Drugs to Forget

by Martin Granger

  ‘News?’

  ‘Yeah, doing some filing for the paper when I came across an old story in the education section. Remembered you talking about a pharma company called Biomedivac and some background research you were doing. There they were in black and white.’

  Nathalie had regained her seat at Geoff’s desk and nearly dropped the phone.

  ‘Biomedivac mentioned in your newspaper?’

  ‘Yeah, I kept the cutting, give me a second I’ve got it here in my pocket, I’ll read it to you.’

  In the far corner of the office a door opened and Stefanie appeared. She pointed to her watch and then made an exaggerated mime of eating with an imaginary knife and fork. Nathalie mimed back, pointing to her phone, shaking her head and holding up her five fingers twice. Stefanie gave her the thumbs up and left the office quietly.

  Her phone burst into life, ‘You there Nathalie? Here it is. “Star pharmacologist Temba Murauzi wins award for African research exchange.”’

  ‘Yeah, but what’s that got to do with Biomedivac?’

  ‘That’s the company doing the exchange with the university. They’ve got some laboratories in North Africa.’

  Nathalie remembered her conversation with James Townes. ‘Morocco?’

  ‘Yes that’s right. How did you… Of course, you’ve already done some research on them. Anyway, this guy is quite a whiz-kid apparently and will be working with their research department. And guess what one of their projects is?’

  ‘Ebola.’

  ‘Got it in one. Thought we could use him to entrap WEXA. You know, tell them that we could get some antidote for their Ebola carriers.’

  Nathalie’s mind was racing. It was a great idea. Someone who could be filmed in the Biomedivac Moroccan plant talking about antidotes and a means of getting WEXA stitched up on camera at the same time.

  Lloyd’s voice came down the phone. ‘Nathalie, you still there? I’ve not got long.’

  ‘Sorry Lloyd, just thinking. I’ve been wondering how we could get real evidence against WEXA. This might just do it. But do you think this guy will play ball? It’s quite a dangerous thing we are asking him to do.’

  ‘I’m not sure. Figures that if this guy is into ethical drugs and saving lives then he could be open to helping out.’

  ‘Maybe, but I think we should take it one step at a time. Why don’t you contact him and say we’re doing a piece on antidotes. Mention we know the big cheese at Biomedivac and it could give him team points. Don’t reveal anything about WEXA at this stage. If he seems comfortable with the filming idea then we might be able to bring that up later.’

  ‘Sounds a plan. Must go, got a meeting. I’ll try to get in touch with him this evening. Will let you know how it goes.’

  Lloyd’s phone went dead with the characteristic lack of a goodbye. On cue Stefanie knocked on the door again.

  ‘He’s pacing up and down in the lobby, if you want that lunch you better go down and stop him wearing out the carpet.’

  ‘On my way,’ said Nathalie folding up her laptop and zipping it into the case. ‘Is it still raining?’

  ‘It’s eased off. I was going to get you a cab but Geoff says it’s only a ten-minute walk. Thinks the traffic fumes will do him good.’

  ‘That and the saving of a taxi fare,’ laughed Nathalie.

  ‘He’s not scrimping on lunch. You must be in his good books, it’s not often he takes his directors out in the middle of the day.’

  ‘Very true,’ mused Nathalie. ‘The last time was somewhere in the middle of the Cretaceous period if I remember. I wonder what he wants.’

  ‘Only one way to find out,’ said Stefanie ushering her out of the office.

  Geoff marched her down Greek Street and across Shaftesbury Avenue. Stefanie was right, the rain had eased off leaving pools of water in the curbs and a steam of vapour as the July sun burned the moisture from the roads.

  ‘Have you been to the oyster bar before?’

  ‘Outside my pay grade Geoff,’ replied Nathalie, almost skipping to catch up with him.

  ‘Oh it’s not too bad, not like the restaurant. You don’t have to have oysters; the shrimp and scallop burgers are really good.’

  ‘Your “not too bad” and my “not too bad” probably differ. I bet the burger costs a bit more than a McDonald’s.’

  ‘Perhaps, but I’m paying so…’

  ‘So what extra work do I have to do?’

