Bite Read online

  Publishing Details

  First published in Great Britain in 2007 by Ludensian Books

  www.ludensianbooks.co.uk

  85 Linden Walk

  LN11 9HT

  Copyright © Nick Louth 2006-2014

  www.nicklouth.com

  The right of Nick Louth to be identified as the author has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.

  9780857193797

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A CIP catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the British Library

  All rights reserved; no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior written permission of the Publisher. This book may not be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise disposed of by way of trade in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without the prior written consent of the Publisher.

  No responsibility for loss occasioned to any person or corporate body acting or refraining to act as a result of reading material in this book can be accepted by the Publisher or by the Author.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance between the characters herein and real persons living or otherwise is purely coincidental.

  Cover design by DAB Graphics

  Cover picture by Shutterstock

  For Louise

  Praise for Bite

  "Fast, smart and terrifyingly plausible. Bite is a thoroughly assured thriller with an unusual and alarming setting – it sinks its hooks into the reader from the first chapter and does not let go."

  – Jon Henley, Guardian

  "When his girlfriend Erica disappears in the middle of the night, Max Carver gets caught up in a plot to unleash a deadly epidemic in this gripping tale of blackmail and revenge. Against the backdrop of a devastating disease, and violent criminals, we discover the terrible secret locked away in a kidnapping years earlier that links Erica to the unfolding events. This a masterful and dexterous weaving together of characters and plot, and a real page turner. Nick Louth will drag you out of your parasite-free comfort zone in this immensely satisfying read."

  – Rosie Carr, Investors Chronicle

  About the author

  Nick Louth is a financial journalist, author and investment commentator. He is a former Reuters correspondent, and a regulator contributor to the Financial Times, Investors Chronicle and Money Observer. Nick Louth is married and lives in Lincolnshire.

  Nick Louth is the author of:

  Multiply Your Money

  The Investment Diary of Bernard Jones

  Bernard Jones and the Temple of Mammon

  Dunces With Wolves: The third volume of the Bernard Jones Investing Diaries

  Chapter One

  August in New York. A sweaty evening, zoo class on a crowded jumbo jet, waiting for take-off at JFK. Hour-old rain smoked off the tarmac like oil from a hot pan. Now movement, finally, after an hour’s delay. The 747 began to accelerate, engines whining. Droplets ran diagonally across the windows, the runway lines dashed beneath like tracer fire, overhead lockers rattled. KLM flight 648 lifted off, destination Amsterdam. Three hundred and fifty passengers began to relax, thinking their problems were over.

  Not a chance.

  John Edward Davies sat in aisle seat 38C. He looked just as a John Edward Davies should: ordinary, anonymous, forgettable. A name designed for a false passport. Under the seat in front of him he had a small zip-up bag. Inside was a Tupperware box, its lid held tightly in place with three thick rubber bands. That is where ordinariness ended.

  The food box was, in Pentagon-speak, ‘a cost effective weapon delivery system’. So light, so innocuous. Seemingly empty. Almost, but not quite. It contained no electronics, no clock, no explosives, no chemicals, no poison gas, no unusual bacteria or viruses, no radioactive materials. Nothing any terrorist had ever used. Nothing to trigger airport security. Nothing noticeable on an X-ray machine, no scent for a sniffer dog, no metal for a metal detector.

  Yet there was more death in that box than in any bomb. John Davies had done his homework. The contents of the box could kill more people than the Hiroshima atomic bomb. Just much more subtly. Much more slowly.

  For the next few hours all he had to kill was time. To stay calm and keep quiet. Think ordinary, be ordinary, and keep his feet pressed tight around that box. Next to him, in seat 38B, a curly-haired man sat tearing pages from the in-flight magazine, folding them into origami swans and doves, balancing them on his tray table. Before Davies could turn away, the neighbour caught his eye and began a conversation. He was Max, a sculptor, an American. John Davies nodded and smiled at the right moments, saying little until finally getting the chance to turn back to a magazine.

  Outside, the sunset crystallised to a vibrant orange brushstroke on a prussian blue horizon as the plane slid out into the Atlantic night.

