The Chosen Dead (Jenny Cooper 5) (45 page)

Jenny could picture Ayen as a child sitting straight-backed in the mission school classroom. She delivered her evidence with the same earnestness and attention to detail that she must have shown in her studies. Despite all she had seen, she remained rigorous and attentive, rooted in something deep and substantial Jenny could only assume was the faith inculcated by the Sisters. Having spoken just a few sentences, Ayen had the jury – and Jenny – captivated.

She had lived in Ginya all her life, she said, and had four brothers and two sisters. When she was young and at school, she had hoped to leave the village and train to be a nurse, but then the war came. Many of the men, including two of her brothers, were killed by the Janjaweed, their throats cut and their bodies left unburied. There was no hope of leaving after that. Life became a little easier when, a year or so ago, the old well was replaced by a borehole that went deep into the earth. It was wide enough only for a thin pipe through which water was sucked by a solar pump, but there was always sufficient to drink. It had always worked without a problem until one morning the pump was found broken. A young man was sent to the next village, where there was a telephone from which he could call the government office in Malakal. For nearly two days they went without water until a tanker arrived. It was like a gift from God.

The tanker water had tasted good: clear and cool, far nicer than the water they drew from the well. Everybody drank until their bellies were swollen and could hold no more. It was some hours later during the night that people started to fall ill. At first it was the children and the very old. It began with headaches and fevers, then their skins erupted in rashes, their faces and limbs started to swell and the whites of their eyes turned black. They started to fit as if devils were dancing inside them. By morning adults were falling sick, too, even the strongest men. Ayen prayed with her sisters just as the nuns had taught them, but it was no good. One by one they were all struck down. Some of the old people were saying it was a curse, others said the water had been poisoned. Ayen hadn’t known what to believe: she had drunk the water and felt fine. By the second night she was the only person left in the village who wasn’t sick, and more than half the people were already dead. None of her family survived till morning. She waited for death to take her, too. But it didn’t come.

‘I went out of the village to pray,’ she said. ‘I remembered the stories of Lazarus, and of Legion and the swine; I prayed the evil spirits would leave us and go into the cattle.’ Ayen paused, raising her hand to her mouth as if she might cry, but no tears came. ‘Then I saw the jeep coming. I saw Mr Adam.’

Her account grew sketchier as she tried to recall the events of the bewildering days and weeks following her rescue from Ginya, a place she had left only twice in her twenty years of life. Jenny extracted the barest details of her journey to the hospital at Malakal, where the doctors could find nothing wrong with her. She had nowhere to go and asked Adam to help her find the nuns who had run the school in Ginya. She wanted to go to their convent in Juba, but he told her he wanted to take her back to his country. He said he would look after her and that she could help to find out what had killed all the people in her village.

They stayed in Malakal for several weeks, getting her papers and a passport, then Adam brought her to England to the house in Bristol. He told her she wouldn’t have to wait long, that he was going to find out what caused the disease in her village and then she would tell her story. When people heard it, he told her, there would be no more people dying like they had in Ginya. One morning he came to find her and said they were going to meet a man, a doctor, who would scrape her mouth to find out why she hadn’t died like the others. They travelled a long way in Adam’s car. She sat with his son, Sam, in the back seat.

‘Is the man you met that day with Mr Jordan sitting in this room?’ Jenny asked.

‘Yes,’ Ayen replied. ‘That’s him.’ She pointed to Guy Harrison.

They had met beside a petrol station. He scraped the inside of her mouth with a cotton bud, then handed something to Adam that looked like a silver bottle. They drove again, this time to the place where Adam’s father was buried. His father had been very precious to him, Adam had told her, and he wanted to talk to him before they told the story of what had happened in Ginya.

She had left him by himself and was walking with Sam in the field when the men came. There were three of them in a big vehicle. She heard shouting and saw Adam running towards his car. He managed to get inside, and she saw him drinking down the contents of the silver bottle as the men beat on the windows. One of them saw her and chased her into the woods, where she managed to lose him.

