As the Asher & Asher business has grown, Colin now has help in our Edgeware Road office. Ching is from Hong Kong, and Else is from Poland. The speed at which they can work sometimes astounds me. The FBI, CIA, MI5, and MI6 could learn a few things from Colin, but don’t tell him I said so.
When I checked my email at 11:30 p.m. my report was there. Colin’s little team had produced it within six hours. Some civil service.
“Jinx,” the email began, “See attached - a few notes for which you need to thank Else, not me. I’ve been pounding the streets of London most of the day, and it’s cold, wet and bloody freezing out there.
Colin.”
I opened the attachment.
“Report on Shah Corporation:
Established 2012. International trading arm for Al Zafar Agencies Ltd, a company originally registered in Jordan in 1997. Al Zafar is solely owned by Mohamed Abdul Rahman Kader - nationality uncertain but either Egyptian or Jordanian.
Al Zafar is mainly an agency for a long list of international companies in baby foods, health foods, and pharmaceuticals.
The organisation has offices bearing the name Al Zafar in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi. Latest figures suggest a profitable company based on 120 million USD turnover.
Our Kuwaiti agent says Mohamed Kader is a multi-millionaire with business interests in several other companies (still trying to obtain more detail).
Shah Corporation was set up as Shah Medicals in Egypt in 2012. No information on the Egyptian company. Al Zafar/Mohamed Kader is involved somehow - perhaps owns it.
Shah Medicals Pte. Ltd is based in Singapore, small. Al Zafar is involved somehow, perhaps owns it, sells to pharmacies in Singapore and Malaysia. Our Malaysian agent says it is unusual for an Arab to set up a company like this in Southeast Asia. Local manager - John Chua.
Al Zafar / Mohamed Kader recently bought a Hong Kong company, Chin Seng Trading - no detail.
Shah Medicals (Nairobi) set up very recently - no detail but thought to be a takeover of a local pharmaceutical distribution company also going by the name Shah, which may have been the reason for buying the company. Al Zafar / Mohamed Kader is involved somehow.
Shah Medicals may include Shah Pharmaceuticals, Shah Technick, Shah Africa, Shah Trading - still trying to unravel this. Say if you don’t need to know.
Our Kenyan agent Jimmy Banda is out of town, but his secretary Louise says the company was in the news recently, apparently
expanding into manufacture. Mohamed Kader was there. He was interviewed on the radio. Personal note: Louise says she used to buy hand cream from old Mr Shah’s pharmacy, and her mother used to buy sore throat pills and other Indian and African remedies. Suggests Shah has long history.
Mr Shah (he was already eighty-two) retired on the proceeds of the buy-out, but he was well respected - a prominent pharmacist of the old school, ex-president of the Pharmaceutical Society etc.
Other information:
Mohamed Kader may (unconfirmed) also have offices or agents in Jakarta, Bangkok, Jeddah, Cairo, Athens, Istanbul, and Lagos, Nigeria.
Al Zafar name is registered in several countries.
According to our Kuwaiti agent, Mohamed Kader trained as a doctor in Cairo but failed or was thrown out of university (unconfirmed).
Started as a medical salesman in Amman before setting up Al Zafar agencies.”
It was a superb piece of work and far more than I hoped for but not much more about Mohamed Kader than I had already dredged from my memory. I also knew I could still be chasing something that was totally unconnected to Virex’s problem. Except that - and I kept returning to this - both Amos Gazit and Charles Brady seemed to hold suspicions about one or more companies at the trade show. Which one? And why?
Livingstone? Greg O’Brian? Fact was I really didn’t like O’Brian. His involvement was only a hunch but I felt comfortable with it.
It was midnight, and I was thinking about Anna when the phone next to my bed rang. It was Amos Gazit from Virex. “Sorry to call you, but Charles Brady just called me. He told me to inform you in strictest confidence. One of our own senior researchers, a Dutch guy called Jan De Jonge, has not been seen for three days.”
I’d been lying down, but sat up.
“He just disappeared. I told you we suspected an insider, but this guy was not one of my suspects. He’s been with us three years. Worked in my department, for God’s sake. Know him well. Single guy. Most worrying thing is he was closely involved in the development of the material we lost.
“Charles thinks there’s a connection and asked me if you had anything yet. I told him it was probably too early. The police have not even been told yet, nor his family in Holland. Reckon we’ll give him a day or two to see if he turns up, but I can tell you, we are not confident. There’s a chance he might show up, but things are too coincidental to be anything else. And we don’t need the publicity.”
Gazit rambled on a while longer until: “What do you think?”
I thought that Gazit and Brady were clutching at straws and I was the only straw within clutching distance They clearly didn’t want publicity, but families and others had a right to know and that meant the police might get to know. Everyone might get to know. “Meet me in the lobby,” I said.
I found Amos Gazit amongst the potted ferns. We walked through the hotel, past the closed souvenir shops and out through the restaurant where a pianist was still playing his heart out to around three late diners. We then stood by the iron railings above the ten-feet fall into the river. Gazit spoke first. “So, what can we do?”
I said I didn’t know but: “You seem to think there’s a connection with what you’ve lost, but we can’t be sure. There are too many unknowns.
It’s difficult to know where to start.” I paused, thinking. “Tell me.
How much were the police, FBI, etcetera, involved with the Biox disappearances? Did Biox deliberately keep things quiet for corporate reasons just like you? Did they just adopt the stance that these guys were grown adults who’d opted for a career move? Is that what you should do? For the sake of your financial situation, stay cool, treat it as unimportant - just an ordinary employee moving on? Can you do that?”