  Geoff looked at her askance. ‘Nathalie, as if.’

  ‘Only joking Geoff.’

  Geoff nodded appreciatively. ‘No, it’s just that Stefanie has told me that I’ve been a bit abrasive recently. Should take more care of my staff. Thought you deserved a treat.’ He gestured around the corner. ‘Down there on the right, the second red door.’

  The door was opened for them by a small man in a tailcoat and top hat. Inside was a horseshoe-shaped bar. ‘Le zinc’, the French would have called it. This ‘zinc’ was edged in zinc but the bar itself was made of a crazed cream ceramic. Inside the horseshoe, waiters in long aprons scurried like the crabs they were serving between customers who were sitting on tall bar stools. Nathalie noticed a few famous faces amongst the clientele. Geoff helped her onto a towering barstool and eased himself onto the one alongside.

  ‘Glass of wine?’ he asked passing her the menu.

  ‘Please’, she answered scanning the list. ‘The first sauvignon on the list looks good.’

  Geoff called the waiter and pointed at the menu. ‘Two Loire sauvignons and…?’ He looked at Nathalie.

  ‘Fish pie please,’ she said without hesitation.

  ‘Fish pie and burger and chips,’ said Geoff interpreting the scallop burger and pommes allumettes from the menu as he handed it back.

  ‘Geoff,’ said Nathalie scornfully.

  ‘What?’ cried Geoff feigning innocence.

  The food was delicious. Geoff’s designer burger came with all the trimmings and Nathalie’s pie was crammed with fish and prawns in a creamy sauce.

  ‘Okay, where are we up to with Lloyd?’ asked Geoff gulping down the last mouthful of his wine.

  ‘Interesting phone call.’ Nathalie told Geoff about the African pharmacologist and Biomedivac. ‘It’s an amazing coincidence, Lloyd is trying to meet with him this afternoon.’

  ‘So that fits in with your Horizon proposal idea. Shoot a scene with him in Morocco talking about bioterror antidotes?’

  ‘Yes, but it could be more than that. If we can gain his trust we may be able to get him to meet WEXA, pretend to be a sympathiser and offer them some protection from their own weapon.’

  ‘That would be a real coup. I was wondering how you were going to get some hardcore proof on camera. Do you think he’ll be up for it?’

  Geoff had to wait whilst Nathalie finished the last mouthful of her pie. She rinsed it down with a swig of sauvignon and shook her head.

  ‘We don’t know. Neither of us have met him but, as I told Lloyd, if we take it softly softly – do the general antidote scene first – and then see where it takes us…’

  ‘Ah yes the antidote scene. I thought we better get a move on with that so I’ve written your Horizon proposal for you. E-mailed it across to the BBC this morning. Just in case our Professor Townes starts fishing around.’

  ‘That’s brilliant Geoff. I was wondering when I was going to get the time to do that.’

  ‘Thank Stefanie, she said you had your hands full. Anyway, I thought I would have a better chance of getting it approved.’

  Nathalie pushed him on the shoulder.

  ‘Oi, these barstools are high, you could do some serious damage to an old man.’

  Nathalie pushed him again.

  Twelve

  Nick Coburn had spent a whole day at the police station and had eaten enough rice cakes to last him a lifetime. His police officer friend, Michael, had been apologetic but there was an emergency on; a big jewel heist in downtown Surabaya. The duty officer had been instructed to keep him comfortab
le and fed. Comfortable was an upright plastic chair on metal legs. The food was okay but boring. Once you’d had one bakcang rice cake you had had them all. Nick had tried to get some information out of the desk team but they had little English and he had no Javanese so little progress there. Past experience had taught him that it would be useless traipsing around a city he didn’t know, looking for Tom. Sure he could ask passers-by had they seen a white guy with a local girl, but there were thousands of young white male tourists in Surabaya, most of them accompanied by local females. So he had waited. Michael would be his best bet to find the little bastard.

