The Lucifer Network (47 page)

Phipps half turned to him. ‘You bloody stick to the rules, Sam.'

Sam nodded. He'd stick to them all right. His own.
Only one thing mattered to him – learning the secrets of that building before they went up in smoke.

They moved to the crest of a rise, using trees as cover. The one-time monastery stood fifty paces away, its white walls glowing eerily in the moonlit blackness. It had a pitched, tiled roof and shuttered windows. The upper floor was in darkness, but at ground level, double doors stood open and lights were on inside. From behind the building they heard the sound of breaking wood.

Phipps led them to some bushes from where they could see into the yard at the back, a space protected from the northerly winds by a high wall. Light spilled from the rear of the house. A bonfire stack had been built of old wooden bed frames. Books, papers and bedding were strewn beneath the timbers, ready to be ignited. But whoever had done it was inside the monastery again.

They flattened themselves to the ground. Sam sensed other marines were near, but couldn't see them.

A man in a respirator emerged from the house, his arms full of cardboard boxes. Tall and thin, he wore a grubby white coat. He tipped the boxes onto the stack, then pulled a cigarette lighter from his pocket.

‘Willie . . .' Sam mouthed, desperate to get the marine on his side. ‘Your rules are fucking
wrong.
'

The lieutenant didn't reply at first. Sam could almost hear the clicks of the calculations going on in his brain.

‘We
can
go overt,' Phipps whispered, as if talking to himself, ‘if something happens that puts our lives in danger . . .'

Sam swallowed. He'd got the message. It was down to him. He turned to Arthur Harris. ‘Come on, chum. We've got work to do.' He jerked the reluctant translator to his feet. Phipps made no effort to stop him.

Harris felt a protest rise in his throat, but it stuck
somewhere behind his teeth. He stumbled after Sam like a lemming.

The man in the white coat looked up in horror at their sudden emergence from the darkness. He thrust his spare hand into a pocket as if going for a gun.

Sam already had the Browning out of its holster and levelled it at his chest.

‘Stop!'

His yell was muffled by the rubber of his respirator. The man saw the pistol and froze.

‘Put that flame out! Tell him, Arthur. Translate, for Pete's sake.'

Harris tried, but his breathless Russian was inaudible beneath the mask.

‘Louder,' Sam hissed. ‘It's what you bloody came for, man.'

Harris filled his lungs and released a stream of invective. But instead of stopping the lab man in his tracks it galvanised him into action. Ignoring the threat of being shot, he tossed the lighted Zippo into the base of the stack then whipped out a VHF handset from his pocket, shouting into it in Russian.

Seeing that things were about to get dangerously out of hand, Willie Phipps sprang forward, his MP5 pointing like a bee sting. The Russian stared at them, eyes like whirlpools behind the lenses of his mask. Then, suicidally, he began to move towards them, his arms spread wide in an effort to block their advance for long enough for the flames to take hold.

Phipps swung the gun against the side of the man's head and felled him. Then Sam threw himself at the fire, pulling away the bed-frame timbers before their ends had a chance to light. He kicked at the papers burning at the base, but it was too late. The blaze had caught.

‘Shit!' He leapt back to prevent his dry suit catching fire.

Suddenly there was the sharp crack of a bullet by his ear and he flinched. He saw a puff of dust from the monastery wall behind him where it had thwacked into the stucco.

‘Down!' Phipps yelled, swinging round to face the way they'd come. The shot was from beyond where the marines lay hidden. Sam flattened himself next to Arthur Harris as more rounds smacked overhead. Beyond the scrub he could see muzzle flashes in the darkness as two men hurled themselves towards the monastery, firing wildly.

Phipps opened up with the submachine-gun, prompting a fusillade from the marines in the bushes. The gunmen fell. A couple of the soldiers emerged from cover to check the men were disabled. They stood over the bodies and loosed off rounds to finish them off. Sam sensed their relief at doing what they'd wanted to do at the farmhouse ten minutes before.

Behind him the bonfire crackled and spat as the flames spread across its base. He heard the ping of glass exploding. Bottles and vials from the lab, he guessed. Vital evidence going up in smoke. He scrambled to his feet to attack it again, pulling whatever he could from the flames. The heat was intense, the blaze now fuelled by bed sheets and blankets. He grabbed a piece of bed frame as a probe, trying to beat out the conflagration, but the heat defeated him.

