The Satan Bug

'Yes, Baxter. Sorry about that, too — but I told you, plain as I could, not to waste time on him. He said to Deny that although it wasn't the top secret stuff that was going — that was impossible to get out of 'A' laboratory — it was nevertheless pretty important stuff. Very important stuff, indeed. Britain leads the world in the production of microbiological diseases for wartime use against men, animals and plants. You'll never hear of this when the Parliamentary Estimates for Mordon Health Centre are being passed, but our scientists in Mordon have either discovered or refined to the purest and most deadly forms the germs for causing plague, typhus, smallpox, rabbit and undulant fever in man: hog cholera, fowl pest, Newcastle disease, rinderpest, foot-and-mouth, glanders and anthrax in livestock: and blights like the Japanese beetle, European corn borer, Mediterranean fruit fly, boll-weevil, citrus cancer, wheat rust and heaven knows what else in plants. All very useful in either limited or all- out warfare.'

'What's all this got to do with Dr. MacDonald?' Hardanger demanded.

'I'm coming to it. Over two years ago our agents in Poland began taking an interest in the newly-built Lenin Museum on the outskirts of Warsaw. So far, this museum has never been opened to the public. It never will be — it's the equivalent of Mordon, a purely microbiological research station. One of our agents — he's a card-carrying member of the party— managed to get himself employed there and made the interesting discovery that the Poles were discovering and refining the various bugs I just mentioned a few weeks, or at most months, after they had been perfected in Mordon. The inference was too obvious to miss.'

'Easton Derry started investigating. He made two mistakes: he played it too close to the cuff, without letting us know what was going on, and he unwittingly gave himself away. How, we've no idea. He may even have taken into his confidence, quite unknowingly, the man who was responsible for smuggling the stuff out of Mordon. MacDonald, for a certainty — it would be too much to expect two espionage agents operating at the same time. Anyway, someone became aware that Easton Derry was in danger of finding out too much. So Derry disappeared.'

'The General here then made arrangements to have me removed from the Special Branch and introduced into Mordon as security officer. The first thing I did was to stake out a decoy duck. I had a steel flask of botulinus toxin, strength one — it was so labelled, introduced into a cupboard in number one lab annexe. The same day the flask disappeared. We had a VMF receiver installed at the gates, for the flask contained not toxin but a micro-wave battery-powered transistor sender. Anyone carrying that and coming within two hundred yards of the gate would have been picked up at once. You will understand,' I said dryly, 'that anyone picking up a flask of botulinus toxin is unlikely to open it up to see if it really does contain toxin..'

'We picked up no one. It wasn't hard to guess what happened. After dark someone had strolled across to a deserted part of the boundary fence and chucked the flask into an adjacent field — it's only a ten-yard throw to clear all the fences. Not because they had any suspicions of the contents but because this was the way it would usually be done — you know how often spot checks and searches are made of people leaving Mordon. By eight o'clock that evening we had micro-wave receivers installed at London Airport, Southend and Lydd airfields, the Channel ports and—'

'Wouldn't the shock of having been flung over the fence have smashed the transmitter?' Hardanger objected.

'The American watch company that makes these transmitters would be most displeased if one did break,' I said. 'They can be fired from a high velocity naval gun without being affected in the slightest. Anyway, late that night we picked up a signal in London Airport. Almost inevitably it was from a man boarding a B.E.A. flight to Warsaw. We took him and he told us he was a courier, picking up stuff about once a fortnight from an address in South London. He'd never actually seen his contact.'

'He told you that?' Hardanger said sourly. 'I can imagine how you made him volunteer that information.'

'You'd be wrong. We told him — he was a naturalised British subject — ex-Czech — that espionage was a capital offence and he thought he was turning Queen's evidence. He turned it pretty fast, too. It was his supplier from Mordon we wanted to nail, so I was duly thrown out of there and have been haunting this damn address and neighbourhood for the past three weeks. We couldn't get anyone else to do the job because I was the only one who knew and who could identify all the scientists and technicians in Mordon. But no luck— except that Dr. Baxter reported that the disappearances had stopped. So we seemed to have stopped that leak — temporarily, anyway.'

