HUNTED
NOTES TO MY DEARLY BELOVED MOTHER
NOTE 1
A WHISTLEBLOWER
“Every country needs its whistle-blowers. They are crucial to a healthy society. The employee who, in the public interest, has the independence of judgement and the personal courage to challenge malpractice or illegality is a kind of public hero.” (Fuad Alakbarov)
I don’t suppose you’ve ever met a whistle-blower, mother, but I’m about to describe what it’s like to be one. Whistle-blowers live quietly and get on with their job until they decide it’s time to tell the world what they know. That’s when their trouble starts.
In my case, with complicated scientific evidence, I first went to the Ministry of Defence. They were sceptical but passed me on and that’s how I eventually met Stash. That’s not his real name, you understand, but this is a strange and dangerous business and the Chinese Communist Party and Big Pharma don’t take betrayal lightly. They hate bad publicity.
It began when I whispered to a friend at the British Consulate General in Shanghai: “I’ve decided to go home and pull the plug on Stihl Laboratories,”
“Stihl Labs? I thought your boss, Professor Yi Song, was an adviser at Stihl”
“He’s more than an adviser,” I said. “The Chinese Communist Party effectively runs Stihl and the CCP runs thick through Song’s blood. Stihl Labs kowtow to him.”
“So, what is Stihl up to?”
“It makes big money for its shareholders which include the CCP. In return they help the CCP deliver its defence policy.”
“Sounds like you might need a good lawyer,” he replied.
Because of the wine I’d drunk that night I returned to my apartment in high spirits thinking it seemed a good idea to have a lawyer to fall back on. So, who did I know? Ah, yes, Sophie, I thought. My ex-girlfriend whom I’d not spoken to for ten years.
Now you never met Sophie, mother. It’s just as well really. It was never likely to last. She became a corporate lawyer and was far more commercially minded than me. So much so in fact that she eventually dumped me and moved to Geneva to work for a company called Berlin Biotech.
Hopefully, I thought, she was still there and would even know the biotech industry. I pondered for a while but eventually found a phone number and used the ‘blast from the past’ approach thinking this was the most appropriate for a guy who had once bedded a woman for the best part of a year in a flat in Cambridge. Sorry, mother.
“I’m heading back to the UK,” I told her.
She didn’t seem especially delighted to hear from me but I persisted. “I’ll be looking for a job but I’ve also got some other matters I want to get off my chest.”
“What matters?” she asked.
“Things to do with biological weapons.”
“Where?”
“China of course but I just wanted to say I intend to go public; things might get tricky and I might need a lawyer. It’s no longer germ warfare. It’s gene warfare.”
“Very interesting,” she said as if it really wasn’t at all interesting.”
I didn’t say much more but over the next couple of days, I began to wonder if I’d made a mistake. Looking back, it was a serious mistake, mother, but whistle-blowers start by seeing the bad in those they intend to blow the whistle on and forget that old friends might be just as bad.
Coincidentally, the first sign of trouble came three days later.
I was packing to fly to London when the intercom in my apartment sounded with the face of a Chinese guy on the screen. I clicked him in and two minutes later he was there in person with an envelope which he insisted I open it in his presence. And there it was – a threat from lawyers in Munich to cease and desist from making false claims about its client’s products, their client being Stihl Laboratories AG, Frankfurt, Germany. I hadn’t made any claims yet, but how did they know I was about to?
Sophie sprang to my mind but I continued packing. Next day I went to the airport. But I was already a marked man, mother. It started the moment the plane touched down at Heathrow. “Ah yes, Doctor Warner. There’s someone waiting to see you.”
That’s where I first met Charlie. “Charles Hartington, sir. Cadwalader and Moore, UK layers representing Stihl Laboratories, Cambridge, Massachusetts. My card.”
Charlie was no lawyer. He was a rude and untidy character who carried a gun. He succeeded in one thing; he made me nervous. But this was just the start.
NOTE 2
BIOLOGICAL WARS
“Science is a super power, but without a humanitarian heart to guide it in the right direction, it always ends up doing more harm than good.” (Abhijit Naskar)
Where does a whistle-blower go with evidence that shows the Chinese plan to start and win a biological war, mother?
The Ministry of Defence seemed the obvious place so I called the main line saying I was reluctant to explain anything over the phone. That got me nowhere so I tried a different approach. “It’s military intelligence. I’ve just returned from ten years working in China.”
