The Secret (Dr Steven Dunbar 10) (2 page)

‘Encrypted?’

‘Of course.’

‘Good. Our friends in Pakistani intelligence know all about the virus and the initial field tests – they were instrumental in setting them up – but your side of things must remain confidential. Understood?’

Mark nodded uncertainly. ‘The field tests?’ he asked.

‘We’ve been trying out the virus.’

‘On people?’ Mark asked, betraying disbelief.

‘Yeah. It’s OK; nobody died.’

‘But that’s . . .’

‘Life, doctor,’ Brady interrupted. ‘Some of us have the privilege in life of doing what’s decent, moral and honourable and some of us have to do what’s necessary. Uncle Sam expects you to just do your job, OK?’

Mark agreed, feeling he was doing so on autopilot as he struggled to come to terms with what he was hearing but knowing that any protest he might m
ake would probably result in his being asked what the hell he thought he was doing at Fort Detrick anyway: making toys for Christmas?’

‘Have you heard of the
Khyber Pass, doctor?’ Brady asked.

‘Of course, in boyhood stories.’

‘Tomorrow you’ll be driving through it.’

Mark was the last to be picked up in the morning. He had been told it would be a low-key affair. This translated into two vehicles which looked military in origin with the ability to handle rugged terrain but lacking any markings. Brady introduced Mark to two other
s who would be travelling in their vehicle, a Pakistani intelligence officer named Faisal and a US marine driver named Mick. The other vehicle looked to contain four more marines, judging by their haircuts.

‘Faisal hails from the Khyber
Pakhtunkhwa,’ said Brady.

Mark looked blank.

‘It’s the modern name for what used to be called the North West Frontier in your story books, doctor.

‘Now, a little less romantic, perhaps,’ said Faisal, speaking perfect English with an accent that even sounded English to Mark’s ear: he guessed at English schooling.

‘A troubled place,’ said Mark.

‘Still is,’ said Faisal. ‘One of the English poets described it as having blood on every stone.’

‘Let’s hope for a quiet day,’ said Brady. ‘The others will be coming up from the Afghanistan side. We’re meeting at a small village away from prying eyes.’

They fell to silence as the day wore on, Mark mesmerised by the mountains that towered above them on the ascent through the pass and thinking about the car
nage they’d witnessed through the years.

‘Not much longer now,’ said Faisal to Mark before giving instructions to the driver. ‘The vehicles can’t manage the final stretch; it’s too steep,’ he explained. ‘We’ll be met.’

He made a call on what Mark noted was a satellite phone and ten minutes later they pulled off the road at the foot of a rough track that wound up into the mountains. A number of heavily bearded men in traditional dress were waiting there, sitting astride mopeds, automatic rifles slung across their backs.

‘Not exactly Harley D’s
, are they,’ murmured Brady, eyeing the bikes as they got out.

‘I’m just relieved they’re not donkeys,’ Mark confessed.

Faisal and Brady agreed the order of travel for the pillion passengers. Faisal would be a passenger on the first bike with Mark riding pillion on the second then Brady and finally two of the marines. Their driver Mick and the remaining marines would stay with the vehicles.

Mark, clutching his briefcase, mounted the second moped
, looked for something to hold on to rather than the rider, and sent a nervous glance towards Brady, who smiled back. He took comfort from knowing that by travelling upwards they would remain in sunlight a little longer, avoiding the darkness which was already stalking the valleys below. The angry insect-like rasp of two-stroke engines rose to fever pitch and the party moved off through a blue fug of exhaust, the bike wheels scrabbling for grip on the loose stony path and sending a hail of pebbles over the edge of an increasingly precipitous drop. Mark closed his eyes and turned his face sideways to seek the shelter offered by his rider’s back. He maintained this pose until the noise began to fade and the column drew to a stuttering halt at a spot where the track split into two.

Mark didn’t know why they’d stopped but didn’t care: he immediately took the chance to dismount and stretch his calf muscles
, which had been threatening to cramp through being confined in the same position for such a long time. Surely they couldn’t be lost? He was dusting himself down when Faisal walked over to him and said, ‘This is your first time here, doctor. Come, you should see the view; it’s something special.’

Brady nodded his agreement.

Mark could already see that the view was indeed spectacular, the dying rays of the sun turning the mountain tops red as far as the eye could see. He followed Faisal up on to a rocky promontory and gasped in admiration as all was revealed.

