Blood Hunt (22 page)

When he started hallucinating—starbursts in his eyes—still north of Poitiers, he stopped to sleep. A cheap motorway motel looked tempting, but he stayed with his car. He didn’t want to get too comfortable, but it didn’t make sense to turn up for his meeting with Marie Villambard unable to concentrate or focus. He wound the passenger seat as far back as it would go and slid over into it, so the steering wheel wouldn’t dig into him. His eyes felt gritty, grateful when he closed them. The cars speeding past the service area might as well have been serried waves crashing on the shore, the rumble of trucks a heartbeat. He was asleep inside a minute.

He slept for forty deep minutes, then got out of the car and did some stretching exercises, using the car’s hood as his bench. He took his toothbrush to the toilets, scrubbed his teeth, and splashed water on his face. Then back to the car. He was a hundred miles from his destination, maybe a little less. Despite his stops, he’d made good time. At the back of his map book there was a plan of Limoges. It had two railway stations: the one he wanted—gare des Bénédictins—was to the east, the other to the west. He headed south on the N147 and came into Limoges from the north. Almost at once the streets started to hem him in. They either bore no signposts or identifiers, or else were one way. He found himself shunted onto street after street, twisting right and left and right… until he was lost. At one point he saw a sign pointing to gare SNCF, but after following it didn’t see another sign, and soon was lost again. Finally he pulled over, double-parking on a narrow shopping street, and asked a pedestrian for directions. It was as if he’d asked the man to talk him through open-heart surgery: Bénédictins was difficult from here, he’d have to retrace his steps, the one-way system was very complicated…

Reeve thanked the man and started driving again, waving at the complaining line of drivers who’d been waiting to pass him.

Eventually he crossed a bridge and saw railway lines beneath him, and followed those as best he could. Then he saw it, a huge domed building with an even higher clock tower to one side. Bénédictins. It looked more like an art gallery or museum than a city’s railway station. Reeve checked his watch. It was half past five. He found a parking space, locked the car, and took a few seconds to calm himself and do a few more exercises. His whole body was buzzing as though electricity was being passed through him. He walked on to the station concourse, looked over to the left and saw the restaurant and bar.

He paused again outside the bar itself, looking around him as though for a friend. Actually, he was seeking out the opposite, but it was hard to judge from the people milling around. There were down-and-outs and students, young men in military uniform and businesspeople clutching briefcases. Some stared anxiously at the departures board; others sat on benches and smoked, or browsed through a magazine. Any one of them could be put-ting on an act. It was impossible to tell.

Reeve walked into the bar.

He spotted her immediately. She was middle-aged, wore glasses, and was chain-smoking. There was a fog of smoke in the bar; walking through it was like walking through mist. She sat in a booth facing the bar, reading a large paperback and taking notes in the margin. She was the only single woman in the place.

Reeve didn’t approach her straightaway. He walked up to the bar and settled himself on a stool. The barman had already weighed him up and was reaching for the wine bottle. He managed not to look surprised when Reeve ordered Perrier.

There were six other men in the bar, eight including the waiters. Reeve studied them all. They’d stared at him collectively on his arrival, but that was only natural in a French bar as in bars around the world. Mostly they were drinking short glasses of red wine; a couple of them nursed espressos. They all looked like they fitted right in; they looked like regulars. Then he saw that someone else was watching him. She’d put down her book and pen and was peering at him over the top of her glasses. Reeve paid for the water and took his glass to her booth.

“Mr. Reeve?”

He sat down and nodded.

“A good journey?” There was irony in the question.

“First-class,” Reeve replied. He would place her in her early fifties. She was trim and well dressed and had taken care of herself, but the lines around the neck gave it away. Her hair was salt-and-pepper, swept back over the ears from a center part and feathered at the back of her head. She had the word executive stamped on her.

“So,” she said, “now you will tell me about your brother?”

“I’d like to know a bit about you first,” he said. “Tell me about yourself, how you came to know Jim.”

