SKELETON GOLD: Scorpion (James Pace novels Book 3) Read online

  The rain that fell steadily from a grey, typically English summer sky, served to cool him as he started his marathon. Pretty soon, jacket off and carried under his arm, the rain had concealed all evidence of his sweating. Soaked to the skin, he huffed and puffed his way up the street until he found the relevant quiet avenue that led off through a residential area, ending up at a tiny playground, neatly fenced with iron railings and filled with a couple of brightly-coloured plastic slides and swings. Two wooden, slatted park benches sat opposite each other, across a small gravel path that led from the entrance gate to the exit on the far side, about thirty feet away.

  Although it was very small, the inside of the railings were hedged with trees and tall shrubs; twenty years old if they were a day. With the cool rain and an unseasonably persistent breeze rustling the leaves, the park was totally empty. It was also fast approaching six o’clock in the evening so most children were at home, getting ready to eat dinner. The time and place had been very carefully selected.

  Wormly pushed open the gate and stepped inside the playground, casting a furtive look around but finding that he was totally alone. Darkness wouldn’t fall for hours yet but the daylight was subdued under the heavy cloud cover, seeming more autumnal as the rain began to fall a little harder. With feet aching, he slipped his wet jacket back on and settled his massive frame onto one of the benches. Birds sang softly in the surrounding treetops, accompanied by the rhythmic wheezing and gasping as his burning lungs struggled to recover from the exertion.

  He waited and, very slowly, his fat-coated heart settled back to a steady beat. Checking his cheap, imitation Rolex watch, Wormly traced the movement of the hands around the face. Five, ten, then fifteen minutes passed and he was beginning to get agitated. He looked potentially paedophilic; a fat man sitting alone in a children’s playground. It would attract attention if he stayed too long.

  Just then, the gate swung open and a beautiful young woman pushed a pram through, crunching up the path. Mid-twenties, with blonde hair falling wetly around her shoulders, she wore tight-fitting black leggings and a long, dark purple leather jacket that fell almost to her knees. Minimal make-up enhanced her natural beauty, with clear olive eyes, small nose and high cheek bones finely accentuated her features.

  As she drew level, Wormly was silently cursing his luck when his recently recovered breath was stolen completely by the shock of her stopping, leaning down, and planting a warm kiss wetly on his lips. Pulling back, she threw him a broad smile and settled herself down next to him, while slipping a slender arm across his massive shoulders.

  ‘Sorry I’m late, darling,’ she said, looking him squarely in the eye. ‘Today has been a nightmare.’

  Yes…yes…quite,’ he stammered, still completely taken aback by the kiss. Wormly was very inexperienced with women. Even as a younger man, when he carried far less weight, girls had avoided him because he was basically unpleasant, selfish and rude. He wasn’t a virgin but that had come about by frequent visits to local brothels since his late twenties. He’d never yet had a female partner who he had not had to pay for. A free kiss, to a man like him, was priceless.

  ‘I have to get back to work, honey. Sorry to dump you with the baby but I’ll get off as soon as I can and bring a bottle of wine in with me for dinner. We could order a take-away from that nice little Chinese restaurant around the corner.’

  As the fog of surprise lifted and the light of realisation exploded like a firework lancing high into a dark sky, Wormly finally understood that this was the person he had been waiting for.

  ‘That sounds perfect,’ he nodded, smiling.

  She looked at the bloated, red-faced, balding man sitting next to her and reviled inside at the knowledge that she had to kiss him goodbye yet. Ever the professional, she stiffened her resolve and got on with the job. She didn’t want to spend any longer in his company than necessary.

  ‘Shall I post those forms for you?

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know,’ she coaxed, ‘the ones for the tax office we talked about this morning?’

  Wormly pulled out the thick, soggy envelope and passed it over to her silently. He did not know what to expect next and watched, unmoving as she stood up, leaned back down and kissed him again. Then she hurriedly walked back down the path and out the gate, throwing a jaunty wave back as she disappeared around a nearby wall. Alone again, with a suspiciously silent baby in a pram, Wormly took a deep breath and forced his hands to stop shaking. The rain fell even harder but this time he did not notice.