‘Some say it’s a reflection of the blood in the sky,’ said Faisal of the crimson landscape.

Mark’s imagination knew no bounds as he struggled to take in the rugged beauty of all that lay before him: he was on a distant planet in the outer reaches of the universe,: he was a time traveller,: he was a speck of dust in something that was infinite. Eventually, when reality made its pitch, he turned to thank his companion for the experience but was chilled to the bone by what he was confronted by. The demeanour of the pleasant, smiling man with the language and accent of an English public schoolboy had changed dramatically. The look in Faisal’s eyes was one of pure hatred.

‘What the . . .’

Faisal let out a yell and all hell was let loose as more than a dozen Kalashnikovs opened fire from the rocks above and around them. Brady and the others didn’t stand a chance: they were mown down in a matter of seconds, leaving Faisal and Mark the only two of the party left alive. Two of the men from the rocks materialised beside Mark and pinned his arms behind his back as Faisal inspected the corpses on the ground, using his foot casually and apparently without emotion.

Mark felt trapped in a bad dream from which there was no escape: it was the running
-in-mud scenario. He couldn’t take his eyes off his erstwhile travel companions, their riddled bodies lying in pools of blood which were already drying into the dirt, and he seemed to have lost the power of speech. His throat had contracted to the point where he could only make gasping noises.

One of the bodies moved. Amazingly, Brady was still alive
, though clearly mortally wounded. Mark saw he was looking up at him. ‘Don’t tell them, doctor . . . Don’t fucking tell them . . .’

They
were Brady’s last words. A full stop was applied by Faisal putting a pistol shot through his head, causing his brains to splatter out over the stones and Mark to throw up.

Mark deduced that t
hey were in some kind of cave complex when the blindfold was removed and he’d stopped blinking against the light. As a scientist, he immediately took on board that it was electric light, quickly correlating this with the distant but distinctive sound of a generator. Several computer monitors sat on a bench to his left. Two were manned by turbaned men; three others had screen-savers lazily doing their thing, tumbling cubes and fish going nowhere. Faisal stood there with an armed man on either side. ‘You have something we want, doctor. I’d appreciate your cooperation. In fact . . . I must insist.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Mark, glad he’d got the words out but afraid his insides were turning to water.

‘Let’s cut to the chase, shall we?’ said Faisal, holding up a disk salvaged from the contents of Mark’s briefcase, which were at his feet. ‘This is encrypted; I need the key.’

Mark swallowed, his head swimming with all that had happened.
Cut to the chase
?
he thought.
Cut to the fucking chase
?
That was the sort of thing English actors said in some crummy olden-days drama on TV, not some fucking psycho in a cave in the middle of fucking nowhere. When would this nightmare end? His head lolled in silent appeal. ‘I don’t have it.’

‘Shit,’ said Faisal although not angrily, more as if it had been the response he’d been expecting
and he was mildly irritated. He punched numbers into his satellite phone and then held it by his side until it beeped twice. He examined it and nodded in satisfaction before turning it round and holding it up in front of Mark’s face. Laura and Jade filled the small screen. Their mouths were taped but their eyes spoke of the terror they felt. A knife blade hovered at Laura’s throat. Jade wore a badge that said
I am 4
.

‘Now, do we understand each other?’

The dam broke inside Mark and he unleashed every expletive he could think of at Faisal, who remained impassive throughout the outburst. When he finally ran out of energy and imagination, his curses degenerating into disjointed sobs and appeals, Faisal said simply, ‘Give me the key.’

Mark, unable to take his eyes off Laura and Jade, nodded silently and was released from his bindings. He picked up his empty briefcase from the floor and said, ‘I need a knife.’

Faisal nodded and one of the armed men handed Mark his knife, handle first, to the accompaniment of clicking gun mechanisms. Mark picked away at the stitching of an interior side panel of his briefcase and extracted a computer memory card. He handed it to Faisal who passed it to one of the men sitting at the monitors. After a few moments, the man appeared satisfied and indicated as much to Faisal, who smiled. The intelligence agent took back the memory card and put it along with the disk he’d held up earlier in an envelope which Mark noted was marked
Vaccination schedules
. He handed the envelope to one of his men and told him where to take it, adding, ‘When you get to the village, leave it at the clinic. Dr Khan will pick it up from there.’ Then he turned to Mark who was now suffering the agony of having betrayed his country on top of everything else.