So she told him the story of a woman who had always been a writer, ever since her school days, a story not dissimilar to Jim’s own life. She said they’d met while she was on a trip to London. Yes, she’d known Marco in London, and he’d told her his suspicions. She had come back to France and done some research. In France the farming lobby was even stronger than that in the UK, with close ties between farm owners and their agrichemical suppliers, and a government—no matter whether left- or right-wing—which bowed to pressure from both. The investigation had been hard going; even now she wasn’t much further forward, and had to leave the story for long periods of time so she could do work that would earn her money. The agrichem story was her “labor of love.”

“Now tell me about Jim,” she said. So Reeve told his side of it, a seasoned performer by now. She listened intently, holding the pen as if about to start taking notes. The book she’d been reading was the biography of some French politician. She tapped the cover absentmindedly with the pen, covering the politician’s beaming honest face with myriad spots, like blue measles. The barman came over to take another order, and tutted and pointed. She saw what she’d been doing, and smiled and shrugged. The barman seemed not much mollified.

“Do you know this man?” she asked Reeve. She meant the politician. Reeve shook his head. “His name is Pierre Dechevement. Until recently he was responsible for agriculture. He re-signed. There was a young woman… not his wife. Normally, such a thing would not be a scandal in France. Indeed, there was no trace of a scandal in Dechevement’s case. Yet he still resigned.”

“Why?”

She smiled. “Perhaps because he is a man of honor? That is what his biographer says.”

“What do you say?”

She stabbed the pen at him. “You are shrewd, Mr. Reeve. For years Dechevement took bribes from the agrichemical compa-nies—well, no, perhaps bribes is too strong. Let us say that he enjoyed hospitality, and received favors. In my opinion one of those favors was the young lady in question, who turns out to have been a sometime prostitute, albeit high-class. Dechevement was quite brazen; she accompanied him to functions here and abroad. He even became her employer, giving her a position on his private staff. There is no record that she contributed any work, but she was paid a generous salary.”

Marie Villambard lit a fresh Peter Stuyvesant from the stub of the old one. Her ashtray had already been emptied twice by the barman. She blew out a stream of smoke.

“Dechevement’s closest ties were to a company called COSGIT, and COSGIT is a French subsidiary of Co-World Chemicals.”

“So Dechevement was in CWC’s employ?”

“In a manner of speaking. I think that’s why he was told to resign, so no one would bother to backtrack and find that the young prostitute had been paid for by Co-World Chemicals. That might have created a scandal, even in France.”

Reeve was thoughtful. “So you weren’t working along the same lines as my brother?”

“Wait, please. We have not yet… scratched the surface.”

Reeve sat back. “Good,” he said as his second Perrier arrived.

“In a sense, Dechevement is only a very small part of the whole,” Marie Villambard said. The waiter had brought her a new pack of cigarettes, which she was unwrapping. Reeve noticed that all the customers who’d been in the bar on his arrival had now been replaced by others—which didn’t necessarily mean there wasn’t surveillance.

“I have become,” she went on, “more interested in a man called Owen Preece. Doctor Owen Preece. Your brother was interested in him, too.”

“Who is he?”

“He’s dead now, unfortunately. It looked like natural causes. He was in his seventies—a cardiac crisis. It could happen to anyone that age…”

“Well then, who was he?”

“An American psychiatrist.”

Reeve frowned; someone else had mentioned a psychiatrist in connection with CWC…

“He headed what was supposed to be an independent research team, funded partly by government and partly by agrichemical companies, to look into BSE, what you call mad cow disease.”

Reeve nodded to himself. Josh Vincent had mentioned something similar—research funded by CWC itself, using psychiatrists as well as scientists.

“This was in the early days of the scare,” Marie Villambard was saying. “The team comprised neurologists, viral specialists, experts in blood diseases, and psychologists. Their initial reports were that the disease ME—”Yuppie Flu‘ as it was called at the time—was not a disease at all but was psychosomatic, an ailment brought on by the sufferer for some complex psychological reason.“

“They were working on prion protein?”

“That is correct, and they found no evidence to link prion proteins found in organophosphorus substances, or any pesticides currently in use, to any of the range of diseases that other scientists claim are closely linked to them.”

“They were got at by CWC?”

