Payback (26 page)

Now
it was Barton who was quiet, as he furiously thought through how to play this. And he had just accused Tom of not being a risk-taker! Could Tom possibly realise what he had done? In a very real sense, he had just thrown his life down like a chip at the Estoril casino. Barton was left with only two stark options. Have Tom killed. Or involve him in everything, as a full partner.

‘
Is this why you met up with Peregrine Mitchell?’ he asked, at last.

The
sound of Mitchell’s name nearly sent Tom into catatonic shock. It was his death warrant. Barton knew about Mitchell! He was as good as dead. There could
be
no other outcome. ‘Mitchell?’ he parried, the panic cracking his voice.

Barton
watched the reaction to what he had said and puzzled over it. ‘You met a headhunter from Management International. At some Pall Mall club. So you really are serious about leaving. What’s he offered you? Some nice safe corporate job? Pension? Job security? Isn’t that really what you want?’

Slowly
it was becoming clear that Barton did not know headhunting was just Mitchell’s cover. Perhaps he was safe after all. In fact, he could make it work for him. ‘So. Now even I get followed by your goddamn private detectives!’ His feigned outrage sounded convincing. ‘Well good! Now you can see that I’m in demand. I
have
other options. But no, I’m not interested in being some corporate desk jockey. If I’d wanted that, security, the white picket fence syndrome, I wouldn’t have stuck by you all these years, would I?’

‘
My private detective reported something else.’ Barton’s cold, washed-out blue eyes held Tom, playing with him, like a cat with a bird. ‘It seems you spent the night with my daughter.’

The
blow across his mouth threw Tom’s head against the side window, and blood gushed from his lip, split by Barton’s Masonic pinky ring. The big man’s face was now hard against his, the stale cigar breath acrid, making Tom feel sick. ‘You sleep with Lydia, the one person I care about in this whole stinking world! What was it? A one-off...a quickie? Or was screwing her your way of hitting back at me?’ The second blow was less hard, but sent spasms of searing pain through his nose.

‘
No!’ Tom called out, grabbing Barton’s collar and shaking him viciously. ‘You don’t understand. I like Lydia. A lot. But I figured you wouldn’t want me seeing her.’

Barton
contemptuously brushed off Tom’s grip, and moved back a little, calmer now. His mood swings were lightning quick. ‘She likes you. Always has. It’s written all over her. Every time she sees you.’ He was panting slightly. ‘Why do you think she schlepped all the way out to Belize—to see me? To snorkel at the Cays? No way.’

Tom
shook his head, stemming the blood with his handkerchief. ‘I don’t know what to say to you.’

But
this was something Barton had been thinking about a lot, since reading the detective’s report on their night together. He had not intended to confront Tom with it just yet, but a vague plan, ambition even had been formulating in his scheming, hyperactive mind. ‘But you really do like her?’

‘
She’s special. Yes.’

Suddenly
Barton was grinning. ‘Then everything’s solved,’ he said, handing Tom his own handkerchief. ‘Everything’s tidy.’

‘
I don’t understand.’

‘
It’s obvious. There’s no way I could involve a regular partner in what I’m doing. I simply couldn’t trust anyone that much. Not even you. But a son-in-law...Now that would be someone I really
could
make a full partner. As one of the family. And I certainly need some help. You said you were in or out. Well...agree to marry Lydia, and you’re in. In, right over your head. Deal?’

Tom
stared at the offered hand. It was typical of the man’s megalomania to offer such a thing without even a thought to whether Lydia actually wanted to marry him. But the unstated alternative to the bargain hung heavily in the air.

‘
Deal. If she’ll have me,’ Tom heard himself saying. Barton’s burst of violence had really brought home to him just how unstable the man had become. More so even than all the cold frightening facts from Mitchell.

‘
Good!’ Barton smiled. ‘And I’ll tell you everything—everything, tonight.’

*

Lydia had stayed on at the ranch, to kill the remaining four days before her flight back to London. All around her workmen were raising electric fences to encircle the inner complex of the ranch-house and the cabanas. Two more helipads were being marked out by the landing strip, and four tall, stilted guard posts were going up. A group of fifty military-looking men had also arrived, wearing fawn and green fatigues. They erected their own tented village in a morning, and by afternoon were jogging and drilling like the small private army they were.

‘
What’s happening here?’ she asked Penny as he drove her off in his buggy. He was taking her to his lab again. As, thanks to Banto, there were now no animals left there for testing, her father had hit on the idea of getting her to see what actually went on in a genetics lab. In this way he hoped to reduce her prejudices against the science. And himself.

‘
They’re getting the place ready for an important meeting. Some international VIPs.’

‘
Scientists? They must be expecting one hell of an attack from the animal rights people.’

‘
No. This all has nothing to do with my side of things. It’s one of your father’s other businesses. Some investment syndicate. That’s all I or anyone else around here knows about it.’

She
pressed him, knowing any additional information would be useful to Tom and his people, but it was clear that he knew no more. Despite herself, she had enjoyed all the time so far spent with Penny at the lab, and they had held long and mutually enlightening debates over the hot topic of bio-ethics, not least because the USA, unlike most of Europe, had yet fully to ban human clone experimentation. Penny dismissed the hysteria over the possibility of human cloning, pointing out that mice were much closer genetically to humans than sheep—and no one had come close to cloning even one of them. Despite this, he did confess that rumours persisted in the profession of the Chinese already conducting human clone experimentation.

