Crisis (Luke Carlton 1) (8 page)

They sat bolt upright in their chairs, leaning forward to get a clear view. There were twelve in all, eight officers in full dress uniform, their faces inscrutable beneath their huge, sweeping, Soviet-era hats, and four scientists in white coats. Their chairs were bolted to the floor in a circle, arranged around a circular pit, like spectators at a miniature gladiatorial arena. A double pane of hardened glass separated them from the pit and each man had a gas mask beside him, just in case. Down in the pit the two armed guards saluted, awaiting the order. The most senior officer present, a
Sangjang
, a colonel general with three stars on his epaulettes, nodded solemnly. The guards marched out and a steel door hissed shut behind them.

The family looked up in fear at the men who stared down at them as they huddled together. The parents knew what was coming – other prisoners had talked about it in the camp – and fell to their knees, wailing and sobbing, begging forgiveness, swearing undying loyalty to the Dear Leader and to the Party. A lowly Party official, the man’s crime had been to make a joke about the Dear Leader in the workers’ canteen one day. It was reported, of course, and he had ‘confessed his crime’, but before the day was out he was on his way to the labour camp. His wife of twelve years still did not know what they had done wrong.

For a few seconds nothing happened, their pleas being mouthed silently on the other side of the thick glass. And then, from a vent
high up on the wall, came a pale yellow vapour, heavier than the air. Coiling and twisting like a living creature, it spread along the walls and sank slowly to the floor, where it unfolded like a carpet. The officers and scientists leaned further forward still, some making notes. When the gas reached those in the pit, their bodies were racked with spasms. A derivative of phosgene, a choking agent dating back to the trenches of the First World War, this was Agent MX, the latest addition to the arsenal of massed batteries of artillery units ranged along the border with South Korea, all aimed at its capital, Seoul. The People’s Assembly had been adamant: it must be tested extensively on live human subjects.

Dr Mun tried hard to remain impassive as the ‘experiment’ drew to its inevitable and grisly conclusion. He fiddled with his pen and pretended to write notes as the condemned family writhed and vomited on the other side of the glass, the parents trying in vain to save their two children even as their own lives ebbed away. When their twitching ceased, he joined in the chorus of obligatory applause and stood beaming as the colonel general came up to congratulate him and the other white coats. Then he made a dash for the toilets.

Mun barely had time to check there was no one else in the room before he threw up his lunch of rice balls in the stained lavatory bowl and yanked the ancient flush. He turned the rusting tap and splashed his face with water. He would probably be decorated for this but right now he wished he had never been born. When he raised his face from the sink a man was staring back at him. The insignia on his epaulettes marked him out as a
taejwa,
a senior colonel in the Korean People’s Army. Two thin red stripes and four silver stars. A powerful, influential man. ‘Comrade Colonel!’ exclaimed Dr Mun, pulling himself up to attention. ‘An honour!’ He stood stock still, wondering if he had washed away the evidence of his disgust. But the officer who faced him looked far from stern. In fact, he seemed equally sickened. The colonel moved slowly to the sink and turned the tap full on. They spoke in low whispers, their exchange masked by the spluttering of the running water.

By the time they went their separate ways Mun felt his heart would burst with the enormity of what they had just discussed. Yes, he could deliver what the Comrade Colonel was asking for. He had the authority – no one would question it – and access to the material, but surely this was treason of the highest order. Should he report the colonel? Was this a trap, a test of his loyalty? What the colonel had asked him to do was almost unbelievable. And yet . . . And yet he could not go on working for this vile regime. If he could play some small part in its downfall he could live with his conscience.

Dr Mun wasted no time. The next morning, at eleven o’clock precisely, he broke off from his work in the lab to go for his customary glass of watery ginseng tea, slipped into a side office and gave an order over the phone. Fifteen hundred grams of highly radioactive caesium chloride were to be diverted from the adjacent waste unit to the Pang Sang Un People’s Defence Unit on the outskirts of Pyongyang. There the colonel would take charge of it. Dr Mun knew what this material could do to those exposed to it. Even in news-starved North Korea, word had reached the scientific community of the infamous Goiânia incident in 1987. He had read of how the curious townspeople in the Brazilian city had found an abandoned container glowing blue at an old hospital and decided to prise it open. Four had died from radiation poisoning. Many others had survived with burns, nausea and a lifetime’s likelihood of developing cancer. Whatever the colonel had in mind, Mun knew it was destined to hurt people he loathed, the Politburo, whom he considered to be barely human.