That worked. I was put trough to a man who listened to a brief outline of what I was – a molecular biologist – and said that OK, under the circumstances, a face-to-face meeting might be useful. I agreed to a meeting on Friday morning at 11am.
Friday morning came and I was escorted to an empty side room to wait. A few minutes later I was joined by two suits, man A and man B who shook my hand. They listened, nodded politely but admitted that injectable gene therapies that induced metabolic changes intended for use in biological warfare were too technical for them.
“I think you should talk to someone at the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) at Porton Down near Salisbury,” said A. “Call this number and tell them you’ve been to Fulham Road.”
“Fulham Road? But this is Whitehall.”
“I know. Just say you’ve been to Fulham Road.”
The mysteries of military intelligence, mother. They would soon increase.
The next day, Saturday, I took a train to Brighton simply because it was out of London and with a train service to Salisbury. Bear in mind, mother, that this was early December, cold and wet. In Brighton I checked in at a bed and breakfast joint, the Seagull Lodge, and called the number A had given me.
“Fulham Road did you say? One moment.” I waited. Then: “An appointment is fixed for 11.30am on Monday morning. On arrival go to the main reception and say it’s about Fulham Road.”
Monday morning came. This time it was a middle-aged man wearing grey trousers and a white, open necked shirt with an exposed bouquet of curly, grey chest hair who met me. “Doctor Warner, I presume.”
He led me outside and around the block to another door that opened into a small office with three chairs and a coffee-stained table. “Take a seat.”
“And you are?” I said thinking his name would be useful.
“Paterson,” he said. “What’s your background?”
“BSc UCL. PhD in Virology, Cambridge. Followed by ten years studying the modus operandi of the pharmaceutical industry and the Chinese Communist Party and how they exploit molecular biology.”
“I see.” He put on a pair of thin rimmed spectacles. “I understand what you’ve got is quite extensive – and technical.”
I handed him the file. “This is a summary of other reports.”
In the ten minutes of deathly silence that followed I watched his facial expression change from mild disinterest to something bordering on fear. He removed his glasses. “Interesting. Who did the Chinese translation?”
“Me.”
“Anything else?”
I produced the two cease and desist letters and the card from Charles Hartington of Cadwalader and Moore. He replaced the glasses, read it, picked up a phone that lay between us, asked someone to check it out and then resumed reading my report until the phone buzzed. “Yes. I see. Thanks.”
He turned to me. “Cadwalader and Moore exists but the London office doesn’t know anyone called Charles Hartington. Sounds as if you were - what shall I say? – intercepted.”
He then lifted the phone again, pressed numbers, said, “He’s here,” and sat back with his hands behind his head, his glasses half way down his squat nose and his grey eyes fixed on me. We waited for two minutes until the door opened. This time it was a heavy, square shaped man with a mop of fine white hair, a white moustache and a matching lab coat.
Paterson waved his hand in my direction. “Doctor Warner. Joshua Daniel Warner, to be precise.”
White moustache shook my hand so I said, “And you are?”
“Neville. You are fluent in Mandarin. Right?”
He then flipped through my file for an unbearably long time as Paterson and I watched in silence. He finally wiped his moustache and sniffed. “What the hell have you got here, Doctor Warner? If this is just a summary then it’s dynamite. The Chinese won’t like this getting out. Neither will Stihl Laboratories. The mRNA research is the most worrying. And you say they’ve already injected it into some poor blighter.”
“Blighters, sir. Pleural.”
“Just one of the genes mentioned is a life changer.”
I, of course, already knew that. Inject it, give your body a few days to realise what had hit it and you could expect to be laid low by any one of several debilitating diseases that, for their intensity, depended on your existing genetic make-up. Death might well come as a blessing.
Hidden in another file the word Uyghur was mentioned and I had spent the best part of one night translating results of clinical tests carried out somewhere in Xinjiang Autonomous Region. I’d wondered if the United Nations with its famed Universal Declaration of Human Rights might also like to see it. The trouble with that idea was that a snippet I’d gleaned by hacking Song’s computer showed that the UN and the WHO already knew so what the hell was going on?
Moustache, aka Neville, was still speed-reading, flicking from page to page and constantly blowing air though his moustache. “And, of course, everything has the total blessing of the CCP,” he muttered.
“Nothing gets done without the CCP being involved somewhere,” I said.
“The number of university and government labs doing defence-related biological research increases every day,” he continued. “And China will never sign anything that restricts its bioweapon development.”
Good. At least I didn’t have to spell it out to him. China rarely signed anything. If they did then an excuse for pulling out could always be found.
