Кен Макклюр: Miasma

‘Get it off your chest.’

‘People have stopped answering my enquiries. The banks are usually very helpful when it comes to giving account information — they know we’ll have a good reason for asking, but not this time. The Fraud Squad hasn’t responded to my request for help in accessing Swiss bank information and Interpol haven’t got back to me with any more information about the dead banker. They said they would and also put out a wider net for any more reported murders like the ones we’ve seen. I keep thinking the information has been coming in, but someone or something is stopping me seeing it.’

‘John will hit the roof if that’s the case,’ said Steven. ‘You know what he’s like when it comes to preserving our independence. You interfere with that at your peril, even if you’re the Prime Minister.’

‘I could be imagining it...’

‘I doubt it,’ said Steven, ‘Your gut feelings have always been right in the past. If you think something’s not right... it isn’t.’

John Macmillan arrived in the office, obviously in a bad mood. ‘Five o’clock in the morning,’ he fumed. ‘Would you believe it? Five o’clock in the bloody morning and the Home Secretary calls me to apologise for not calling me yesterday, says he owes me an explanation but it can wait until after the meeting.’

Steven and Jean exchanged glances. ‘The meeting?’ Steven enquired politely.

‘Sorry, yes, we’re having a meeting at Albert Embankment at eleven. MI6 are hosting, but MI5, Special Branch and the Met will also be present. Apparently, Jean has opened Pandora’s box.’

‘Really?’ exclaimed Jean.

‘She has been asking perfectly legitimate questions,’ Steven interjected. ‘Does this mean we’ve intruded on someone else’s pet investigation?’

‘Far from it,’ said Macmillan. ‘From what I hear, no one has the faintest idea what’s going on.’

The Home Secretary opened proceedings by apologising for his lack of familiarity with what he called, ‘the usual channels’ — he had only been in the job for a couple of months — and offered this as his reason for ‘a lack of correlation’ in departmental interests.

‘I shall do my best to summarise what I’ve been told and hope that we will all be able to see a bigger picture... should there be one.’

The Home Secretary turned to Macmillan. ‘Sir John, your people have been investigating the deaths of two senior medical scientists who were found dead after being subjected to a particularly horrible death. A request to Interpol led to the highlighting of two further murders involving the same MO, a Swiss strategist working with the World Health Organisation in Geneva and a French investment banker based in Paris. More recently, one of your people asked the Metropolitan Police for help in securing details about the two English victims’ financial status. Might I ask why?’

Macmillan nodded to Jean who answered, ‘I made the request, Home Secretary, preliminary enquiries suggested that both men enjoyed a lifestyle which we suspected might be well beyond their apparent means.’

‘But both were very successful medical professionals,’ countered the Home Secretary.

‘In specialties that would not allow them much if anything in the way of private practice,’ Steven pointed out.

‘Ah, where the real money is,’ said the Home Secretary. ‘Understood, and what have you learned?’

‘We haven’t heard back from the Met, sir.’

‘Chief Superintendent?’ said the Home Secretary, raising his eyebrows and turning to a silver haired woman wearing police uniform.

‘We were in an unusual situation, Home Secretary. We received much the same request from more than one party. At that point I decided not to respond to anyone until you were brought into the loop.’

‘Who or what were these other parties, chief superintendent?’

‘MI5 and MI6, sir.’

‘Both of them!’ exclaimed the Home Secretary. ‘Who’d like to go first?’

A man Steven knew to be a senior MI5 Intelligence officer smiled and said, ‘We have been watching a man named Jeremy Lang for some time, sir. He operates as a high-end London estate agent dealing in expensive properties, but we believe his main focus has been in money-laundering for Russian would-be London residents. Unfortunately, he passed away recently — from natural causes as far as we know — but we managed to get our hands on his books, so to speak. Among the Russian names, were two English ones, Martin Field and Simon Pashley. We wanted to know why and made a request similar to Sci-Med’s to the Met for bank account information.’

‘That leaves you, C, what was your interest?’

The head of MI6 cleared his throat and said, ‘We were aware of the murders of Field and Pashley, and of Sci-Med’s request to Interpol for details of any matching crime, which unearthed two more victims, the French investment banker and the WHO strategist. We extended the search even further and found one more, Dr Samuel Petrov, who was killed in the same manner. At the time of his death, he was working at the University of the Negev in Beer Sheva in Israel but had moved there from his previous employment in the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia in the USA. He was Jewish, and as such, had been eligible for Israeli citizenship, which had been granted, but it did look to us a bit of an odd move. People leaving places like CDC tend to attract the attention of intelligence services. We were able to share information with our US colleagues regarding similarities to the European deaths; they were able to tell us about Petrov having come into a great deal of money, secreted away in foreign accounts with no obvious source. Looking for links, we too asked the Met about the financial standing of the two Englishmen.’

The Home secretary shook his head and said, ‘Certainly complicated. Well, Chief Superintendent, put us out our misery.’

‘I can confirm, sir, that the two Englishmen had also received large sums of money over the past two years. Both had Swiss bank accounts and... off-shore interests. None of it was ever reported to Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, so I think we can assume that the money came from Russian ex pats using Jeremy Lang’s laundering expertise along the way.’

‘Although not in acquiring London property,’ said Steven.

‘Not in property,’ agreed the chief superintendent.

‘How big were these sums of money?’

‘We think in the region of ten million US dollars... each.’

There were gasps in the room. ‘Not stealing sweeties, then,’ muttered Steven.

‘This tends to put everything in a new light,’ said Macmillan. ‘We are dealing with something much bigger than we imagined. Unfortunately, that is about all we know. We don’t know what these people were being paid to do: we don’t know why they were murdered and we don’t know by whom... or am I wrong?’

Macmillan looked at the head of MI6 directly.

‘Well, C,’ said the Home Secretary.

‘We do know a little more, sir, at least we think we do. We think that the killings were not just sadistic, they had elements of ritualised execution to them.’

Steven asked, ‘What made you think that?’

The MI6 chief exchanged a quick glance with the Home Secretary who nodded, adding, ‘We have no secrets from Sci-Med.’

Steven noted that Macmillan’s expression remained Sphynx-like.

‘The torture comprised removing small segments of flesh from each victim until access to the femoral artery was achieved. The artery was then opened and the victim allowed to bleed to death. We think this all may have been an allusion to an ancient execution method known as, death by a thousand cuts. ’

‘Does that help in knowing who they are?’ Steven asked.