The Virus (10 page)

Kaplan was astonished at the trouble which Count Philippe Vincennes had gone to on his behalf. He had just begun to thank his host when other guests were shown out on to the terrace, and the Count rose to greet them. Some twenty persons altogether had been invited. They included the British Ambassador to Belgium and his wife, a Turk who was NATO’s Deputy Secretary General and a small dapper man with sharp mobile eyes who turned out to be Willy van Broyck, the Minister for Trade. Kaplan found himself trying to make conversation with van Broyck’s wife, an ugly Flemish woman who spoke little French and less English. He was relieved when the signal was given for the party to go into dinner, a sumptuous affair which Hélèna, the Count’s wife, insisted on referring to as a “modest family supper.” There was a flunkey behind every chair. Wine flowed in abundance. Course followed course with bewildering variety, each more exquisite than the last.

“Woodcock shot on the estate.” The Count beamed down the length of the long table. Kaplan, from the other end, where he sat on the Countess’ right, saw the old man’s reflection upside down on the polished surface. There was something faintly sinister about it. He was not sure he would care to be a woodcock on the Count’s estate.

After the cheese and the dessert, the Count called for port and liqueurs, and Hélèna Vincennes led the ladies out of the room. The men moved towards the Count’s end of the table and reseated themselves.

Kaplan found himself next to Willy van Broyck. Evidently not concerned with pleasantries, the little man came straight to the point.

“The Count tells me, Mr Kaplan, that you propose to investigate our airport for the traffic of wildlife. You are wasting your time, you know. My country rigorously enforces the Washington Convention on the Protection of Endangered Species.”

“I’m sure, Mr van Broyck. I’m more interested in what has happened in the past. I understand there was quite active trade through Brussels . . .”

“I do not think that is so, Mr Kaplan.”

“Forgive me, but . . .”

“The past is the past,” the Minister interrupted sharply, and turned to his neighbour.

Kaplan was left with the distinct impression that the Minister was posting a KEEP OUT sign on this particular stretch of territory. He suspected that the message came as much from Count Vincennes as it did from van Broyck.

This impression was confirmed when, later in the evening, after they had joined the ladies, Kaplan noticed van Broyck engaged in earnest, muttered conversation with the Count. More than once, he saw them glance in his direction. After a while, the Count excused himself from van Broyck and left the room. When he returned, Kaplan observed that his splendid white hair was slightly damp, as if he had been caught in a shower.

By eleven o’clock the other guests had gone home. Kaplan told his hosts that he proposed to take a quick turn on the terrace before himself retiring for the night. Outside, he bent down and touched the grass. It was wet; it had indeed rained during the evening. He went back into the house, reflecting on the events of the day. Beneath the surface glitter of the company and the lavishness of the arrangements, he could detect an ominous under-current: there was something rotten, something dangerous in the air. He wanted to find out what it was. He felt sure that there was more to Count Philippe Vincennes than met the eye. On previous occasions when he had visited the château in the company of Louis Vincennes, the Count’s son, he had had the same impression. Tonight it had been confirmed. He felt sure that the Count and van Broyck had been talking about him. And why had the Count disappeared outside like that in the middle of the evening?

Kaplan’s room was on the first floor of the château, above the courtyard. The bed was turned down and he noted that his pyjamas had been taken from his suitcase and laid on the pillow. He wondered which of the Count’s servants had been responsible for that little gesture. Had the man, or woman, who unpacked his pyjamas also been through his things in a systematic way?

He put his hand to the bottom of the case. The report was where he had left it, under a pile of shirts. Kaplan didn’t believe it had been disturbed but he could not tell for sure. He took the document out of the case and sat down on the bed to reread for the second time Diane Verusio’s report on vivisection and the use of monkeys in medical research. As he picked it up he could not help visualizing the scene as it had confronted him that fraught afternoon in Greenwich Village. He could see the unmade bed, the clothes on the floor, the photograph on the mantelpiece. Diane Verusio would never go back to Greenwich Village but Kaplan knew the moment he first read her report that she had not died in vain.