Moustache still hadn’t finished. “Their military grants a priority to biological methods of defence,” he said.
“Correct.”
“And biological warfare is part of Chinese national strategy.”
“Correct.”
“In fact, their biological weapon development and research on biosecurity pose a massive threat to the world.”
“Correct.”
“Are you aware of the Chinese Defence Universities Tracker run by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute?”
“Yes. I contribute to it. Anonymously.”
The Chinese Defence Universities Tracker (CDUT) existed because it was widely known that the CCP was deliberately building links between its civilian universities, its military and its security agencies. Their plan was to leverage the civilian population to maximise military power. In other words, one and a half billion civilians were being trained to think that biological warfare was inevitable sooner rather than later and that they needed to be prepared with superior bioweaponry.
Raise the flag. Cheer the great leader.
Stash was still flipping through my report whilst twisting the ends of his main feature.
“Mm. Well. Very interesting. Stihl Laboratories, eh? Up to their ears. That really puts the cat amongst the pigeons.”
“My boss spent most of his time working for Stihl on the other side of Shanghai. I only ever saw him when he wanted some of my own tech.”
He raised a snowy white eyebrow. “Would that be Professor Yi Song by any chance?”
I nodded.
He closed the file and sat back. “Oh, dear me. Yi Song. Your boss. Still going strong and still at it. Do you know about his experiments with human embryos and foetuses?”
“Yes,” I said. “There’s an entire section on that in report number six.”
“I see. We clearly need time on this. Meanwhile, what are we going to do about you? I feel nervous just sitting next to you.”
I didn’t laugh.
“We often come across things like this,” Stash continued. “Of course, we actually go out looking for it because that’s our job. But to have someone walk in here with a bundle of stuff like this feels like holding a live grenade.”
“There’s more in my suitcase.”
“You travelled from China with it?”
I nodded like a kid who’d brought his entire Xbox system to school to play with during lessons. “Ninety percent is on a cloud storage site,” I hastily added.
“Thank goodness. Same quality?”
“Sure,” I replied. “But it covers other areas of research. Are you aware of research to find the most addictive food additives? There’s a multinational fast-food company investing millions in a project in Guangzhou. Their best additive causes kidney failure in mice and pancreatic cancer in macaque monkeys. The military love it. As usual, funding is not a problem.”
“Good Lord. We’ve never paid much attention to food additives.”
“Oh, things are well advanced,” I said. “Take methylglyoxal for example. Methylglyoxal gets released when the body breaks down junk food. It goes on to disable BRCA2 genes that naturally suppress tumour growth. So, Chinese thinking says ‘let’s find something that works even better than methylglyoxal’.
I tried not to laugh at my little joke and went on:
“Food additives are potential biological weapons. With normal food like steak, egg and chips on the way out, they want the next generation to only eat artificial foods. Barbequed, artificial meat balls and insects are popular amongst the young. Instead of nice, fresh green vegetables why not try cultivated and genetically modified seaweed grown hydroponically? No longer do you need to bomb them or cause a pandemic. Just poison the kids with fizzy drinks and packets of junk snacks and Pringles. I reckon it could take years to positively link an increase in widespread, chronic renal disease to a specific food additive. All you’d have is arguments and a long drawn out Covid-type controversies about the origin and precise cause of excess deaths – in this case mostly cancers and organ failure.”
This time, Stash raised both white eyebrows, got up and walked around the room watched, expectantly, by Paterson and me.
“By the way,” I said as he walked. “They plan is to market their additives to food manufacturers around the world with certificates showing they pass all existing tests. The trouble is that existing tests won’t detect the secret additions. Food additives are the next best thing to poisoning water supplies or mass sterilisation.”
Stash finally sat down, leaned across the table and put his head in his hands. “I agree with the Fulham Road guys. I think you need some protection, Doctor Warner. Excuse me while I call London.”
What they eventually found me, mother, was an old, stone cottage up in the hills in the Peak District of Derbyshire. “It’s registered as a holiday cottage but it’s an MI6 safe house.” Stash said. “Apparently it’s a bit isolated but perfect for keeping a low profile.”
That old stone cottage would have been nice in summer, mother, but not in December and January and, as you will see, it wasn’t as safe as they claimed.
I was, though, very grateful. I already had Charlie on my mind and there were soon to be others; a German hit man called Klaus, a sordid little fellow from the Chinese Embassy and a younger one in a hooded anorak who worked for a Chinese spy agency.
