Payback (9 page)

Bolitho
had seen enough men die on him not to recognise this, and he certainly did not want to face Barton with a corpse. The native was badly dehydrated and running a temperature of over a hundred. He also stank like a polecat for want of his natural toilet, and lack of twentieth-century lavatory training. But now at long last, they had made their touchdown at Philip S.W. Goldson International Airport, ten miles north-west of Belize City. Mightily relieved at the prospect of getting the native away from people and having him fixed up by Barton’s doctors, Bolitho also hoped to get for himself a more powerful painkiller. The gnawing from whatever a lifetime’s heavy drinking had left of his liver was becoming unbearable.

There
were no problems at immigration, and as Bolitho cleared customs with Banto he immediately saw a young man holding up a card bearing the name ‘Temple Bio-Belize’, Barton’s local research plant outside San Ignacio. For the first time in his life, he could have kissed a man, so welcome was the sight of someone to share the burden.

As
at last Bolitho and his prisoner fell exhausted into the big Shogun, the Carib driver looked back suspiciously at the two strangers. They both looked real sick. And there was already too much illness around at the lab for his liking. There had been too many sickies who did not get better. That was the gossip. Something strange was going on in there, and people who asked too much got into big trouble. This was a job he did not like. Maybe he would quit. Maybe soon.

Too
many sickies. And now two more. They made him nervous.

Chapter Five

‘Mr Bates, isn’t it? Hallo. Perry Mitchell. Good to meet you.’ He offered his hand in greeting.

They
were in the outer hall of The Travellers Club, snow falling heavily outside. Having showed Tom where to hang his wet coat and hat, he asked, ‘A quick snifter, or shall we go straight up and eat?’

Tom
shook his head. The champagne from the night before at the Savoy had left him headachy. ‘I don’t normally drink at lunchtimes,’ he said.

‘
I understand. A bit the same myself. Better none than one, eh? We’ll eat straight away then. I’ll lead on.’

As
they climbed the staircase to the dining room, the Coffee Room Manager came forward to greet them. ‘Good afternoon, Mr Mitchell. We’ve kept your usual table,’ he said, and led them to the far end of the long room, by a window. For reasons of distant club history the dining room was known as the Coffee Room, and ironically was just about the only room where coffee was not served.

The club
was Mitchell’s favourite recruiting ground, the table distance good and wide. He opened with trivial small talk while they chose what they wanted, and he filled out the slip of paper with their order. Once the waiter had collected it, and brought them over a bottle of water, Mitchell got to the point. ‘You must be approached a lot by executive-search people,’ he remarked cheerfully, splashing water into Tom’s glass. Seeing him nod, he added, ‘Because the truth is, I have to tell you that I’m a bit of a fraud. Got you here under false pretences. Not really a headhunter at all.’

Tom
looked carefully at the other man for the first time. Late fifties. Bald pate with just a circle of black hair. Narrow black-rimmed spectacles. Medium height and a stocky, strong-looking body. Charcoal-grey flannel suit, well cut; a white shirt and dark blue military-looking tie. His handshake had been dry and vice-like. But the lasting impression was one of a malevolent intelligence at work. All in all a disconcerting, sinister man.

‘L
et me guess. You’re really a financial advisor, with
just
the right investment opportunities for a man in my position. Am I right?’ He knew he was not, but Tom could think of nothing else to bat back.

‘
And I’ve got you here to sell you a pension? Or investment bonds? Very good!’ Mitchell laughed, but only with his mouth, showing a set of large, even teeth.

‘
I don’t have time for quiz games,’ Tom replied sharply, looking at his watch. ‘I want to know why you set this up. Now. Or I’m out of here.’

‘
Of course you do,’ Mitchell replied, not put out. Nobody was ever allowed to hurry him. ‘And I’ll tell you. All in good time. But first, let me introduce myself properly. As you’ve learned I’m not a headhunter. At least not in the conventional sense.’

‘
Well, what exactly
are
you?’

‘
I have a nickname in my old firm. They call me “The Recruiter”. But that’s running ahead of things. I
can
promise you that I’m not a time-waster. Your time or mine. Can we at least take that as read?’ The tombstone teeth flashed briefly again.

