Miasma

by Ken McClure

  ‘Oh my God.’

  ‘What the hell’s going on, Steven?’

  Steven took a deep breath. ‘Altman’s name appeared on an intelligence services list, which I saw for the first time yesterday. MI6 think that he was as much involved as Phillipe Lagarde in the infiltration of organised crime into world aid organisations.’

  ‘And you didn’t tell me?’ exclaimed Tally.

  ‘I . . . made the decision not to tell you because . . . I wanted you to live. You and Altman got on and I wanted it to stay that way because if I had told you everything I knew, you wouldn’t have been able to disguise your true feelings.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, really.

  ‘Go on.’

  Steven told Tally about the deliberate use of small implants to provide the means of spreading epidemic disease under the guise of vaccinating people. She was left speechless until she managed to splutter out, ‘But who in their right mind would do something like that?’

  ‘In this instance, a small group of Russians, mainly expats living in London but with homeland links. They are not insane, they have their reasons for doing it and it’s connected with money, but I haven’t figured out the details yet.’

  Tally gave a deep sigh and, after a short pause, said, ‘That’s what happened to Monique’s family, isn’t it,’ she asked, ‘they were deliberately killed.’

  ‘I think so. Lagarde and co must have been testing out their latest way of spreading disease. They put small implants comprising Ebola virus in a tiny plastic shell under the skin of your friend’s loved ones. Three weeks later they turned up under the guise of care and concern and ruptured the implants using wireless technology.’

  ‘This is just all . . . I just can’t believe . . . I don’t know what to say.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Steven, ‘do you honestly think you could have kept all that to yourself if I had told you? If Altman had suspected you were on to him, you would have been in great danger. As it is, he’s become a victim himself. It’s obvious the Chinese contingent are still pretty angry about what’s been going on.’

  ‘Do you think they’re some kind of vigilantes?’

  ‘No way,’ said Steven. ‘I’m still convinced it’s all about money. You said Altman was found several hundred miles away from where he should have been, where exactly?’

  ‘In an apartment, in the town of Beni up in Kivu Province.’

  ‘Kivu? And in a town that’s at the very heart of the latest outbreak of Ebola,’ said Steven, ‘pretty strong circumstantial evidence against him, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘In the light of what you’ve just told me, yes, I suppose.’

  ‘How are the authorities dealing with this?’ asked Tally.

  ‘They don’t know yet.’

  ‘What! . . . Steven!’

  ‘I know, I know, I’m still trying to figure out what’s behind it all.’

  ‘But you can’t keep something like this to yourself.’

  ‘Tally, Tally, Tally,’ Steven pleaded, ‘it’s not as if nothing is being done. The intelligence communities of several countries are well aware of the infiltration of world-wide aid agencies – they know much more about it than I do; the information about Lagarde and now Altman came from them. They are dealing with it as a matter of global urgency: they know a clean-up is essential if public confidence is to be retained. It’s too late to stop the latest outbreak in DRC; it’s been caused by criminals hiding under the WHO banner, but if I can highlight what it’s all been about, it would be much more useful to those charged with bringing the crooks to justice and putting a stop to it all. I’m very close and that’s what the PM asked me to do, remember?’

  ‘Vaguely . . . something about intellectual input if I remember rightly . . .’

  ‘Some things have a habit of escalating,’ admitted Steven. ‘But the big test for you right now is to keep everything you’ve heard to yourself. You don’t know who’s a friend and who’s a foe; you must be all sweetness and light to everyone until you get on that plane home and please God, that will be soon.’

  Just before Steven turned out his bedside light, a message came in on encrypted mail from the Home Office. The remaining patients in the Royal Free, suffering from Marburg disease, had died.

  ‘God bless,’ he murmured. ‘The perfect end to a bloody awful day . . .’

