‘You do know the way?’ Richter asked, steering one of the pool cars, an anonymous dark blue Ford Fiesta, through the tangle of suburban streets in the fairly new housing estate.
Charles Vernon nodded, perhaps a trifle uncertainly, and referred again to a piece of paper he was holding in his hand.
‘It should be the next street on the right,’ he replied. And as Richter turned the last corner he pointed ahead. ‘There it is.’
‘And you’re sure he’ll be in?’
‘Yes. He rarely leaves the house because of the medication he’s on. He’s been in pain ever since he was shot. And, in any case, I telephoned before we left. He’s expecting us, and he’s also expecting a specialist this afternoon, which is why we’re here first.’
Richter parked the car about fifty yards from the house Vernon had indicated and left the vehicle on the opposite side of the road.
‘His name’s Johnson, Jonny Johnson,’ Vernon said as they crossed the road together. ‘He’s a former sergeant, as I told you. He served in Iraq and then in Afghanistan before he was invalided out because of his injury. That’s what kept him alive, obviously, though I doubt if he would think himself lucky because of what happened to him.’
Vernon had already briefed Richter about what had happened to Johnson. Leading a foot patrol on the outskirts of Kandahar, on what had seemed to be a fairly quiet day, a sniper’s bullet had ricocheted off a slab of rock and found its way under his body armour and basically smashed his testicles and scrotum to a pulp. His penis barely survived and he had tears in his thighs and buttocks. The doctors had stopped the bleeding and sewn up what they could find, but hadn’t been able to do much more for him, and he’d been invalided out as a result. But, as Vernon had explained, the fact that his testicles had been destroyed meant that the testicular cancer that had slain so many other black soldiers had no way of affecting him.
‘He was the only one left alive from the TRAIT trial,’ Vernon added as they waited beside Johnson’s front door. ‘I went into the archived files and noted the contact details of all the subjects, or victims might be a better word. Then I ran a check on them. Every one of them was dead apart from Johnson, some only dying over the last few weeks. He’d moved house and there’d been a delay in his records being updated. So I changed his details to muddy the waters in case anyone came after him. Anyone trying to snip off the last loose end, as it were.’
‘You very probably saved his life,’ Richter said, then half-turned to the right as the door in front of them opened.
The man standing there looking out at them was black and heavily-built, his upper-body strength still apparent, despite his spreading waistline.
‘Hullo, Professor,’ Johnson said. ‘Come inside.’
His voice was distinctly higher in pitch than Richter had expected, doubtless a consequence of the bullet that had maimed him.
The house was simply furnished with none of the frills – flowers, pictures, throws and that kind of thing – that would suggest a woman’s touch. It reminded Richter of one of the numerous plain and simple single officer’s rooms he had occupied during his military career, just on a much bigger scale.
‘This is a colleague of mine, Paul Richter,’ Vernon said, and the two men shook hands. ‘So, what time’s your appointment, Jonny?’
‘The specialist said he’d be here at three thirty. That’s in just over half an hour. I was surprised to hear from him again after so long, but he said he had some good news, a different kind of treatment that would help make the pain go away.’
Richter smiled at him, but he clearly wasn’t amused.
‘That’s a somewhat cynical and misleading expression, Jonny,’ he said, ‘though we have no doubt that if you do accept the treatment your pain will certainly end – permanently – because you’ll be dead.’
‘What? How do you – and why would anyone want to kill me, if that’s what you mean? I’m a nobody.’
‘You’re not a nobody,’ Vernon said, ‘and we do now think we know what’s been going on. Let me remind you of what I said when I visited you here a couple of weeks ago. Many years ago a medical trial was conducted, and you were one of the subjects but you didn’t know it at the time.’
Vernon sketched out the TRAIT field trial, the catastrophic results of it and how he’d got involved, and what he and Richter expected to happen.
‘All of the other soldiers involved in the trial have since died of testicular cancer,’ he said. ‘When I found you were the last survivor, and when it became clear that something else, something much bigger, was going on with the TRAIT material, I guessed that one of the people involved would probably want to find and eliminate you.’
‘But I don’t know anything about this,’ Johnson said. ‘I couldn’t say anything.’
‘You couldn’t,’ Vernon agreed, ‘but your body could. They were trying to destroy all traces of the project. The victims were all dead – apart from you – and then they started killing the scientists who were involved, the last one only a few weeks ago. They would want you dead because your body very probably still contains some of the bacteria you were infected with, and those, along with the archived TRAIT material, would be enough to expose the whole thing. No trace of the bacteria would have been found in the autopsies of the other soldiers because the pathologists would have had no idea what they were looking for, or even where they should be looking.’
‘And that’s why we think the specialist coming here isn’t going to try to cure you. He’s coming here to kill you,’ Richter said.
‘Why now? Why didn’t they come weeks or months or years ago?’
‘Because TRAIT was old and forgotten, most likely, but I also helped hide you away from official scrutiny,’ Vernon went on. ‘Your old address was in the TRAIT documentation. When I found you’d moved house, and nobody had accessed the archive, I knew I had time to do something. I deleted the old address so that anyone looking for you wouldn’t have a starting point for a search, and I marked your record as NFA – no fixed abode – and deleted all the other contact information like your National Insurance number. For anyone searching for you, you’d seem to have vanished. Two days ago I restored the data with your new address and asked you to call me if anyone approached you. And yesterday they did, and that’s why we’re here now.’
‘And I’m here to make sure nothing happens to you,’ Richter clarified.
‘That figures,’ Johnson said. ‘You remind me of a few special forces guys I’ve met in the past. Compact, strong and scary, and that looks to me like a Glock inside your jacket.’
‘Got it in one.’
