The Chosen Dead (Jenny Cooper 5)

by Hall, M. R.

  Seconds passed. Jenny let him think, weigh the odds. She offered a silent prayer.

  ‘Make a note of this postcode.’ He spelled it out. ‘You’ll see the forest entrance. Turn in and go along the track to the right. There’s a pull-in on the left after a hundred yards. I’ll try to be there in fifty minutes.’

  ‘Where is this place? You don’t know where I’m starting from.’

  ‘The Cottesloe Hotel, Marlborough – I traced your IP address. There are very few secrets in this world, but I do have some of them. Now hurry.’

  TWENTY-SIX

  ALISON HAD PLEADED WITH JENNY to go to Ross and leave it to her to meet with the caller, but Jenny knew it couldn’t have worked. He would already have looked her up, memorized her face, taken pains to decide whether she was a woman he could trust, possibly with his life. She couldn’t have lived with herself if he’d seen Alison and turned tail. She had made one concession and had phoned the hospital. The nurse in the isolation unit handed her to the registrar who had care of Ross during the night, and just to make him feel better, Jenny told him that she was on her way. He confirmed to her that Ross had become infected with Q fever and tried his best to reassure her, promising that a new combination of drugs would reverse the pneumonia that had set in. Jenny hadn’t the heart to tell him his efforts would more than likely be in vain.

  As she drove the hire car out of the hotel with Alison following, she had asked herself again whether, if she arrived too late to see her son alive, she would be able to live with her decision. The answer was no. But nor could she live with not having done all in her power to save him. She had no choice: her life – or all that she counted as her life – ended with his. And having accepted the fact, she felt as eerily peaceful as the night.

  The satnav led her fifteen meandering miles along country roads and single-track lanes that twisted along ancient boundaries and over chalk downs before descending into the ink-black Savernake Forest. Centuries-old oaks and spreading beeches reached out to each other from opposite sides of the road, forming a shadowy tunnel that seemed to close in more tightly with every passing yard. The road dipped and the canopy grew denser, blocking out every speck of sky. The outer darkness was complete.

  A disembodied voice quietly instructed her that she had arrived at her destination. Jenny slowed, searching the unbroken line of trees at the roadside in search of the forest entrance the caller had described. She caught sight of it up ahead – a rough forest track wide enough only for a single vehicle. She slowed and turned in, Alison’s Ford tailing her all the way. The VW’s underside scraped noisily over the thick ridge of grass growing down the track’s middle, forcing her to creep along at walking pace. She followed a slow right-hand bend and arrived at a fork. To the left she could make out the outline of a stationary trailer partially loaded with timber. She followed the instruction to continue round to the right, following the track through several more steep bends until she arrived at what he had described as a pull-in: a semi-circle gouged out of the bank big enough only for a forestry tractor to make a three-point turn.

  Jenny pulled over and drew to a halt. Alison came alongside and wound down her window.

  She pointed to the track up ahead. ‘I’m going to turn around and reverse up there. You should turn around, too – best to face him head-on. Sound the horn if you need help. And don’t whatever you do get out. Let him come to you.’

  ‘Fine.’ Jenny let Alison feel she was in control, a detective again.

  Alison shifted into reverse, turned her car in the tight space and reversed twenty yards further up the narrow track. When she killed her lights she became invisible. Jenny followed suit, jerkily turning the VW around so it pointed back the way she had come. She dipped her lights, let the engine idle, and waited.

  Only a few minutes had passed when the first flickers of light probed through the trees, rising and dipping as the approaching vehicle bounced through the deep ruts. Jenny readied herself, feeling her fingers tighten around the rim of the steering wheel. The lights drew closer and finally appeared around the nearest bend. The oncoming car, a silver saloon, slowed and came to a stop some twenty feet ahead of her. After a few seconds’ pause, the phone on her passenger seat rang.

  It was him, the voice she had heard less than an hour earlier. ‘I presume that’s you, Mrs Cooper.’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Who’s that behind you?’

  ‘My officer. Don’t worry – she’s fifty-seven and wearing her pyjamas. Would you like her to step out of her car so you can see her?’