  Recognising that falling asleep was now well-nigh impossible, he got up to make coffee on auto-pilot. He was about to switch on the TV to seek distraction, but then decided against. Distraction was always temporary and he was experiencing, in himself, signs of overload. There were just too many awful things going around in his head: he felt he was approaching some kind of tipping point and wherever that might lead.

  Sitting with his head in his hands wouldn’t help, nor would howling at the moon, nor kicking the cat – he didn’t even have a cat . . .this last thought highlighted the ridiculousness of his train of thought and brought the suggestion of a smile to his lips. Self-pity and hopelessness had no place in his life, even when they were coming at him mob-handed, but Tally was right when she said he had to share what he knew. He would give himself another forty-eight hours.

  Steven decided not to go in to the Home Office in the morning; lack of sleep and hovering feelings of depression over what people were prepared to do to each other induced a need in him to seek out signs of normality for a while. He wanted to see people going about their daily business, women pushing prams, men delivering parcels, clerks carrying briefcases, people arguing with traffic wardens – anything to reassure him that people planning to cause thousands of deaths by triggering off epidemics of killer viruses was far from the norm.

  The warmth of the sun on his face and dappled light coming through leafy trees helped provide a healing balm that allowed him, after a couple of hours, to start thinking about his investigation again. The fact that the awful people behind it were not lunatics should now be viewed as something in his favour, he decided. As any detective knew, killers without reason or purpose were always the hardest to catch. He was dealing with focused, intelligent people and he was convinced the motive was money.

  Steven’s logical start to analysis was interrupted by dark clouds rolling in from the west and the threat of rain becoming imminent. He had no desire to get soaked so he hailed the first cab he saw.

  ‘Just in time,’ said the driver as the clouds started delivering their load, riveting the roof of the cab. ‘Where to, mate?’

  Steven told him and hoped for silence, but it was not to be. The driver offered up a stream of opinions. ‘What d’you think of all this Brexit crap, then?’ he asked.

  ‘Beyond me,’ Steven replied.

  ‘The world’s going crazy, mate, it’s just one crazy thing after another. We want to leave Europe; the Scots want to leave us. Why can’t we all just get along?’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘And there’s another thing,’ said the driver as the traffic slowed to a halt. ‘Another one, look at him, a bloody electric car run out of charge.’

  Steven saw an embarrassed man attempting to push his lifeless little car with its electric credentials emblazoned on its door, into the side of the road.

  ‘Good luck with that, mate,’ said the driver. ‘Christ knows where he’ll find a charge point round here . . . and if he does, it’ll be hours before his car will move. Bloody politicians have got no idea, they just don’t think before they announce their big plans and strut around on the world stage leaving us with no choice – we all gotta be green.

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘What kind of car have you got then?’

  ‘A Porsche.’

  ‘Good man!’ exclaimed the driver with a guffaw. ‘What we need is someone like Jeremy Clarkson in parliament if you ask me, talk a bit of sense he would. Here we are, mate,’ he announced as they drew up outside Marlborough Court.

  ‘Nice talking with you,’ said the driver, acknowledging the tip with a smile and not appreciating that he’d do
ne all of the talking.

  Steven slumped down into his chair by the window and embraced the silence. He wasn’t absolutely sure, but he thought he might just have had enough normality for one day. After a few minutes, he acknowledged hunger pangs and got up to search through cupboards and the fridge for something to eat, but had to face up to the fact that he hadn’t bothered to do any shopping for quite a while and didn’t feel like going out. Cheese on toast would do.

  Steven returned to his analysis and concentrated on DRC. How could a relatively small group of people make a lot of money out of causing an epidemic – no, successive epidemics – in a poor African country, riven by civil war and disease? The fact that they were a small number ruled out any kind of attempted coup. Even the rebels in Kivu Province seem to have given up on taking over government: robbery with violence was easier.

  Mineral extraction, particularly diamonds, had been plagued by competition coming from the setting up of illegal mines in difficult areas of the country and copper and cobalt mining revenues had been subject to the attention of dishonest politicians, although Steven remembered reading in the material he had gathered on DRC when Tally first went there that elections had been promised and investment had cautiously started appearing again.