“Not exactly, but there is good reason to believe Dr. Preece was in the employ of CWC, and he was head of the team. He gave the final okay to their results. He had access to all the data…”

“And could have tampered with it?”

“One member of the team resigned, claiming something along those lines. He was killed in a boating accident only weeks later.”

“Jesus. So Preece falsified tests and results? And all this was partly funded by the U.S. government?”

Marie Villambard nodded throughout. “The initial idea had come down from someone in the middle ranks of Co-World Chemicals. Some of us assume this man was responsible for put-ting Preece in charge. Dr. Preece was in some ways an excellent choice—he was a psychiatrist of some renown. He is also thought to have carried out experiments for the CIA.”

“Experiments?”

“On humans, Mr. Reeve. In the fifties and sixties he was part of a team which tested the effects of various hallucinogens on the human nervous system.” She saw something close to horror on Reeve’s face. “It was all perfectly legal, believe it or not. The subjects were patients in lunatic asylums. They had few rights, and no one to fight for what few rights they had. They were injected with all manner of chemicals; we can’t even say which. Preece was a small part of this. It only came to light recently, after his death, when some CIA files were released. It made some of us wonder about his involvement with various committees and research projects post-1960. This man had something to hide, some shame in his past, and those with a past can always be bought.”

“And the CWC employee who suggested all this…?”

“Kosigin,” said Marie Villambard. “A Mr. Kosigin.”

“How do you know?”

“Your brother found out. He interviewed a lot of people under the pretext of writing a book about Preece. He spoke to scientists, government agencies; he tracked down people who had been involved in the original project. He had evidence linking Preece to Kosigin, evidence of a massive cover-up, something concerning every person on the planet.” She lifted her cigarette. “That’s why I smoke, Mr. Reeve. Eating is too dangerous, to my mind. I prefer safer pleasures.”

Reeve wasn’t listening. “Whatever evidence my brother had has gone to the grave with him.”

She smiled. “Don’t be so melodramatic—and for goodness’ sake don’t be so silly.”

Reeve looked at her. “What do you mean?”

“Your brother was a journalist. He was working on a dangerous story, and he knew just how dangerous. He would have made backups of his disks. There will be written files somewhere. There will be something. In an apartment somewhere, or left with a friend, or in a bank vault. You just have to look.”

“Supposing the evidence has been destroyed?”

She shrugged. “Then the story is not so strong… I don’t know. Maybe it is impossible to find a publisher for it. Everywhere we look, in every country which uses these chemicals and pesticides, we find some government connection. I do not think the governments of the world would like to see this story published.” She stared at him. “Do you?”

He stayed silent.

“I do not think the agrichemical conglomerates would like to see the story appear either, and nor would agencies like the CIA… Maybe we should all just get back to our ordinary lives.” She smiled sadly. “Maybe that would be safer for us all.”

“You don’t believe that,” he said.

She had stopped smiling. “No,” she said, “I don’t. It has gone too far for that. Another good reason for smoking. I am like the condemned prisoner, yes?”

And she laughed, the terror showing only in her eyes.

She had some information she could give him—copies of documents—so he followed her in his car. They left the city traveling towards a town called Saint Yrieix. This is all I need, thought Reeve, more driving. The road was a succession of steep ups and downs, and a couple of times they found themselves stuck behind a tractor or horse trailer. At last Marie Villambard’s Citroën Xantia signaled to turn off the main road, but only so they could twist their way along a narrow country road with nothing but the occasional house or farmstead. It was a fine evening, with an annoyingly low sun and wide streaks of pale blue in the sky. Reeve’s stomach complained that he’d been shoveling nothing but croissants and coffee into it all day. Then, to his amazement—out here in the middle of nowhere—they drove past a restaurant. It looked to have been converted from a mill, a stream running past it. A few hundred yards farther on, the Xantia signaled left, and they headed up a narrower, rougher track made from hard-packed stones and sand. The track led them into an avenue of mature oak trees, as though this roadway had been carved from the forest. A couple of roads leading off could have been logging tracks. At the end, in absolute isolation, stood a small old single-story house with dormer windows in the roof. Its facing stones hadn’t been rendered, and the shutters on the windows looked new, as did the roof tiles.