  ‘That’s all right.’

  ‘Then why don’t you come and join me?’

  He considered the offer. ‘OK.’

  He dimmed his lights, allowing Jenny to see him as he climbed out. He was tall, though stooped at the shoulders. Early thirties. Jeans and a lightweight hiking coat, a small rucksack over one shoulder. He walked towards her; short brown hair, glasses, as anonymous as a bank teller. She leaned over and popped open the passenger door. With one more nervous glance to Alison’s car, he climbed in next to her. She sensed his discomfort; it was more gaucheness than fear.

  ‘Jenny Cooper. Pleased to meet you.’ She offered her hand.

  His handshake was limp and non-committal.

  ‘Am I allowed to know your name?’ Jenny asked.

  ‘Guy,’ he said awkwardly.

  He started to unzip the rucksack. ‘I’ve got the antibiotics for Q fever – the intravenous version. I didn’t think he’d be able to swallow. I don’t know the exact dosage.’ He brought out a clear plastic bag containing a number of small glass vials.

  Jenny hurriedly stashed them in the stow-box in the side of the driver’s door, out of his reach.

  ‘I don’t know if you want this—’

  He was holding a small steel flask about the size of a coffee cup with a screw-down top.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Meningitis,’ he said, as casually as if it had contained coffee. ‘It’s not particularly dangerous, not to most people, at least.’

  Jenny looked at it, too frightened to touch.

  ‘Put it in the glove box,’ she said.

  He did as she asked.

  ‘Are you in any danger?’ Jenny asked.

  ‘Probably. But I had nothing to do with what happened. I’m just a lab technician. We weren’t even sure what we were doing. This isn’t what Professor Slavsky wanted.’ He turned to her. ‘I need you to know that.’

  ‘You work for Slavsky’s company?’

  ‘Yes. Combined Life Systems.’ He seemed surprised. ‘I thought Kwan would have told you—’

  He stopped in mid-sentence, startled by the sound of an approaching engine. They both stared out of the windscreen as an array of four headlights headed in their direction. They belonged to a large four-wheel-drive vehicle that was tearing up the track, showing no sign of slowing. Alison switched on her headlights, leaving Jenny and her passenger caught in the cross-beams, light from both directions bouncing off the mirrors and reflecting off the windows.

  It all seemed to happen inside the space of a single second: Alison shot forward, slewing around the outside of the stationary VW and angling straight into the path of what Jenny could now see was a black Range Rover. It didn’t slow, but rather seemed to accelerate as it ploughed headlong into the front nearside of Alison’s Ford. The impact of metal on metal and exploding glass made a sound like a dull explosion. The Ford’s bodywork crumpled like tinfoil, and the whole concertinaed wreck was shunted at high speed across the loose dirt, before tipping on its side and slamming hard into the foot of the bank. Continuing in its trajectory, the Range Rover skimmed Jenny’s wing and pitched violently, front first, into a drainage ditch to her right. All its massive momentum translated into a half-somersault that brought its roof down hard onto a tree stump. It came to rest nearly upside down, its four wheels spinning noiselessly.

  ‘Alison!’ Jenny threw open her door.

  ‘Don’t!’
/>   Guy snatched at her, but she slipped away and ran towards the wreckage. It was lying on its right-hand side. Alison would be jammed in against the ground, trapped by twisted metal. The front end was so staved-in, the only way out for her would be through the rear windscreen.

  ‘Alison!’ Jenny pounded on the underside of the car.

  There was no answer.

  ‘Alison!’

  She turned sharply at a sound coming from the Range Rover. The driver’s door had fallen open. In the near-darkness, Jenny saw a dark, heavy-set, balding figure clamber to the ground and stagger out of the ditch.

  ‘Mrs Cooper!’

  Guy was climbing out of the VW, frantically waving at her to come back.

  ‘Give it to me. You give it to me,’ the approaching figure said, in a low, threatening growl.

  Jenny stood her ground. ‘Who the hell are you?’ She was fearless; there was liquid fire in her veins.

  ‘Koos.’ He spat the word at her and kept coming, now only feet away.

