why? Because Jim was a threat to his supply of TRT?

He walked smartly towards the plane as the stairs dropped down. He heard footsteps behind him, trotting quickly towards him. He turned sharply, but it was only airport staff getting up to speed on the arrival. ‘Get her refuelled as fast as possible,’ he said to the captain, who met him at the top of the steps. ‘We’ve got to be on our way, pronto.’

‘Roger,’ said the captain, flashing his oversized smile. ‘We can refuel in the British Virgin Islands if you like.’

‘Do it,’ said Jim.

He slumped into a chair by a porthole overlooking the private terminal. Any minute now he would see a squadron of police careering in. He was praying his shedload of karma was going to be enough.

Stafford’s right knee was giving him a bit of trouble so he’d brought his shooting stick to the ha-ha and now sat on it heavily.

Right on time, there was Lady Arabella on her hunter, cantering around the field. Something in the far right-hand corner of his vision piqued his attention. He looked towards it without moving his head. A giant wood pigeon was gliding towards the tree to his right. How unfortunate for it, he thought, snapping the breech of his shotgun. The stupid bird had flown at the wrong time and in the wrong direction.

Stafford had no desire to kill it, but he could hardly keep up his pretence of hunting if he let another pest float by him in full view of Lady Arabella. He raised the gun and fired, the pigeon falling a few feet from him. Suddenly another was on its way towards him. ‘Good grief,’ he muttered. He fired again and the second bird fell obligingly close to the first. He broke the shotgun gently so the cartridge did not fly and took the cases out carefully, putting them in his pocket. He reloaded but left the gun broken.

‘Top shot,’ said Arabella, still some yards away, her high, clear voice carrying to him through the still air.

Stafford gave a little bow. ‘I think perhaps pigeon pie is now on the menu,’ he said.

‘Does your Mr Evans have you shoot his dinner for him?’ she asked. ‘How very economical.’ She smiled.

‘On occasion.’

‘Perhaps I should invite him to sample some of our estate’s produce.’ The horse stood perfectly still under her.

‘I’m sure he would be delighted.’

She studied him for what felt like a long time. ‘You’re interesting, Stafford,’ she said. ‘Yes. In your way you’re almost as mysterious as Mr Evans.’

‘I can’t see how,’ said Stafford, more than a little flustered.

‘Good day,’ she said, giving him a sideways look as she lightly pushed the horse onwards.

He watched her go, then collected the two birds. He would clean them and send them over to her.

Jim was on his way back and Stafford could tell from the message he had left that all was not well. He was therefore somewhat distracted when a car came up the drive and the familiar figure of Superintendent Smith got out. ‘What’s he doing here?’ Stafford said aloud, and headed for the front door.

He opened it as Smith reached the steps.

‘Well, well, well,’ said Stafford. ‘What brings you here?’

‘You, as a matter of fact,’ said Smith, his voice spiced with a hint of sarcasm. ‘Saving your skin as always.’ He skipped athletically up the worn stone staircase. ‘Can I come in?’

‘Of course. I take it it’s about the package I despatched.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m glad they’ve sent you, old chap.’

Smith strode into the grand hall and had a quick look around. ‘We need to know right away where those samples you sent to Porton Down came from,’ he said, after his quick survey. ‘Is Jim about?’

‘No,’ said Stafford. ‘He’s flying back from America as we speak.’

Smith nodded. ‘OK.’

‘Right,’ said Stafford. ‘Wait here while I fetch the gal.’ He turned on his heel and headed off.

So this was Jim’s new pad, he thought. Very nice. Jim had once tried to give him ten million pounds as a present. He had just laughed and handed it back. ‘Go on,’ Jim had said. ‘I’d be dead twice over if it wasn’t for you.’

Smith had smiled rather grimly. ‘It might not be a fortune to you, Jim, but it would kill my reason to be alive. I’ve got to have something pushing me to get out of bed in the morning. With ten mil I’d buy myself a big armchair and a tanker of whisky and drink till I rotted away.’

Jim had hopped up and down in frustration – it had made Smith’s day. ‘Well, consider it banked,’ he’d said. ‘So long as I’ve got it, it’s yours.’

The hall walls were covered with fine old paintings and other ancient decorations. He found it hard even to contemplate what it all cost to keep up. You needed to be extremely rich to maintain premises like these, but Jim was a lot wealthier than that. ‘It’s another world,’ he nearly said, as Stafford arrived with a pretty young woman in tow.

‘Superintendent Smith, this is Kate,’ he said, standing to attention. ‘Kate, this is Superintendent Smith from Counter-terrorism Command.’

‘Hello,’ she said.

‘It was Kate who came by the samples,’ continued Stafford.

‘Good to meet you,’ said Smith. ‘And where, may I ask, did you come by them?’

Kate’s face was burning and she could tell she had gone bright red. ‘Professor Cardini’s lab in Cambridge.’

‘It’s far more complicated than that,’ said Stafford. ‘Kate was attacked there by some kind of mad lab technician. He followed her here.’

Kate was nodding and trying to watch them both closely at the same time.

Smith’s head was bowed forward, his arms behind his back. ‘Can you take me straight to where you got them?’ he asked, lifting his face and peering at her intently.

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘We’d better get going then, right away. I have half of Porton Down waiting on the road outside.’ He turned to Stafford. ‘Some of them will want to come in here and check everything. The rest will follow us.’