Payback (18 page)

‘
Nonsense. That was all a long time ago. And in those days you had a team of, what, twenty crack technicians helping you? In purpose-made official labs. Is Rybinski there? Congratulate him too. You’ve both done brilliantly. Especially you, Ladislas. Replicating all that with just a handful of young Portuguese lab technicians. People who you had to keep in the dark about what you were really doing. How on earth did you pull it off?’

Blacher
snorted, mostly at sharing any credit with the arrogant Russian with whom Barton had insisted he work. Someone who, Barton claimed, had helped the Gulf War Allies, having earlier installed specialist plant for the Iraqis; billing him as ‘the man who stopped the biological Scuds’.

‘
They think we’ve been producing a new top secret biotech intelligent fertiliser. One that adapts itself to whatever soil conditions it finds,’ he replied. ‘That explained away the fifty-gallon drums of biological growth medium we’ve been getting through. It’s not so crazy actually. Some of the ingredients and processes are very similar. That’s how we convinced the Portuguese inspectors, remember.’

Then
Blacher’s mood changed. ‘We celebrate, but we should not forget the terrible accident. Those poor young men. I will never forgive myself. We were working too quickly. Cutting corners. But it was, you still assure me, vital for us to finish as quickly as possible. Absolutely vital for Israel’s security.’

‘
Sine
qua
non
. That I assure you. And those people, they were just illegal immigrants. North African Arabs. Angolans.’

‘
Don’t ever talk to me that way! Don’t include me in your racism!’ Blacher shouted. ‘I don’t hate Arabs or Angolans or anyone! How dare you make me feel like some camp doctor!’

Barton
realised he had misread him. ‘I’m sorry...’

‘
Just because that imbecile Russian assistant you forced on me, Rybinski, misread the trial dosages!’

‘
I’ve said I’m sorry. You want to help keep Israel secure. I know that. I’m sorry.’

He
had enticed Blacher out of retirement by representing himself as an intelligence go-between for the Israelis, convincing Blacher, a lapsed Jew, that Jerusalem had requested his help. Saying they needed a biological deterrent for a deadly intelligence poker game with Iran. It was public knowledge that Tehran, with Russina support, was well on its way to completing the Bushehr nuclear power station. An Israeli intelligence report, openly circulated to journalists to put pressure on the USA and EU—a copy of which Barton showed to Blacher as evidence of his credentials—alleged that some hard-line Mullahs were also expecting the Russians to leave behind know-how on using the plant’s enriched uranium. This was raising the spectre of the long-feared Muslim Bomb, to set against Israel’s two hundred stockpiled nuclear warheads. The hawks in Iran needed to know the dire consequences of that course of action.

The
whole game, Barton had assured him, was no more than a textbook ‘Emily’ intelligence tactic: CIA-speak for the deliberate leaking of accurate intelligence to the enemy in order to deter them. The tactic had worked before, he reassured Blacher, showing him now published KGB reports from the early 1970s when the Soviets were redoubling their work on biological warfare. Just as the West was publicly destroying its stockpiles, a CIA double agent was fed with intel which told the Soviets that both the USA and Britain could rebuild their biologiocal arsenals within weeks. And that Western scientists remained far ahead of the Soviet Union in their research, with secret new strains that could devastate livestock, plants or people. It had been, Blacher himself well remembered from his days at Portreath, enough to force the Soviets to make important policy changes.

‘
But the deaths...They make me ashamed,’ Blacher continued. He was still utterly convinced that he was clandestinely working for Israel, just as so many of his nuclear scientist friends had done for so long.

‘
Accidents. All of them,’ lied Barton. ‘Ladislas, please...this is a day to celebrate, even as you remember the tragedy. By creating the base toxin in commercial quantities, you’re helping prevent a dangerous weapons race with Iran. They will soon know that if they proceed with nuclear weapons production at Bushehr, then Israel will up the stakes with the potential for biological deployment. Rejoice in that. You’ve performed a great humanitarian service!’