Mark said, ‘You’ve got what you wanted. Let my wife and daughter go.’

Faisal didn’t bother with a reply. He nodded to the armed men flanking Mark and they gripped his arms to drag him outside, ignoring his questions and pleas before ending his suffering with a burst of gunfire that echoed off the surrounding rocks in a fading, repetitive requiem.

Back in
Deansville, Laura's and Jade’s lives also came to an end. Not being in the wilds of the Khyber, gunfire would have aroused suspicion in the small Maryland town, so a knife was used. What had started off as such a good day for the McAllister family had ended very badly indeed.

When Faisal received confirmation that the marines left to guard the vehicles down in the pass had been dealt with and that the vehicles themselves had been destroyed, he felt a warm glow of satisfaction. All he needed now was a message confirming that the information he’d obtained from the American had arrived safely at the pre-arranged collection point in the village for his mission to have been a complete success. He got it before sunrise.

When Faisal emerged from the cave complex to watch the sun come up, his conclusion that life was good was to be short-lived. He had underestimated the CIA man Brady who, unsure of whom or whom not to trust in Pakistani intelligence, had attached a tiny GPS transmitter to Faisal's clothing, thus ensuring that the CIA would know exactly where he was within a one-metre range of any spot on the planet. If for any reason Brady did not report back within an agreed period of time, a train of events would swing into operation. Brady was dead, but from beyond the grave he was responsible for a little black speck's appearing in the morning sky as Faisal drew deeply on his first cigarette of the day. The speck was an unmanned drone that had locked on to Faisal’s GPS signal.

The calm gaze with which Faisal watched the speck get bigger had barely time to change in response to the awful dawn of realisation before the drone unleashed i
ts fiery equivalent of hell on earth and Faisal, together with his friends and accomplices, were all but vaporised in the firestorm that swept through the caves. The CIA wasn’t to know that the information they wanted most to destroy wasn’t actually there.

Dr Steven Dunbar parked the Porsche Boxster and got out to clamber over steep dunes to reach the beach, with the soft, dry sand and tufted grass begrudging him every step of the way. He needed to escape the travails of everyday life, to get his head straight, to think things through, and, as always, it was a beach he came to when milestones loomed large in his life. The location of the beach didn’t really matter as long as it was deserted and afforded him views to the horizon with a big expanse of sky above, the bigger the better.

Today’s beach was on the north shore of the Solway Firth in south-west Scotland – the part tourists rushed past on their way north to Loch
Lomond in their haste to embrace the Walter Scott-manufactured myths of the Scottish highlands. Many of those who knew and loved the wild, romantic shores of the Solway were in no hurry to let the cat out of the bag and were aided in their desire for continuing anonymity by uneven sand banks, fast-flowing tides and quicksand lying in wait for the unwary.

Steven’s milestones were the usual mix of sad and happy common to most folk – a time when a life-changing decision had to be made, the death of a parent,
an impending marriage, the birth of a child and, in his case, the tragic loss of a wife through the ravages of a brain tumour. Today he’d learned of the death of a friend and needed to be alone. He’d been on leave up in Scotland visiting his daughter Jenny when the news had reached him. Sir John Macmillan, his boss and head of the Sci-Med Inspectorate in London, had phoned to tell him that Dr Simone Ricard of the French-based but international charity
Médecins Sans Frontières
had been found dead. Macmillan had remembered that she’d been a friend of Steven’s and thought it significant enough to interrupt his long weekend with the news. Currently he had no further information but would keep him informed if and when details came in.

Steven reached the water’s edge and drew a line in the sand with his toe for no particular reason. It was clear enough today to see where the sky fell into the sea and this pleased him. It conferred a sense of order on the scene
, unlike days when the heavens disappeared into the water in a miasma of grey nothingness. He thought about Simone and wondered, as he had so often in the past, how they had become friends in the first place. True, they were both doctors, but they could hardly have been more different in outlook.

Simone was French, the only child of professional parents – both university lecturers – who’d been born and brought up in Marseilles but had moved to Paris to complete her education and attend medical school. She had wanted to become a doctor from an early age and had never wavered in her determination. For her, medicine was a true vocation while for him it had been the course he’d followed at university, the one he had pursued
largely in order to please parents and teachers who’d sought the kudos of having a doctor in the family or on the school records.

