Алистер Маклин - The Satan Bug

“You going to smash that desk open?” he demanded.

“Let MacDonald object if he feels like it.” I swung the axe twice and the drawer splintered. The albums and the doctor’s correspondence with the World Health Organisation were still here. I opened the album at the page with the missing photograph and showed it to the General.

“A photograph our good friend didn’t seem to care to have around,” I said. “I have more than a vague, obscure feeling that it may be important. See that scratched out caption, something about six letters, some town certainly, starting with TO. I can’t get it. With any other kind of paper or with two different kinds of ink it would have been easy for the lab boys. But white ink on white ink on this porous blotting paper stuff? No good.”

“Not a chance.” Hardanger gave me a suspicious look. “Why is it important?”

“If I knew that I wouldn’t worry about what the caption was. Did you find our dear Mrs. Turpin at home?”

“No reply. She lives alone, a widow, as I found out from the local station after I’d called her number. An officer has gone to check, but he’ll find nothing. I’ve put out an all-stations call for her.”

“That’ll help,” I said sourly. I went quickly through MacDonald’s correspondence, picking up replies from his W.H.O. correspondents in Europe. I knew what I was looking for, and it took me only two minutes to isolate half a dozen letters, from a Dr. John Weissmann in Vienna. I handed them across to the General and Hardanger. “Exhibit ‘A’ for the Old Bailey when MacDonald’s en route to the gallows.”

The General looked at me, his face old and tired and expressionless. Hardanger said bluntly, “What are you talking about, Cavell?”

I hesitated and looked at the General. He said quietly, “It’ll be all right now, my boy. Hardanger will understand. And it’ll never go any further.”

Hardanger looked from me to the papers and then back to me again. “What will I understand? It’s time I understood. I knew from the beginning that there was something I couldn’t touch in this damned business. You accepted this job with too much alacrity in the first place.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “It had to be this way. You know I’ve been in and out of a few jobs since the war – Army, police, Special Branch, Narcotics, Special Branch again, security chief in Mordon, and then private detective. None of it really meant anything. I’ve been working for the General here non-stop for the past sixteen years. Every time I was heaved out of a job – well, the General arranged it.”

“I’m not all that surprised,” Hardanger said heavily. I was glad to see he was more intrigued than angry. “I’ve had my suspicions.”

“That’s why you’re a superintendent,” the General murmured.

“Anyway, about a year ago, my predecessor in security in Mordon, Easton Derry, began having his suspicions. I won’t go into the where and the when of it, but he came to the conclusion that certain highly secret items in the bacteriological and virus line were being smuggled out of Mordon. His suspicions became certainties when Dr. Baxter approached him privately and said he was convinced that certain stuff was going astray.”

“Dr. Baxter!” Hardanger looked slightly stunned.

“Yes, Baxter. Sorry about that, too – but I told you, plain as I could, not to waste time on him. He said to Derry that although it wasn’t the top secret stuff that was going – that was impossible to get out of ‘A’ laboratory – it was nevertheless pretty important stuff. Very important stuff, indeed. Britain leads the world in the production of microbiological diseases for wartime use against men, animals and plants. You’ll never hear of this when the Parliamentary Estimates for Mordon Health Centre are being passed, but our scientists in Mordon have either discovered or refined to their purest and most deadly forms the germs for causing plague, typhus, smallpox, rabbit and undulant fever in man: hog cholera, fowl pest, Newcastle disease, rinderpest, foot-and-mouth, glanders and anthrax in livestock: and blights like the Japanese beetle, European corn borer, Mediterranean fruit fly, boll-weevil, citrus cancer, wheat rust and heaven knows what else in plants. All very useful in either limited or all-out warfare.”

“What’s all this got to do with Dr. MacDonald?” Hardanger demanded.

“I’m coming to it. Over two years ago our agents in Poland began taking an interest in the newly-built Lenin Museum on the outskirts of Warsaw. So far, this museum has never been opened to the public. It never will be – it’s the equivalent of Mordon, a purely microbiological research station. One of our agents – he’s a card-carrying member of the party – managed to get himself employed there and made the interesting discovery that the Poles were discovering and refining the various bugs I just mentioned a few weeks, or at most months, after they had been perfected in Mordon. The inference was too obvious to miss.

“Easton Derry started investigating. He made two mistakes: he played it too close to the cuff, without letting us know what was going on, and he unwittingly gave himself away. How, we’ve no idea. He may even have taken into his confidence, quite unknowingly, the man who was responsible for smuggling the stuff out of Mordon. MacDonald, for a certainty – it would be too much to expect two espionage agents operating at the same time. Anyway, someone became aware that Easton Derry was in danger of finding out too much. So Derry disappeared.

“The General here then made arrangements to have me removed from the Special Branch and introduced into Mordon as security officer. The first thing I did was to stake out a decoy duck. I had a steel flask of botulinus toxin, strength one – it was so labelled, introduced into a cupboard in number one lab annexe. The same day the flask disappeared. We had a VMF receiver installed at the gates, for the flask contained not toxin but a micro-wave battery-powered transistor sender. Anyone carrying that and coming within two hundred yards of the gate would have been picked up at once. You will understand,” I said dryly, “that anyone picking up a flask of botulinus toxin is unlikely to open it up to see if it really does contain toxin.

“We picked up no one. It wasn’t hard to guess what happened. After dark someone had strolled across to a deserted part of the boundary fence and chucked the flask into an adjacent field – it’s only a ten-yard throw to clear all the fences. Not because they had any suspicions of the contents but because this was the way it would usually be done – you know how often spot checks and searches are made of people leaving Mordon. By eight o’clock that evening we had micro-wave receivers installed at London Airport, Southend and Lydd airfields, the Channel ports and–”

“Wouldn’t the shock of having been flung over the fence have smashed the transmitter?” Hardanger objected.

“The American watch company that makes these transmitters would be most displeased if one did break,” I said. “They can be fired from a high velocity naval gun without being affected in the slightest. Anyway, late that night we picked up a signal in London Airport. Almost inevitably it was from a man boarding a B.E.A. flight to Warsaw. We took him and he told us he was a courier, picking up stuff about once a fortnight from an address in South London. He’d never actually seen his contact.”

“He told you that?” Hardanger said sourly. “I can imagine how you made him volunteer that information.”

“You’d be wrong. We told him – he was a naturalised British subject – ex-Czech – that espionage was a capital offence and he thought he was turning Queen’s evidence. He turned it pretty fast, too. It was his supplier from Mordon we wanted to nail, so I was duly thrown out of there and have been haunting this damn’ address and neighbourhood for the past three weeks. We couldn’t get anyone else to do the job because I was the only one who knew and who could identify all the scientists and technicians in Mordon. But no luck – except that Dr. Baxter reported that the disappearances had stopped. So we seemed to have stopped that leak – temporarily, anyway.