Stanley Johnson - Kompromat

They helped Barnard to the helicopter. Selkirk ran through the pre-take-off checks. He had taken plenty of shortcuts in his life but never when it came to flying planes.

‘Oh, heck,’ he swore. ‘We’re out of fuel. Can’t believe this. I thought I’d asked Ching to fill it up when we came back from the Bungles.’

It was another five minutes before they were ready, in which time Barnard began to feel like death.

They took the spider with them in an empty marmalade jar. Even dead, the insect looked lethally menacing.

Dr Phillips, in the Accident and Emergency Unit in Kununurra District Hospital, was as puzzled as Melanie Selkirk had been.

‘Just give me a second.’ Taking the jar with him, he hurried out of the room.

He returned less than two minutes later, looking strained and worried. ‘I showed it to Professor Cohen, our toxicology expert, who happens to be on duty tonight. It’s a Sydney Funnel Web Spider, the deadliest spider in the world. The Professor comes from Sydney. That’s the good news. We know what we’re dealing with.’

‘What’s the bad news?’

‘We don’t have any anti-venom here.’

‘Why on earth not?’

‘There’s no call for it. Sydney’s the only place in Australia this particular spider lives, mostly in dark corners and moist basements. That’s why it’s called “Sydney”. It’s never been seen in this part of the world. Not until now that is.’

Barnard lay on the bed in the A&E unit, while Dr Philips examined him. Barnard had been bitten on the right leg, below the knee. The whole lower limb was red and swollen.

He prodded Barnard’s stomach. ‘Any abdominal pain?’

‘I feel as though I’ve been kicked in the stomach by a horse,’ Barnard replied.

While the examination continued, Melanie tapped the words ‘Sydney Funnel Web Spider’ into the search bar of her Apple iPhone 7.

‘ The bite of the Sydney Funnel Web Spider is usually painful, both due to large fangs and acidic venom. Convulsions may occur. Death may occur within an hour. ’

She checked her watch. It was already an hour since they’d left Lazy-T. Barnard wasn’t dead yet and he had hadn’t even had any convulsions. Always look on the bright side, she thought.

A tall, white-coated man hurried into the room with a vial in his hand. Professor Cohen said, ‘Try the Red Back Spider anti-venom. It’s all we’ve got.’

They gave him one vial of CSL Red Back Spider anti-venom first, injected intra-muscularly, followed twenty minutes later by another.

‘I feel much better already,’ Barnard said.

‘You look better too,’ the doctor said. ‘Do you want to stay overnight?’

When Barnard politely declined, Dr Philips handed Melanie two more vials. ‘He won’t have a relapse,’ he told her. ‘But if he does, give him another shot.’

They were back at Lazy-T before midnight. Barnard couldn’t believe he had recovered so quickly. At one point he’d thought he was going to die. The wonders of modern medicine.

Mickey Selkirk was pleased as punch. He didn’t often fly the heli at night nowadays. ‘Do you want a drink before you turn in?’

‘No, but I think I’ll check the bed before I get in it!’

Ching, meanwhile, had heard the helicopter return. He saw Barnard walk back to the house, with no obvious signs of distress.

What the hell had gone wrong? he wondered.

What kind of anti-venom had they given Barnard in the hospital? Mind you, he thought, if the old man hadn’t checked the fuel before take-off, they wouldn’t have made it to the hospital at all.

Selkirk’s Lazy-T ranch had its own satellite dish. Ching tapped out a message on his laptop and pressed Send.

Li Xiao-Tong’s computer pinged. A new email had arrived:

‘ Regret unable to fulfil your order for one portion of prawn curry. Await further instructions. ’

‘Damn and blast,’ Li Xiao-Tong swore under his breath.

He went upstairs to report to the minister for State Security, Zhang Fu-Shen. He was expecting trouble. Zhang made a habit of saying, ‘Failure is not an option’.

Zhang’s reaction to the news that Edward Barnard was still alive and kicking surprised him.

‘Forget about Barnard,’ Zhang instructed. ‘We have bigger fish to fry. You sent me the recording of Barnard’s Skype call with his wife. Well, I listened to it. She says her husband would never have worn US-Flag boxer shorts and I believe her. So the video we used to try to trap Barnard was faked.’

Back in his office, Li fired up his laptop and clicked on the file. There was Barnard in the lift with the two girls; there was the fuzzy, long shot of the three of them on the bed, the man with his face obscured in the tangle of thrashing limbs and there – yes! – were the US-Flag boxer shorts, still lying where they fell, like a soldier on the field of battle, when Mr X hurried to join in the fun.

He paused the film, and enlarged the frame. Close-up, the US-Flag boxer shorts looked rather attractive. Silky and inviting. Edward Barnard might take a different view but he, Li Xiao-Tong, senior official in the Chinese ministry of state security, rather fancied himself wearing Old Glory underwear.

He enlarged the frame still further until the writing on the waistband of the briefs was clearly legible: ‘PUT AMERICA FIRST’ it said.

Li racked his brains. Now who on earth would have ‘PUT AMERICA FIRST’ sown into the waistband of their underpants?

The specially constituted inter-departmental team had been studying the video film for more than two hours in the basement of MI5’s Millbank headquarters overlooking the Thames, and they were feeling the strain. Analysing frame by frame the video Barnard had brought back from China was hard work. The constant stream of messages from ‘upstairs’ – the Director-General’s office – asking for a report on progress contributed to the tension.

Joshan Gupta, head of MI5’s technical support services, understood the need to come up with an answer quickly. But he was also deeply reluctant to draw conclusions that the evidence didn’t support. MI5 and its sister service MI6 had been deeply scarred by the ‘dodgy dossier’ at the time of the Iraq war, when Britain’s intelligence services had been accused of distorting, falsifying or, at the very least, ‘sexing up’ evidence relating to Saddam Hussain’s supposed Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). They didn’t want to be caught twice in the same trap.

‘Let’s try to be clear,’ Gupta said. ‘The Chinese somehow acquire a video which shows the former Secretary of State Edward Barnard in a compromising position. We all accept that Barnard is indeed the man in the lift with the two Russian ladies but we seem collectively to be conceding that the man on the bed is not Mr Barnard. First, there is Barnard’s own statement that he does not believe he is involved, even though he was possibly inebriated or even drugged. Second, CCTV evidence from the hotel shows Barnard entering his room alone, and not in the company of the two Russian ladies. Third, according to Mrs Barnard, Mr Barnard does not normally wear boxer shorts and would certainly never have worn US-Flag boxer shorts.’

Joshan Gupta paused.

‘But surely,’ he continued, ‘it would be going too far to argue that just because Ronald Craig was in the Kempinski Hotel at the same time as the two Russian ladies, the figure on the bed with the said ladies is indeed Mr Craig?’

Jill Hepworth, one of MI6’s Russian specialists, was keen to put forward the alternative point of view.

‘Let’s blow up those boxer shorts again,’ she requested.

As the image of the US-Flag boxer shorts appeared on the giant screen in the MI5 basement conference room, Jill Hepworth took out a laser pointer.