The Constant Gardener

"To act or else. She felt bound to us. To you. By loyalty. She was a British diplomatic wife and she was determined to do things the British diplomatic way. "The easy way is, bypass the system and go public. The hard way is make the system work. I prefer the hard way." She said that. She clung to a pathetic notion that the Brits had more integrity — virtue in government — than any other nation. Something her father drummed into her, apparently. She said Bluhm had agreed the Brits could handle it, provided they played fair. If the Brits had such a big stake in it, let them take the word to ThreeBees and KVH. Nothing confrontational. Nothing dire. Just persuade them to withdraw the drug from the market until it was ready. And if they didn't — "

"Did she set a time limit?"

"She accepted that it would be different from zone to zone. South America, Middle East, Russia, India. But her first concern was Africa. She wanted evidence within three months that the drug was being disappeared. After that the shit would hit the fan. Not her words, but nearly."

"And that's what you sent to London?"

"Yes."

"What did London do?"

"Pellegrin did it."

"Did what?"

"Said it was a load of naive bullshit. Said he was buggered if Foreign Office policy was going to be dictated to him by some born-again British wife and her black lover. Then he flew to Basel. Had lunch with the KVH boys. Asked them whether they might consider hoisting a temporary red flag. They replied to the effect that the flag wasn't red enough and there was no soft way to withdraw a drug. Shareholders wouldn't countenance it. Not that the shareholders were being asked, but if they were asked, they wouldn't. Ergo, nor would the board. Drugs aren't cookbook recipes. Can't just fish one bit out, an atom or whatever, add another bit, try again. Only thing you can do is fiddle the dosage, reformulate, not redesign. Want to change it, you've got to go back to square one, they told him, and nobody does that at this stage. Then they rattled their sabers about curtailing their investment in Britain, adding to the Queen's jobless."

"What about ThreeBees?"

"That was a different lunch. Caviar and Krug on Kenny K's Gulfstream. Bernard and Kenny agreed there'd be mayhem in Africa if the story got out that ThreeBees were poisoning people. Only thing to do, stonewall while KVH'S scientists put the polish on the formula and fine-tune the dose. Bernard's only got a couple of years to go. Fancies his chances on the ThreeBees board. On the KVH board too, if they'll have him. Why settle for one directorship when two will do?"

"What was the evidence KVH disputed?"

The question appeared to send a shiver of pain through Woodrow's entire body. He lifted himself upward, seized his head with both hands and rubbed his scalp vigorously with his fingertips. He flopped forward, his head still in his hands, and whispered, "Jesus."

"Try water," Justin suggested, and led him along the corridor to a hand basin, and stood over him, much as he had stood over him in the mortuary when he was vomiting. Woodrow held his hands under the tap and sluiced water into his face.

"The evidence was bloody massive," Woodrow muttered, back in his chair. "Bluhm and Tessa had gone from village to clinic, talking to patients, parents, relatives. Curtiss had got wind of them and launched a cover-up. Had his man Crick organize it. But Tessa and Bluhm kept a log of the cover-up too. Went back and looked for the people they'd spoken to. Couldn't find them. Put it all in their report, how ThreeBees wasn't just poisoning people but destroying the evidence afterward. "This witness has since vanished. This witness has since been charged with criminal acts. This village has been cleared of its inhabitants." Made a bloody good job of it. You should be proud of her."

"Did the woman Wanza feature in the report?"

"Oh, the woman Wanza was a star. But they put the muzzle on that brother of hers all right."

"How?"

"Arrested him. Extracted a voluntary confession. He came up before the beak last week. Ten years for mugging a white tourist in Tsavo National Park. The white tourist never gave evidence, but a lot of very frightened Africans saw the boy do it so it was all right. The judge threw in hard labor and twenty strokes of the cane for good measure."

Justin closed his eyes. He saw the crumpled face of Kioko squatting on the floor beside his sister. He felt Kioko's crumpled hand as it thrust into his own at Tessa's graveside.

"And you still didn't feel any need — when you first read that report — and knew more or less it was true, I suppose — to say anything to the Kenyans?" he suggested.

The truculence again. "For God's sake, Quayle. When did you ever put on your best suit, trolley round to the Blue Boys' headquarters, and accuse them of mounting an orchestrated cover-up and taking Kenny K's shilling for their trouble? That's no way to make friends and influence people in sunny Nairobi."