Tom
was by now feeling uncomfortable: cornered and disoriented by the man. Mitchell’s whole demeanour was one of innate authority and gravitas. Whatever he wanted from him, it would be nothing trivial. ‘You’ve got me for an hour. Go ahead.’

‘
Good. Thank you.’ Mitchell looked pleased. He had scored his first points against Tom, and each knew it. ‘Now—not that I want to put you off the excellent potted shrimps you’ve ordered—how much do you know about biological weapons?’

Tom
was taken aback. ‘No more than the next man who reads the news,’ he replied. ‘There was talk that Saddam had an arsenal throughout the Gulf War. Maybe Syria too. And some people claim diseases like AIDS are caused by experiments going wrong. But that seems like conspiracy theory bull to me. I don’t know that biologicals so far have ever been used in war.’

‘
Oh it’s happened. And it’s nothing new,’ Mitchell replied, nursing the wine list. ‘The first recorded case was in 1347, at the siege of Caffa in the Crimea. The attackers, Mongols, threw dead and dying plague victims over the city walls at the Genoese. Later, Genoese traders and sailors took the bacillus with them all over Europe. It became a massive epidemic.’

‘
The Black Death?’

Mitchell
nodded. ‘Three hundred years later, Pepys also describes how plague victims flicked their scabs at rich people escaping London. And earlier this century, during World War One, the Germans infected horses in America being shipped out to the Allies. They used glanders, a very nasty bacteria which caused debilitating lesions in the animals.’

‘
But surely, modern-day biological warfare has been banned. Closed down years ago.’

‘
There was a 1972 treaty signed banning the stuff. But believe me, it’s still with us.’

The
starters arrived and they ate in silence for a while. Tom, however, could resist no longer. ‘And what’s all this got to do with me?’

Mitchell
smiled again. ‘There are any number of horrible biological cocktails that mad, ambitious or desperate men can use. And they’re relatively easy to deliver. Certainly compared with nuclear devices.’ He shovelled a spoonful of egg mayonnaise into his mouth. ‘The real nasties include anthrax. This causes malignant pustules—blisters—on the head or arm. The skin becomes like raw liver before at last you die—perhaps of fever, septicaemia or haemorrhagic meningitis.

‘
Another treat is known as aphlotoxin. That causes cancer. Or haemorrhagic conjunctivitis, which causes the eyes to bleed...And then there’s tularaemia. How are the shrimps, by the way?’

Tom
looked at him and did not answer.

‘
Well. The poison I
really
want to talk about today is a little beauty called botulinum toxin,’ Mitchell went on. ‘A millionth of an ounce of the stuff will kill you. Choke you to death. It works like this. First you suffer from headaches and dizziness, with blurred vision. Probably seeing double. Soon after the mucous membranes of the throat become very dry and constricted, and you’ll feel unable to speak. A tracheotomy might help—cutting an air passage in your windpipe.’ He made a theatrical cut at his throat with his table knife. ‘But most likely you just die from a paralysis of the respiratory muscles. A horrible, noisy, slow way to go.’

Tom
was becoming annoyed. Putting his cutlery down he rounded on Mitchell. ‘I said you had an hour. Make that two minutes now to get to the point.’

‘
Haven’t you guessed? Come now. I’m surprised at you,’ Mitchell replied expansively. ‘The
point
is Sir James Barton. The
point
is we think he may be developing this stuff at your labs near Lisbon. And the
point
is that you’re his closest adviser and business confidant. A fellow director of his biotech businesses.’ He picked up the wine list again to choose a half-bottle to have with his lamb.

Tom
was speechless with shock. This accusation, if true...made what Barton was doing completely unconscionable. He fought to get a grip on himself. ‘So who exactly
are
you, making such fantastic, actionable allegations?’ he responded sharply, showing more bravado than he actually felt.

But
Mitchell was now laughing to himself. Something had genuinely amused him. Looking up from the wine list he grinned at Tom. ‘You know, I’ve been coming here for over thirty years,’ he said. ‘I wonder if it’s always been there, or whether someone on the Wine Committee has suddenly developed a sense of humour. Take a look at the number alongside the club claret here—the Borie-Manoux.’

Tom
took it and read it out. ‘Double O seven.’