He flipped through the passages, reminding himself of the key passages. Instinctively he felt sure that there was a connection between the trade in endangered species, as investigated by Diane Verusio, and the incidence of Marburg disease. He had learned from Franz Schmidtt that monkeys from Africa had been suspected as the cause of the original outbreak. Diane Verusio had been investigating the trade in monkeys and then had gone down with the disease. Surely there was a connection between the two! There just had to be.

“Almost all major medical research centers in Western Europe and indeed in the Soviet Union are involved,” he read:

The trade in live animals, often animals belonging to rare and endangered species, is probably worth over US $3,000 million annually. Africa is at the heart of this trade, being the source and origin of many of the animals, especially monkeys and other primates, used for research purposes. One of the key questions the author of this report has attempted to answer is: Just how do the animals enter Europe? In theory, all European governments have undertaken obligations in the context of various international conventions which would make importation impossible. In practice, it is clear that these obligations are being breached, and breached in the most blatant manner.

Later in the report, Diane Verusio examined the various ways in which live animals were entering into trade. Kaplan could not help admiring, as he had done the first time he had read the report, the thoroughness with which the author had done her work.

He came to another underlined passage:

Apart from the entry into Europe of certain Asian species, e.g. rare parrots via Hong Kong and London (a loophole which the British authorities are determined to close), the most probable route for major illegal importation is Belgium. With its close links to Zaire, which as the Belgian Congo was a former Belgian colony of major importance, Belgium — and in particular Zaventem airport at Brussels — is the ideal “entrepôt” or staging-post for the illegal trade in wild animals. High Belgian officials, politicians and other prominent men are thought to be involved . . .

Kaplan put the report away, burying it once more at the bottom of his suitcase. With men like Philippe Vincennes around, it was hardly sensible to have thirty pages of dynamite lying on one’s coffee table. He turned the light out and drifted into sleep.

The Count was up to see him off at eight o’clock. He looked remarkably fit and spry for a man of sixty-five or so. This morning he was wearing a navy-blue blazer with gold buttons, a pale blue silk shirt with a cravat, cream trousers and a pair of white canvas shoes. He smiled at his guest benignly.

“Ah! my dear Lowell! Did they give you breakfast? Did you try the ‘jambon d’Ardennes’? I’ve always thought it goes down very well at breakfast. Particularly with figs.”

“A marvellous breakfast,” he replied. “And thank you so much for your hospitality. Give my best regards to Louis when he gets back from Africa.”

The Count, standing on the steps in front of his château, waved him off and watched the long black car accelerate away.

Kaplan came to the bend in the drive. He remembered it was here, where woodmen had been working in the forest at the roadside, that he had stopped the previous afternoon on the château side to admire the view. Travelling in the opposite direction, he turned the steering wheel of the car to the left and saw the château slide out of view in his rear-vision mirror.

It was just as he was preparing to accelerate into the bend that he saw the tree across the road. He made a split-second decision. The tree had not been there the previous evening. There had been no storm in the night which might have brought it down. If the tree was where it was now it had been put there for a purpose. He had a fleeting mental image of the Count coming back into the room with damp hair, and he made up his mind. He jammed his foot on the brake and flung the Mercedes into reverse. He was already round the bend and out of sight of the tree, reversing at some 25 k.p.h. and gaining pace, when he heard the sound of machine-gun fire. Simultaneously, a tattoo of bullets ripped along the coachwork of the roof of the car. Kaplan kept going. Once over the bridge, he backed the car into a clearing and roared forward once more, back in the direction of the château. He reckoned time was on his side. Whoever had laid the ambush was now on the wrong side of the tree for easy pursuit.

As he swung off the drive down the cart-track where he had pulled in the previous day, he caught a glimpse of the château. There was no tall figure standing on the front steps; the Count had obviously gone inside. The motorway ran to the east. Kaplan did not stand on ceremony. He crushed the first two gates he came across. There was something gratifying about the sound of splintering wood.