  The pram contained a doll, covered neatly in blankets. Beneath the cheap plastic toy, Wormly’s stubby, probing fingertips felt a thick wad of bank notes. Satisfied, he stood up and pushed the pram back out of the playground and headed back towards the station again, stopping after a few hundred feet to slip into a back alley.

  Checking he was not being observed, he retrieved several wads of money and tucked them into the inside pockets of his sodden jacket before walking back onto the main street, leaving the pram and doll pushed up against a rickety wooden fence.

  Wormly had no intention of putting himself through another squashed journey on the underground, and stretched out a hand to hail a taxi. This time of day they were plentiful and he was soon tucked up on the back seat of one of them, engaging the chirpy driver with occasional conversation, mainly about the rain and some recent flooding in Scotland. As he thumbed the thick wads of notes, through his jacket, he felt like a naughty schoolboy who had just pulled a classroom prank, exhilarated yet fearful that he might be exposed as the culprit at any minute.

  But he knew there was little risk of anyone catching on to what he had done. It had all been so simple.

  All they had wanted was photocopies of an old seaman’s diary. That was it! They didn’t even want him to take the risk of removing the book itself. On one of his frequent trips to return material to the secure archive, Wormly had found the book easily. New material was always kept on a specific shelf, close to the door, as these documents tended to be requested most frequently. After a period of time, when all the secrets had been mulled over by top officials elsewhere, they would be filed in the normal way but that usually took a couple of months.

  So, he wasn’t surprised to find it sitting on the shelf and he had managed to squirrel it away inside his jacket without anyone suspecting anything. He stayed late at work that night, explaining to his boss that he wanted to catch up with some paperwork. He spent an hour in the copier room, mixing legitimate and secret copying, until he had finished. Wormly locked the diary and the copy in his personal locker before heading home.

  The next day, he was asked to visit the secure archive again; to collect a requisition for some high ranking bigwig up on the third floor. It was perfect timing and the diary magically reappeared on its shelf barely eighteen hours after it had been removed. Nobody noticed its absence. No alarms went off and everything in Wormly’s office ran at its normal, dreary pace. Nothing had altered, except Wormly’s fortunes.

  Back in the present, Wormly decided to pay the driver a handsome tip, purely because it made him feel important and assuaged his ego on this amazing day in his life. Once safely inside his little suburban home, he emptied out his jacket and counted each note carefully.

  True to their word; whoever they actually were, (he didn’t know and cared even less) the notes added up to a cool one hundred thousand pounds sterling; a mixture of used notes, but mainly in twenties and fifties.

  After treating himself to a delivery of three pizzas and a bottle of red wine, Wormly hid the money inside an old shoebox, which he then secreted in an old trunk inside his wardrobe. Covering the trunk with a handful of old towels, positive his luck had changed for the better, he went to bed.

  His greed made him blind to the reality of just how much danger he was now in.

  4

  The annual conference of the African League was Solomon Munambe’s favourite moment in his political schedule. It got him away from his worn,
bow-legged desk in his office and brought him out of the Namibian capital city of Windhoek for two weeks, once every year. It was always held in Kenya’s own capital; this time in Nairobi’s newest tourist gem, the Hotel Excelsior.

  Rising twenty storeys above the sweltering heat of the pavement, the hotel took the form of a delightfully elegant tower, topped with a glass dome that sparkled beneath the African sun. Sandstone façade and brick-trimmed windows lent the hotel a stately feel, while its glitzy, revolving glass doorway hinted at the contemporary luxury to be found within.

  The African League was a respected forum, concentrating purely on humanitarian issues that blighted the vast continent; famine, drought, disease and the typically tragic human consequences of Africa’s seemingly constant tribal wars. It did not have the remit to deal with the bigger political issues, or the headache of having to try to solve them. That was left to others.

