Sam Bourne 4-Book Thriller Collection. Sam Bourne

breathed out heavily. He remembered those years at university, followed by more years in graduate school, most of them spent in a lab. He had become a research pharmacologist by the time he was twenty-seven and had spent the next fifteen years working on a single project, codenamed Operation Help. It was his boss’s little joke, playing on ‘help’ as a synonym. For Andre van Zyl belonged to a team searching for a cure for AIDS.

      They were just a part of it, of course. The headquarters of the research effort was in New York, with satellite teams in Paris and Geneva. The South Africa field office was smaller still, chosen for what the corporate literature called its ‘clinical resonance’. Translation: South Africa had a handy supply of AIDS sufferers.

      They had been testing out new remedies on groups for years now. Andre had been at some of the trials, clinics out in the sticks taking one hundred sick men and women, marking fifty of them as a control group and handing new tablets to the rest. Andre had been at his computer when the results came through. Time after time his reports had had the same conclusion: no impact; statistically negligible results; needs further work.

      But nine months ago, a set of data had come back that could not be ignored. The sample group had shown an improvement unlike any seen before. The symptoms were not just held at bay; they were becoming non-existent. The medication seemed not only to pacify the virus, but to chase it out of the system altogether.

      Within a week, scientists from the Geneva team had flown in to see the patients for themselves. A few days later the head of the entire project arrived from New York. He ordered the control group be put onto the new drugs immediately, on ‘humanitarian grounds’.

      Andre had to laugh at that. For he knew what would happen next. The head honcho from America would publish a paper in Nature, hailing his breakthrough and bidding for the Nobel prize that was surely his, while the US Food and Drug Administration would start testing the new tablet. Once they had given the seal of approval, it would go on sale and make the company they all worked for one of the richest in the world. They had found the Holy Grail of twenty-first century medicine: they had found a cure for AIDS.

      The only trouble were people like Grace, the woman Andre had met on one of the earliest trials. Too poor to get the antiretroviral medicine she needed, AIDS was a death sentence for her – not a condition that could be lived with, as it was in Europe or the US. This cure would be no cure for her or for the millions of women, men and children like her, all over the world. The new drug would never reach them because it would be too expensive. The company had a patent on the new medicine that would last twenty years: until then, they had a monopoly and could charge what they liked.

      So he had gone to the FedEx office earlier that day with a large box addressed to a man he had never met in Mumbai, India. Revered and reviled as the king of the copycats, this man had made a fortune making bootleg copies of the latest western drugs and selling them to the Third World for a tenth of the price. He had done it with some of the early AIDS medicines. Now, in the next day or two, he would receive a full blueprint for the cure. Andre’s note issued a clear demand: ‘Make this drug and distribute it to the world. Now.’

      The sun was beginning to set; he could hear the waves more easily than he could see them. He would go to a bar and chug back a beer. Who knew when he would get another chance. Tomorrow the company might discover his theft, his treachery, and have him arrested on a dozen counts. With this much money at stake, they would have to make an example of him: he could be in jail for years.

      So he decided to savour this night. He drank, he flirted. And when one beautiful girl, with long bronzed legs and a skirt that barely stretched over her bottom, came on to him, he rose to the occasion. She laughed at his jokes; he rested his hand on her smooth, naked thigh.

      The ride in her open-topped car was punctuated by long, open-mouthed kisses at each traffic light. They fell into her apartment, her clothes falling willingly to the floor. And when she went to fix him a drink, he gulped it down gratefully, not even noticing the powdery residue still undissolved at the bottom of the glass.

      He coughed a little; he grew dizzy and resolved to drink less next time. As he lost consciousness and fell towards death, he could hear the girl’s voice, gently reciting what sounded like a poem. Or perhaps a prayer.

THIRTY-TWO

       Saturday, 11.27pm, Manhattan

      If it had not been for lust and guilt, Will might never have seen him. He had not yet had a chance to tell TC of his breakthrough, the phone call from Jay Newell, when she stood on tiptoes to reach for a book from one of her highest bookshelves. As she stretched, her thin shirt pulled away from her jeans, revealing the taut, unmarked skin of her lower back. For all the feelings of shame, he was at it again, noticing the shape and curve of TC’s body. He turned away.

      To dispel any impression that he was ogling, he made a point of looking elsewhere, starting with a glance down at her desk. It was piled high with papers, cuttings from magazines, fine art journals mostly, but with the odd piece from the New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly too. There were flyers promoting film seasons at art house cinemas, a couple of catalogues from clothes stores, two thick editions of Vogue and what he could see was a handwritten letter.

      At a job interview he would have called his next impulse professional curiosity, but the simpler truth was that he was nosy. He tugged at the paper, sandwiched between an edition of the New York Times Sunday magazine and a seasonal guide to the Lincoln Center, until he could glimpse the top half of the first sheet.

      Will jumped. The letter was written in a series of symbols that looked like gibberish. Yet it was definitely a letter, on personal notepaper, with a date at the top right in conventional numbers. He frowned. Surely he would have remembered if TC was fluent in another language. Indeed, he distinctly recalled that one of her few areas of academic deficiency was linguistic. She always said she regretted that she had never learned French or Spanish; despite her supercharged education, she had never found the time.

      Movement outside caught his eye. A couple were getting out of a just-parked Volvo: perhaps they had been at the movies or at a dinner party with friends. They might have been himself and Beth, enjoying a normal life. The very idea struck a sharp pain into his heart. For the hundredth time since the phone call a couple of hours earlier, he heard her voice. Will? Will, it’s Beth.

      He dragged his gaze away. Further up the street there was a pair of teenage boys in oversized jeans and a middle-aged woman carrying a single flower. Instantly Will could see and hear Beth at the Carnegie Deli, telling him the story of Child X and the flower he had handed Marie, the grieving receptionist. Beth had been so touched by that action, an act of humanity which, Will felt sure, his wife had somehow drawn out of this wild, damaged young boy.

      Directly below, on the opposite sidewalk, was the man in the baseball cap.

      Will did not recognize him straight away. Even when he saw the blue body-warmer, he did not make an immediate connection. But something in the man’s stance, a certain relaxation of posture that suggested he was not on his way somewhere else, but needed to be right here, sparked a memory.

      Will instantly snapped back the curtain and took a step away from the window. He had seen that man this very evening; he had thought him a lonely tourist, admiring the headquarters of the New York Times, peering into the window as if he had nothing better to do. Now this same man was pacing around outside TC’s building. It was too much of a coincidence.

      ‘TC, how many exits are there out of here?’

      She looked up from the King James bible she had just taken off the shelf. ‘What? What are you talking about?’

      ‘I think we’ve been followed and I think we’re going to have to leave right now. Except we can’t walk out the front entrance. Any ideas?’

      ‘You’re kidding. How would any—’

      ‘TC, we don’t have time for a discussion.’

      ‘There’s