Corruption!

by Elizabeth Ducie

  Walter worked for the World Health Organisation. The WHO must have procedures for dealing with potentially dangerous situations. But who should she talk to? She doubted there would be a phone number on the website for ‘dial this number if you think one of our inspectors has walked into the factory owned by a gang of dangerous criminals.’

  Sending yet another text message, she accepted that there really was nothing she could do. She would just have to hope her messages got through to Suzanne before the Mladovs realised just who was inspecting their factory in Kharkiv.

  Chapter 25

  At first sight, Nadia Petrovna was a scary looking woman. She was large, very large in fact. Not fat particularly, but tall and heavily built. She towered over Suzanne and was almost the same height as Walter Mukooyo. She wore a spotless white laboratory coat over what looked to be army fatigues, and Suzanne found it easy to imagine this woman with a Kalashnikov in her hand. Yet when Nadia smiled, flashing a mouthful of shining white teeth, but with just one gold tooth front and centre, the impression of an army captain faded away.

  “Please come this way,” she said in almost perfect unaccented English. “And excuse my English, it is very poor.”

  “It’s far better than my Ukrainian,” said Suzanne, giving the standard response to any such apology wherever she travelled. But Nadia shook her head and the smile disappeared momentarily.

  “Russian,” she said. “Here in Kharkiv, we speak Russian. Nobody speaks Ukrainian in this part of the country.” Then the smile returned as she ushered them out of the administration building and across the site towards the rather dilapidated looking factory block, built of dark red brick.

  Suzanne had visited several factories in this region previously, so she was prepared for what they found when they entered the front door, but she could see from the look on his face it took Walter Mukooyo by surprise. Once through the door, they entered a modern, well-appointed foyer, with a map on the wall showing the whole of the facility, and doors leading in three different directions. Nadia appeared to notice his surprise as well, because she gave a peal of laughter.

  “Don’t always judge by appearances, Dr Mukooyo,” she said. “In my country, we are good at surprises and nothing is ever exactly as you might expect.”

  Suzanne knew that under the Soviet regime, it had always been easier to renovate an old building than to build a new one, and she suspected that was what had happened here. Nadia confirmed her suspicions.

  “We were planning to rebuild this factory some twenty years ago and all the plans were drawn up. The project was just beginning when the Soviet Union collapsed, and Ukraine became an independent country once more. At that point we could have thrown out the plans and started again. But instead, we decided to go ahead with the refurbishment anyway. We’ve combined the preservation of the old with the establishment of the new.”

  “But this doesn’t even look twenty years old,” said Suzanne.

  “No, it’s not. We started with the warehouse, then moved on to the laboratory, and finally renovated this factory block a little over ten years ago. And we’re continually updating, replacing, renewing.” She gave a little sigh. “In fact, I sometimes wondered if we would ever have a stable period when we weren’t undertaking some kind of refurbishment project, somewhere on the site. But for the moment, all is finished.”

  “It sounds as though you’ve been working here for a long time?” asked Walter Mukooyo.

  “I’m coming up for my fortieth anniversary next month,” she replied with a touch of pride in her voice. “I started as a packing operative in the tablet department, although it was nothing like the one we have now, and gradually rose to my current position. I was appointed Production Director three years ago. Now, shall we go and look at the manufacturing departments? The changing rooms are just this way.” At that moment, a middle-aged man appeared through one of the doorways. “Ah, here’s Josef Evgenevich, our Chief Engineer. He’ll take you through the male changing suite, Dr Mukooyo. We’ll meet you on the other side. Please come this way, Mrs Jones.”

  As she donned the white coat, disposable hat and overshoes Nadia provided for her, Suzanne mused on the fact that for the past few weeks, she had actually been Mrs Ford. For years, she’d been called Mrs Jones, both in the former Soviet Union countries and in Africa. And in all cases, the use of ‘Mrs’ had been a mark of respect, rather than an indication of marital status. And after all, her company was called the Jones Technical Partnership. She guessed she’d just let them carry on calling her Mrs Jones.