He made ground rapidly and paused at the top of a rise to see if he could detect any sign of pursuit. The countryside seemed peaceful. In the distance, the turrets of Count Philippe Vincennes’ château were shedding the last traces of morning mist. Whoever it was who had fired at him, Kaplan concluded, had now given up.

However, he had no wish to linger on enemy territory. He could see the Namur–Brussels motorway across a field of wheat. He hoped it was the Count’s wheat. He put the car at the standing crop as a hunt follower might put his horse at a hedge, and smashed diagonally across the field. He hit the hard shoulder of the motorway at around 50 k.p.h. and pulled neatly into the stream of morning traffic.

As he drove he found he was trembling. In his work for the Atlanta Center for Disease Control Kaplan had from time to time been exposed to considerable danger. Anyone who worked with lethal pathogens took risks. But this was the first time to his knowledge that someone had taken a pot shot at him and he found the experience unnerving. He kept an eye on the rear-vision mirror. He doubted if he was being followed. Not by the Count’s men at least. No one else had taken the cornfield route to the office that morning. But still it paid to take precautions.

He didn’t go right on into the city. Instead he took the ring road to Zaventem. In the parking-lot at the airport he sat for some time in the car, trying to work things out. He had a feeling that he had been on his own long enough and that quite soon now he was going to need assistance.

He left his car in the parking-lot. Apart from a line of bullet-holes in the coachwork and corn in the front bumper, the rented Mercedes was not much the worse for wear.

When he entered the terminal, Lowell Kaplan had no very clear idea of what his next step ought to be. Of one thing, however, he was quite certain: he needed a large cup of hot coffee.

There was a restaurant on the upper level and he made directly for it, picking up an
International Herald Tribune
on the way. He stopped in mid-stride when he saw his old friend Franz Schmidtt’s photograph on the front page and the caption: GERMAN TOXICOLOGY EXPERT FOUND SHOT.

“Jesus Christ.” Kaplan could hardly believe it.

Shocked, he fetched his coffee and sat down with the paper. The story didn’t go into details. Apparently the Professor had been surprised in his study at home the previous afternoon. There was no indication as to who the intruder was, nor why the Professor should have been attacked. There followed a brief résumé of Schmidtt’s career.

As he sat there, Kaplan wondered whether Schmidtt’s sudden death might in some way be linked to his own visit to Marburg and to the conversations which they had had. Had the bluff and genial Franz Schmidtt been talking out of turn? Could his house have been bugged? Would the German authorities have gone to such lengths as to actually murder the man to ensure that a story which they had first suppressed over fifteen years earlier stayed buried? It was sheer speculation, of course; but in the light of the attempt on his own life that morning it did not seem to be wholly improbable. Kaplan realized that he was getting into murky waters.

Arming himself with a fistful of five-franc pieces, he went to a phone and looked up the international code for Germany. Frau Schmidtt herself answered.

“Heidi! It’s me, Lowell Kaplan. I just heard the news. This is dreadful.”

“God damn you, Lowell.” The hatred in her voice was unmistakable. “You should never have come. You should never have got him to talk . . .”

“Heidi! I never realized . . .” Kaplan was talking to himself because the line had gone dead.

He went back to the restaurant and ordered another coffee. Shocked by the conversation he had just had with Schmidtt’s widow, he needed time to recover. He sat at the table and stared bleakly at the runway where the morning traffic was already building up.

“Excusez-moi, est-ce que la place est libre?”

Kaplan looked round to see a man of about forty, with thinning red hair and a ginger moustache standing by the table. He wore a blue SABENA uniform with a perspex ID card stuck to his breast pocket.

“Help yourself.”

The man took a seat and ordered breakfast. While waiting for his coffee and croissants to arrive, he asked Kaplan:

“Are you English?”

“American.” Kaplan’s response was gruff. He didn’t want to engage in small talk.

“Ah, where are you going?”

“I’m not going anywhere, actually. I’m just visiting the airport today.” Kaplan looked at the SABENA ID on the man’s lapel and an idea occurred to him. Perhaps it would be worth making conversation after all.

“I guess you work here.”