In paranoid totalitarian regimes, it is often said the further a person rises up the greasy pole of power, the more they need to watch their backs if they want to survive. In Ceauşescu’s Romania of the 1980s, children were encouraged to report their parents if they suspected them of ‘anti-state views’. In pre-invasion Iraq, it was often said that President Saddam Hussein had the uncanny knack of being able to tell if a member of his regime was plotting against him, even before that person had decided to make his move. And so it was in North Korea.

They came for Dr Mun that same day, right at the end of his shift, dragging him from the lab, still in his white coat, even as he loudly proclaimed his innocence. His fate had been sealed the moment the colonel had picked up the phone that afternoon to the feared State Security Department. Now Mun was destined to disappear into the gulag, where there was every possibility he would end up on the wrong side of the reinforced glass in that dreadful human laboratory. Yet even now, in his darkest hour, he remained professional. As they bundled him into the Black Crow, the van used to transport political prisoners, he begged them to tell him just one thing. Had the radioactive caesium been safely secured? ‘Please,’ he sobbed. ‘You don’t know what this stuff can do. The people must be protected.’

A blow to the back of his head from the butt of a pistol nearly knocked him unconscious. ‘No talking!’ they screamed. But the arresting officer could not resist a final verbal blow. ‘Do not fear, Comrade Mun. Your colonel has been a loyal citizen. All seven hundred and fifty grams have been secured. They will be used as evidence against you at your trial.’

‘Wait! Only seven hundred and fifty grams?’

‘Silence!’ Another crack of the pistol butt and for Dr Mun it all went dark.

AT FIRST LIGHT
they filed out to the flight line, Luke, the lawyer and their Colombian police pilot – black leather flying jacket, reflecting shades and hair slicked back, smooth and shiny, across his scalp. Luke took an instant dislike to him.

‘Pacific swallows,’ remarked Friend, who was dawdling on the tarmac to admire the birds that swooped and dived in the early-morning sun, catching the midges that hovered above the grass. ‘Reminds me of home.’

‘We’ve only been gone a day, John.’

‘I know, I know. Just saying.’

One by one, they clambered aboard and strapped themselves in for the three-hour hop from the capital to the Pacific coast. It all started so well, the pilot brimming with confidence, flashing a winning smile beneath his aviator shades. Squashing his tall frame into the Cessna Caravan eight-seater, Luke discovered that the police plane was so small he could touch both sides of the fuselage with his fingertips. The top of his head brushed the cabin roof. There was a brief and noisy commotion in the back as the ground crew struggled to find space for Friend’s suitcase. Then they were off, swerving once to avoid a pool of rainwater then taking off west into the wind, lifting clear of the runway with the sprawling, tin-roofed
barrios
of Bogotá spreading out beneath them.

Twenty minutes later it felt like a rough ride at Alton Towers Amusement Park. The tiny aircraft was pitching and yawing, buffeted by the Andean thunderstorm that swept in over the
cordillera
. Battered by rain, the windscreen had only one wiper working, intermittently. The pilot unbuckled his seatbelt and half rose out of his seat to peer through the gloom outside. He sat down, turned to Luke and grinned, still wearing his redundant sunglasses. In the seat behind, Friend heaved twice into a plastic bag. This, said Luke to himself, is not the way I want to go out.

But then the storm clouds of the high Andes gave way to the hot, humid river valleys of Cauca province. A river twisted below, brown and sluggish. And then the jungle was before them, spreading far to the south, leaching across the border into Ecuador. The badlands, thought Luke, as the pilot levelled up to land. Nariño province, the most dangerous of all Colombia’s thirty-two
departamentos
, the place with the biggest per capita murder rate in the country, and they were heading for its epicentre, Tumaco port. The natural trouble-seeker in him said, Bring it on, I’m ready. But another, more measured, voice told him to watch his back, get the job done and extract himself in one piece. He had Elise to think of, and Friend to keep out of harm’s way.