  Five minutes later, the audit party was reunited inside the production facility itself. Nadia had told Suzanne and Walter that the factory produced mainly tablets, with a small sterile facility elsewhere on site for the production of antibiotics. The building they were currently in housed the tablet suites: mixing, granulation, drying, tableting, and packaging. And Suzanne could see it was first class. All sections were constructed as rooms within rooms, with half-glassed panels and smooth walls of painted metal. The visitors were able to see everything from the corridors, so there was no need for them to enter any of the actual production rooms. There was a gentle hum in the background which Nadia explained was the air conditioning.

  “We produce a mix of different products in this facility,” she said, “around twenty different types of tablet, plus there’s a small capsule-making suite at the other end of the building. All the rooms are under negative pressure. You will notice that each room has a small vestibule between it and the corridor. That’s an airlock at a higher pressure than both the processing room and the corridor. It means any dust generated during processing—and there will always be some, no matter how good the operatives or how effective the in situ dust extractors—is kept in the room and doesn’t risk contaminating the rest of the processing rooms. But at the same time, there’s no risk of any contamination from this corridor being carried into the processing room.”

  “And the clean rooms are operating at what standard?” asked Suzanne.

  “Class 10,000.”

  Suzanne made a note on her pad. Interesting, she thought. That’s one class higher than it needs to be, according to the regulations. I wonder why that is? She made a mental note to ask Yuri Mikhailovich over lunch.

  All the rooms were in operation, which was also interesting. Suzanne was used to seeing lots of shut down, spotless areas when she audited factories. Many managers felt the less activity there was going on, the lower the chances of an operator making a mistake in front of the inspector. Obviously, there was no fear of that in this company.

  “It’s a busy little plant, isn’t it?” said Walter. “Is it usual to have enough staff to run all the rooms at the same time?” He’d said very little since they’d started the tour with Nadia, and had seemed to spend most of his time ogling the operators who wandered around the corridors in their scrubs, but he was obviously taking things in. Suzanne had considered the same point. She often saw factories where a small team ran the whole of the tableting facility, starting at the beginning of the process with weighing out the raw materials and following the batch through to at least tableting. The packing hall was generally separate and fully staffed. But to see that in the manufacturing areas was rare.

  “Well, it may not be normal in other factories,” replied Nadia, “but we’ve always had the policy that we need enough staff to run everything at once. We have so many orders that we really can’t afford to have half our equipment shut down at any one time.”

  “But if you’re producing in all the rooms at the same time, and presumably, it’s not always the same product across the whole suite, how do you ensure there’s no cross contamination via the air handling units?” Suzanne asked.

  “Each room has its own individual air conditioning system. We have a huge roof space and each room’s system is located immediately above it.” The answer came so casually, it almost slipped by unnoticed. A separate air conditioning plant for every single room? That was unheard of. The perso
n providing the money in this company was either very rich or was rapidly approaching the point of pricing themselves out of the market. Suzanne wondered exactly what was being produced in this factory to push them down the road towards such extravagance.

  Chapter 26

  “I’m getting old, my friend,” the tall, stooping man said as the pair strolled into the garden. It was another sweltering day in Kursk Oblast, in the south-west of Russia. A day when the air was still and burned the nostrils. Where any movement brought sweat to the face and the shoulder blades in an instant. Sitting inside was uncomfortable, airless even. But outside, there was pleasant shade to be had and occasionally, a gentle breeze stirred some of the air and cooled it slightly.

  The house on the hill, on the edge of Fatezh, was large, rambling and very old. He’d bought it twenty years ago, as he watched the Soviet Union collapse and found himself separated by new borders from the way of life he loved and the nationality he felt most allegiance to. And for many years it had stood empty, an insurance policy; a promise to himself that he would always have somewhere to hide if he needed it.