Gazit replied. “I don’t think we should make a big issue out of it.
That’s for sure.”
I took the plunge. “I spoke to Biox about their own disappearances
“You did what? Why?” Gazit shouted it into the night sky, but I’d expected it.
“Don’t worry,” I said, knowing full well he’d worry anyway. “I didn’t tell them about Virex or what you’d lost, but I needed to dig to find out about their own problems. I reckon there’s a connection somehow.”
“Jeez,” he said.
I put a friendly hand on his shoulder. “Let’s take a stroll down there. I like the river at night.”
It’s true. I like rivers at night. But there are other ways to make the experience more romantic than strolling with a stocky, bespectacled American in his fifties who’s sweating with nerves. We strolled in silence as moths, and a thick concentration of other insect life circled the streetlights. Water slopped against the wall beneath us as a late-night river taxi chugged across on the warm, windless air. Am I creating the mood?
“Tell me more about this Dutch guy,” I said. “Putting the problem of theft aside, can you think of any reason why he should suddenly take off like that?”
“He was just a quiet guy,” said Gazit. “Like I said, he’d worked for a Dutch pharmaceutical company for two years and joined us on a recommendation - poached if you like. He was first rate. He had done some virology in Boston, returned to Holland, and then come back again. He’d work late. I was often still there, of course, and we’d chat, mostly about work. He was interested in the business side. He’d check with me on time scales and so on.”
Gazit looked across the river, but he was seeing nothing.
“I’m talking myself into thinking he may have had another reason,”
he said. “He used to talk politics, but we all do, don’t we? He didn’t like the way Europe was going. Europe was an economic disaster waiting to happen. The world was on course for irreparable environmental destruction. There was social problems and too many
people caused by too many immigrants. The world was overpopulated. Conversations were never long. Sort of short bursts.”
“Did he know the two guys from Biox?”
“Yes, probably. We were all in and around Boston. The scientific community is close, but I don’t know what he did in his spare time.
He used the gym. He played tennis. He’d written a few papers on herpes virus. He mixed with students from Boston University. He probably crossed paths with David Solomon, who also spent time at the university. He would complain about pay, but he was well paid.
He asked me once about part-time lecturing, but I told him to forget it and focus on his real job.”
“Might he have joined the other two from Biox, wherever they are?”
“Yeh,” he said, as if it was a genuine possibility. “Money might be the reason. He seemed to think he was worth a lot more than we were paying.”
“So, money was a real hang up?” I asked.
“Real hang up? Maybe. But maybe there was something else biting him.” He turned to face me. “Whatever his problems were, if this proves to be connected to the other disappearances, then something is seriously amiss here. These guys must be somewhere and, unless they’re dead, are going to surface somewhere, sometime.”
***
Because of Amos Gazit, I spent another night in the hotel.Gazit and I finished talking around 2:00 a.m. By then, Anna’s phone was off, and I fell asleep fully dressed. At six thirty, though, I was awake. I showered, dressed, and was so hungry that I ordered a full American. Virex were paying so I didn’t feel too bad.
By seven thirty, I’d checked out, and by eight, I was knocking on the door of room number 118 and waiting. The door was opened on the chain. An hour later, we were lying on the bed and Anna was on her elbows, peering down into my face.
I am not always the tongue-tied, apologetic wimp you might think.
Now and again, with conditions being ideal, I can perform like any
male lead in an old black-and-white film drama. But I don’t need a neat greased-up haircut and a dark suit, and my leading lady doesn’t need to be wearing long flowing skirts, petticoats, and red lipstick and smoke cigarettes on silver holder. But I can still talk like Cary Grant or whatever his name was if I want to.
At the height of my dialogue, a cockroach had appeared to watch and learn my technique. If all went well, there’d be a hundred young cockroaches running the floor within weeks.
I had started out cautiously enough but soon got into the swing. The start was all about my business, the travelling, and the life-threatening risks I took when investigating criminals. I admit it was not a particularly romantic subject, but a man can sometimes find himself in tricky, emotional situations, so do the best he can. And Anna, for some reason, was stroking my unshaven face as if I was a child.
My romantic phase continued as I found myself describing viruses, but that was Anna’s fault. She’d asked me what a virus was. No woman had ever asked me that before, so I had to start somewhere.
“It’s like a piece of Lego,” I said. “You know what Lego is?”
I’m not sure if she did, but she nodded enthusiastically while staring into my eyes from six inches away. “Lego,” I repeated, thinking I’d found a brand-new turn on. “But a virus is very small and looks like nothing you’ve ever seen with your eyes. Viruses come in thousands of different shapes and sizes, and they grow inside you and make millions and millions of copies identical to themselves.”
“Like cancer?”
“Something like that. But some clever people play with these tiny viruses just as if they were made of Lego. They pick out one piece of Lego, put in another or change its colour, then they look at it and see what this new piece of Lego can do. If you want to and you are really clever, you can make a piece of virus Lego cause a new disease.”
“I decided I’d found a cool way of describing what is known as “gain of function” research, which, some say, should be made illegal. I’m not sure if Annna fully understood, though. She was more interested
in pulling on my ear and drawing lines where the wrinkles were growing.
Finally, I took a deep breath. “I should probably not be telling you this, but I quite like sharing things with you.” That was when my nerves started rattling. Should I aske her? Now? Whilst her fingers were beginning to run further down my chest.
“So,” I said. “Will you come with me?”
She collapsed onto my chest and looked up. “Where are you going?”
“Singapore,” I said.
“When are you going?”
“Today.”