He had gone all the way through medical school before maturing enough and achieving the self-confidence necessary to admit to himself and everyone else that he had no great wish to board the medical career train: his heart simply wasn’t in it. When the arguments wer
e over and the dust had settled he had gone on to complete his studies and qualify as a doctor, even working his obligatory registration year in hospitals before veering off to join the army and pursue a career more suited to his love of the outdoors and a yen for adventure.

A strong build and a natural athletic ability honed on the mountains of his native Cumbria had ensured rapid progress in the military, serving with the Parachute Regiment and then with Special Forces in operations all over the world. The army of course, did not ignore his medical qualifications and had put them to good use in training him up to become an expert in field medicine, the medicine of the battlefield where initiative and the ability to improvise were often as important as professional knowledge. It was these qualities that
would later lead to his recruitment to the Sci-Med Inspectorate when the time came for him to leave the service in his mid-thirties.

The
Sci-Med Inspectorate comprised a small investigative unit based in the UK’s Home Office under the direction of Sir John Macmillan. It was their job to investigate possible crime or wrong-doing in the hi-tech areas of science and medicine – areas where the police lacked expertise. The investigators were all qualified medics or scientists who had done well in other jobs before coming to Sci-Med. Macmillan did not employ new graduates: his people had to have proved themselves under stressful, demanding conditions in real life. Turning out for the local rugby club or indulging in executive team-building games at the weekend did not count for much to his way of thinking. He knew the most unlikely people could crack when reality came to call.

Steven had proved himself to be a first class investigator and was regarded as such by Macmillan although they had not always seen eye to
eye, Steven often feeling frustrated when highly placed wrong-doers were too frequently in his eyes allowed to get away with their crimes in the so-called ‘national interest’. A couple of years before, things had come to a head after a particularly difficult assignment and Steven had resigned from the Inspectorate to begin a new life with Tally – Dr Natalie Simmons – a paediatrician working in a children’s hospital in Leicester whom he had met in the course of a previous investigation.

Tally had never really come to terms with what Steven did for a living, having witnessed at first hand some of the dangerous situations he found himself in. It had proved such a stumbling block to their relationship that they had parted over it
, with Tally declaring that she couldn’t face a life of continual worries over whether her man was going to come home or not. Things had changed when Steven resigned from Sci-Med and got back in touch to tell her so, assuring her that he had no intention of returning. Would she now consider spending her life with him? To his relief, Tally’s feelings hadn’t changed. She had welcomed him back with open arms.

Steven had found a job with a large pharmaceutical company in
Leicester as head of security – more concerned with the guarding of intellectual property and the vetting of staff than the patrolling of premises – and they had set up home together in Tally’s flat. Despite loathing his job and finding himself in the rat race he’d always managed to avoid, Steven declined all attempts by John Macmillan to lure him back to Sci-Med, believing that, in time, he would grow to feel better about his new career and consoling himself with the thought that at least he had Tally.

An unexpected wildcard had been thrown into the mix when Macmillan had fallen ill with a bra
in tumour and had asked to see Steven before undergoing major surgery with what doctors had warned him was a less than certain outcome. At Tally’s insistence, Steven had travelled to London to be at Macmillan’s bedside, only to find himself immediately under pressure when Macmillan asked that he seriously consider taking over from him as head of Sci-Med should he fail to pull through. Steven, faced with the awful choice between reneging on his promise to Tally and turning down a possible last request from the man he respected more than anyone else had in fact declined. He had apologised to Macmillan, hoping that he’d understand how much Tally had come to mean to him and that he couldn’t risk losing her.

There was to be another twist
, however, when Tally, sensing how unhappy Steven was in his new job – although he’d never openly admitted it – and how badly he fitted in to the system of corporate hierarchy, decided that she couldn’t be party to such a situation any longer. She’d insisted that Steven return to Sci-Med: she would support him and they’d work something out.

In the event, Steven did not commit to taking over at
Sci-Med but did agree to go back and take a look at something that had been troubling Macmillan greatly, the sudden deaths of a number of people including a former health minister who’d been involved in a series of health service reforms some twenty years before. It was during the course of this investigation that Macmillan underwent surgery and amazed his doctors by making a good recovery against all the odds. He was now back at Sci-Med in full charge of all his faculties and the organisation he had founded.

