Ken McClure - The Secret

As he reached the frosted glass swing doors to the North lab, he imagined a change in the darkness inside, a change that he couldn’t quite put his finger on but had to ascribe to the blue funk he was in. The lights weren’t on inside but the many windows allowed in light from neighbouring buildings and the street lights below. He turned on the lab lights and paused while the fluorescent strips stuttered into life. The lab looked just like it always did.

Liam walked over to his bench and lit the Bunsen burner. He wanted to create the suggestion of a reason for his being here should a security man look in. He perched on his stool, taking comfort for a moment from the sound and warmth of the burner flame and the air of normality it was providing. He shook his head and just couldn’t understand his nerves. What an idiot.

Liam got together a series of bits and pieces of lab glassware and a bottle of culture medium. He really would set up a few cultures before he left just in case anyone should suspect that he’d been in and ask about it. With that done, he took out a pair of latex gloves from the box above his bench and put them on as he walked towards the closed door of the side room where Dan had his desk.

Liam wrinkled his nose as competing smells reached him; one was that damned tobacco smell again and the other was... human vomit. He put his hand to his face — adding latex to the mix — and stopped in his tracks. What the hell was going on? His nerves had returned like a swift incoming tide. Was he really smelling these things or was tension screwing up his senses?

Once again he was tempted to turn and head for home but the office door was only a metre away and his bench alibi looked just fine — as if he’d been working for the past thirty minutes. Five minutes more and he’d be done searching through the drawers. Surely he could hold himself together that long? Of course he could.

Liam opened the office door and light from the main lab entered to reveal a tableau from hell. An Asian man was standing there, pointing a pistol fitted with a silencer at him. Slumped in his desk chair and secured with tape was Dan Hausman. His face, swollen and distorted, spoke of the agony he was clearly in; a pool of vomit where he’d thrown up lay at his feet. Liam felt sickness well up in his own throat.

‘Come inside. Shut the door behind you,’ said Dr Ranjit Khan of Pakistani intelligence.

Liam did as he was told.

‘Sit down in the other chair, back to me.’

Once again Liam complied. His fear was such that he had difficulty controlling his limbs and his mind was rebelling against taking in any more horror but he could now see that the damage to Hausman’s face and bare chest where his shirt had been ripped open had not been done by beating. The thick glass bottle on the desk and the glass dropper beside it testified to that. Smoke was curling up from the neck of the open bottle. Liam recognised the swimming baths smell — the fumes of hydrochloric acid. Hausman’s left cheek was blistering badly and his lower lip was already deformed.

Liam struggled to say something and Khan hit him sharply across the back of his neck with the side of his hand, a blow hard enough to stun him and make sure that he was only vaguely aware of being trussed up with tape like Hausman. When he struggled back into full consciousness his assailant asked, ‘Who the hell are you?’

‘Liam Kelly... I’m a student.’

‘Your colleague here has something I want, Mr Kelly. He’s being rather awkward about it. But then he’s CIA... all that training.’

‘CIA?’ exclaimed Liam, hoping that somewhere in his croaking reply, surprise had registered.

‘I keep telling you...’ groaned Hausman through burnt lips, ‘I don’t have the damned key...’

‘Of course you do,’ said Khan with a calm assurance that Liam found chilling. ‘You’re a credit to your service, but perhaps you’ll feel differently about things when you watch me trickle acid slowly down Mr Kelly’s forehead and see it enter his eyes.’

Liam lost control of his bladder sphincter as his head was jerked back by the hair and Khan filled the pipette with acid. ‘Aren’t you CIA chaps supposed to protect the innocent? Or is that just so much American crap, the sort of stuff your president spouts every time he steps in front of a camera?’

‘He hasn’t got it,’ said Liam, his voice becoming a scream, having risen a full octave. ‘It didn’t come here. Dr Ricard sent it somewhere else.’

Khan seemed surprised. ‘What the hell do you know about this?’

‘Not much,’ Liam gasped as his head was jerked back further. ‘Just that she sent the key you’re looking for to a friend.’ He couldn’t take his eyes off the glass dropper and its contents. It was being held about six inches from his face. The fumes from the open bottle of acid on the desk were already attacking his nasal mucosa.

‘What friend?’

‘Dr Steven Dunbar of the Sci-Med Inspectorate.’

‘Where do you fit into the picture?’

‘Steven has the key; he doesn’t have the disk.’

‘So he asked you to get it?’

‘Sort of.’

‘That’s why you’re here?’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s Dunbar’s interest?’

‘Dr Ricard was his friend. He doesn’t believe her death was an accident.’

Khan didn’t comment but he put down the dropper and replaced the top on the acid bottle. ‘Is that his only interest?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why did he want the disk?’

‘If Dr Ricard sent him the encryption key, he thought she must have had a reason.’

Khan nodded, seemingly satisfied.

Liam could see that Hausman was losing consciousness. He desperately needed medical help. Liam said so to Khan.

‘Indeed,’ Khan agreed. ‘Where do I find Dunbar?’

‘I don’t know.’

Khan looked sceptical. ‘So how did you plan to tell him if you’d been successful?’

‘He gave me a phone number.’

‘Give me it.’

‘It’s on my phone.’

Khan removed Liam’s mobile from the pocket of his denim jacket and flicked through Contacts. ‘Steven D?’

‘That’s him.’

Khan nodded and picked up his pistol, which he’d laid down while he held Liam. He checked the tightness of the silencer before shooting both men through the back of the head.

It had been a bad day, Steven decided. He’d been harbouring notions of some kind of double celebration at the end of it with Tally being told she’d got the job at Great Ormond Street and Charlie Malloy agreeing to the scheme that was going to see progress in the investigation at a rate of knots. Instead, Tally had turned up at the flat at four thirty, feeling less than optimistic about her chances after a long day of interviews which she thought hadn’t gone well. ‘I think maybe I let my tongue run away with me on more than one occasion,’ she reported. ‘And I’m pretty sure I didn’t say what they wanted to hear.’

Steven had tried reassuring her that they wouldn’t be looking for a subservient, box-ticking wimp as one of their consultants: they’d welcome a woman with strong views and a sense of what was right rather than what was politic but failed to convince even himself. They both knew the establishment tended to prefer people who ‘fitted in’, people who, like the royal family, tended to avoid expressing views on anything.

Tally had now set off back to Leicester. She’d let the evening rush hour pass before saying good-bye with an attempt at being cheerfully philosophical about what she feared would turn out be failure. There had been an underlying despondency about her however, that Steven had found infectious. He poured himself a drink and slumped down in his favourite chair to put his heels up on the window sill. Feeling that she’d enough to worry about, he hadn’t mentioned to Tally that he himself had a reason for feeling low. John Macmillan had returned from lunch with the news that Charlie Malloy had dismissed their plan out of hand. ‘Plain, bloody lunacy,’ he’d called it.