  For more than two decades, his wife and their extended family remained in Kharkiv while he lived his adventures in southern Africa. His visits home had been infrequent, but apparently joyful and welcomed. Whether it was the lifestyle his wife actually wanted was a totally different matter, and sometimes, just occasionally, he suspected it might not be, but he never asked the question and she never volunteered the answer. She died at the start of the new millennium after many years of more or less happy coexistence, leaving him with four children. One of these, his eldest son, was dead, fished out of the Dnieper with a bullet in his skull. An adopted daughter from Mozambique, a real cuckoo in the nest in many ways, was also dead; drowned in a far-off place. His own daughter had been married for many years to a doctor in Kiev and never visited.

  That left his remaining son who stayed close to his father, brought his wife to live in the family home and proceeded to raise five children, all of whom worked in the family business in some way or another. And when, five years ago, politics and itchy feet dictated a change of scenery, the old man transplanted the whole family to Kursk Oblast without thinking to consult anyone.

  Yes, Stefano Mladov still ran the family with a rod of iron and even now, at the age of eighty-two, he could make people quail with just a glance. He still had a full head of hair, although it was bright white instead of the black of his youth. His skin was the colour of tanned oak from many years in Africa and recently from working in the garden. Apart from the hottest of days, like today, Stefano spent hours tending the vegetable patch. He gained as much pleasure from nurturing a crop of radishes and presenting them to his daughter-in-law each May, together with a big bunch of lily of the valley, as he had in the old days from beating a rival, often literally, or seeing one of his schemes come to fruition. But tonight, he was feeling his age and a sense of impending doom seemed to settle on his shoulders.

  “You? You’ll never get old!” His companion gave a short bark of laughter. Like Stefano, he was casually dressed in jeans and a light shirt, but he still looked more like the civil servant he’d once been, rather than a fugitive from the law and a dangerous criminal, which he also was. Michael Hawkins still dyed his hair, although the pepper and salt mixture he favoured made some concessions to his seventy-plus years. His shirt was neatly pressed, whereas Stefano’s was crumpled and stained with sweat under the armpits. Hawkins also wore smart loafers with white socks, whereas Stefano’s feet were pushed into old flip-flops, his gnarled toes looking like sausages that had stayed under the grill too long.

  Michael Hawkins had arrived on Stefano’s doorstep one day nearly four years ago, having slipped out of Brazil under an assumed name as soon as he had been released from custody in the British Embassy in Brasilia. He’d not even gone back to his villa in São Paulo. Holed up in a backstreet boarding house in a part of Brasilia where no-one asked any questions so long as the rent was paid on time, he’d contacted his driver-cum-bodyguard, Max, and instructed him in what to retrieve from the villa, and where to find it. He’d signed the property over to Max and told him to enjoy himself. Then he slipped away one night, boarded a freighter bound for Central America, and from there, by a slow and circuitous route, he returned to Europe. But not to the United Kingdom. That would have been too risky.

  The authorities knew he had once been Sir Fredrick Michaels, the retired civil servant and Head of the International Health Forum. They knew he hadn’t died by taking his own life back in 2005. And they probably also knew by now he was actually Michael Hawkins, drug dealer and mastermind of any number of money-making schemes across the developing world. No, the United Kingdom wasn’t a good place for him to go. He’d gradually worked his way across Europe, helped by the leaky borders of the European Union, and finally reached Fatezh, five months after his brush with the Jones sisters and the British authorities in São Paulo. He’d been in the former Soviet Union region ever since.

  Both men had made enough money during their earlier years to never have to work again. But having money didn’t stop you from wanting more. And while Stefano ran the family enterprises, Hawkins had set up his own team and now had another thriving business supplying drugs to dealers all over the region. He was also responsible for a series of occasional but extremely lucrative raids on warehouses and transport depots in Eastern Europe. These two men were together responsible for a fair chunk of all the pharmaceutical-related crime in the region and were very proud of the fact.