  Munambe, although he delighted in his fortnight off every year, was a very rare breed of politician; especially in Africa. Incorruptible, completely dedicated to his countrymen and to the African people as a whole, he had served his government for over twenty years. He had turned down several large bribes and other political sweeteners during that time.

  Known and respected as an honest man throughout African circles, if anyone deserved a break from the fifteen hour days that he usually put in, six days a week, it was Munambe.

  He sat on an elegant bar stool, propping up the highly burnished antique mahogany bar, and sipped at his cold glass of beer, idly watching the bubbles furiously chasing each other from the bottom of the glass to the top. This was his fifth beer in an hour and his head was beginning to swim with a muzzy sensation that threatened to interrupt his mental clarity. Much as he was enjoying the chilled, amber liquid, he put the glass down and slid it away from him with a sense of finality. This would not solve the problem, he knew.

  It was a little after three in the morning and the young bartender; a dark-skinned local man with undeniable good looks and a reputation amongst the staff for being the hotel Don Juan, was dutifully cleaning glasses. He waved Munambe goodnight and watched his only customer stagger off in the direction of the lifts.

  Returning to his polishing, he wondered what could have brought the man down to the bar just before two o’clock and driven him to drink so much, so quickly. He arrogantly decided, at last, that it was probably something to do with women and promptly forgot all about it.

  Up in his room, on the tenth floor, Munambe pushed open the double doors of his balcony and stepped out to suck in some deep breaths of warm air. The hotel’s central position gave him excellent views out over the city. Down below, traffic still buzzed merrily along the roads and the sea of neon and sodium lights that lit Nairobi served as a reminder of how quickly Africa was catching up with the rest of the developed world. Looking around, he could have been in any large city, anywhere in the world.

  The telephone call that had roused him from a fitful slumber some three hours earlier was the reason for his early morning need for alcohol. Even now, and he’d been mulling over the contents of the call ever since hanging up the receiver, he was at a loss to understand what the hell was going on.

  He had never been contacted during the conference before. Everything, however important, had always been deemed suitable to await his return. After all, Namibia was mostly desert and open savannah, and boasted a largely stable government, so there wasn’t a great deal to go wrong. With tourism expanding year on year until it now made up a huge percentage of the country’s income, the remaining militant factions within its borders had long since put down their guns. Nobody wanted to rock the tourist boat and the country was beginning to thrive.

  On one hand, tourists were attracted to the unspoilt game parks; several large international safari operators had their headquarters in the country. Luxurious lodges and tented resorts offered a five-star opportunity to photograph Africa’s diverse wildlife in its natural habitat, which drew in large numbers of people and hard cash.

  The second draw for tourists was the infamous Skeleton Coast; a beautifully barren desert coastline that made up the country’s western border with the Atlantic Ocean. With hundreds of miles of desolate sandy beaches, constantly shifting to the touch of ferocious storms and high winds that regularly battered the hot, dune-pocked coast, a strange phenomenon could be observed that was found nowhere else.

  For years, ships of all shapes and sizes had found themselves thrown up onto the beaches by the venom of sudden squalls and heavy seas; marooning the vessels and their crews in a very hostile environment. The sand was in such flux that the beaches themselves constantly changed shape, often moving out into the sea and effectively locking the wrecked ships inland, sometimes by several miles.

  Photographers regularly visited the country to take amazing pictures of dozens of rust-streaked, sand-blasted ships that littered what appeared to be open desert. Modern ships were still being lost along the coast but modern communications allowed their crews to be rescued quickly. Years before satellite communication, GPS and even effective long-range radio, hundreds of marooned sailors had not been so lucky, perishing in a state of parched, thirst-driven madness.

  Aside from the booming tourist industry, Namibia boasted some modest oil and gas fields and, as a rule, was considered to be one of the safer, more successful stories in recent African history. The odd disease outbreak and tribal conflict were easily resolved because they were confined to relatively small geographical areas; a large portion of the country was devoid of human beings and home to a plethora of animals, living in vast game reserves that had enjoyed the protection of the law for over a decade.