‘Water,' he murmured, spinning round in the vain hope of seeing a convenient hose. There was nothing, and searching the place would waste precious time. He'd saved what he could from the flames. What mattered now was the information inside the Russian's head.

Harris still lay motionless on the ground, his hands over his ears. Sam tapped him on the shoulder.

‘It's okay. The war's over.'

Harris scrambled to his feet, relieved that he'd survived his baptism of fire.

‘Make this fuckwit talk to us, Arthur.'

Eager to take charge again, Willie Phipps wrenched the Russian's hands behind his back and secured them with nylon ties. ‘Let's see what's inside this creep's head,' he snarled, pulling the prisoner to his knees and pressing the gun barrel into the back of his neck. A couple of his soldiers ran past, their belts heavy with grenades. They flattened themselves against the outside wall of the monastery, one each side of the open door, then swung inside, searching with their guns.

Harris began his questions. The responses were muted. Pretence of ignorance, whines of complaint. The Russian was playing for time.

‘You're getting up my nose, scrote,' snapped Phipps. He grabbed the man's respirator, as if to pull it off.

The Russian writhed and pleaded.

‘He's begging you not to take that off,' Harris translated.

‘You don't say . . .'

‘Says he'll co-operate.'

‘Then he'd better be quick.'

Harris repeated his questions, listened to the responses, then probed further. For a couple of minutes the Russian talked, his words now punctuated by gulps of shock.

‘There's a biology lab inside the house,' Harris confirmed eventually. ‘Set up over a year ago. He says they've been experimenting with viruses. Several kinds. Smallpox was the main one.'

‘
Smallpox?
' Sam interjected. ‘Not rabies?'

‘Hasn't mentioned it,' said Harris quickly, not wanting
to lose the thread of his translation. ‘There were three of them running the lab. All Russians, all ex-VECTOR. Igor Chursin was in charge. His number two was Yuri Akimov – not a name known to me, but it's likely they'll have heard of him at Cheltenham. And this fellow's called Sasha Koslov. He's the lab assistant. The two men you just shot are Croats. Security guards. The word he used to describe them was pretty contemptuous. Translates roughly as “pond life”.'

‘Okay, but what happened here?' Sam pressed. ‘Why the carnage at the farmhouse?'

Harris questioned some more. Koslov seemed reluctant to answer.

‘He's muttering something about an escape,' Harris explained. ‘Being evasive. Doesn't want to talk about it.'

‘Tosser!' growled Willie Phipps, wrapping a big, square hand round the Russian's filter and wrenching it upwards. The rubber mask separated from the man's skin with a sweaty, sucking sound. Koslov squirmed and writhed, trying to push his face back into it. His pinioned hands tore uselessly at their ties. He pressed his lips shut and flattened his nostrils, his eyes swelling with the strain of holding his breath.

‘Let's have a look at your miserable, evil little face,' Sam murmured, twisting the man's apoplectic visage towards the light of the fire. Broad forehead, Slavic eyes popping from their sockets. Muted squeals from the throat.

‘Whasthat you're saying? Speak up.' Sam turned to Harris. ‘Smallpox'll make a terrible mess of his looks before it kills him. Tell him, Arthur. Then ask him about the escape again.'

When Harris repeated the question, the reddening face nodded frantically, eyes pleading for the mask to be restored.

Phipps pushed it back down, easing the rubber over the man's chin and checking the seal on his neck. The Russian sucked in great gasps of filtered air before speaking again.

As he talked, Willie Phipps met Sam's look. They'd reached the same conclusion. For Koslov to be so terrified of exposure, the air around them had to be a soup of infection. They glanced at the bonfire and nodded to one another. The most lethal stuff could well be on it. Putting distance between themselves and the flames made sense. But as they prepared to move, Harris held up a hand.

‘Hang on. He's describing the escape.'

Sam listened hard. His knowledge of Russian was rusty but he understood Koslov to be talking about a ‘boy'.