  Jenny heard Guy shout out again, ‘Stop!’ but his voice seemed distant, muffled. She was staring at the man as if through a tunnel, as he reached his right hand inside his jacket, his small eyes fixed on hers, then her fingers found the coldness of the metal ring at her neck, and as he brought out the gun, she pulled the knife from its sheath and her fist was already travelling in a back-handed arc towards him. He looked up in surprise as the tiny blade glinted, a speck of diamond in the night, then sliced downwards, meeting his skull at the right temple and cutting hard and deep in a diagonal across his forehead. It tore through his right eye, nose, lips, jarred over his teeth and finished its journey in the hard bone of his chin. He screamed – an ugly, piercing wail – and dropped the gun, pressing his hands to his face as blood fountained out between his stubby fingers. Suddenly Guy was at her side, picking up the gun and pushing her back towards the VW.

  ‘We’ve got to go! We’ve got to go!’

  She climbed into the driver’s seat, then thrust Alison’s phone into Guy’s hands.

  ‘Call an ambulance.’

  Without looking back, she took off along the track under the overarching trees, as if in a different tunnel: one that led straight to her son, knowing it was what Alison would have wanted.

  Still using Alison’s mobile, Jenny made a single call to Williams, waking him from a drunken sleep in a west London hotel room, to ask him to make arrangements for Guy. His full name was Guy Harrison and he was a senior lab technician at Combined Life Systems. That was all she knew, and all for the moment that he wished to tell. They made the rest of the journey in silence. Jenny didn’t dare call the hospital, knowing that if she heard it was already too late she might jerk the wheel and send them barrelling into the concrete barrier separating the motorway carriageways. She felt herself skating along the edge, the forces of life and death pulling at her with equal ferocity.

  Williams’s three uniforms jumped out of an unmarked car and were opening the passenger door the moment she pulled up outside the hospital. A quiet ‘Come with us, sir’, and Guy was gone. She took the drugs he had given her, left the steel flask in the glove box, and made her way into the building alone.

  The isolation unit was on the sixth floor at the far end of the east wing, as far away from the hospital’s vulnerable heart as it was possible to be. She rode up in an empty elevator, her hand closed around the plastic bag containing the vials in her jacket pocket. It was nearly 3 a.m., and the long white corridor was deserted, the only sound a geriatric moan from behind one of the swing doors to the wards known affectionately to the staff as death row. It was no place to be ill, let alone to die.

  Jenny turned the corner at the far end and was confronted with a welcoming committee. Three figures stood up from the seats in the bay outside the secure, air-locked entrance: Simon Moreton, Ruth Webley and her square-jawed friend. She strode past, ignoring them.

  Moreton stepped into her path. ‘Jenny, we’re going to have to talk.’

  ‘I need to see my son.’ She pressed the buzzer requesting admittance.

  ‘I’m afraid you won’t be allowed in,’ Moreton said. ‘They’re taking extreme precautions.’ He glanced nervously at Webley and her companion. ‘There are special procedures for suspected BWs. Contact with dedicated medical staff only.’

  ‘There are no longer any civilian doctors with your son,’ Ruth Webley said dispassionately. ‘He’s being cared for by a team of military specialists.’

  Jenny looked through the observation pane to the vestibule and a further set of double doors beyond. No one came. She pressed the buzzer a second time and held it down.

  ‘I’m sorry, Jenny,’ Moreton said. ‘You can’t go in.’

  ‘I have to,’ Jenny protested. ‘I have drugs for him.’

  She watched the three of them exchange uncomfortable glances.

  ‘The medics think he has Q fever,’ the square-jawed man said. He spoke like an NCO, not the officer she had assumed him to be. ‘A recombinant strain –’ he pushed back his shoulders – ‘possibly administered deliberately.’

  ‘Do you think I don’t know that?’ Jenny said. ‘Will someone please get me through this door? I have drugs.’ She pulled the small clear plastic bag from her pocket. ‘Please.’

  She saw the look of incredulity on his face as he exchanged glances with Webley.

  ‘How do you know?’ Webley said.

  Her colleague was turning away, reaching for his phone. Moreton was struggling to keep up, already out of his depth.