Ayen dipped her head in shame. ‘I ran away. I left the baby and I ran away through the trees. It was like the war again.’

She spent the night hiding, sure that she was going to be hunted down and killed.

‘Why did you think you would be killed?’ Jenny asked.

‘The men who took Adam spoke the language of the Janjaweed.’

‘They were speaking Arabic?’

‘Yes. I heard them shouting. I had heard that tongue during the war.’

‘Did you see them take Adam Jordan away?’

Ayen nodded. ‘Yes. They pulled him from the car and drove him away.’

She had woken to the sound of voices. From the cover of the trees she watched policemen arrive and saw them take Sam. Too frightened to show herself, she stayed hidden until late in the morning, when the policeman standing by Adam’s car walked away from it along the road. She ran to the car to fetch the doll she had given him as a present when he rescued her from Ginya. She had carved it herself.

‘Why did you do that?’ Jenny asked.

Ayen looked at her, puzzled, as if the answer were obvious. ‘While people were dying, I held it in my hand and the sickness didn’t touch me. There were good spirits for me in that doll.’

The good spirits had continued their work. A car stopped for her on the road and the woman driving it had taken her to Bristol. Frightened to tell her story and not knowing who to trust, Ayen had pretended not to be able to speak English and told the woman nothing. For days she hid in her room, too frightened to leave, even to fetch food, then Mr Thorn arrived. He told her he was taking her to Ireland, to the Sisters of Charity who had taught her in school. She went in his car with Gabra, but in the hurry to leave she had forgotten her doll and there were no spirits to guard her. The police caught them before she could get on the boat.

Jenny reached down into her briefcase and brought out the figurine that had been lying on the floor of the abandoned bedsit. ‘Would you like it back?’

Ayen’s eyes lit up. Jenny got up from her seat and handed it to her. She seized hold of it in outstretched hands and pressed it to her lips.

‘Thank you, Miss Deng. You may step down.’

Clinging to the doll, Ayen made her way back to her seat.

Honouring her agreement with Fitzpatrick, Jenny asked the single reporter present to leave the hall while the next witness gave evidence. Stirring from a semi-doze, he dutifully did as she asked.

Every bit as gawky as she remembered him, Guy Harrison kept his eyes fixed on the floor, too shy to look directly at the jury, as Jenny led him through his evidence. He had been working for Combined Life Systems first as a lab technician, then as a senior technician, since its establishment by the late Professor Roman Slavsky ten years earlier. From the outset, a premium was placed on security. All employees were required to sign a strict confidentiality agreement containing punitive penalty clauses: leaking company secrets wouldn’t only cost your job, you would be sued for everything you owned. The quid pro quo was that everyone down to the receptionist was granted generous share options: Slavsky convinced them he had a vision that would make their company one of the richest pharmas in the world; they were all going to be millionaires.

The concept was simple and, as Slavsky often repeated to them, a perfect example of beating swords into ploughshares. As a Soviet military scientist, he had spent many years developing work first commenced by his American counterparts in the 1960s. In its first incarnation, the idea had been to study populations that showed immunity to certain common viruses and bacteria, with a view to developing weapons that would attack only certain ethnic groups. The work had limited success, but in the early 1980s US biotech companies started perfecting cheap laboratory techniques that allowed DNA from one organism to be spliced into any other. The fruits of much of this work filtered back to Slavsky and his colleagues in Moscow, who began to see new possibilities for targeted biological weapons. What if an agent like botulism could be adapted to attack only the cells of a person who carried a given set of genetic characteristics? It was a tantalizing prospect for military planners, but Slavsky’s work hadn’t progressed beyond the theoretical stage when he fled across the Iron Curtain in 1989.

