E. Seymour - A Deadly Trade - A gripping espionage thriller

‘But, surely, there are treaties and agreements…’

‘Which can be broken.’ He leant towards me once more. ‘Government exists to protect its people. One has to fight any threat, however vile, accordingly.’

I didn’t speak. Not for a moment did it occur to me that Reuben was mistaken. Whatever Reuben said about being out of the game, my old mentor had always been the kind of man who kept his ear close to the ground. There was no reason for me to suspect that this had changed. What scared me more, instead of coming to Reuben to pick his brains and borrow money, I’d discovered a conspiracy of unimaginable proportions. And I was at the centre of it.

‘Let me show you something,’ he said, climbing to his feet. He gestured for me to follow and retraced his steps through the kitchen and back out into the long hall. On his left, a wooden door, which I’d assumed led to a cupboard under the stairs. Taking a key from his pocket, he unlocked the door, opened it, flicked on a light, and descended a short flight of wooden steps to a basement room where, against the farthest wall, there was a sofa. Facing the sofa, and fixed to the wall nearest the stairs, a fifty-inch plasma screen sitting astride an antique desk, the remaining walls lined with books.

Reuben invited me to take a seat. I obeyed and watched as he touched a catch underneath the drawer in the desk revealing a false compartment from which he removed a brown sealed envelope that he placed to one side. Sliding the back panel of the dummy drawer to the left, he revealed a secondary hiding place. From this, he picked out a DVD with skull and crossbones drawn crudely in black marker pen along the spine. Reuben slipped off the cover and fed the disk into the DVD player. Nothing much happened. A lot of flicker. No sound. Lots of grainy moving images like the flaky footage you find on a pirate video. Then Reuben switched off the lights and it felt as if I was being swallowed whole. I blinked, fused in concentration.

Picture the image: a cavern, sides made of solid rock, wide metal ducting as if to pump fresh air into the bowels of the earth. At ground level, men dressed like astronauts walking slow-limbed. Some, who wore thick gloves and held clipboards, had their attention fixed on a chamber with transparent walls around twelve metres wide by twelve metres high, although difficult to tell. A metal tube fed into the domed glass roof. Inside, a group of people: an emaciated-looking white guy and a young teenage couple holding hands alongside two other men and women who stood separately. If I had to take a guess I’d say the non-whites were Chinese, Korean maybe. Their tattered clothes hung on them like shrouds, their expressions one of mute rank terror, the like I had never seen and I’ve seen a lot of fear in my time.

A cursory nod from one of the ‘astronauts’ or rather scientists, as I now believed them to be, signalled that something was about to happen, but I didn’t understand what. I pitched forwards, straining to comprehend, rapt by the figures in the glass dungeon. Within seconds all seven cupped hands over their faces and fled to the outer extremities of the see-through prison. The young couple herded desperately together, eyes agape with fear. Within a minute, two of the women were vomiting. One man, with blood issuing from his nose and mouth, crashed to the ground. Another turned purple, leaking through every orifice, body in spasm. The white guy, unaffected by the spreading contagion, collapsed to the ground and, with hands over his head, knees to his chest, rocked in despair. Blood and bile, faeces and vomit spattered the floor and glass. They were shouting, screaming, but I heard no sound, only a chorus of unheard voices. I am rarely moved, but my fists curled and found their way to my mouth. I longed to look away, to escape, and to empty my mind but I remained transfixed.

At last, buckling under the vicious assault on her nervous system, the last surviving girl, bloodied and broken, leant towards the dying boy and kissed his mouth. I thought my hardened heart would seize up.

Reuben’s voice shattered the silence. ‘The killing process took three minutes,’ he said matter-of-fact, switching off the film and switching on the lights. Same length of time I’d allowed myself to steal in and out of Wilding’s home, I registered.

‘What about the white guy?’

‘He was taken out and shot. Experiment over.’

‘So he was immune?’

Reuben nodded, held my gaze in a vice-like grip. ‘In simple engineering terms, it’s a tremendous feat to divide one human genome from another, but…’

‘Excuse me,’ I said, stumbling past Reuben and upstairs.

‘The cloakroom is on the right by the front door,’ he called after me.

I found it and threw up in the sink. Adrenalin dump, I convinced myself, totally unconnected, to what I’d just watched. Splashing water over my face, I gaped at my reflection in the mirror. Apart from my obvious pallor, I thought I’d be unrecognisable. I thought the man I believed myself to be was hiding but he wasn’t.

‘You are shocked,’ Reuben said as I emerged and rejoined him in the kitchen.

‘We’re talking about biological genocide,’ I snapped. ‘I take it the clip is genuine?’

‘It has been authenticated although we are not entirely certain where this took place. The footage emerged over a decade ago.’

‘Bearing in mind you didn’t show me this shit as a form of entertainment, what’s the exact connection to Wilding?’

‘I am simply making you aware of possibilities,’ Reuben said, pulling his punches, ‘I’m giving you the context within which I believe she worked.’

‘Why?’

An unnerving gleam entered his eye. ‘To save your soul.’

Too late for that. Redemption was beyond me: I’d committed too many acts of violence. I shook my head.

‘You are indifferent to death?’ he said, his turn to be shocked.

‘I’m indifferent to life.’

Reuben frowned. I think he found my response glib and irritating. ‘Joshua,’ he said, with a stern and penetrating expression. ‘What about the lives of others?’

I took a deep breath. I’d spent my entire professional life singularly unconcerned by the lives of others. I didn’t do noble and I didn’t do self-sacrifice. And yet…

Reuben was still talking. ‘I do not know how far such weapons have progressed because I no longer have the kind of connections I once had, but it’s a safe bet that you are mixed up in something of apocalyptic proportions.’

In spite of the outward show, the content of the video-clip and the spectre of mass murder taunted me. I thought about Wes, about the so-called data on the hard drive. Assuming Wilding had been engaged in defending the nation, someone had stolen it with the intention of neutralising our defence capability. It might also have been stolen to trade with individuals intent on carrying out an atrocity. Like it or not, I had to face the possibility that certain unscrupulous people, individuals I dealt with on a daily basis, wanted this type of material to sell on. I didn’t give a damn about my own survival but, as Reuben had already pointed out, the lives of others were now at stake. Locating the hard drive suddenly assumed increased urgency. What I was going to do with the material when I got my hands on it I hadn’t a clue.