Payback (30 page)

Since
she had learned of it, her father obtaining cell lines from primitive PNG tribes had haunted her. But now it was she being forced to live the nightmare he had created. She had one more question for now. ‘And Payback, Banto. What exactly is Payback?’

Uncomfortable
talking to a woman, and naturally shy of any form of directness, he shifted his weight nervously and stood up. ‘Time we go,’ he said, unwittingly answering her question by avoiding it.

Lydia
hauled herself up, now knowing the worst. This glimmering of a fresh dawn may be her last.

Four
exhausting hours’ trek later—he with his fluid, unhurried movements, she jerky, quick, and wasting energy—he at last allowed her the first decent rest period. She was completely exhausted, and as she lay back, her head against a rotting log, deep blessed sleep came immediately.

She
was woken by the physical nearness of Banto. He was kneeling by her right side, with a strange look on his face: a sharp threatening look that froze her. Then his enormous hand was on her right breast, sliding slowly across her open shirt top, the other hand gathering her hair holding her head back, so that she had to look upwards. She fought to stifle the involuntary scream rising in her throat. The fear of Banto now raping her had anaesthetised all her feelings and she became limp, incapable of effective resistance, physical or mental.

But
then she realised that something else was happening. The physiological stock-in-trade of pick-pockets and magicians had been at work on her. Banto’s hand on her breast had diverted her attention away from something else. There was some other pressure on her left breast. Something was moving under her shirt. Something big and warm was settling there. Nesting!

The
tarantula is also known as the wolf spider, from its hairy body and wolverine face. It feeds mostly at night on insects, small frogs and mice. Not with the help of webs. Tarantulas, like wolves, pursue their prey, and kill it not with venom, but a bite from its powerful jaws. A bite highly painful to man, and which risks fatal secondary infection or parasitic attack in the jungle. In the day-time, however, they are timid creatures, burrowing to safety and away from the light—as this one, which, having explored her sleeping body for orifices in which to hide, had finally been attracted to the beat of her heart, burrowing instead under her shirt. Its body length of three inches, and leg span of five, was now resting contentedly over her breast.

Banto
had spotted the movement under her shirt as the spider had settled. Crouching at her side, and seeing now that she had realised what he was doing, he released her hair, freeing her to look down. Then, with a slight nod of warning, he tore off the shirt with his left hand and swept the tarantula off with his right. The roughness of his hand chafed her like sandpaper. Shaking, she sat up, arms behind her, her exposed breasts glistening with sweat. A part of her suddenly actually wanted him to scoop her up and hold her protectively against his beautiful body, the boyhood initiation scars deeply sculpted on his arms and back. He had saved her, and if he now claimed his prize...The brief moment was elemental, as a heady cocktail of delirium, exhaustion and fear suddenly aroused her, her nerve ends craving those over-sized, rough hands...

Banto
looked away, the centuries yawning between them. Breasts were not sexual to him. He remembered his mother regularly holding orphan piglets to her, letting them suckle. As for sex and relationships, their experiences and conditioning could not be more different. For Banto, displays of affection were to be avoided at all costs. And sex for him was strictly for procreation, not recreation. Men and women in his village did not live together. Indeed, some PNG tribes, like the Huli, had bachelor villages and the men would not even let women grow or cook food for them. When the Christian missionaries had come to Banto’s village, they had tried to encourage men and women to cohabit, but it had never caught on. There remained the practical business of limiting the number of mouths to what the village could feed. Women were only allowed additional children after their last child had become self-sufficient. If for whatever reason there were too many children, sexual relations stopped completely, with ‘mistakes’ left exposed to the jungle, to die.

Added
to all this was the simple fact that Banto—at last looking at the semi-naked Lydia, sensing the fleeting wantonness in her—found her pink skin, blonde hair, and especially her sickly sweet smell, utterly repulsive.

She
quickly covered herself, coming to her senses and getting a grip back on herself. Blushing, she avoided his eyes and simply said, ‘Thank you. Thank you for saving my life.’

