‘Then Warner first,’ said Steven, flicking open the first folder. He had just finished working his way through the second when John Macmillan arrived in the office.
‘I’ve just had a word with the Home Secretary,’ he said. ‘A team of searchers have been going through Crowe’s lab at Porton all night. So far they haven’t found anything at all suspicious.’
‘Pity,’ said Steven, following Macmillan through into his office where he told him about his late night conversation with Rees. ‘Not only have these bastards known all along about the cause of Gulf War Syndrome,’ he said. ‘But they could have cured it if they’d chosen to.’ Steven told him about the first step in construction being the isolation of the new antibiotic. ‘Even the very early versions of the agent would have been treatable,’ he said. ‘The fact that they didn’t say anything about that…’
‘Must mean that they have a pretty serious reason for keeping it secret.’ completed Macmillan. His gaze moved to the files that Steven was still holding.
‘I thought I’d see if I could get something useful out of Warner or Everley,’ said Steven.
‘Did you ask Rees about the possibility of coming up with another drug to tackle the agent?’ asked Macmillan.
Steven nodded. ‘Could take a month, could take a year,’ he said. ‘There’s no way of knowing.’
‘The Home Secretary is meeting with the PM this morning to keep him apprised of developments. How would you rate the threat?’
‘Unknown,’ said Steven.
‘He’ll love that,’ said Macmillan with a sigh. ‘Who are you going to see first?’
‘Warner,’ said Steven. ‘Everley’s in Scotland.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Kissing Tory arse according to this,’ said Steven, holding up the file. ‘He’s been unable to get himself adopted as a candidate in any English constituency where he had even the remotest chance of being returned so it looks as if he’s turned his attention north of the border. He’s been doing the rounds.’
‘I didn’t think there were any Tories left up there after the debacle with the poll tax,’ said Macmillan. ‘You’d think he had even less chance.’
‘No doubt he’ll find that out for himself, him being a bright sort of a chap…’ said Steven.
‘Or there’s something we don’t know about,’ said Macmillan.
Steven was walking up the steps at Channing House in Kent when he heard singing coming from the garden at the side of the house and stopped to listen.
‘Early one morning, just as the sun was rising…’
Although singing tends to disguise accent, Steven didn’t think that the voice belonged to a gardener. He retraced his steps and walked along to the wicker gate at the right hand side of the house where he could see a man of military bearing, dressed in tweeds, pruning a large berberis shrub with secateurs.
‘Colonel Warner?’ he asked.
‘Who the devil wants to know?’ spluttered Warner, having to use bluster to disguise the fact he’d been taken by surprise.
Steven walked in through the gate and showed Warner his ID.
Warner grunted and said, ‘James Gardiner warned me you might come calling. I can’t tell you any more than he did. What happened all these years ago was an accident; nothing more nothing less. There wasn’t anything that any of us could have done about it and that’s an end to it.’
‘Not quite,’ said Steven as Warner resumed his pruning. ‘A great many men were left incapacitated because of that so-called accident.’
‘I think that’s a moot point, if you don’t mind my saying so,’ said Warner.
‘Oh, I know there were a whole lot of other contributing factors which served to muddy the water and gave you all something to hide behind,’ said Steven. ‘But the Porton agent still played a leading role. I think you know that.’
‘As I say, that’s a moot point and to be regretted if it should be true,’ said Warner.
‘Of course, these men needn’t have suffered at all if the whole truth had come out at the time,’ said Steven.
‘I don’t think I know what you mean,’ said Warner, pretending that the piece of berberis he was cutting at the time had suddenly become extremely interesting. He examined it closely.
‘From the very outset there was a known cure for the agent,’ said Steven. ‘If it had been made available as soon as it became clear there was a health problem, Gulf War Syndrome would never have become an issue.’
Warner stopped pruning and looked slightly stunned. ‘What the devil are you talking about?’ he said. ‘How could there be a cure? It was just a prototype of something they had just started work on.’
‘The first thing Crowe and his team did once they had decided on the bug they were going to base their agent on was to come up with an antibiotic to cure it,’ said Steven. ‘Even the earliest prototypes would have been treatable with it.’
‘Look here, science is all a bloody mystery to me,’ said Warner. ‘If what you say is true and they had a way of undoing the effects of the accident why wouldn’t they have done so? You’re not making any sense.’
‘Because they intended continuing development of the agent,’ said Steven, watching Warner closely. ‘The cure had to remain a secret otherwise it would have rendered the agent useless as a weapon.’
‘But all development work stopped after the accident,’ said Warner.
‘I think not,’ said Steven.
‘You mean, Crowe?’
‘I’ve good reason to believe that he continued development work on it and succeeded in constructing a biological weapon that satisfied the original design criteria.’
‘Good Lord,’ said Warner, clearly taken aback. ‘Looking back, I never did like the fella, always something about him. So what’s he going to do with it now that he’s got it?’
‘I was rather hoping you were going to tell me that,’ said Steven.
Warner looked astonished. ‘You thought that I…’
‘And James Gardiner and the other members of your group…’
‘Now hold on! James warned me about this nonsense. Just because we love our country and hate seeing it fall into the hands of the kind of below-stairs trash that seem to be into everything these days doesn’t make us a bunch of terrorists. Everything we did, we did within the law.’
‘How about developing the agent in the first place?’ said Steven.
‘That had Government sanction,’ said Warner.
‘Did it?’ said Steven.
‘James assures me that it did,’ said Warner.
‘Crowe was a member of your group.’
Warner gave a deep sigh. After a pause he said, ‘James insisted that our group should include like minded people from all walks of life. He thought that Crowe fitted the bill at the time.’
‘And Mowbray?’
‘And Mowbray,’ said Warner, looking down at the ground.
‘You needed someone like him?’
Warner nodded. ‘An insider in Intelligence? Of course we did. Cold fish but… horses for courses, as they say.’
‘What about Everley?’
Warner gave a snort of derision. ‘Man’s a buffoon,’ he said. ‘A self-opinionated clown.’
‘But a rich one,’ said Steven.
‘We needed his cash,’ agreed Warner.
‘How big is the organisation?’ asked Steven, hoping that this key question would just slip into the run of things but Warner saw it immediately. ‘Just the four of us,’ he said, returning to his pruning.
‘It’s not the group I’m asking about,’ said Steven. ‘I need to know about the organisation it was fronting. I think that Crowe and Mowbray may have been using it for their own ends.’
‘I really don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Warner.
‘You said you loved your country?’ said Steven. ‘Do you really want to see it influenced by the likes of Crowe and Mowbray?’