  His patience had paid off. Towards the end of the afternoon the tranquillity of the police station anti-room was broken by an eruption of police officers and alleged burglars. The crooks were protesting their innocence and the officers were challenging this by thrashing around with their truncheons. ‘Rough justice,’ thought Nick. His friend Michael had pulled out a diamond necklace from one of the captives’ pockets. More protests of innocence, more thrashing of truncheons. After ten minutes or so the scuffles died down and the thieves were locked in the cells on a lower floor. All that remained was the distant shouting coming from the stairwell.

  ‘Okay, where were we?’ asked Michael, attempting to mend the rip in his uniform with a staple gun.

  Nick held out his hand. ‘Rice cake?’

  ‘No thanks,’ said Michael, turning up his nose at the suggestion. ‘I’ll send out for some fried chicken later. Catching thieves is hungry work.’

  The noise from the cells was getting louder. Michael gestured towards the elevator. ‘Let’s go upstairs to the analyst room, quieter up there.’

  Nick pitched the rice cake into a wastepaper basket like a basketball player. ‘Lead the way Columbo.’

  The elevator ran to a third floor corridor. At the end a metal door led into a large room filled with humming computer terminals. The room was windowless and lit by cold neon light strips. A dark-haired woman in her mid-twenties, wearing a short-sleeved grey uniform top, was bent over a keyboard in the far corner. Michael walked up to her and tapped gently on her epauletted shoulder.

  ‘Officer Sukarno.’ Despite the soft touch she jumped.

  ‘Officer Sukarno, this is Captain Coburn, from England.’

  ‘Promoted to captain and demoted to English in one sentence,’ thought Nick, but he held his counsel.

  ‘We are cooperating with Captain Coburn’s department concerning an important and confidential international incident,’ continued Michael. ‘We have a cryptic message here from one of his operatives,’ he said holding out his hand for Nick’s bar receipt.

  Nick prised it out of his top pocket with two fingers and handed the slip to Michael. The police officer in turn gave it to the young woman.

  ‘As you see it has the cryptic message SITER written in what we think is charcoal. We would like you to pass this through your computers and see if it corresponds to some sort of location.’

  Officer Sukarno took the piece of paper and smoothed it out next to her mouse mat. She took a dome-like glass paperweight from her desk and placed it onto the receipt. Nick and Michael leaned in unison as she peered through the glass. After a few seconds she sat up almost crashing into the faces of the two men.

  ‘I do not think our digital intelligence system will decipher this code,’ she said pan-faced.

  Michael was about to protest when she lifted the slip from under the paperweight and handed it back to him. ‘You see, you have missread the word. One of the letters did not come out in the charcoal but the object making it, presumably a match, did create some sort of indentation. It’s not SITER but SISTER. Does that make your search a little easier?’

  Nick grabbed the bar bill from Michael and held it up to the light. ‘Shit. Well it was dark.’

  ‘You’ve had it in your pocket all day,’ said Michael. ‘I could have asked the duty officer to look it up in the phone book. You needn’t have waited to get access to all of this,’ he added waving his hands at the roomful of hardware.

  ‘It’s too fucking late now,’ snapped Nick, feeling angry with himself. ‘But as we’re here why don’t we stick Gita’s sister’s name into that thing and see what it comes up with.’

  It couldn’t have been easier. Gita’s sister’s name and address was on the National Register. After that the most complicated software that they used was Google Maps. The haloed blue dot flashed over a small street adjacent to a canal not far from the harbour.

  ‘Can we look at the street view?’ asked Michael.

  Officer Sukarno tapped the keyboard. She arced the mouse to show the street. A group of pitched-roofed tightly packed houses fronted a narrow hardcore road and a dark green canal. The area was poor but well-maintained. Gita’s sister’s house was a small semi-detached concrete bungalow with a minuscule terrace bordering a single window and a small front door. The plasterwork was painted a bright cobalt blue. A sheet was draped over a line obscuring the terrace.

  ‘Bet she would have taken that down if she knew they were taking a picture of her street,’ commented Nick.

  ‘I doubt if they have the software to see it so I don’t expect they really mind,’ said Sukarno pointedly.

  Michael looked at the clock on the wall. ‘Well, sheet or no sheet, it’s going to be difficult to see it soon if we don’t hurry. It will be dark by the time we get there.’ He casually saluted the young officer. ‘Thank you for your time. As I said, this is a confidential international operation so I would be grateful if you would not mention it to anyone, not even your immediate colleagues.’