  But today they’d received some disturbing news and had met together to discuss how they were going to deal with it.

  It was Stefano’s creaking joints and occasional twinge of arthritis that had occasioned the comment about getting old. But he didn’t really believe it any more than Hawkins did. The two men knew they were invincible and assumed they were going to live forever. Having strolled around the large garden once, admiring all the crops flourishing despite the heat thanks to an irrigation system costing a small fortune in water every summer, they now sat in the shade of a huge walnut tree. Stefano took out a cigarette case and offered it to Hawkins, as he did every single time. And as always, Hawkins shook his head and declined. Stefano lit up, inhaled deeply, let out a stream of smoke rings and sighed.

  “Well, my friend,” he said, “it looks like we might have a problem. Let me tell you what we know so far and you can tell me what you think. And more importantly, what do we need to do?”

  Chapter 27

  The rest of the Kharkiv Pharmaceuticals factory was equally as impressive as the tablet department. Operators appeared to be well trained and careful in how they behaved. Even the packing hall was quiet and industrious looking. Suzanne had visited numerous packing halls and knew many of them were staffed by older women, often with a wicked sense of humour and a keen taste for fun. She remembered from her early days in the industry, before her ‘poacher turned gamekeeper’ move to a regulatory role, how the women used to make the life of the new graduates hell with their jokes and ripe language. And it had been especially difficult for the young men, who were often from a sheltered background and unused to such behaviour.

  Given the investment that had obviously been made in the facility, it was no surprise to see the tabletting and packaging equipment was also top of the range. Suzanne recognised the names stamped on most of the kit; well-known brands from Western Europe, mainly Germany. This was a Rolls Royce of a factory; there could be no mistake about that.

  After they’d seen their fill of the manufacturing facility and asked all the questions they could think of, Nadia took them out of the building and across to another block. This was the warehouse, and once again it appeared no expense had been spared. The building was high, but it was a single-storey only, with racks of pallets reaching up to the distant roof. And it was fully automated! Nadia introduced them to the warehouse manager, who told them he operated the whole building with just a deputy and one porter.
The stock was moved around by robots.

  “Who wrote your logistics program?” asked Suzanne, and by this time was fully expecting to hear the name of a well-known German software company. And she was spot on.

  A gentle beeping sound heralded the arrival of another robot, just behind them. They stood aside and watched as it moved slowly along the line of racks before stopping at a bay further down the aisle. The hydraulics kicked in and the pallet was raised high off the ground, before being nudged gently and securely into place on the upper shelf of the racking. Then the robot retracted its forks and disappeared around the corner to join the queue awaiting re-entry to the manufacturing facility. Shades of Douglas Adams, thought Suzanne. You could almost suppose that robot had a sense of satisfaction at a job well done!

  “Very impressive,” said Walter. “One of the best warehousing facilities I’ve seen—and believe me,” he said in an aside, winking at Suzanne, “I’ve seen some warehouses in my time.”

  “Yes, we’re very lucky,” said Nadia with what looked to Suzanne like a smug smile. “Our owners are very generous when it comes to investment, and we never have to argue for months before we can buy any equipment, like some of my colleagues in other companies do.”

  “And who are your owners?” asked Walter. “Would they be people I know?”

  “Oh, I doubt it,” she replied. “They’re just a group of Ukrainians who believe pharmaceuticals should be made safely and under modern conditions. Now, if you’ve seen enough here, we’ll go and have a look in the quality assurance department.” She led them back into the yard and across to a small single-storey facility which they found, unsurprisingly, was packed with modern equipment. The instrument laboratory contained High Performance Liquid Chromatographs, a mass spectrometer, and every other possible piece of equipment that might be called for by the analytical methodology listed in all modern pharmacopoeia. There was a small, but perfectly formed, sterile testing suite. And there was a large sunny room where the shelves were packed with reference books. “Our library,” explained Nadia.