The Secret

The murder of Tom North was a difficult one. A terrorist assassination couldn’t be ruled out entirely if, as Ricksen had said, North had been on their at-risk register, although the torture aspect made it more problematical and the manner of his killing was, as the Special Branch man had said, out of character. Explosives rather than knives were usually the choice of Islamic terrorists when it came to achieving their ends. But if North’s death was linked to what Simone had stumbled across, it suggested that North might not have been part of it, whereas his senior post-doc’s faulty recollection of when blood samples from Simone had been received and what had happened to them put him very firmly on the naughty step. Steven needed to know a lot more about Daniel Hausman.

He turned on his laptop and found an encrypted message that had come in from Jean Roberts. She had obtained contact details for Bill Andrews, the charity money administrator who had been with Simone in the gallery at the Strahov monastery library. He and the organisation he worked for were based in Kansas City — a long way from Wall Street, thought Steven. Mind you, so was charity. He checked his watch: the time difference suggested he give it another hour or so.

Jean had also included her report on the participants at the Prague meeting. Her conclusions were that everyone was who they said they were but some had ‘more interesting’ backgrounds than others. She had listed those on a separate sheet: Dan Hausman was among them. Hausman had obtained his PhD from UCLA — the University of California at Los Angeles — before being recruited by the military and posted to Fort Detrick, the US equivalent of Porton Down. His PhD thesis had been on virus — cell interactions. As expected, there was no indication of what he had worked on at Fort Detrick. He had then left the military and sponsorship by the US pharmaceutical company Reeman Losch had enabled his secondment as a post-doctoral fellow to Tom North’s lab in London. Jean had added a note saying that Reeman Losch were not big players in pharmaceuticals — they weren’t quoted on the New York stock exchange — and that their special interest was in anti-viral compounds. It wasn’t clear where their income came from as only one of their products — an anti-retroviral agent — had come on the market. Since they were a private company, there was no way of scrutinising their accounts. Try US Intelligence, thought Steven. To his way of thinking it seemed probable that Reeman Losch was a front for them, given Hausman’s time at Fort Detrick and then his sponsored fellowship in the North lab.

The picture was building. Reznik from CDC Atlanta, Henson from Porton Down and Hausman from Fort Detrick all had an interest in the Prague meeting and what was going on in the borders region between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Bill Andrews also appeared on Jean’s list of ‘interesting’ people. A graduate of Harvard Business School, he had worked briefly for an investment bank in New York before being recruited into the CIA. His career remained a blank until he surfaced again, this time working in financial management for the charity Children First before moving to his current position with the body that oversaw all American charitable contributions to health in the third world.

‘Well, well, well,’ murmured Steven. ‘Enter the CIA.’ He sat back in his chair and let out a long sigh. It was odds on that Andrews still worked for the CIA, and his connection with Children First could hardly be coincidence. It was almost certainly he who set up the false aid teams under the umbrella of Children First. Now, as financial controller of all charitable monies collected in the US for health projects in far-away places, he was in a position to direct funds to wherever the CIA wanted them to go. In fact, the CIA could actually fund their own projects under the guise of charitable contributions.

Jean had added a codicil pointing out that another participant at the Prague meeting, Dr Ranjit Khan, had been a classmate of Andrews at Harvard: they had shared an apartment. Khan had returned to his native Pakistan after graduating and was believed to be working for Pakistani intelligence — currently a somewhat fractured body thought to be at odds with the present government. It was possible that he had been responsible for supplying the Pakistani element in the fake aid teams.