Miasma

by Ken McClure

  Tally, for her part, felt that she could not share the details of what she had been learning and doing at the preparatory course for fear of upsetting and alarming Steven even further. She couldn’t even share her fear that much of what he had said at the outset was probably right. Her planned role in DRC was that of organisation and management of medical teams and general resources in a relatively small area, but the dangers inherent in being so near the reality of what the virus from hell could do could not be ignored, especially after days like today when she and others about to travel to DRC had spent hour after hour practicing the donning of protective clothing, boots and visors and checking each other carefully for weak points before going through the rigmarole of disinfecting each other before removing contaminated clothing and starting all over again.

  Tally could not help but feel that, in full gear, she and the others looked exactly like illustrations she’d seen of plague doctors of long ago. This led to the uncomfortable thought that, when it came to treating a disease like Ebola, modern medicine could not do much more than these practitioners of long ago. Vaccines could prevent humans from contracting viral diseases in the first place, but once the virus had struck and the disease had developed inside you, you were on your own. Good nursing care from brave, volunteer nurses might just help you stay on the right side of the line between life and death, but there was little medics could do to help.

  ‘Any side-effects from the vaccination yet?’ asked Steven. Tally had been given the Ebola vaccine three days before.

  ‘No,’ Tally replied, ‘and what do you mean, “yet”?’ she added, making it into a joke.

  ‘Sorry, I just thought with it being an experimental vaccine there might be problems.’

  ‘You’re right, there have been some reports,’ Tally admitted, ‘bur nothing serious, so fingers crossed.’

  ‘I take it they’ll monitor antibody levels to make sure you have a good level of protection?’ Steven asked.

  ‘Of course,’ said Tally.

  ‘Good. So, what’s on the cards for tomorrow?’

  ‘Oh, more of the same, I guess,’ Tally replied. ‘Lectures on safety, practical classes on the handling of equipment, question and answer sessions with people who were in West Africa during the 2014-16 outbreak, and who can provide useful local knowledge.’

  Tally had given a broadly general reply. She had omitted to mention that the main topic for the following day would be the safe disposal of the dead.

  ‘Have you been given a date?’ Steven asked.

  ‘To be confirmed,’ said Tally, ‘but next Thursday seems likely.’

  Steven nodded.

  ‘Your turn,’ said Tally, breaking the ensuing silence. ‘How’s your investigation going?’

  ‘Jean hopes to have some new information for me tomorrow. Hopefully it will help support my working hypothesis that a small group of brilliant people were paid a lot of money by Russian oligarchs living in London to come up with something that annoyed some Chinese people a lot.’

  ‘But you still have no idea of the nature of what they were doing?’

  Steven shook his head. Scott Jamieson is interviewing the widows of the two English victims to see if they might know more about their husbands’ big pay days than they care to admit and John Macmillan is asking the PM for a copy of Special Branch’s notes on the money-laundering estate agent.’

  ‘That sounds promising,’ said Tally, ‘depending on how many Russians he had on his books and whether all of them bought houses.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Steven. ‘The ones who used his talents for putting money through the washing machine but not to buy houses are the exactly the ones I’m looking for.’

  SIX

  ‘I’m afraid the PM’s office is proving slow at handing over the copies of the Special Branch material you asked for,’ said Jean Roberts.

  ‘Well, I can’t say I’m too surprised about that,’ said Steven.

  ‘You know what they say about things that seem too good to be true.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Steven, ‘but that was the deal. The Prime Minister assured us personally that we would have access to any material that the police and security services came up with. Perhaps John might help with a little memo to the PM?’

  ‘I’ll ask,’ said Jean. ‘On the bright side, I’ve come up with a bit more info on Samuel Petrov. He’s the son of Dmitry Petrov, a wealthy Russian expat currently living in London.

  ‘What do we know about Daddy Petrov?’

  ‘We know that he is very rich and still controls mining interests all over the Russian Federation from his base here in London. Father and son had a big fall-out over Sam’s reluctance to join the business after he graduated and didn’t speak for several years, but we think the rift has been healed somewhat and they are known to have seen each other several times before junior’s move to Israel.’

  ‘Excellent,’ said Steven, ‘a dead body in the Negev has links to Russian expats here in London. Another link in the chain. Let me know if any Special Branch stuff turns up. I’m going to spend time with Tally before she leaves for DRC on Thursday.’

  Jean nodded. ‘Wish her good luck for me.’

  Steven drove Tally the seventy-five miles or so up to RAF Brize Norton on Thursday morning where she was to board an RAF flight taking supplies and volunteer medical personnel to the Democratic Republic of Congo. The nurses among the medics were NHS volunteers from all over the UK while the doctors came almost exclusively from the British arm of Médecins sans Frontierès.

  As they gathered on the tarmac, Steven could see that Tally’s fellow travellers were of an age that suggested this might be their first experience of volunteering. Smiles and good humour were the order of the day, but, he suspected, this was covering a multitude of nerves.

  Conversation between himself and Tally had been limited on the journey up, but not uncomfortably so. They had known and loved each other long enough to be at ease with silence and know what each other was thinking. Hugs before boarding were enough . . . although Steven did give in to asking, ‘Got your phone?’