  Munambe had re-played the telephone call in his mind at least fifty times already but did so again, just in case he’d missed something. He found nothing new, which frustrated him. Munambe had only arrived two days previously, with the actual conference due to begin the following afternoon, following a sumptuous lunch that had been planned for the large press contingent expected to cover the event. The call had come from a Tswana Kaoni, a junior minister attached to his office.

  Munambe was primarily responsible for tourism and overseeing the security of the game reserves; a job that had been his for over six years. Before that he had worked within the interior ministry, dealing with issues such as border controls and crisis management; refugee issues by another name.

  Kaoni’s tone had been excitable and it had taken the best part of five minutes before Munambe’s sleepy brain had managed to decipher the full enormity of the message. Suddenly wide awake, he had forced Kaoni to repeat the facts, slowly and clearly. Sadly, they sounded worse the second time around.

  For most people in the western world, experience of bubonic plague was limited to information gleaned during typically dull history lessons in their school years. Confined to the Middle Ages, children grew up understanding that it had been a terrible disease, spread by fleas living on rats, although the people living at the time had no idea where it came from or how it was spread. Large, filthy, sewage-soaked medieval towns and cities were perfect breeding grounds for the rats that bore this hidden death and millions had perished in agony, bodies covered in weeping sores and huge boils.

  It was a footnote in history to most people, a disease long since understood and treatable. Most people actually thought it was a disease that had disappeared from the planet but they were misinformed.

  It was true to say that the disease was no longer a major killer of people and that it had genuinely been eradicated from all major, developed countries. But it had not vanished because it was a naturally occurring disease that still popped up every now and again in the rural areas of less developed nations.

  In Africa, Ebola was the current nightmare that garnered all the media attention, with plague now totally overlooked, even forgotten. Generations of native farmers had learned to spot the signs and destroy, by burning, infected animals to prevent the spread to other animals, or humans. Even they w
ere more concerned with Ebola.

  Suddenly, dreadfully, something had changed and it had forced Munambe into a brief, alcohol-fuelled panic. According to Kaoni, one of their regular anti-poaching aerial reconnaissance flights had spotted a massive herd of dead wildebeest, right in the heart of one of the most popular game reserves.

  Fearing mass poaching, the plane had managed to land. In the absence of any bullet wounds on the carcasses, tissue samples had been retrieved and taken back to base, where the laboratory had quickly established the cause of death as bubonic plague. Worse still, the pilot also reported seeing hundreds more dead animals when he returned to do a follow-up sweep of the nearby savannah a few hours later. Elephant, rhino, giraffe, lion, zebra; all dead and spread over several square miles. Rapid, massive decimation of wildlife had occurred and the finger of suspicion pointed squarely at an explosion of plague.

  This level of infection had not occurred in living memory before, so Munambe was right to be horrified. If the disease continued to spread, it could conceivably wipe out huge numbers of the game that Namibia now relied upon to entice foreign tourist revenue into its coffers. Even more concerning was the truth that the human residents within the area might be at risk too.

  Munambe resolved to snatch a few more hours sleep because he knew he’d be needing his wits about him in the morning. Just as he was settling back into bed, however, another call came through from his office. Kaoni’s voice sounded more anxious, with no hint of tiredness that might have been expected as the time ticked its way towards four o’clock.

  ‘I have an update, sir. It is not good news. I am sorry to disturb you again but this cannot wait.’

  ‘It’s quite alright,’ said Munambe, sitting upright and sucking in a preparatory breath. ‘Please, go on.’

  ‘The laboratory has been working very hard to further examine the tissue samples that were collected from the dead wildebeest,’ Kaoni explained. For a moment, Munambe felt his heart flutter at the tantalising prospect of their original diagnosis being wrong but his hopes were quickly dashed. ‘The duty team called in our chief scientist to check their findings. He has confirmed that it is plague.’