‘My God.' Harris sounded shaken by what he was hearing. ‘They used human guinea pigs to test their vaccines.' His voice was flat. ‘It was the Croats' job to keep the lab supplied.' He pointed to the men on the ground a few feet away. ‘Says that when Chursin and Akimov needed someone to experiment on, the Croats took the boat to Split or Dubrovnik to look for people sleeping rough. Refugees – Bosnians, Kosovans. Or druggies. They'd kidnap them, bring them here and keep them chained up while trying out new viruses on them – the word he's using is “mutated” viruses. I don't know what that means exactly.'

Sam knew precisely what it meant. And he knew of an Austrian doctor who was an expert on the subject.

‘The main aim of the research was to develop antidotes,' Harris continued. ‘Most of their vaccines didn't work, so the people died.'

‘How many, for God's sake?' Sam asked.

‘He thinks around thirty over the past year. He says
the people themselves were rubbish. Refugees. Nobody missed them.'

‘Except their mums,' Phipps suggested.

‘What about the escape?' Sam prodded.

‘It was a few days ago. One of the prisoners had been infected with a new smallpox variant. He says it's a strain which the world's stock of vaccine can't touch.'

‘And they lost him?'

‘Yes.'

‘Jesus . . .'

The man was a walking timebomb.

‘By the time they'd discovered he was missing the boy had got to the farm and taken the farmer's daughter hostage. The girl was mentally backward, Koslov says. The boy took her off in the farmer's boat. To Lastovo, they think – they assumed he was heading for the ferry to the mainland. Chursin, Akimov and a couple of the Croats went over to Lastovo to look for him, but there was no sign. Chursin panicked. He feared the boy would contact the police and the game would be up. So he sent the Croats back with this man, with orders for the lab to be burned and the farmer and his family to be killed. All trace of what they'd been doing here to be removed or destroyed. That's it. That's what he said.'

‘And a vaccine for this new smallpox?' Sam demanded. ‘They'd developed one?'

Harris checked. The Russian shrugged again.

‘That's what they were testing on the boy. He says find him and we'll know if it works.'

‘Christ,' Sam whistled. ‘If it doesn't, we've got a lunatic wandering around infecting people with an untreatable plague.' He posed the most crucial question of all. ‘Who were they doing this for, Arthur?'

Harris asked the Russian, but the man just shrugged. His own confidence growing, Harris himself threatened
to remove the man's mask and throw it into the fire. But the answer remained the same.

‘He says he doesn't know,' Harris translated. ‘Chursin never told him.' Phipps grabbed at the mask again, but Harris put out a hand to stop him. ‘No. I really think he's telling the truth.'

‘Course he bloody knows . . .' Phipps insisted. He clamped his hands round the Russian's neck and squeezed. ‘See if a lack of air helps him remember.'

There were two more key questions Sam still wanted answers to. The rabies-like virus used against the two EU officials in Brussels – had it been produced here? And had a Mr Harry Jackman supplied the scientists with their raw materials?

He decided to wait a moment before asking them. To see if the onset of suffocation would persuade the man to name his employers.

They watched for some sign of a readiness to co-operate, but all they saw through the steaming up lenses of his mask was some unexplained horror in his eyes. Eyes which stared past them, looking at a point high up on the wall of the old monastery.

Sam suddenly understood. But too late. As the warning yell took shape in his lungs, the head that Willie Phipps was so forcefully gripping burst apart like a rotten fruit. He twisted his face away in horror, catching a glimpse of smoke at the upstairs window from where the shot had been fired.

Sam's stomach rebelled but he managed to swallow back the vomit before it filled the mouthpiece of his mask. Harris scrabbled frenetically across the stony ground, desperate to get away from the appalling sight of the Russian's brains spread across Willie Phipps's torso. Ignoring the gore, the lieutenant raised the MP5 and loosed off rounds towards the monastery window.

Sam flung himself sideways, rolling away from the line of fire, then got to his knees to run for cover. Arthur Harris was nowhere to be seen. He darted for the corner of the monastery, crouched, looked again and saw the translator lying prostrate a few feet away, his hands clamped to his head.

‘Arthur!' Sam shouted. ‘Over here! Quick!'

But Harris didn't move. There was blood oozing through his fingers.