The Secret

Steven drew a line down from Prague to Paris and wrote in Aline’s name before moving on down to London. The only link between Simone and London was the series of blood samples she’d taken in the village and sent there. She’d posted them to the North lab but they had been redirected to Porton Down by Dan Hausman. Steven pencilled Fort Detrick, CIA and Reeman Losch against Hausman’s name before drawing a line that looped out back up to Prague and the delegate attending from Porton, Neville Henson.

He took a moment before he wrote Ranjit Khan’s name against London. Why had Khan come to London? It couldn’t have been to stop the blood samples going anywhere for analysis: it was too late for that, and why would he need to do it anyway? Hausman, who was almost certainly CIA, was already in the North lab and had been able to divert them away from the diagnostic investigation that Simone had requested. He’d simply passed them on to Henson at Porton. When questioned, his explanation for redirecting the samples had been that they were obliged to forward samples from patients with undiagnosed conditions to a lab equipped to do diagnostic work. That was true, but he’d lied about where he’d actually sent them.

Tom North’s torture and murder was still a puzzle, in terms of both who had done it and why. What did the killer want from him? He might have twigged what Hausman was involved in and threatened to expose him, or perhaps he had known nothing of what was going on in Afghanistan but had stumbled across something that had made him suspicious.... but what was that something? And why the torture element?

Steven acknowledged for the first time that he had been underestimating Hausman’s role in all of this. He’d been so pleased to get Jean’s findings linking him with Fort Detrick and the CIA that he hadn’t given much thought to what he might actually be doing in the North lab in the first place. He’d just been thinking of him as the person who’d sent on some blood samples to Porton and lied about it. There had to be more to Hausman than that. The fact that he had sent them to a named individual at Porton suggested a personal connection which in turn suggested a possible link between the North lab and Fort Detrick and Porton and maybe even CDC Atlanta, considering the presence of one of their people at the Prague meeting.

Although Hausman had not volunteered much about what he was working on when Tom North had introduced them on his first visit to the lab, Steven remembered that North had told him that the American was working on post-polio syndrome, the puzzling condition developed in later years by some people who’d recovered from the disease in earlier life. Was that true? Or was it a cover for some giant conspiracy involving germ warfare labs on both sides of the Atlantic?

Steven turned his attention to Bill Andrews, the CIA-backed head of charity funding for aid teams in Afghanistan and Ranjit Khan’s suspected accomplice in the murder of Simone. According to what he’d learned from people from WHO and Médecins Sans Frontières, Andrews was about to preside over a huge new injection of funds into the region — many more aid teams with American funding were going to appear on the ground. Was this really just conscience money from the CIA or was there something else behind it?

Steven had a eureka moment. He suddenly had a frightening vision of what was going on. A new biological weapon had been devised. Scientists at Porton Down, Fort Detrick and at least Hausman in the North lab had been involved in its development and MI6, the CIA and probably French and Pakistani intelligence were, to varying extents, in the know. The fact that a fake aid team had been discovered helping in the hunt for Bin Laden was small beer and had been used as a useful diversion.

There were other fake teams in the area and about to be a lot more. They weren’t offering people protection; they were using the inhabitants of a remote, lawless region as experimental animals. That’s why people were sick in the village that Simone and her team had stumbled across. They had been deliberately infected with something but... they were sick, not dead, Steven reminded himself. His hypothesis came to a grinding, pen-tapping halt.

He couldn’t see a way round the problem. A few minutes ago he’d felt sure he’d cracked the mystery, but now... In the terrifying world of biological weaponry where tales of ‘weaponised’ anthrax and genetically altered smallpox conjured up visions of hell on earth with city streets filled with the dead and the dying, a weapon that made people sick didn’t seem to rate. Was he missing something or was he simply wrong?