He
stood up slowly and began shifting his weight in obvious discomfort at all this. ‘We go,’ he said, gruffly, pounding his fist on his thigh in agitation.

Chapter Fifteen

Tom Bates was met plane-side at Heathrow by a security man and taken in a buggy to an area used only by authorised airport personnel. He did not clear immigration or customs, and was soon speeding down the M4 to London in the back of the anonymous-looking Range Rover. Neither man spoke much on the journey, and with the reassurance that they would get his suitcase to him later, he was taken down to Mitchell’s MOD ops room within an hour of touching down.

Peregrine
Mitchell looked grim-faced, tired, and somehow older. Offering Tom a coffee, he forced a half-smile. ‘Well done,’ he said. ‘Very well done. Those papers you got out of the lab were exactly what we needed.’

Tom
had called the number Mitchell had given him on returning to the Ritz, and young Manuel Ferez from the Lisbon Embassy had called soon after to collect them. ‘How’s the woman? The agent who came to see me? Is she safe?’ Tom asked.

‘
We got her out of Lisbon. But it was a close-run thing. Barton’s security men had been watching her apartment,’ Mitchell replied, matter of factly.

Tom
was relieved. Seeing the fear in her eyes had first brought home to him the seriousness of what he had got himself into. Grimacing at the stewed, strong coffee, he asked, ‘So. Those papers were really worth all the trouble, then?’

‘
Invaluable.’

‘
Good. Because that’s it from me,’ he said firmly. ‘I’ve done my bit. You can count me out from now on.’ It was a decision that he had made the night before. A decision which in truth had needed very little debate with himself. He was not cut out for heroics. Oeiras had taught him that much. That momentary panic attack had been the first in his life. He had survived it, and in the end—as Mitchell himself had just acknowledged—acquitted himself well. But Tom knew the truth. Knew how close he had been to bottling out.

Mitchell
shook his head wearily. This was not what he wanted to hear. ‘But we badly need you over in Belize. Alongside Barton. And you have to brief our special forces with your inside knowledge of both Oeiras and the San Ignacio ranch. It could save many lives.’

‘
I’ll brief your people as much as you like. No problem. But I’m not going back over there. I quit. And nothing, nothing you can say will change my mind.’ Tom scowled at him, determined not to be talked round.

Mitchell
shook his head, and went to the phone and dialled the internal number. ‘It’s Perry. Would you come down please, doctor. Right away.’

They
maintained the awkward silence for the few minutes it took for the man to arrive. ‘Mr Bates, this is Dr Merrick. The doctor—a bacteriologist—is one of our leading experts on biological weapons. One of the world’s leading experts, based at Porton Down.’

The
small, neat man looked more like a country vet. In his forties, the wispy, sandy hair, somewhat loud tweed suit and thick rubber-soled brown boots seemed altogether too rural for the heart of Whitehall. His handshake was firm and dry, and his penetrating brown eyes looked troubled.

‘
You must be curious to know what was in those papers you got out for us yesterday,’ Mitchell said.

‘
No,’ Tom lied. The truth was he was desperate to know, but shrewd enough to realise that if they shared it with him, he would once more somehow become ensnared. ‘I’ve told you, I want nothing more to do with any of this.’

Mitchell
sat down heavily opposite him. ‘You’ll credit me, I think, as being someone with experience of the uglier side of this world of ours. I’ve seen many things in my life—in the old USSR, in Africa and Indo-China. Things that I wish I could forget. Wipe clean, like a video-tape.’

Tom
nodded respectfully. ‘I’m sure you have.’

‘
Then when I tell you those papers show the most repulsive, the most frightening threat I have ever come across...That it was the reason Blacher took his own life. That what Barton and Rybinski have developed really is terrifying enough to stop governments in their tracks...then what? Would you at least reconsider?’

