“We’ve got a new client, Jinx,” Colin said.
Colin often calls me Jinx over the phone or when he’s out of reach.
My real name is Mark Dobson, and I was sitting and relaxing with a glass of ice cold Beerlao at the Shangri-La Hotel in Kuala Lumpur, having only just finished a job for our last client when he called.
We’d even been paid for it, so I was reflecting on a job well done. It was also Friday, and I was wondering if I should treat myself to a weekend in Bangkok before heading home.
Colin sensed my lack of interest. “It’s a biomedical research company from Boston, USA,” he added, and I imagined him grinning because he knew I preferred working with higher-tech types of business.
The last two clients had been corporates making big brand consumer stuff - blue chips with counterfeit problems. My job was to nip things in the bud before they got out of hand. I’d become good at counterfeit jobs. I was so good that I was finding them routine. You get to know the sorts of people involved in rackets like that. You know their ways and where they hang out. I could take you to backstreets and even some big industrial estates where counterfeiting is the number one local industry.
The Chinese are good on electronics. The Thais are brilliant at printing jobs like fake passports, and if you ever want Gucci handbags, Scotch whisky, or nicely packaged copies of Avon or Estee Lauder cosmetics, then there’s a small town just outside Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam I’d recommend as a starting point.
Asher & Asher is the name of the company Colin Asher and I started some years back. If we had a website, which we don’t, counterfeiting might be given a mention, but international corporate fraud, industrial espionage, and theft of intellectual property would be the highlights.
So, when Colin mentioned an American biomedical research company, I put my beer down.
“I was thinking of flying to Bangkok for the weekend,” I said.
He gave a short laugh. “Ha! How is she?”
I told him I’d not seen her for months. “She probably won’t even recognise me.”
“No problem then, Jinx. Come back here. Duty calls.”
Colin often talks about duty. “Duty calls,” he says. “He who escapes a duty avoids a gain,” he says. “Happiness is the natural flower of duty.”
“What about a duty to myself,” I said. “You’ve been married twice.
Can we forget our duties when it suits us?”
This time, he tried another one on me, “When a stupid man does something he’s ashamed of, he always says it’s his duty.”
“The biggest shame is I never seem to get a day off,” I replied.
“Aww. Now you’re bringing tears to my eyes.”
It was only banter, but being the same age as Colin and still single, I wasted the next few seconds on considering my private life. Being single suited Colin just as much as it did me. Being single meant I could jump on a plane with five-minute notice, talk to myself if I felt like it, and sometimes forget my own name. However, it doesn’t bode well for a woman expecting a cosy life with a man who arrives home for dinner on time. I am not a man who can forget the day just gone and leave it in the hallway with his hat and coat.
Sadly, several women with foresight have complained that my passion and commitment for completing a job for a client seemed to take precedence over completing other jobs requiring similar devotion. My reply has always been that passion takes many forms, but I admit that I’m not good at defending my own character. Faced by such accusations, words dry up.
So why am I admitting to a few private weaknesses at the start?
Because I was about to face another of those situations and I need to explain why things turned out like they did early on rather than struggle to do so later. Meanwhile, I was already intrigued by what Colin had just said. “Tell me some more,” I said.
“Virex International. Based in Boston. They do research on viruses and other nasties.”
“Never heard of them,” I replied.
“Nor me, until their president, Charles Brady, called. Something about our reputation spreading far and wide.”
“I’ve always said word-of-mouth marketing beats a website.”
“So don’t ruin it, Jinx. If you get here within twenty-four hours, you could meet him off the plane with a fancy placard, saying, ‘Welcome, Charles.’ What a great start that would be.”
So, I cancelled my vague, private plan and, while finishing my beer, sat with my phone and booked a flight to London instead of Bangkok.
***
I was in London for two nights and one day.Most of the day was spent waiting for Brady’s delayed flight to arrive from Boston, and by then, Colin and I had pieced together a lot more about Virex International. We knew they worked on vaccines and did complicated research on viruses that caused influenza and other human disease. Their problem, according to Colin’s brief conversation with Charles Brady, was that they’d lost some sort of research material, but Brady had been reluctant to say much over the phone.
Colin and I swapped views and listed some questions. What sort of research material? How and when was it lost? That sort of thing.
Whatever it was, we dismissed break-in and common theft by a local cat burglar. It looked more like industrial espionage to us, so I was quite looking forward to meeting Virex’s Charles Brady.
When I saw him, though, he wasn’t quite what I’d imagined. Here was a slightly overweight middle-aged guy with a nice tan wearing a crumpled beige suit, wide-striped shirt, and flowery tie. He reminded me more of a gay jazz musician I once met than a scientist in a white coat who would sit analysing electron microscope images all day long. But at least I got invited into the American Airlines arrivals lounge for coffee.
Once we’d settled, he began a long explanation about his flight delay while all I wanted was to start on my list of questions. In exasperation and because he was already looking at his watch to go somewhere else, I finally asked him to get to the point. “What exactly have you lost, Mr Brady?”
He seemed to be in some doubt, which intrigued me. He then said they’d lost some phials of frozen virus samples, but instead of a description of the virus itself, I got a full technical explanation of the freeze-drying process. It was like a distraction, as if he didn’t want to come clean. After a full minute, I asked him, “What sort of virus?”
First, he wiped his forehead, as if the answer would cause him to break out in a sweat. Then he sniffed. “A type of coronavirus,” he said. Then he checked his watch again.
He’d mentioned something about a meeting in Cambridge later, so I decided to move things along. What I needed was a fix on the cost of what I imagined were a few frozen test tubes. Costs always put things into perspective. “Give me a figure, Mr Brady,” I said. “What’s the financial cost of the loss?”
That threw him again. He sniffed once more, but eventually, put a value of a few million dollars on it. It wasn’t an exact sum and not as big as I imagined it might be. It was probably big for a company of Virex’s size, but before I could react, Brady said something else:
“One of our scientists left around the same time,” he said. “There has been quite a turnaround of senior staff in the industry around Boston recently.”
I heard what he said and still remember the nervous way in which he told me. It had been a significant comment, which I was to dwell on later, but at the time, Brady was still talking. He ended with, “If you need more information, there’s a conference on infectious diseases in Bangkok that starts on Tuesday. Amos Gazit, our head of research, will be attending.”
It was the mention of Bangkok that fully registered. Everything I’d been doing recently seemed to centre around Southeast Asia. “What exactly do you want Asher & Asher to do, Mr Brady?”
He again checked his watch. “Talk to Amos. Ask questions and see what turns up,” he said.
I was still pondering on the return to vagueness when he stood up, saying he had to go or he’d be late. We left the lounge. I shook his greasy hand, and then I watched him walk away while pulling a case on wheels and wiping his face, as if I’d given him hot flushes.
I was to remember Charles Brady’s manner at that first meeting. I pondered on it for a while as I watched him go, but then I put it aside and called Colin in the office. “He’s gone,” I said. “He provided a few more facts but left behind still more unanswered questions, but I assume we’ll take Virex on as a client.”
Colin grunted, which meant he was too busy to talk but that he agreed.
“In that case, I’ll leave you to discuss the fee, etcetera,” I added. “He was in a hurry but suggested I talk to his head of research—a guy called Amos Gazit, who’s at a conference.” Colin grunted again, so I added, “So I’m flying to Bangkok tonight to meet Gazit at the conference.”
That woke him up. “Christ Almighty,” he said. “If that had been me, he’d have told me his head of research was at a conference in Kazakhstan or Bolivia.”