Theory made the leap to practical reality in the early 2000s, when it become possible to decode vast sections of the human genome quickly and cheaply. Slavksy’s idea was to put an ethical spin on his earlier research. He would isolate the genetic code for ethnicity not to develop smart weapons, but to create smart vaccines and medicines that would be effective only on certain populations. He saw it as a huge joke on rich Western governments, who had used their financial muscle to drive down the price they paid for drugs, beyond the point at which the manufacturers could afford to discount them for poorer countries, thus depriving the neediest of badly needed medicines. But if you could develop an Aids vaccine or a cancer treatment that would operate only on West Africans or Indonesians, they could have it for a dollar, while Americans and Europeans would have to pay ten for a version engineered to treat their populations. If he could perfect the technique, every major drugs company in the world would want to license the technology.

Their efforts were stunningly successful. The DNA of individuals from hundreds of different ethnic groups was compared for minute variations. Within six months it became apparent that in among the three billion base pairs of DNA that make up the human genome there was a region containing fewer than a hundred pairs, in which the code varied significantly among different local populations.

The work then progressed to the much slower task of identifying and precisely analysing the proteins expressed by these genes, for only when they were understood could a mechanism be reverse-engineered that would allow a drug to activate only in the presence of that tiny sequence.

‘Imagine a very complicated set of molecular keys and locks,’ Harrison said. ‘Our technology was designed to create locks that could be opened only by the key created by each specific ethnic gene.’

By 2008 work had already begun on a meningitis vaccine that would operate only on populations sharing a gene sequence common to 80 per cent of sub-Saharan Africans. The end was in sight, but Slavsky had worked himself to exhaustion. Word of their work had leaked out. Slavsky suddenly found himself bombarded with offers to buy the business. He resisted, but following his sudden death, his daughter became the majority shareholder and sold to the highest bidder, Mohammed Al-Rahman, a Saudi businessman who had invested his family’s oil wealth in biotech.

During the period of Al-Rahman’s ownership, everything had changed. Many senior personnel had been replaced, and Harrison had found himself demoted to menial tasks and excluded from the regular strategy meetings. Within the past eighteen months, a whole new lab within a lab had been established, and dark rumours had circulated about the nature of its research.

One of those absorbed into the new secretive team was Katya Toluev, a gifted young woman whom Slavsky had personally recruited from St Petersburg University. Harrison had worked closely with her until she had joined the inner circle, but their friendship picked up again when they found themselves working alongside one another at the Diamond Light Source. It was obvious to Harrison that Katya was deeply troubled and unhappy. Near the end of their stretch at Diamond she finally took him into her confidence and told him that she and her team were working on a contract to create BWs. Al-Rahman had refused to tell them who the buyer was or even to assure them it was legal. She suspected the customer was a Middle Eastern or North African government: they were developing a strain of meningitis designed to activate in the presence of the sub-Saharan gene, which they had named SS1, and another which they had isolated amongst Ashkenazi Jews, named, unimaginatively, AJ1.

Katya’s concerns weren’t only ethical: she knew the work was illegal. She confessed to Harrison that she had been contacted by an Oxford academic, Sonia Blake, who was surprisingly well informed. She had known that Slavsky had been developing ethnically targeted medicines, and she also claimed to have information that some of the staff imported from the Middle East were known to have been working on BW programmes in Saudi Arabia and North Africa. It was a crude attempt at blackmail: Blake offered Katya the choice of turning whistleblower or taking her chances once Blake made her evidence public. Katya hadn’t needed much persuasion. Nor had Harrison.

He agreed to help her obtain evidence: a live sample of the recombinant meningitis that could be independently analysed. Several weeks passed during which Katya hadn’t mentioned the subject again, but late one evening she had called him in great distress, saying that she had heard from Blake that there had been a mass death from meningitis in South Sudan that bore all the hallmarks of their pathogen. A British witness had reported that an entire village had been wiped out, leaving only one survivor, who had been brought to the UK. Sonia Blake was preparing to make formal allegations based on a dossier of evidence, and had given Katya a last chance to cooperate.