‘
There’s such a thing as crying wolf, Mitchell!’ Tom snapped, feeling this damn man’s tentacles enveloping him once more.

‘
Mr Mitchell is in no way exaggerating,’ Merrick cut in sharply. ‘What Rybinski has attempted to develop is truly horrifying. Believe me.’

Clenching
his fists under the table, Tom closed his eyes tight. What more could they throw at him? ‘OK,’ he heard himself say. ‘But this had better be good!’

Relieved,
Mitchell nodded instructions at the doctor to carry on.

‘
Mr Mitchell tells me you’re already to some degree familiar with the devastating power of biological weapons. He’s told you something about botulinum toxin?’

Tom
nodded. ‘It all seemed barely credible. That so little could be so dangerous.’

‘
Oh, it’s true enough. And like everything else, there are always people working to refine and make even more efficient weapons of mass destruction and death. Biological warfare has been no different,’ Merrick went on. ‘Some of the most innovative work was taking place in the old Soviet Union, at an organisation called Volchov. Under the direction of Andrei Rybinski. Since the fall of the USSR, people like him have been cast aside, and he made his services available on the open market to the highest bidders. Bidders, of course, like Sir James Barton.

‘
By teaming him up with my dear friend, the misguided but gullible Ladislas Blacher, Barton has been able to create not just a huge scientific quantum leap in biological warfare, but also the practical weapons application for successful delivery. Something even the Soviets struggled with.’

‘
What? Some more powerful kind of biological bomb?’ Tom was feeling frightened now. The genie was about to be released.

‘
Not more powerful. No,’ Merrick answered, grimly. ‘But more selective. It’s based on specially cultured “intelligent” viruses. Viruses that seek out certain DNA codings before attacking. Mr Bates, Sir James Barton has commissioned the most terrible weapon since the atomic bomb. By bringing together the worlds of biological weapons research and genetic engineering, he has created the world’s first bio-ethnic bomb. In the way the neutron bomb was designed to kill people while leaving buildings intact, so this viral biological weapon will kill distinct racial groups without harming others. The age of bio-ethnic cleansing is about to dawn.’

Tom
’s mind raced to digest what he was being told. The memories of crude ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, Africa and Asia were all too vivid, as well as the Holocaust and Stalin’s massacres. Barbaric TV images from Bosnia and of the Hutu massacres flooded his mind. Such a weapon would find a ready market amongst many of the world’s dictatorships, separatist and terrorist groups. And such a weapon was indeed a formidable deterrent, even against the world’s most powerful nations. ‘How can you be sure?’ he asked, still barely able to believe it.

‘
Those papers you got out included details of Rybinski’s clinical trials. With post-mortems on his victims.’ The doctor took out his copy of them. ‘He had a control group of young male Africans. Mostly Angolans. And a same size group of racially pure Jews. North European Ashkenazim and North African Sephardim. I know of some recent genetic research that has established measurable differences in the frequency of certain male Y-chromosome halotypes between traditional Cohanim priests and lay, non-orthodox Jews. So modern-day descendants—the Cohens—do seem to have some slight genetic difference, thanks to this particular male chromosome being passed down from the original priesthood for three thousand years. And that’s a difference
within
a racial group. Establishing genetic differences
between
racial groups is even more straightforward. No, Mr Bates, those clinical trials are unquestionably a precursor to some form of bio-ethnic bomb.’

‘
It’s even cleverer than you might think,’ Mitchell cut in. ‘Barton got himself the open cheque commission from the drugs barons to threaten the President of the United States. To force him to call off the dogs. Well, any nation state attempting to do this has just one chance. Given America’s complete dominance in conventional and nuclear weapons, given the sophistication of her interception capabilities, the only hope is to threaten in an area where they’ve slipped behind. Chemical or biological warfare. It’s the one Achilles heel, their one soft area of under-belly. And your man Barton has gone straight for it.

‘
Now, Mr Bates. Will you help?’

‘
And you think the attack will be on Israel?’ Tom replied, deflecting the question.