Their arrival in Tumaco was anything but discreet. They touched down with a bounce, briefly taking to the air again, then landed and rolled to a stop. Luke peered out of the small Perspex window and saw a reception committee lined up and waiting for them, a squad of police commandos in full combat gear, their faces tiger-striped in green and black camouflage paint. He recognized them as the Jungla, Colombia’s elite counter-narcotics Special Forces, set up by Britain’s SAS in 1989, later trained and mentored by America’s Green Berets. Luke remembered being told by someone on an earlier visit: ‘It’s pronounced
khoongla
.’ They had a certain macho reputation, fast-roping down from Blackhawk helicopters into heavily defended jungle labs ringed with Claymore mines and booby traps. But they were not cowboys: they had taken their share of life-changing injuries. A corporal
with a prosthetic leg had laughed off his injury and once told Luke: ‘You know the only thing we Jungla are scared of? It’s
el coralillo.
The coral snake. We have no anti-venom. All our stocks are used up.’

Luke dropped his rucksack on to the tarmac, jumped down from the doorway of the Cessna then strode up to greet the troop commander, who welcomed him to Tumaco.

Out on the edge of the airstrip, not far away, a garbage collector put down his broom and spoke into his mobile phone. There was a pause at the other end. Salsa music played softly in the background, then came a grunt of thanks and the line went dead. He went back to his broom as the convoy of police jeeps swept past him in a cloud of dust.

Far away, up in the cool air of the hills, a message was whispered into the ear of a man they called El Pobrecito. It was an ironic sobriquet, meaning ‘poor little thing’, a nickname he had earned when he had wept tears of joy after beating his first victim to a pulp with a baseball bat. ‘
Han Ilegado
,’ they told him
.
‘They have arrived.’

‘
I HATE TO
be a bore,’ said Friend to Luke, ‘but what makes you so certain that this is the right hotel?’

It was mid-morning in Tumaco and their convoy of police vehicles had rolled and jolted its way from the airstrip into town. Their escort had already dismounted and was now urging the two Englishmen to get off the street and inside the generously named Hotel Paradiso.

‘Because,’ replied Luke, helping the lawyer with his luggage yet again, ‘it was mentioned in the latest report from Bogotá station. This is where Benton spent his last day alive.’

Once inside, Luke asked for the room, number 16, that Benton had slept in. He wanted to get right under his skin, to sense his movements and get a feel for what he had been on to. Luke wasn’t squeamish: washing his face in a dead man’s sink didn’t bother him. In his first year at university he had been told he was inheriting his bedsit from a boy who had hanged himself there the previous term. Luke looked up now into the cracked and blotchy mirror and briefly considered the reflection that met him. There were faint creases around his eyes from all those months of squinting into an Afghan sun. Like most of his mates, he had always been more interested in what he was looking out at than in how he appeared to other people, although Elise was definitely
working on him in that department. Elise. Just the thought of her brought a smile to his face.

He sat down on the bed, which sagged alarmingly in the middle. ‘You fat bastard,’ his muckers would have shouted, if he had been in barracks, probably followed by ‘Who ate all the pies?’ Stuck in that distant hotel room, he suddenly missed the Marines and the banter. Instead, he had John Friend, the Service lawyer, and now the man was knocking insistently on the door.

‘I don’t suppose you have an adaptor by any chance?’ asked Friend, poking his head into the room. ‘And what about the water? Do you think we can we drink it?’

Luke reached into a side pocket of his rucksack and handed him his own adaptor. ‘This is your first time in South America, isn’t it?’

‘I should say so. Actually it’s my first time out of Europe. Well, unless you count Tenerife.’ He left, closing the door behind him.

Luke checked his watch. It was time to get started on the investigation. His overriding priority was to find Fuentes, the locally recruited agent who had been working with Benton. Or, rather, for Benton. Fuentes had been the last man to see him alive, apart from Benton’s executioners. But if I were Fuentes, reflected Luke, I would have gone very deep underground by now. In fact, I would probably have disappeared altogether. The coroner’s office had not reported any more bodies in the last twenty-four hours so he had to assume Fuentes was either still on the run or had been caught by the cartel. So where was he? Perhaps he would get some answers out of the local police chief. Vauxhall Cross had given him the name before he left, a Major Humberto Elerzon.