‘
If you say so,’ Blacher replied, uncertainly.

‘
I do say so. Relax today. Take a holiday. You are a great man. And I will see to it that your work is fully recognised in the secret corridors of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.’

This
pleased Blacher, a child of an orthodox
frum
family. A man guilt-ridden for abandoning his faith for the racy mistress of science. And a man now in his early seventies, thinking more and more about his own death—something for which that faithless mistress still had no answer.

*

Mitchell had made no concession to the climate or the late hour, and arrived dressed in a dark navy suit and waistcoat, his tie impeccably knotted in a half-Windsor.

Waving
him into his suite, Tom remarked, ‘Aren’t you hot in all that?’ He was himself wearing the trousers from his cream linen suit, and a dark mushroom Sea Island cotton polo shirt.

‘
There’s so much air conditioning out here. I could happily wear my old army greatcoat,’ Mitchell complained.

Smiling,
Tom showed him over to the two easy chairs positioned around a low coffee table by the window. Offering him a drink, he noticed that even in this, Mitchell’s choice was singular, almost from another generation: ‘A dark rum and water. No ice.’

Staying
now with mineral water, Tom sat opposite him in the corner chair Mitchell had deliberately left for him. ‘You’re a queer bird, Mr Mitchell. An English expression, I think. I hope it doesn’t offend.’

‘Y
ou’re not the first person to find me—what? Opaque?’

‘
And is that how you see yourself?’

Mitchell
immediately recognised Tom’s attempts at amateur psychology. Reflective responsing: answering a question with a question. Probably picked up on an expensive management course. He decided to play along for a while, for fun. ‘Perhaps it is. Think of me as the black coating on the mirror. Enabling others to see themselves.’ He was pleased with this bit of nonsense. Your move, he thought, sipping the rum.

Tom
looked slightly puzzled, but ploughed gamely on. ‘Me, I’m a dilettante at heart.’ He leaned forward conspiratorially. ‘The truth is that we consultants are on the whole a pretty bogus lot. We breeze in, then breeze out, leaving the management we’ve just rubbished to do all the real work.’

Page
two, thought Mitchell. Tell a stranger a secret to make him like you...

Then
it suddenly occurred to him: Tom might be so brainwashed with techniques that he no longer recognised them as devices. Perhaps the man no longer simply met people, but ‘encountered standard psychographic types’. Perhaps he did not have friends, just certain people to share his ‘quality time’. ‘It’s only recently that the word dilettante has been used pejoratively,’ Mitchell batted back, starting to enjoy himself. ‘The original Age of Reason dilettantes, the Grand Tourists, understood all the arts and sciences. Fully rounded men. You can see it in their faces. The portraits of the Dilettante Society members are now in Brook’s.’

Tom
too was enjoying this, warming to the man and totally failing to spot that Mitchell, with cold calculation, had already turned over to page three. Deliberately reflecting back Tom’s own values and interests to make
him
comfortable. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘Education should have remained holistic. Separating arts and science was a cultural disaster. In fact, this was what attracted me to consultancy. We’re encouraged to think in the round. Like the Dilettantes. To be a kind of intellectual Swiss Army knife, you know?’

Mitchell
had by now had more than enough of all this nonsense, but did his best to hide his feelings. ‘People see
us
less as a Swiss Army knife, and more a blunt instrument of state,’ he went on, now pulling the conversation round to the point. ‘But that’s really not true. Staying with the simile, I’d describe us as a surgeon’s knife. Used by highly trained specialists, and only after the most thorough diagnosis of what needs cutting out. For the health of the body as a whole.’

‘
And that’s how you see James Barton, as some kind of malignant cancer?’

‘
That’s exactly how we see him. Our job is to act, before it spreads.’