Ste
ven, who had resigned his job with the pharmaceutical company in order to carry out the investigation, was still with Sci-Med but ever mindful of how Tally felt whatever she said – something that constantly caused him to overstate the routine nature of what he was doing, hoping to convince her that being in danger was very much the exception rather than the rule. Tally didn’t really believe it and he had to concede that she did have a point. He had come perilously close to losing his life on more than one occasion in the past few years.

Tally hadn’t come with him to
Scotland this weekend: she’d agreed to provide cover at the children’s hospital for her boss whose mother had died after a short illness. Steven had driven north alone to spend time with his daughter Jenny and the family she had lived with since his wife Lisa’s death. Jenny had been a baby at the time but was now moving into the ‘seniors’ at her primary school in the village of Glenvane in Dumfriesshire where she lived with Lisa’s sister, Sue, her solicitor husband Richard and their own two children Peter and Mary.

Tally and Jenny got on just fine b
ut Steven had given up harbouring dreams about his daughter's coming to live with them on a permanent basis and all of them playing happy families – a notion of domestic bliss he’d entertained for some years, albeit to happen at some unspecified time in the future. He now recognised it as being both impractical and unrealistic. Jenny had lived too long with the folks in Glenvane and was happy there, accepted and much loved as one of the family. Having a ‘real daddy’ who came to visit whenever he could was a bonus in her life not an alternative. Sue and Richard had agreed with this assessment, having no wish at all to lose their ‘second daughter’.

Apart from this, Tally had a career of her own to pursue and no thoughts of giving it up. In fact, Steven’s return to
Sci-Med had encouraged her to start applying for a consultant’s post, the next step up from her current senior registrar’s position and something she’d been delaying because of Steven's having given up so much to come and live with her in Leicester. Success in this would almost certainly mean a move to another town or city, but with Steven living in London through the week Leicester was no longer their natural base. A position in a London hospital would suit them both down to the ground.

Steven paused in his progress along the water’s edge to pick up a handful of stones and begin throwing them out as far as he could, straining to hear the splash against the sound of the wind in his ears. Each successful one seemed to trigger a new thought about Simone. Whereas he had gone off to join the army as soon as he’d finished medical school, Simone had gone off to do what she could for the sick and the suffering in the third world. She would never follow the traditionally comfortable career path of the medic to middle class affluence and status. She would use her skills and dedication to help those who needed her in Africa and
Asia throughout a career which had come to an abrupt and unfair end for whatever reason.

She had been working for some years for
MSF, prepared to go wherever they chose to send her, but she was also a very charming and persuasive woman who had been used by the organisation to seek funding and practical help from big business –mainly the pharmaceutical industry – on many occasions, something she’d proved good at, with company executives often complaining with good humour that she could pick their pockets without their realising what had happened.

Steven had first met
her when he had been seeking information about an outbreak of Ebola in one of the African countries where she had recently been working. He had been trying to identify the source of a possible case being held in a UK isolation unit. They had liked each other from the outset and their friendship had been cemented when Simone spoke of the difficulties of performing surgery in the bush and Steven was able to help her with tips and suggestions gained from his own wide experience of field medicine. Carrying out emergency surgery on the wounded in the deserts of the Middle East and in the depths of the South American jungle had given him a lot to pass on.

Simone could never understand why Steven had joined the army in the first place –
You train to save life and then you train to take it? It’s crazy
– just as he didn’t understand why she had devoted her entire life to what he saw as taking on an impossible task with the odds continually stacked against her and everyone like her. He was a very practical individual who didn’t believe in getting into fights he couldn’t win while she was very much an '
It’s better to light a candle than curse the darkness'
sort of person. Although he’d never said so, Steven had always suspected that religion might be behind Simone’s outlook, as was so often the case with those involved in the apparently selfless doing of good, but this idea was torpedoed when on one occasion Simone had volunteered that she didn’t believe in God. It had taken him so much by surprise that he could only mumble ‘Me neither'.

They had met at irregular intervals, usually when Simone was in
London with her ‘begging bowl’, as she put it, although it sounded better with a French accent. They would get together for dinner and discuss the state of the world, Steven’s views reflecting his ever-growing cynicism while an apparently eternal optimism that always made him laugh shone from Simone. He smiled at the memory as he picked up another handful of pebbles to throw into the sea. He had once said to her that he could understand why everyone liked her but failed to see what she saw in him. She’d laughed and put her hand on his arm to reply, ‘You have a good heart, Steven. Don’t try so hard to hide it.’