‘
Indeed!’ Mitchell chuckled on. ‘This Bond business is getting out of hand again. A restaurant a while ago even opened right by our Vauxhall Bridge headquarters called “Moneypenny”! Dear old Ian must be turning in his grave...

‘
But, sorry, to answer your question at last, Mr Bates. Who
am
I? I’m a pensioned-off spy, and now chief business recruiter for MI6. And we very much hope you’re going to agree to help us stop Barton.’ He paused for effect. ‘Be our man on the inside. That kind of thing. I’ve already discussed it with the CIA people here in your embassy and they’re right behind it. You will help? Won’t you?’

For
once, Tom looked and felt bewildered. Could this really be true? Was it really possible that Barton had been systematically duping him over all these years? Had he been too pre-occupied enjoying himself to ask questions—the classic busy fool? Because yes, perhaps there
had
been things in his peripheral vision, things he had preferred not to see. Those phone calls Barton took in private... and the new product line Barton had just admitted keeping from him.

Before
he replied, this all needed serious thought. Very serious thought indeed.

*

James Barton had flown to Houston, preferring it to Miami, and picked up the flight for the hop over the Gulf of Mexico and down to Belize. It was a wet early evening when he touched down.

He
liked his visits to the tiny, sub-tropical country, where because of the inward investment he had brought, he had become something of a celebrity in political circles. The size of Wales, and a population that of Bournemouth, it was known as Honduras when it was a British colony, becoming the independent nation of Belize in 1981. Despite this the British had retained a sizeable military presence to deter neighbouring Guatemala from swallowing up Belize. But ten years after Belizean independence, Guatemala for the first time formally recognised Belize as a sovereign state, and the main UK forces left in 1994, followed by its training and support unit in 2011, leaving just a few seconded advisors. Links with Britain remain strong, however, and to a degree the government looks to London still to bolster its relations with both the European Union and the USA.

It
had in fact been EU money, under the European Development Fund, that had finally selected Belize as the base for Temple’s biotech development lab. Tom Bates had helped secure a further two million ECU grant, which had bankrolled over half the start-up costs. And of course supplies of labour were cheap along with illicitly supplied lab animals.

The
Carib driver and young American Dr Noel Penny, the lab chief, were waiting at the airport to meet him. As the driver took the bags and led them to the Shogun, Penny shook Barton’s hand. ‘Welcome back,’ he said. ‘Good flight?’

‘
One metal tube’s much like another,’ Barton replied.

‘
I’m afraid we have to go by road. The helicopter’s down, waiting for some spares to arrive.’

Barton
snorted his annoyance and frowned at the man. He was a world-class biochemist, but seen as something of an eccentric by his peers. His impatience to bring potential breakthrough drugs forward from animal to human testing had badly alienated him from the Federal Drugs Agency. In frustration at them, he had several times experimented on himself as a one-man clinical trial, the results of which he then published on the Internet. This is how he had come to the attention of Barton. A genius in a hurry was exactly what he had needed. And, in turn, a millionaire prepared to build him the world’s biggest chemistry set with which to play was Penny’s idea of heaven.

‘
How’s the native tribesman?’ Barton asked.

‘
Physically fine.’

‘
Physically fine? Meaning what exactly?’ he demanded, snapping on his seat-belt in preparation for Belize’s notoriously pot-holed roads.

‘
He was underweight and dehydrated from a bout of gastroenteritis. But mostly he’s over that. Psychologically though he’s in deep trauma.’

‘
And how’s that showing itself?’

‘
I’m no social anthropologist, but from the little I know about these things, I’d say he’s suffering from acculturation. Trying to make sense of the Western world from his limited native terms of reference. He spends most of his time in some kind of trance. Self-induced. Or chanting some mantra over and over—like caged zoo animals which show repetitive behaviour, pacing or pawing the same spot.’

‘
Is he talking? Bolitho told me he spoke some English.’

‘
I suspect his English is quite good. He’s said only a few words to us—but I can tell that he understands much of what’s said to him. And more...’

They
were now motoring aggressively away from the airport for the fifteen-kilometre drive towards Belize City, before heading south-west through Hattieville, the capital Belmopan and down the western highway to San Ignacio. Heavy rain over the last two days had once more flooded the river alongside the four-lane road, making conditions treacherous. ‘What’s that mean: “and more”?’