Fifteen minutes later, the doorbell rang. Richter and Vernon stepped out of the living room where they’d been talking and into the kitchen, while Johnson went into the hall to answer the door. Richter hadn’t thought there’d be any danger to Johnson until the ‘specialist’ was in the house, and Vernon had guessed that the ‘new treatment’ would probably be in the form of an injection that would send Johnson peacefully to sleep for all eternity.
They listened carefully as Johnson led the way back into the living room, and they could tell at once that there were two visitors, not one, and that altered the dynamics of the situation. Leaving Vernon listening in the kitchen, Richter eased his way into the hall, took out his Glock and silently attached the suppressor to the end of the barrel.
‘What is this new treatment?’ Richter heard Johnson ask.
‘It’s nothing for you to worry about, Mr Johnson. It’s just one injection and then I can guarantee that the pain will end. Could you just roll up your sleeve for me?’
‘Not until you tell me what’s in that syringe,’ Johnson insisted.
‘Yes, why don’t you tell us?’ Charles Vernon said, moving from the kitchen and stepping into the living room.
‘You!’ another voice snapped, a voice Richter recognised. ‘You meddling old fool. Well, you won’t be able to interfere in anything else once I’ve finished with you. Just give him the jab, Gregory. Vernon can come with us so that I can shut him up for good.’
Richter heard the sound of an automatic pistol being cocked and stepped into the living room himself – it was getting quite crowded in there – his Glock aimed in front of him.
‘Good afternoon, Poulson,’ he said and, as William Poulson turned towards him, shifting the aim of a small black automatic pistol he held in his right hand, Richter squeezed the trigger.
The report was like a dull slap, probably completely inaudible outside the house, but the effect on Poulson was devastating. He slammed back into the wall behind him, his mouth open but no sound emerging, and then slid slowly down it until he was sitting on the floor. The pistol dropped from his grip and then his head slumped forward and he toppled sideways.
‘Didn’t like him the first time I met him,’ Richter said.
He walked over to the man, picked up the pistol he’d dropped and put in in his pocket. Then he checked his neck for a pulse.
‘He’s dead?’ Vernon asked, making it sound more like a statement than a question.
‘He has ceased to be,’ Richter agreed, ‘which just leaves us with you,’ he added, turning to the other man in the room.
He was wearing a grey suit and seemed to have been frozen in place. In one hand he held a syringe and in the other an empty ampoule.
‘Professor Gregory Quine, I believe,’ Richter said, ‘and you still haven’t answered the question. What’s in that syringe?’
‘Who are you?’ Quine demanded.
‘Who I am doesn’t matter, Prof. All you need to know is that it’s over because we know all about TRAIT. So give us the answer. Or I’ll shoot you the same as I did your boyfriend over there in the corner. What’s in that syringe?’
Quine shook his head, and Richter aimed the pistol directly at him.
‘It’s what I said it was,’ Quine said. ‘It’s a painkiller. That’s all.’
‘That’s good because I don’t think Jonny here is going to want it. But if I decided to, say, shoot you in the foot, you might be quite glad of it.’
‘He can have it anyway,’ Johnson said. He reached out, grabbed Quine’s right hand and began forcing the syringe across his body and over towards his left arm.
The scientist struggled, but Johnson was bigger and heavier and much stronger. And he was really angry, on several levels.
Quine squealed when the needle entered the muscle of his left bicep, and Johnson simply changed his grip slightly so that his forefinger was resting on the plunger of the syringe. Then he began forcing it down.
‘No, no, please no.’
‘If it was good enough for me, Doctor, I reckon it should be good enough for you,’ Johnson said, then relaxed his grip as Quine slumped down, falling in a heap on the carpeted floor.
Vernon stepped forward and picked up the ampoule that had dropped from his grip.
‘What is it?’ Richter asked.
‘Potassium,’ Vernon replied. ‘Or a potassium compound, anyway.’
‘Which means what?’
‘Which means attempted murder,’ Vernon told him. ‘If he’d administered it, Jonny would have been dead in a few minutes. Of course, it’s supposed to go into the bloodstream, not the muscle, but I guess the effect will be much the same. It just might take a bit longer.’
The three of them stood in a semicircle and stared down at Gregory Quine. His eyes were glazing over and he was dribbling, but he was definitely still alive. For a while, anyway.
‘Sorry about the mess, Jonny,’ Richter said. ‘Give me a couple of minutes and I’ll get it sorted.’
He took out his mobile phone and dialled the Hammersmith direct line.
‘This is Richter,’ he said. ‘I’ll need a clean-up crew with full facilities at this address as soon as you can make it.’ He gave the address of Johnson’s house. ‘There’ll be two bodies to shift – well, there’s only one at the moment but there’ll be two by the time the team gets here – and they’ll both need work. One’s a suicide. That’s the easy one, a self-administered injection. Maybe take him to wherever he lives and leave him in bed. Something like that. The other one kind of walked into one of my bullets so we’ll need something messy to cover it up. A road accident maybe. Got it? Okay, thanks.’
He ended the call and looked across the room at Vernon, who was still staring in a somewhat bemused fashion at the slobbering heap that had previously been Professor Gregory Quine. Johnson – a man clearly far more used to be surrounded by dead bodies than a professor of biochemistry, had sat down in a well-used leather recliner and was looking over at Richter.
‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘If you hadn’t been here and that bastard had pulled a gun on me, I might have had no choice but to take the needle. That or let myself get shot, I suppose. Either way, I’d have been dead. So, thanks.’
‘No problem. I don’t like loose ends. But it’s really all down to the prof here. If he hadn’t started digging we’d all be in a lot more trouble than we already are. But that’s another story.’