Myles paused before he answered. Then he raised three fingers. ‘Three things,’ he said.
The leading Somali raised his eyebrows, stunned by Myles’ audacity. Then he motioned for Myles to make his demands.
‘First,’ said Myles, ‘I want you to agree that Helen gets the first dose. She’s been infected for longer than any of us. She needs the medicine most of all.’
‘And your second demand, Mr Munro?’
‘Do you agree to the first?’
The Somali gang men looked at each other. One of them started speaking in a foreign dialect, but the other cut him short. Then, based on only eye contact between them — eye contact which made Myles sceptical — the leading African nodded. ‘OK, we agree: she gets the first dose.’
‘Good,’ said Myles. ‘Second, I go free.
‘Agreed — on the condition that we get to go free too,’ said the Somali. ‘We’re not going to the police.’
Myles accepted the point. ‘OK, agreed,’ said Myles. ‘And third, you tell me who sent you.’
The three men looked at each other again. This was a hard one. Another foreign-language argument ensued. It began to look as though the answer was going to be no — they would refuse to say who they were working for.
Helen broke in. ‘Look, guys. We know you were sent by either Juma or Placidia,’ she said. ‘So who was it: Juma or Placidia? Or do you want to die of this disease?’ Helen coughed as she finished her sentence. It was a guttural cough and she bent over double. The men looked frightened just watching her.
Myles was sure he knew what the answer would be: plague was a mass killer. Placidia-the-idealist wouldn’t use something so indiscriminate. They would have been sent by Juma-the-psychopath.
Then the answer came: ‘Placidia.’
Myles’ eyes widened in disbelief. He tried to hide it. ‘Placidia? Really?’
The Somalis all nodded in unison. One of them even explained how Placidia had told them exactly which tomb to open, after studying some old books.
Helen glanced an ‘I told you so’ look at Myles, before coughing again.
Myles was stunned. He checked again, but the men seemed convincing enough. They were sincere. ‘Why were you so unwilling to say who sent you a few moments ago?’ he asked.
‘Because Placidia has our families and she will get them American citizenship if we succeed,’ explained one of the men. ‘But she said that if her name was mentioned then we would get nothing, and our families may die.’
Myles tried to make sense of it. Was Placidia really so sure of her plan that she thought she could promise US citizenship? And more importantly, was Placidia really planning to infect millions with a deadly illness? What had happened to Placidia to make her change?
One of the Somalis tugged at Myles’ arm, distracting him. ‘Mr Englishman. So we get the cure, right?’
Helen could see Myles was still stunned by the confirmation that Placidia was willing to commit mass murder. She stepped in. ‘Yes, you have a deal,’ she said, erupting into more coughs. She collapsed to the floor, still coughing.
The Somalis turned to Myles. They wanted him to lead them to their cure. For Myles, the power he had over the three men standing around him gave him no satisfaction at all.
Myles realised that the woman he loved was very close to death.
And the woman he had loved in the past had become a psychopathic mass-murderer.
Forty-Five
Breaking into a pharmacy in Istanbul would be easy. Finding the right antibiotics to steal would be harder. Escaping without being caught would be harder still. Doing it all with three untrustworthy gangsters before any of them weakened from the plague — or infected anyone else — was a huge challenge. Myles wasn’t sure it could be done at all. But as he looked at Helen, whose life depended on him succeeding, he knew he had to try.
He led the men out of the excavation tent, and looked around, trying to guess where in the vast city of Istanbul would be the nearest stock of emergency medicine. The light from a road lined with shops was visible just inside the city walls. He gestured towards it: they would walk through the large Roman gate, then look for an illuminated green cross — the universal sign for a pharmacy, an old symbol dating from Roman times which meant a place of healing.
Juma’s men followed Myles eagerly. Too eagerly. They were desperate. Myles wondered how Placidia had sent them here without any protection against the disease they were about to spread.
He was trying to think ahead. They needed antibiotics, but which ones? There were so many types, many of them dedicated to treating specific conditions. A normal pharmacy wouldn’t have antibiotics designed to cure bubonic plague, so he’d need to find a general one, a ‘broad spectrum’ antibiotic. It also needed to be powerful and fast-acting.
He wondered some more. If the Somalis had been sent here without a cure, did they hope to somehow spread the plague without catching it themselves? Or did they know they’d been sent on a suicide mission?
As the team of four approached the floodlit gate in the city walls, now left permanently open for traffic, Myles reflected on just how absurd his situation was. He had infected with a fatal disease the men he was now leading, yet they were following him for a cure. They had been sent here by Placidia, who knew about antibiotics — but had not bothered to supply them with any.
Myles knew he was missing something. Something wasn’t right, but he couldn’t work out what.
The men entered the city and started walking down the street of shops. No pharmacy was in sight. As they continued — down a hill and round a corner — more shopfronts came into view ahead of them. Still no pharmacy. Myles began to wonder how long it would take.
Then one of the Somalis tugged on Myles’ arm. The man said something in his mother tongue.
‘A green cross, he says,’ came the translation. ‘Down that side street.’
The man pointed, and he was correct: on a street which branched off to the right, partly hidden by the curve of the road and a bus stop, was the sign for a pharmacy.
Myles sensed the expectation amongst the three men. They imagined the sign meant they would survive, but Myles knew it was far too early to be sure.
The four of them jogged to the shopfront. A large window display was advertising a slimming drug. None of them could read the promotional material, which was in Turkish, but the message was obvious: these pills will help you lose weight fast. Another display was promoting vitamins at bargain prices, and there was an offer on teeth-whitening products.
Myles looked past them all, towards the back of the shop. There he saw a counter and shelves full of more conventional remedies. Vanity products at the front, medicines at the back.
Myles knew he would need to get properly inside the pharmacy to get the antibiotics they needed. ‘We need to break in,’ he whispered.
The Somalis indicated agreement. Myles checked no one else was around, then inspected the door lock while the others looked around for something to break the glass. One of them found a metal bin a little way down the street, and wrenched it from the bolts which fixed it in place. He dragged it over and threw it at the glass.
It bounced off. None of them was surprised: the glass was thick and the rubbish bin light.
The metal bumped noisily onto the ground. It rolled near another of the Somalis, who also picked it up and tried to hurl it towards the window.
Even though the throw was much harder this time, the metal bin only managed to scratch the glass a little.
‘It’s thickened glass. The bin’s not heavy enough to break it,’ explained Myles. ‘We have to use the bin with our weight.’