On
her first visit to the lab, she had donned a white coat and been given a thorough induction. This began with her performing Penny’s party trick. Following his written-out recipe, she put an onion she had finely chopped in a cooking dish, and stirred in a half-pint solution of water, two and a half tablespoons of washing-up liquid, and a teaspoon of salt. This she cooked in a cool oven for five minutes, regularly stirring, before liquidising it at a high temperature for five seconds.

Having
strained the remaining liquid, she added a few drops of fresh pineapple juice, while vigorously mixing it. This she then, as instructed, put into a tall, chilled glass before finally smoothly adding a little freezer-cold vodka to float on top. After a few minutes, a cloudy layer appeared where the base liquid met with the vodka. This had brought her to the end of the recipe instructions, and she looked at the mess disappointed, convinced it had all gone wrong. She called Penny over, curious to know what she had just done. And why.

He
looked at the mixture and beamed. ‘Well done! Right first time,’ he said, before handing her a spatula. ‘Now, try very carefully to fish out that milky stuff.’

As
she did as instructed, it turned into a fibrous web which she lifted out. ‘Well?’

‘
Congratulations! That stuff’s known as deoxyribonucleic acid. You’ve just created DNA.’ Applauding, he gave her a T-shirt featuring the DNA double helix spiral. ‘You’re now an official member of the DNA club.’

Later
she had learned how to assist as one of the technicians used X-ray crystallography in their attempts in earnest to replicate genetically antigens of the disease-immune PNG cell lines. Penny’s genuine research work, funded by her father, was progressing well. It was Penny’s price for masterminding the ‘Jenner’ scam. By the end, it all served to confuse her, challenging her prejudices. From what she had learned, there was obviously much potential benefit from genetic research—for animals as well as humans. And she had also come to realise that the process was not as alien as she had thought—cell division, meiosis and binary fission all occurring naturally in bewilderingly diverse ways in plants, insects, mammals and man.

Perhaps
her most startling discovery of all, though, was that someone like Penny was not a one-dimensional monster, but a thoughtful, well-read man: motivated only by his vision of a better, disease-free future. Even a future with food-chain animals bred with low/no pain thresholds, and temperamentally programmed to cope with the trauma of factory farming. The two of them were of course worlds apart in their visions, their paradigms, but overlapped far more than either had expected in terms of ethical humanism. It was a discovery that for a fleeting time even made her reappraise her father. Until of course the appalling truth came flooding back to her...

The
next day, she decided not to return to the lab, opting instead to take a horse from the ranch. She might as well grab a tiny holiday exploring a little of the area, having turned down her father’s offer to pay for her to fly back with them.

As
she cantered down the drive to pick up a nearby trail, she did not feel the eyes watching from the bush. Eyes that had tired from long hours of watching for Sir James Barton, but which had none the less seen the deference with which everyone treated this mere woman. Including the man who had taken from him. And he had seen the
kepala’s
face in hers. The corn hair. Blue eyes. Pig nose. Dimple chin. She was
wantok
; she was family with the
kepala
.

She
was the chief’s daughter.

*

After a three-hour meeting with Blacher and Rybinski at the lab, the driver had taken them back to the city. Barton always stayed in a suite at the Ritz in Lisbon, one of his favourite hotels in the world, and as they checked in, he arranged to meet Tom at eight in the piano bar.

Tom
’s room was a mini-suite and he quickly unpacked, showered and collapsed on the bed to think. His split lip had swollen badly, but mercifully his teeth had escaped damage. Head swimming with all that was happening to him, he began to drift off, still jet-lagged, into a light sleep. Until something woke him. It was not the phone. Not someone knocking at the door. But something, someone had woken him...

He
opened his eyes, and shot up with a start. Staring down at him was a woman he had never seen before. Clamping her strong hand on his mouth, she shook her head and hushed him, waving a finger at her lips. Wincing as pain again shot through his tender lip, he sat up, nodding that he understood.

‘
I am Hortense,’ she said, now moving her hand from his mouth. ‘I work with the British. At the Oeiras lab. Mr Mitchell will have told you about me.’

He
looked carefully at her. Mid-thirties, olive-skinned, black page-boy hair, short, strong body. Mitchell had certainly told him about a female agent MI6 had got into the lab. But what to do? How was he to know this was she? Should he trust her, and risk revealing his own involvement? He felt completely unprepared.

‘
I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he replied, cautiously. ‘And how the hell did you get in here anyway?’

She
ignored the question. Standing in corridors and knocking at hotel doors was not something they taught you in training school. ‘I have no time. Rybinski suspects me. You have to help.’ Her eyes were pleading.

‘
I’ve told you, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Should he ring the number Mitchell had given him? Even that would be tantamount to conceding his involvement if she
was
one of Barton’s private security people, testing him.

‘
OK then. Don’t say anything. Just listen. OK?’

‘
Go ahead,’ he replied, sharpening his mind.

‘
I have to disappear tonight. I pushed my luck yesterday trying to get samples out of Rybinski’s private lab. I can’t go back again. They’re already watching my flat. This I know.’ She now sat down on a stool, obviously exhausted and afraid. ‘You’ll be at the lab again tomorrow? As planned?’

He
nodded.

‘
Good. Then you have to do something. Something I failed to do. Rybinski has been conducting his own experiments. Experiments he keeps from Blacher. The Englishman thinks he’s simply producing botulinum toxin. As a military deterrent for Israel. But Rybinski has been modifying it somehow. Genetically engineering the virus. We don’t precisely know how, and we don’t know why. After all, what can be the point? Botulinum toxin is itself one of the most devastating viral killers in the world. But I’m certain that Rybinski has created some new strain. I was tasked to get a sample out for analysis. So we could understand it, and create an antidote.’