  ‘Of course, I have,’ Tally assured him with an extra hug. ‘Talk to you later.’

  Despite Tally’s assurance that she would be supplied with utilities like a phone, Steven had persuaded her to carry a satellite phone he had obtained for her and got her to agree that she would carry it with her at all times without advertising the fact. As a further security measure, it was only to be used one way – she should call him on it.

  Steven answered a call from Jean Roberts on his way back to London. She reported that she now had the information gathered by Special Branch on Jeremy Lang’s Russian clients. Steven thanked her and said he would pick it up as soon as he got back. He ended the call on the car phone only for it to ring again. It was Scott Jamieson.

  Jamieson began by asking, ‘Where the hell are you?’

  Steven smiled at the sound of his friend’s voice. ‘In my car,’ he replied. ‘I’ve got the hood down.’

  ‘Still got the Porsche then?’

  ‘Can’t bear to part with it,’ Steven replied.

  ‘Must be getting on a bit now?’

  ‘To me, she’s as beautiful as the first day I saw her,’ replied Steven, talking about the second love of his life, a Porsche Boxster, he’d had for six years.

  ‘Fair enough,’ said Jamieson. ‘I’ve just been to see Mrs Field; we had quite a long conversation.’

  ‘How did you find her?’

  ‘Not too difficult to fathom, Upper middle class with all the usual attributes, hugely loyal to her husband, believed anything he said without question. She couldn’t think of any meetings he’d had with people she felt suspicious about and hadn’t noticed any changes in temperament come over him. She didn’t like speaking about money, of course – very vulgar. The bottom line is, I really don’t think she had any idea about how much hubby had squirreled away or where it came from. Boy, is she going to get a surprise one day soon, unless, of c
ourse, HMG find some way of confiscating it.’

  ‘Well, I think we can agree on all that,’ said Steven.

  ‘I’m going up to Leicester tomorrow to see Mrs Pashley. I don’t think you talked to her?

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’ll get back to you after I’ve seen her.’

  The book that Special Branch had recovered from the late Jeremy Lang’s belongings must have been like a dream come true for them, Steven thought as he thumbed through the contents. It contained a list of all the clients he had acted for during the past three years, the properties they had purchased and the prices they had paid for some of the finest houses in London. Steven smiled as he imagined an estate agent’s windows displaying them.

  Among the lists of Russian names, Steven found what had attracted Special Branch’s interest, the presence of two English names, Martin Field and Simon Pashley although no property purchase was mentioned. Steven started going through the Russian names, looking for those with no house purchase made. He was making a separate list of them when his sliding index finger stopped at a name that rang a bell and wasn’t Russian. Marcel Giroud was there and that was the name of the dead French investment banker who left a big bank to set up on his own before coming to a sticky end.

  Steven felt that he’d made progress. He could now move his theory on. Russian expats living in London had invested in a scheme to make a lot of money. They had used Jeremy Lang, their tried and trusted money-launderer, to pay the two dead Englishmen for as yet unknown services. Lang had sub-contracted the task to Marcel Giroud because his own expertise was confined to property deals. He needed the expertise of an investment banker for manipulating investments. It was possible that Giroud had also been involved in paying Phillipe Lagarde, the World Health man and Samuel Petrov, the vaccine designer, although that had yet to be confirmed.

  Apart from the investors, Steven knew the names, nationalities and professional expertise of all the players involved. He had eliminated two of them from his thinking – Lang and Giroud were solely concerned with the financial elements of the operation so he should be able to concentrate on the remaining four and figure out what they might be up to. An hour later, he was still thinking the same thing. What could a Russian vaccine designer, an English pain management consultant, a Swiss WHO strategist and an English prosthetic limb controller be collaborating over?

  This being her first day away, the arrangement was that Tally would phone when she could because she wasn’t sure how long it would take to be briefed and settle in. Happily, there was only a one-hour time difference between DRC and the UK so that wouldn’t be a factor. The phone rang and Steven snatched it up. It was Scott Jamieson.

  ‘Steven hid his disappointment and exchanged small talk with Scott before asking, ‘How did you get on with Mrs Pashley?’

  ‘She’s one of these wives who assume their husband’s status in society should be their own – if he’s a big shot, she thinks she’s a big shot too. I think she feels that half his achievements were down to her.’

  ‘Is she a medic too?’ Steven asked.

  ‘No, a primary school teacher.’

  ‘Mm,’ said Steven, ‘did you learn anything?’

  ‘I don’t think she knew any more about sudden wealth than Martha Field, but I do think I made some progress.’

  ‘Really?

  ‘I encouraged her to speak about her husband’s work and she was in her element, recounting what “they” had achieved. I suggested that her husband’s expertise must have been in great demand across the globe and she agreed.’

  ‘Smart move.’

