Richard Halliwell waited until the man had driven away in his van before he removed the balaclava, then he walked out of the park in the opposite direction.
Unseen by either Halliwell or the Mexican, a shadowy figure on the far side of the hedge waited a full five minutes before he too walked out of the park.
CHAPTER 27
A s Professor Imran Sayed entered the new Commanding Colonel’s office, the pungent odour of fresh sandbags assailed his nostrils. Not only had the door been arched with the freshly filled sacks, but the front and sides of the desk looked like something out of ancient Giza with the green bags packed up to the top of the desk in a pyramid.
‘At ease!’ the Colonel snapped.
Professor Sayed had wandered in with one hand in his suit pocket, and he was somewhat taken aback by the Colonel’s order for him to relax. ‘Expecting an attack anytime soon, Colonel?’ he asked with a grin, unable to resist baiting the military commander.
‘I’ll remind you again, Professor, this country is at war. At war, d’yer hear, and we can never be too prepared. This is a top-secret base and another 9/11 might be just around the corner,’ Wassenberg fumed, momentarily distracted from the Professor’s opinion piece and the reason he had summoned the recalcitrant academic.
‘Perhaps that might be a good reason to sit down and talk with people like President Ahmadinejad and Bashar al Assad,’ Imran replied more seriously. ‘Instead of treating them and their people like pariahs and threatening to bomb them all out of existence. We might get better results if we sat across the table and got to know one another a little better. You never know, we might even find some common ground we can work from.’
‘Iran and Syria are part of the axis of evil, Professor. Haven’t you been listening to President Harrison?’
Not if I can help it, Sayed thought.
‘Chamberlain tried that with Hitler and look where that got us. We don’t negotiate with terrorists, Professor, and one day you and the rest of the academics on this base will learn to leave war fighting to the President and people like me who know something about it.’
Sayed was tempted to observe that neither Iran nor Syria had shown any sign of the territorial ambitions of either Hitler or the United States, nor did the President and his generals seem to know a great deal about the implications of starting a war in places like Iraq. He was beginning to think that the IQ of his Colonel and the sandbags had alarming similarities and he let the comments go through to the catcher.
‘Which brings me to your opinion piece in today’s New York Times. Who authorised that?’ Colonel Wassenberg demanded.
‘I wasn’t aware that an opinion piece, being one man’s opinion, required authorisation from anyone, Colonel,’ Sayed replied, his own anger starting to rise. ‘One of the cornerstones of this democracy, a democracy that we are very keen to impose on the Middle East,’ he added pointedly, ‘is supposed to be freedom of speech, but it seems to me that for conservative governments like this one, freedom of speech only applies if you happen to agree with their policies.’
Colonel Wassenberg was apoplectic. ‘You’re employed by the United States government to adhere to the policies laid down by the President, the Pentagon and myself, and that does not include writing to the papers with criticism that is way above your pay grade. In future you will clear all correspondence through me. Through me, d’yer hear? Dismissed.’
Sayed shrugged, turned and walked from Wassenberg’s office shaking his head. Not only did the Commanding Colonel have some interesting delusions of grandeur, but Professor Sayed judged that Wassenberg was a prime candidate for a stroke or a heart attack. He rolled his eyes and winked at a bemused Kate who was waiting to go in.
‘Crawshaw! Is that Braithwaite woman here yet?’
‘Yessir! USAMRIID Sir!’ Captain Crawshaw shouted. ‘Quickly, the Colonel’s waiting,’ he urged, waving his hand back and forth as he shooed Kate towards the door.
Kate tilted her head, raised her eyebrows and made cross-eyes at the captain before wandering in to Colonel Cluster’s inner sanctum.
‘You wanted to see me, Colonel?’ Kate asked, blinking innocently at the red-faced Wassenberg who was drumming his fingers on the top of his desk.
‘At ease.’
‘Thank you, Colonel,’ Kate said condescendingly, infuriating Wassenberg even further.
‘I said this morning that I wasn’t happy with the standard of dress on this base, and one of the main offenders is you! Jeans are not an acceptable form of dress and your hair is to be cut short or tied in a bun. Crawshaw is sending you a copy of the dress manual.’
‘This may come as a surprise to you, Colonel,’ Kate responded angrily, ‘but I’m not part of your army, or anyone else’s. If I wanted to parade at six o’clock in the morning and tie my hair in a bun I would have gone to West Point, but from the little I’ve seen of that institution’s product,’ she said, glaring at the small man sitting behind his bombproof desk, ‘I’m quite happy with my decision to be a microbiologist!’
Incensed, Kate turned on her heel and strode through the sandbags, leaving Colonel Wassenberg speechless but more determined than ever to demolish the fiery young scientist’s career. He reached for the letter he’d received in the afternoon post, signed personally by the Secretary of Defense, requesting two high quality scientists skilled in Level 4 laboratory work be temporarily assigned to Halliwell Pharmaceuticals as liaison officers on the smallpox vaccine project and added Braithwaite’s name to Sayed’s. This would be a backwater that would at least stall her career until he could think of something more permanent.
CHAPTER 28
D r Richard Halliwell parked his red Mercedes-Benz SLR 722 McLaren Sports in his private car park underneath the Halliwell Tower. With a top speed of 208 miles an hour and a price tag of over $400,000, the sports roadster was just another symbol of Halliwell’s relentless pursuit of power; although for church on Sundays he conveyed a more subtle if no less powerful image with the big black Mercedes S600 sedan he allowed his wife to drive. Simone Carstairs, Halliwell’s personal assistant of nearly eight years, preferred the McLaren.
Halliwell inserted the key to his private lift and rode it to his office. The gleaming monolith of chrome and glass symbolised the ‘Big Pharma of Big Pharma’. Halliwell Pharmaceuticals had offices and factories in sixty-three countries.
Dr Halliwell took off his coat and hung it in the walnut-panelled cupboard adjacent to his private bathroom. Deep in thought, he wandered over to the windows of his office and, as was his habit, stared out towards the early morning mists that hovered over the lake below Stone Mountain. The day before, Vice President Bolton had telephoned to congratulate him on being awarded the Administration’s half-a-billion dollar contract for the production of 300 million doses of smallpox vaccine. Keeping Bolton on the books as a consultant, albeit on a separate set of books, had been a stroke of genius. Fleetingly he reflected on the expertise of his Chief Financial Officer, Alan Ferraro, who was away on leave. He’d never warmed to him, but then again, with the possible exception of his secretary, Halliwell didn’t warm to anyone. As long as Ferraro managed to keep the company clear of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the rest of the Wall Street regulators, Halliwell would continue to