  Steven dug out this material again and after a few minutes was glad he had. He latched on to two hugely interesting facts. Investment in cobalt mining was coming in almost exclusively from China and secondly, DRC was the source of sixty percent of the world’s cobalt.

  Steven paused when he felt that there was something really important about this that he wasn’t seeing . . . but should be . . . The taxi driver! His tirade about electric vehicles and how politicians were determined to force everyone out of petrol and diesel-driven cars into electric ones. This was happening all over the world in response to growing concerns over climate change. Electric vehicles needed big, powerful batteries and battery production needed . . . cobalt . . . lots and lots of cobalt.

  Steven felt a surge of excitement. Were Russian crooks creating the conditions for a take-over of cobalt stocks in DRC? He felt sure he was on to something; this was a breakthrough, but not quite the whole story.

  He went back to reading about cobalt mining. DRC was the number one producer in the world with sixty percent. Number two was Russia, oh, you beauty, yielding forty percent of the world’s current supplies . . .

  ‘And demand for cobalt is about to go through the roof,’ murmured Steven, feeling he was almost there.

  Biologist, Samuel Petrov, who had prepared the killer implants, had a father, Dimitry, a hugely wealthy Russian expat living in London whose money came from mining interests all over the Russian Federation. Sergei Malenkov, the Russian mastermind behind the whole affair, who had carried out the specialised recruitment for the enterprise and who had visited Petrov senior in London, was also hugely wealthy – again due to mining interests across the Russian Federation. Steven felt it safe to predict that these two would hold most if not all the rights to Russian cobalt supplies. They had not been mounting an aggressive take-over bid for the DRC rights held mainly by Chinese investors, they had gone a big step further, the Russians had deliberately set out to destroy DRC cobalt mining completely through continually initiating epidemics of killer disease in the country. No wonder the Chinese investors were furious.

  Miners from abroad would be deterred from coming to work in DRC and local labour would succumb to disease or the fear of it. The cobalt mines would be rendered inert. Malenkov and Petrov senior along with a few London-based Russian expat investors would step up production and effectively control the world’s supply of cobalt. In the coming era of electric vehicles, America would no longer be the controlling influence of the world’s automotive industry, nor would China . . . a small cabal of Russians would.

  Steven felt the adrenaline surge he’d been running on slip away to be replaced by a feeling of calm, He knew however, that he had little time to savour it: the feeling would soon be replaced by exhaustion, and the need to sleep – but not before he spoke to John Macmillan and asked him to set up the mother of all meetings. It was finally time to unburden himself and tell all.

  ‘There has been a change of plan,’ said John Macmillan when Steven arrived at the Home Office in the morning, ‘the meeting has been changed from Downing Street to MI6 headquarters.’

  Steven, whose hopes for a good night’s sleep had been constantly interrupted by implications of his discovery vying for his attention, could only raise an eyebrow.

  ‘The PM feels that anything you have to say should be heard in the first instance well away from the notice of the press. COBRA meetings always attract their interest.’

  ‘How much did you tell her last night?’

  ‘The bare bones of what you told me.’

  Steven was pleased to see that there was a lack of politicians present in the meeting room at Albert Embankment. Apart from the Home and Foreign secretaries the others present he recognised – with a couple of exceptions – as coming from either the intelligence communities or the police – professionals who knew what they were doing.

  The Prime minister called the meeting to order and gave a brief preamble.

  ‘As some of you already know, I asked Dr Steven Dunbar of the Sci-Med Inspectorate to investigate independently a particularly disturbing situation which has attracted the attention of all of us in recent months, albeit in various ways and to varying degrees. Dr Dunbar has a track record of success in investigating complicated crime scenarios in science and medicine and I hoped that he might be able to bring together all our efforts in exposing something which appeared to involve the murder of brilliant scientists, millions of dollars emanating from Russian expats living in London, corruption among global aid agencies and epidemic disease caused by deadly viruses. I am pleased - and indeed terrified – to say that he has succeeded. Steven . . .