  ‘She listed a number of countries and organisations that had sought his help. I appeared hugely impressed and suggested that there were probably not enough hours in the day for him to help everyone. How could he possibly choose? She told me that that was exactly the case – so much so that he had had to put his own clinical work on hold to help out with a recent important plea for assistance. I pointed out it must have been a very deserving cause to warrant that and she confided in me. She whispered, “It was an official request from the Russians”. I sat there wide-eyed in admiration and she explained that large numbers of Russian troops had returned from their ill-fated exploits in Afghanistan with limbs missing and they were desperate for help in designing decent artificial limbs. Apparently, Simon met with a “high-level Russian doctor” in London who had made out such a good case that he felt he couldn’t refuse.’

  ‘I’ll bet,’ said Steven. ‘After hearing ten million good reasons.’

  ‘At this point, I pushed my luck and made up a Russian name. I said, that would probably have been, Dr Mikhail Ivanov . . .’

  She said, no, his name was, Malenkov, Dr Sergei Malenkov.’

  Steven wrote down the name and said, ‘Brilliant, absolutely brilliant.’

  He thanked Scott, adding the promise of beer when they next met up and was about to start foraging around for the Special Branch list on his desk when the phone rang. This time it was Tally.

  ‘God, it’s been a long day.’

  ‘I’ll bet it has,’ said Steven. ‘Are things better or worse than you expected?’

  ‘Better, I think, thanks to the World Health people and Med sans Frontierès,’ Tally replied. ‘They are obviously used to dealing with new people arriving and provided an excellent briefing as well as handing out packs of supplies and equipment. We’ll all spending our first night here near the air base and tomorrow we’ll split up and go off to our respective areas to get the new management structure up and running.’

  ‘Which area are you being sent to?’

  ‘Equateur Province in the North-west.’

  ‘That’s where the current outbreak started, isn’t it?’ Steven asked.

  ‘You’ve been doing your homework,’ said Tally. ‘It kicked off in a small village up there, but wasn’t reported to WHO until cases stared appearing in the nearby town of Mbandaka and the cat was out of the bag.’

  ‘What sort of area are you going to be looking after?’

  ‘It’s a fair size but not heavily populated, mainly small villages spread over a wide area.’

  ‘Without much in the way of roads . . . easy to get lost.’

  ‘I’m here to manage from a central point, Steven,’ Tally assured him. ‘I don’t plan on travelling much. If I do have to go anywhere, I’ve got an old Land Rover at my disposal and I’ve got a tracking device.’

  ‘Sorry, I just can’t help worrying about you.’

  ‘I know,’ said Tally softly, ‘and I love you all the more for it.’

  ‘You had better get some sleep.’

  ‘I’ll call you tomorrow.’

  Steven sat still, letting the silence surround him for a few minutes, wanting to believe that Tally was going to be perfectly safe, but not quite managing. He got up to make coffee before returning to the notes recovered by Special Branch. He found what he was looking for on the third page and allowed himself a small smile. The name, Sergei Malenkov was half way down. Steven knew that, if he had been playing poker, he had just drawn successfully to an inside straight. ‘You beauty,’ he murmured, before calling Scott Jamieson to tell him.’

  ‘Glad it worked out. Anything else you’d like me to do?’

  ‘Actually, yes,’ Steven replied, thinking on his feet, ‘How do you feel about seeing Mrs Field again?’

  ‘Sure, if you think that will help. What am I looking for?’

  ‘I know you thought she didn’t know anything, but I’d like you to ask her if you might take a look at her husband’s appointments diaries. She may have heard her husband mention Malenkov’s name without having any reason to remember it. It could have been something as simple as a one-off meeting, but if it turns out that Field did have any kind of contact with Malenkov, we’d know for sure that he is a big player – maybe the big player – and was involved in setting the whole lot up.’

  ‘Understood.’

  Steven had to admit to himself that he wasn’t g
oing to get anywhere by looking at the four dead men as a single group, hoping to see how their skills could be combined to achieve one specific end. He needed to know more about them as individuals, more about their specific interests, more about their aims and targets, more about what they had succeeded in doing and what they had failed to do. Jean had provided him with recent publications by the two Englishmen and he had skipped through them, picking up on the broad general aims of the research and what had been achieved in the current paper. He would have to go through them more thoroughly.

  Steven started with Martin Field’s paper on advances in controlling pain in terminal patients. He had picked up from his earlier reading of the work that the aim was to be able to deliver pain relieving drugs remotely instead of having to rely on nursing and medical staff having to give it orally or by injection. This, he hoped, could be done by releasing drug doses in response to a remote signal.

  The problem facing Field and his colleagues was that they needed ways of delivering more than one drug – palliative care often demanded the use of multiple drugs. To do this would require separate signals for the release of each drug, probably at different times and with varying frequency. So far, they had come up with a regime capable of dealing with the administering of two drugs, each of which would be released by a separate signal. They needed more and better, more reliable signals before the research became a practical proposition and could make the leap to clinical use.

  Steven sighed as he tentatively made his way into Simon Pashley’s paper, which he had struggled with before, and given up on after concluding that the goal in prosthetic control was basically to make everything smaller. Before beginning, he had taken the precaution of looking out both English language and medical dictionaries to sit handily beside him, but their availability didn’t stop him becoming frustrated as he struggled through the text. At one point he threw back his head and complained, ‘Just what the hell is interdigital, metacarpal control array independence?