  The woman nodded, pan-faced once more.

  Michael turned for the door. ‘Okay Nick, I’ll take you in the police car. We will park up a block away so as not to scare Tom and the neighbours.’

  ‘Let’s hope Tom is there to scare,’ said Nick, winking at the young female officer on his way out.

  The alley marked as ‘Jl Balack Banteng’ was only twenty minutes from the police station. Michael drove the police car into the parking lot of a nearby warehouse and tipped the security guard.

  ‘Found it on bricks the last time I left it unattended,’ he explained.

  ‘Not unlike the Gorbals in the good old days,’ replied Nick. ‘Kids used to say, “Look after your car for a quid governor”. Tell them it didn’t need looking after, they’d show you a rusty nail and say, “Oh yes it does governor”.’

  Michael pulled out his flashlight from the car, ‘East meets West.’

  The two men walked swiftly around the block until they reached the canal. The sun had dropped over an hour ago and the homes and bamboos that were clinging to its edge looked like cut-out black shapes against the skyline. There were no street lights here so Nick and Michael trod carefully past the cramped shanty houses, the odd glimmer of light filtering through their windows. The flashlight caught a splash of luminous blue rising up from the curb. Michael dimmed his torch and gestured to Nick. The low coloured stuccoed wall bordered a small terrace.

  ‘No sheet,’ hissed Nick.

  ‘Yes but it’s the right house,’ whispered back Michael. ‘I’ll stand by the door, you have a look through the window; I’ve no idea what Tom looks like.’

  Nick slid through the small entrance onto the terrace and dropped down on to all fours. The window in front of him was made of latticed wood and the glow from it was making patterns on the small bordering perimeter. Michael edged himself alongside the front door and gave a nod. Nick crawled up to the window and peered over the lower edge. The night was warm and he felt a trickle of sweat run down between his shoulder blades. He pressed his eye to one of the diamond openings in the framework. He froze as a loud noise and light came from over his shoulder. He glanced up at Michael who seemed unperturbed. Merely a passing moped by the canal road. The air was still again, only broken by the incessant noise of crickets. He focused his eyes on the interior of the small room. The window mesh blocked his lateral view so he could only see part of it at a
time. Against the far, bare but painted, wall there was a small single rattan couch or bed. Empty. He turned his head to the right squinting to see if he could see the other side. Two women were squatting on the ground looking towards the front door to the right of him. They both appeared distressed, one of them had obviously been crying. It could have been Gita, but with her hair all over the place and face streaked with makeup it was hard to tell. It was impossible to view the inside of the front wall to see what they were looking at but he thought if he could move to another slat he would be able to get a view of the partition to the left. Putting his finger to his mouth, for Michael’s benefit, he shifted his weight and changed position. Now he could make out the other part of the room. There sitting on a chair with his hands behind his back was Tom. His head was sloped forward and his eyes closed. He appeared to be unconscious or asleep. Nick made a decision. There was no means of knowing who was behind the door or whether they were dangerous or not. But they had the element of surprise. He pointed at Michael’s holstered gun and indicated that they should force an entry. Michael responded by planting his shoulder to the door and heaving with all his might. The door gave way and Nick leapt into the room. The women screamed. A man, who had been standing behind the door, was thrown to the ground. Seeing a knife in his hand Nick stamped on it. The man cried out and let it go. Michael jumped onto his back, pulled his arms backwards and expertly bound his wrists with plastic cuffs.

  The noise woke Tom. He opened his eyes, shook his head and tried to take in the commotion happening all around.

  ‘You okay?’ asked Nick.

  Tom nodded, ‘How did you…?

  ‘Boy Scout,’ replied Nick, having to raise his voice above the still screaming women. ‘Michael, can you ask these young ladies to be quiet and then we can find out what’s going on here?’

  The man on the floor was groaning and in no state to cause a problem so Michael stepped over the bowls of stale noodles that were lying on the floor and went over to calm the women. Nick took a large leatherman from his pocket and used the knife to cut the rope holding Tom to the chair.