‘
Not necessarily. If indeed the first bio-ethnic weapon does target Jews, it could be centred on any major US city.’

Tom
stood up, and helped himself to another mug of the foul coffee. ‘Tell me what to do,’ he said, his back to them.

Mitchell
signalled for Merrick to leave them. When he had gone, he got on to the next piece of difficult news for Tom. News that he knew would hit him hard.

‘
You left for the airport at what time this morning? Early—sixish?’ he asked. ‘And you did not see Barton before you left?’

‘
No. Why?’ Tom immediately sensed that something more was coming.

‘
We’re monitoring all calls at the ranch and Oeiras. At 02.57 this morning, Barton was called by Dr Penny. I’m afraid it looks like Lydia’s been abducted. Barton’s already
en
route
to Miami. A private jet’s being arranged to fly him straight on to Belize.’

Tom
’s heart sank. He felt he could not take much more. Why had he not insisted she came back to Europe with them? Why? ‘Is it certain? Has there been a ransom demand?’

‘
Not yet. And they don’t seem to think there will be. You see, Penny told Barton that the man seen with Lydia in her car was known to them. He described him as “the native”. And used the name Banto. Does that mean anything to you?’

Tom
looked puzzled. ‘Banto? No. Absolutely nothing. Look—I want to turn around right now and get back there too!’

Mitchell
had been prepared for this. ‘You’re flight’s already booked for first thing tomorrow. And gives us all night with you to work on the operational planning. Your up-to-the-minute intelligence is absolutely vital to both teams. I meant what I said earlier. It really could save lives. All right?’

Tom
only upset Mitchell’s plans for him by insisting on calling at his flat before starting with the ops people. He wanted to pack another case of fresh clothes and check his mail. As if to hurry him, Mitchell stayed in the car, engine running, while he went up to the apartment in Chelsea. The place seemed smaller somehow, and instead of helping him touch base with normality, had an unreal, dolls’ house feel. Having hurriedly packed, he flicked through the pile of mail that had almost prevented him pushing the door open, panicking him over the alarm. Five minutes later, and he was about to leave when he remembered to check his phone messages. There were seven, all now out of date or ignorable—except one. Maddie’s voice had startled him, as she simply asked him to touch base with her as soon as he could.

Having
first tried Chester Street, he learned she had left that morning for the Manor. ‘Hi,’ he said. ‘I just got back, briefly. How are you?’ Should, could he tell her about Lydie? What would Mitchell want?

‘
I’m fine. And you, and everyone else? I spoke to Lydia a couple of days ago out there. When’s she back?’

The
hell with what Mitchell would want. Anyway, James could drop the bombshell any time to her about his crass match-making—trying to bully them down the aisle. ‘Maddie, I’m afraid there’s some worrying news about Lydia. It seems she’s gone missing. It’s only a few hours so far. But she didn’t return last night from a drive around San Ignacio. And everyone’s concerned.’

‘
No!’ she gasped. ‘Is there anything else you know? Any sightings?’

‘
She was seen with a man beside her in the Jeep. But so far there’s very little to go on. A full search is underway. Helicopters, search parties, the police...It may all be nothing. She may simply have broken down, and bunked up in some hotel nearby.’

‘
Or bunked up with this man. You know how headstrong she can be.’

It
was not meant unkindly, and until recently he would probably have thought the same himself. Now, however, he felt he had to defend her. ‘Oh, I think that may have been true of the old Lydia, but she’s changed a lot.’

Maddie
sighed in worry. ‘You’re right. There’s someone in her life right now. She told me. Someone really special.’ Tom reddened. He should have told her about the two of them, but now was hardly the right time. ‘She said she’d tell me when we lunched again when she got back. I just hope the guy is worth her. She deserves the best.’ Maddie was now sobbing with worry. ‘We’ve got real close over the last few weeks, you know. Dear God, please let her be all right...’ The sobs now collapsed into bitter tears.