‘I’ll bet,’ said Steven. ‘After hearing ten million good reasons.’
‘At this point, I pushed my luck and made up a Russian name. I said, that would probably have been, Dr Mikhail Ivanov...’
She said, no, his name was, Malenkov, Dr Sergei Malenkov.’
Steven wrote down the name and said, ‘Brilliant, absolutely brilliant.’
He thanked Scott, adding the promise of beer when they next met up and was about to start foraging around for the Special Branch list on his desk when the phone rang. This time it was Tally.
‘God, it’s been a long day.’
‘I’ll bet it has,’ said Steven. ‘Are things better or worse than you expected?’
‘Better, I think, thanks to the World Health people and Med sans Frontierès,’ Tally replied. ‘They are obviously used to dealing with new people arriving and provided an excellent briefing as well as handing out packs of supplies and equipment. We’ll all spending our first night here near the air base and tomorrow we’ll split up and go off to our respective areas to get the new management structure up and running.’
‘Which area are you being sent to?’
‘Equateur Province in the North-west.’
‘That’s where the current outbreak started, isn’t it?’ Steven asked.
‘You’ve been doing your homework,’ said Tally. ‘It kicked off in a small village up there, but wasn’t reported to WHO until cases stared appearing in the nearby town of Mbandaka and the cat was out of the bag.’
‘What sort of area are you going to be looking after?’
‘It’s a fair size but not heavily populated, mainly small villages spread over a wide area.’
‘Without much in the way of roads... easy to get lost.’
‘I’m here to manage from a central point, Steven,’ Tally assured him. ‘I don’t plan on travelling much. If I do have to go anywhere, I’ve got an old Land Rover at my disposal and I’ve got a tracking device.’
‘Sorry, I just can’t help worrying about you.’
‘I know,’ said Tally softly, ‘and I love you all the more for it.’
‘You had better get some sleep.’
‘I’ll call you tomorrow.’
Steven sat still, letting the silence surround him for a few minutes, wanting to believe that Tally was going to be perfectly safe, but not quite managing. He got up to make coffee before returning to the notes recovered by Special Branch. He found what he was looking for on the third page and allowed himself a small smile. The name, Sergei Malenkov was half way down. Steven knew that, if he had been playing poker, he had just drawn successfully to an inside straight. ‘You beauty,’ he murmured, before calling Scott Jamieson to tell him.’
‘Glad it worked out. Anything else you’d like me to do?’
‘Actually, yes,’ Steven replied, thinking on his feet, ‘How do you feel about seeing Mrs Field again?’
‘Sure, if you think that will help. What am I looking for?’
‘I know you thought she didn’t know anything, but I’d like you to ask her if you might take a look at her husband’s appointments diaries. She may have heard her husband mention Malenkov’s name without having any reason to remember it. It could have been something as simple as a one-off meeting, but if it turns out that Field did have any kind of contact with Malenkov, we’d know for sure that he is a big player — maybe the big player — and was involved in setting the whole lot up.’
‘Understood.’
Steven had to admit to himself that he wasn’t going to get anywhere by looking at the four dead men as a single group, hoping to see how their skills could be combined to achieve one specific end. He needed to know more about them as individuals, more about their specific interests, more about their aims and targets, more about what they had succeeded in doing and what they had failed to do. Jean had provided him with recent publications by the two Englishmen and he had skipped through them, picking up on the broad general aims of the research and what had been achieved in the current paper. He would have to go through them more thoroughly.
Steven started with Martin Field’s paper on advances in controlling pain in terminal patients. He had picked up from his earlier reading of the work that the aim was to be able to deliver pain relieving drugs remotely instead of having to rely on nursing and medical staff having to give it orally or by injection. This, he hoped, could be done by releasing drug doses in response to a remote signal.
The problem facing Field and his colleagues was that they needed ways of delivering more than one drug — palliative care often demanded the use of multiple drugs. To do this would require separate signals for the release of each drug, probably at different times and with varying frequency. So far, they had come up with a regime capable of dealing with the administering of two drugs, each of which would be released by a separate signal. They needed more and better, more reliable signals before the research became a practical proposition and could make the leap to clinical use.
Steven sighed as he tentatively made his way into Simon Pashley’s paper, which he had struggled with before, and given up on after concluding that the goal in prosthetic control was basically to make everything smaller. Before beginning, he had taken the precaution of looking out both English language and medical dictionaries to sit handily beside him, but their availability didn’t stop him becoming frustrated as he struggled through the text. At one point he threw back his head and complained, ‘Just what the hell is interdigital, metacarpal control array independence?’
The answer came as he stared up at the ceiling and worked through the words... interdigital — between the digits... metacarpal — pertaining to the hand bones between wrist and fingers... control array independence — individual control of more than one switch on a linked mechanism. It was obvious! Pashley was working on a controller which would permit a prosthetic hand to have working fingers. The mechanisms would be small enough to fit between the fingers and each finger would be able to move independently.
Steven felt a sudden adrenalin rush as he suddenly saw that he had made the connection between what Martin Field had been doing and what Pashley was doing. Someone else had seen possibilities in what the two of them had been doing and commissioned them at great expense to come up with a delivery system which could be wirelessly controlled to release more than one therapeutic drug.
Letting his thoughts run on free reign, Steven could imagine some powerful pharmaceutical company understanding the fortune to be made from such a system, were it to be refined and brought to the market place, but such a theory had no place for Chinese murderers.
Steven went in next morning to speak with John Macmillan who asked the obvious question, ‘How does an ultra-sophisticated drug delivery system warrant both Russian and Chinese interest?’
‘I have no idea,’ Steven confessed, ‘but I’m working on it.’ He felt a little deflated at Macmillan’s apparent lack of appreciation of his establishing the link between the two English scientists, but had to suppose, in the overall view of things... it wasn’t much.
‘There is one thing...’ said Macmillan as Steven got up to leave. He could sense Macmillan’s discomfort. ‘Oh, yes?’
‘I’m getting the impression that the Prime Minister was overly optimistic when she promised to pass on intelligence information to you under the table, so to speak. It’s proving more difficult than she thought.’