Burning Angels

‘For me, this entire conversation has been very personal. I do not normally speak to people about my… gift. You see, that is how I think of it. That I am indeed gifted. Exceptionally so. I have never met another person — a hunter — as gifted as I am.’ She paused and eyed Jaeger. ‘Until I met you.’

He raised his coffee. ‘I’ll drink to that. That’s us — a brotherhood of hunters.’

‘Sisterhood,’ Narov corrected him. ‘So, the question?’

‘Why do you speak so oddly? I mean, your voice has a kind of odd, flat, robotic ring to it. Almost like it’s devoid of feeling.’

‘Have you ever heard of echolalia? No? Most people haven’t. Imagine when you are a child, you hear words spoken but all you hear is the words. You do not hear the stresses, the rhythm, the poetry or the emotion of the language — because you can’t. You do not understand any of the emotional inflexions, because that is not how your brain is wired. That is how I am. It was via echolalia — mimicking but not understanding — that I learned to talk.

‘Growing up, no one understood me. My parents used to sit me in front of the TV. I heard the Queen’s English spoken, plus American English, and my mother also used to play Russian movies for me. I didn’t differentiate between the accents. I didn’t understand not to mimic — to echo — those on screen. Hence my accent is a mishmash of many ways of speaking, and typical of none.’

Jaeger speared another succulent chunk of lamb, resisting the temptation to do the unthinkable and add some green beans. ‘So what about the Spetsnaz? You said you served with the Russian special forces?’

‘My grandmother, Sonia Olschanevsky, moved to Britain after the war. That was where I was raised, but our family never forgot that Russia was the mother country. When the Soviet Union collapsed my mother took us back there. I got most of my schooling there and went on to join the Russian military. What else was I to do? But I never felt at home, not even in the Spetsnaz. Too many stupid, mindless rules. I only ever truly felt at home in one place: the ranks of the Secret Hunters.’

‘I’ll drink to that,’ Jaeger announced. ‘The Secret Hunters — may our work one day be complete.’

It wasn’t long before the food lulled both of them to sleep. Jaeger awoke at some stage to find Narov snuggled close. She had her arm linked through his, her head on his shoulder. He could smell her hair. He could feel the soft touch of her breath upon his skin.

He realised that he didn’t particularly want to move her. He was growing used to this closeness between them. He felt that stab of guilt again.

They’d gone to Katavi posing as a honeymooning couple; they were leaving looking like one.

63

The battered-looking Boeing 747 taxied into the cargo terminal at London’s Heathrow airport. It was remarkable only in that it lacked the usual row of porthole like windows running down the sides.

That was because air freight isn’t normally alive, so what need would it have for windows?

But today’s cargo was something of an exception. It was very much alive, and made up of a bunch of very angry and stressed-out animals.

They’d been cooped up bereft of any daylight for the whole of the nine-hour flight, and they were not happy. Enraged cries and whoops rang out all down the 747’s echoing hold. Small but powerful hands rattled cage doors. Big, intelligent primate eyes — brown pupils ringed with yellow — flickered this way and that, searching for a means to escape.

There was none.

Jim Seaflower, the chief quarantine officer at Heathrow Terminal 4, was making sure of that. He was issuing orders to get this shipment of primates moved across to the big, sprawling quarantine centre that was tucked away to one side of the rain-swept runway. The business of primate quarantine was taken very seriously these days, and for reasons that Seaflower understood well.

In 1989, a shipment of monkeys out of Africa had landed at Washington DC’s Dulles airport on a similar flight. Upon arrival, the cages of animals were trucked from the airport to a laboratory — a ‘monkey house’ as those in the trade called it — in Reston, one of the city’s upmarket suburbs.

Back then, quarantine laws were somewhat less stringent. The monkeys started dying in their droves. Laboratory workers fell sick. It turned out that the entire shipment was infected with Ebola.

In the end, the US military’s chemical and biological defence specialists had to move in and ‘nuke’ the entire place, euthanising every single animal. Hundreds and hundreds of diseased monkeys were put to death. The Reston monkey house was rendered into a dead zone. Nothing in there — not the smallest microorganism — was allowed to live. Then it was sealed off and abandoned pretty much for ever.

The only reason the virus hadn’t killed thousands — maybe millions — of people was because it wasn’t transmitted via aerial means. Had it been more flu-like, ‘Reston Ebola’, as it became known, would have ripped through the human population like a viral whirlwind.