  Jenny became aware that her mind was leaping beyond this conversation to consequences far further down the line. Her response to Webley came not from any conscious calculation, but as if by instinct: ‘Hasn’t Jason Kwan told you?’

  The officer shot another glance at Webley, bewilderment turning to alarm.

  ‘You picked him up this evening, didn’t you?’ Jenny challenged.

  ‘Jason Kwan’s body was identified thirty minutes ago. He’d been shot through the head. He was in his car, just along the street from his home.’

  Jenny felt the muscles of her diaphragm tense. She had smelt his fear as they had sat in his car at Great Shefford. Poor man, she silently repeated to herself, poor, poor man. Instinctively she said, ‘I don’t know how he knew – he wouldn’t say – but he got me these.’

  It was a semi-truth, but one that seemed to slot into Webley’s understanding of events, which Jenny was beginning to suspect was more limited than she had previously thought. Webley nodded to her colleague – his name was Carson – and told him to go ahead. He called through to the ward. A short while later the outer door buzzed and Jenny was directed over the intercom to deposit the drugs on the floor of the vestibule and leave directly. As the outer door closed, a female medic dressed in a white biohazard suit came through the far set of doors and collected them. After a few moments, another military doctor called through and asked to speak to Jenny. He told her that there was no time to check the contents of the vials she had provided, but that without effective antibiotic treatment the advanced pneumonia that had taken hold would invariably prove fatal. Did she wish to take the risk of injecting an unknown substance into her son’s body? She answered that she did.

  As she handed the phone back to Webley, she felt Moreton, who had remained silent during the last several minutes, place his hand on her shoulder.

  ‘I think Mrs Cooper should have some time to herself now. It’s very late.’

  Webley ignored the request. She had seen the holes in Jenny’s story and wanted answers. ‘How did Kwan come to have these drugs? He was just a beamline scientist. Did he know who manufactured this strain of Q fever? There must have been other parties involved.’

  ‘I really think this should wait until tomorrow,’ Moreton protested.

  ‘It’s in all our interests we share this information,’ Webley insisted. There was a note of desperation in her voice. ‘Mrs Cooper, I’m appealing to you – please. If you have any information about
the origins of this organism we need to have it now.’

  She turned to Webley. ‘What was your interest in Sonia Blake?’

  ‘You know I’m not at liberty to answer that.’

  ‘Then we’ve nothing further to discuss.’

  She pushed between Webley and Carson and collapsed onto one of the vinyl hospital seats.

  Webley scraped her nails through her short, practical hair. This was her decision alone, Jenny inferred. Despite the impression he would like to have given, Carson was clearly the underling.

  ‘Might I suggest a breakfast meeting?’ Moreton said hopefully.

  Webley cut him down with a glare. ‘All right, Mrs Cooper. Sonia Blake occasionally supplied us with information in the field of recombinant technology and biological weapons. She had built up an enviable network of connections through her academic work. People in the field seemed to trust her, perhaps because her subject was politics and not science.’

  ‘But you didn’t trust her. I presume her interests extended to our weapons programme?’

  ‘There isn’t one,’ Carson interjected. ‘We develop defensive capability only.’

  Jenny smiled. ‘I read that on your website.’ She aimed another question at Webley. ‘How did Adam Jordan die?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ Webley answered.

  ‘Why take his organs? What were you looking for?’

  ‘I believe I’ve already explained. He was associating with Sonia Blake. She was on a watch list—’

  ‘No.’ Jenny wasn’t satisfied. ‘You were watching Adam Jordan before he died.’ She glanced at Carson, who was standing like a policeman at Webley’s side, hands clasped in front of his crotch. ‘Your colleague Major Fielding was following him.’

  Webley glanced at Carson as if to grant him permission to speak.

  ‘Jordan made several attempts to make contact with British intelligence agents in South Sudan,’ he said, ‘but failed to attend either of the meetings he had arranged. We made a number of informal approaches on his return, but he claimed he had nothing to tell us.’ He shrugged. ‘Africa’s a rough place, especially his patch. I got the feeling Jordan wasn’t cut out for it.’