Tom
had already given a lot of thought to what Mitchell and his man had shared with him at their last meeting. He had since also done a trawl on the net and various databases on biological warfare in general, and botulinum toxin in particular. It had made for sickening, terrifying reading and helped finally make up his mind to agree. But first, before he showed his hand, he needed some reassurances and safeguards. Immunity from prosecution by Barton—or WMC for breaches of his service contract; and a categoric assurance that they would not knowingly put him in any physical danger. ‘Let’s talk turkey, Mr Mitchell. I’m tired and it’s late. As I see it, you want me to use my access to Barton and his business affairs to supply you with intelligence. Intelligence you’ll use for what, exactly?’

Mitchell
moved his chair inches closer to Tom’s, literally forcing him into a corner, making him feel trapped, and willing to agree to anything to escape. This was Mitchell’s page four, and a tactic known to all good salesmen as they go in to close. ‘We need to prevent Barton from letting those biological weapons loose. That’s it. We don’t yet know why he’s developed them, who’s commissioned the stuff, or whether there’s a link with this Aruba syndicate.’

Tom
took a deep breath. This was it. The commitment. ‘I’ll help, but I want some promises in return from you people,’ he said. ‘We all remember Matrix Churchill...’

Mitchell
was heartily sick of having that thrown in his teeth every time he tried to recruit someone. But time was fast running out for him. Bates was the only show in town. He would now somehow have to lick the American into shape, and make him into an effective field operative, in a matter of days. Thrusting out his hand and baring the tombstone teeth, he forced a tired smile. ‘Deal,’ he said. ‘Welcome aboard. We’ll look after you. And really, I’m only tasking you with one thing. One overriding priority. Really get Barton to trust you—with
everything
, and find out why he’s developed the biological bomb. Tell us why, and for whom—and you can leave the rest to us.’

*

Banto had no plan, other than to escape to the deep forest. It was important to feel safe, back in his own world, and to recoup his full strength after all the blood they had taken. But if he had no real plan, he did have a clear and simple aim. Payback. From the big
kepala
, Barton. And then he could return home to his village. To warn and prepare his people as he had vowed.

But
now he had to sit. It was almost night-time, and he knew he had to stop and wait for a while. There is a startlingly common belief shared by primitive nomads the world over—aborigine, Inuit, African plainsmen, Bedouin—that if they travel too quickly, for example in a car or plane, then they have to wait for their soul to catch up with them before moving on. If not, and they leave their soul behind, it will wander lost, for ever.

For
Banto, the deep forest was in any case full of spirit life. Ancestors in
dimanples
—the die man place—separated from their bodies. In limbo. In the forest around his village he knew all the dark places to avoid at night—special clearings where the spirits would hold
sing
-
sings
, chanting mantras and beating deep
kundu
drums; giant trees which had the power to steal your senses if you walked by them at certain angles. And he knew that ancestors,
of
tumbuna
, could became birds of paradise to fly above you, watching, watching...

This
forest was strange however. And it felt, after all his efforts to get there, unwelcoming and dangerous: its sounds and smells alien. The jungle itself was made up of a different balance of trees and vegetation: the colossal guanacastes, breadnut
ramon
trees, strangler figs, the piggy-backing epiphytes, the black orchids. There were sounds of creatures he did not recognise: the caterwauling of a distant jaguar; the clicking from tropical rattlesnakes; tapirs crashing noisily through the underbush. Macaws, parrots and the beautiful ocellated turkeys. The howler and spider monkeys. The bats’ soft, incessant peeping. The maddening frogs.

But
for some miles now, he had felt himself being drawn towards a strong spirit. A kapok tree had been benignly but inexorably reeling him in. It was a 700-year-old ceiba, the world tree, the Wacah Chan, Gateway to the unseen world of Xibalba, sacred to the Maya: its buttress roots alone at the base of the huge trunk were twice his own height. Approaching it he could sense the presence of powerful spirits, spirits of ancient warriors, wise and protective towards him. He knew he would be safe here. Here he could rest, and let his own spirit catch him up with him.