'But according to Baxter and our Polish informant, that wasn't the only leak. We had learnt that the Lenin Museum had developed viruses that had not been stolen from Mordon — but which had been produced in Mordon. Someone, obviously, was sending them information on the breeding and development of those strains. And now we've found that out, too.' I tapped the papers, MacDonald's correspondence with his W.H.O. contact in Vienna. 'Not a new system, but almost impossible to detect. Micro- photography.'

'All that expensive photographic equipment upstairs?' the General murmured.

'Exactly. There's a camera expert due from London to look at his stuff, but his journey's hardly necessary now. Look at those letters from Dr. Weissmann. In every one you will note that the dot from an 'i' or a full stop is missing in the first paragraph. Weissmann typed a message, reduced it to the size of a dot by micro-miniature photography and stuck it on the letter in place of some other dot. All MacDonald had to do was to pry it loose and enlarge it. And he, of course, did the same in his correspondence with Weissmann. And he didn't do it for pennies, either.' I glanced around the richly furnished room. 'He's earned a fortune over the years — and not a penny tax, either.'

There was a minute's silence, then the General nodded. 'That must be the right of it. At least MacDonald won't be troubling us any more.' He looked up at me and smiled without humour. 'When it comes to locking stable doors after the horse has taken off, we have few equals. There's also another door I can lock for you, supposing it's any use to you. The caption that's been scratched out in this album.'

'Toulon? Tournai?'

'Neither.' He turned to the back board of the album. 'This had been prepared for certain members of the W.H.O. by a firm called Gucci Zanolette, Via XX Settembre, Genoa. The word that has been scratched out is Torino — the Italian, of course, for Turin.'

Turin. Only a word, but he might as well have hit me with a sledge-hammer. It had about the same effect. Turin. I sat in a chair because all of a sudden I felt I had to sit, and after the first dazed shock started to wear off I managed to whip a few of the less lethargic brain cells out of their coma and started thinking again. It wasn't much in the way of thinking, not as thinking went, for with the beating and the soaking I had received, the lack of sleep and food, I was a fair way below my best insofar as anything resembling active cerebration was concerned. Slowly, laboriously, I assembled a few facts in the befogged recesses of my mind, and no matter how I reassembled them those facts formed the same mosaic every time. Two and two always came out to four.

I rose heavily to my feet and said to the General, 'It's like the man says, sir. You speak more truly than you know.'

'Are you all right, Cavell?' There was sharp anxiety in the voice.

'I'm falling to pieces. My mind, such as it is, is still on its hinges. Or I think so. We'll soon find out.'

Torch in hand, I turned and left the room. The General and Hardanger hesitated, then followed. I suppose they were exchanging all sorts of apprehensive glances, but I was past caring.

I'd already been in the garage and shed, so those weren't the places to look. Somewhere in the shrubbery, I thought drearily — and it was still raining. In the hall I turned off into the kitchen and was about to make for the back door when I saw a flight of steps leading down to the cellar. I remembered vaguely that Sergeant Carlisle had made mention of this when he and his men had been searching the house that afternoon. I went down the flight of steps, opened the cellar door and switched on the overhead light. I stood aside to let the General and Hardanger into the cellar.

'It's as you said, sir,' I murmured to the General. 'MacDonald won't be troubling us any more.'

Which was not quite accurate. MacDonald was going to give some trouble yet. To the police doctor, the undertaker and the man who would have to cut the rope by which he was suspended by the neck from the heavy iron ring in the overhead loading hatch. As he dangled there, feet just clear of the floor and brushing the legs of an overturned chair, he was the stuff that screaming nightmares are made of: eyes staring wide in the frenzied agony of death, bluish-purple face, swollen tongue protruding between blackened lips drawn far back in the snarling rictus