  It took Steven less than ten minutes to paint a brief but coherent picture of what had been going on in the Democratic Republic of Congo, who had instigated it and why. What he had to say was met with stunned silence. He sipped water while he waited for the first question.

  ‘The bastards are deliberately starting epidemics for financial gain?’ exclaimed an American voice.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re seriously saying that they are prepared to cause thousands of deaths for profit?’

  ‘It could end up being worse than that,’ said Steven, ‘they could wipe out humanity by mistake. People run from epidemics in all directions: they spread the disease. There’s no guarantee when it will stop.’

  ‘Is that what is happening in DRC?’

  ‘People are running at the moment, others are trying to stop them. It’s still spreading.’

  ‘From what you say, this technology could be used to cause outbreaks of any deadly disease?’

  ‘We saw the proof of that at Porton when capsules containing Marburg disease were ruptured by mistake.’

  ‘This could be worse than any tsunami or Chernobyl-like incident the world’s ever had to deal with.’

  ‘It could,’ Steven agreed.

  The Prime Minister thanked Steven and took over, saying, ‘Now that Dr Dunbar has told us what all this is about, perhaps I can ask the police and the intelligence people to report on progress they have been making in their areas of interest in this dreadful situation.’

  Steven and John Macmillan found themselves feeling encouraged by what they heard. Special Branch were ready to act on the Russian expats responsible for providing funding: they were waiting for Malenkov to make his next visit to London before raiding Dimitri Petrov’s house and simultaneously picking up all others concerned. The combined intelligence services of several countries were making good progress with rooting out the bad apples in aid organisations. It would take a while for all the small-time opportunist crooks to be exposed, but, more importantly, they were pretty sure that the big fish recruited by Malenkov had all been based in Geneva and most ha
d already come to a sticky end thanks to Chinese investor involvement.’

  ‘Have any of the Chinese killers been brought to justice?’ asked the Prime Minister.

  ‘No, Prime Minister.’

  ‘Probably for the best, we really don’t want the sort of publicity that would generate.’

  ‘Ideally we don’t want any publicity at all,’ said Steven. ‘The merest suggestion that vaccination is being used for mass murder could cause enormous damage in the fight against world disease.

  ‘There’s already growing opposition to vaccination in many countries,’ said the foreign minister.’

  ‘It wasn’t helped in our own country by a charlatan scaremongering about MMR,’ added Steven.

  ‘Mass vaccination against viral disease is the best hope we have for the future,’ said John Macmillan, who emphasised the point by staring directly at the Prime Minister until she acknowledged with a nod and a slight raise of her hand. ‘Thank you, Sir John, I think your views on the subject are well known.’

  The meeting broke up with the PM making a point of touching Steven’s arm and taking him to one side to thank him personally for what he’d managed to come up with.

  ‘We are not out of the woods yet, Prime Minister,’ said Steven.

  ‘No, but thanks to you we know what’s been going on in the woods,’ replied the PM with a smile. ‘I’m told your lady is still in DRC?’

  ‘I’m hoping she’ll be home soon.’

  ‘Let me know if there’s anything I can do.’

  ‘Thank you, Prime Minister.’

  * * * * *

  Tally was beginning to think Helga wasn’t coming when her Land Rover drew up outside in a late afternoon dust haze. ‘Sorry, there was a problem with some villagers, I had to sort it out.’

  ‘I thought you’d got lost,’ said Tally.

  ‘Not much chance with these trackers,’ Helga replied, tapping her wrist where all the new area managers had been fitted with sat nav trackers when they arrived in DRC to ensure that they wouldn’t get lost. She immediately wondered why Tally appeared to have turned to stone and the blood was draining from her face. ‘What’s wrong?’