  At exactly ten thirty New York time Davies took a bottle of pills from his pocket. He opened it, removed the cotton wool, tapped out an orange tablet with a tiny blue dot at its centre. Swilled it down with a glass of water. In a small diary he flicked to the calendar page for August. Circled the day, noted the time, just as he had for the last three weeks, just as he would have to do for several more weeks.

  Fate has a habit of barging in on all precision plans. A middle-aged woman pushed past the drinks trolley in the aisle and knocked Davies’s elbow. The pill bottle tipped and orange tablets bounced everywhere. The woman apologised, lowered herself to her fleshy knees and started scrambling on the floor to pick them up. The flight attendant joined in. More unwanted attention. Davies told them: it’s okay, I’ll get them. Leave it to me. Just vitamin pills, no problem. But they carried on, making small talk, and tautening his temper.

  Then the woman moved the zip-up bag to reach a tablet. His legs twitched involuntarily, and he snarled. I said leave it. She looked up at him and in her wide eyes was surprise, flecked with fear.

  When she’d gone he counted the pills silently from his tray table into the bottle. Eleven missing. Rattled and angry, now Davies just wanted to do it now and have it finished with. But he knew he couldn’t. Not yet. Not until the right time.

  After the film, more drinks, and then the irritating tangle of headphones and eyemasks, blankets and bedsocks. After all that. When the lights were dimmed and the artificial rules of jet sleep descended. Only then could Davies get up, and do what he had to do. What he had so long dreamed of doing.

  A thin smile played on his lips. Out of the window all light had been swallowed by the ocean of night. A world heading into darkness, at a speed beyond nature’s design.

  It was midnight New York time when Pharmstar Corporation chief executive John Sanford Erskine III left his World Business Class seat to go to the toilet. He walked past the sleeping forms of his personal assistant Penny Ryan and Don Quiggan, chief financial officer. Across the aisle Bob Mazzio, head of mergers and acquisitions, was watching a movie on a personal screen.

  Inside the rest room Erskine straightened his silk tie, brushed the shoulders of his jacket, and patted cologne on his tanned cheeks. At six foot four, he needed to stoop a little for the mirror. He checked his leonine profile in the mirror, tucked a paper towel into his collar and carefully brushed and flossed his teeth.

  With a small silver comb he flicked the last two or three errant hairs to the correct side. Satisfied, he smiled. Fifty eight years old and he still had a thick mane of hair. Once jet black, now it was grey and shot with white above his ears.

  From a monogrammed leather bag he took a small jar of cream. With a fresh face towel twisted on a finger, he took a dab and smoothed it along his bushy black eyebrows. Once the wayward
hairs were in place he dabbed off the excess and used a hairdryer to set them. The eyebrows emphasised his piercing blue eyes, but Erskine had more subtle uses for them. With tiny arches, inflexions and frowns, what he called his calligraphy of influence, he was able to steer a meeting without raising his voice, and engineer a seduction without lowering it.

  Iron Jack Erskine, they called him. He wowed investors and swayed bankers, he overawed rivals and intimidated opponents. Oppose Iron Jack, it was said in the pharmaceutical industry, and the odds were a thousand to one you would lose.

  Trouble is, some enemies never look at the odds.

  Chapter Two

  While victims sleep, predators hunt.

  It was 2.15 a.m. in New York and 8.15 a.m. in Amsterdam. Davies retrieved his zip-up bag from beneath the seat and pressed his fingers through the material, to feel the seal around the box lid. Intact. His curly-haired neighbour lay slumped under a blanket, a paper swan in his hand. Across the aisle a bald businessman lay snoring with his laptop computer still open, its cursor blinking for attention.

  The economy cabin was like a darkened battlefield: sprawled bodies, splayed limbs, gaping mouths, and across the aisle a blanket spattered with red wine. In a few places reading lamps knifed the gloom, illuminating old biddies with permed hair and spectacles on chains, ploughing through the latest thriller. If only they knew where the action really was.

  His fingers reached inside the zip bag and eased off the rubber bands. The lid was still tight. He put the bag on his shoulder and headed towards the curtain partitioning off business class. There was a flight attendant preparing drinks in the kitchen beyond, but she didn’t look up as he padded past. Five feet further on was the staircase reaching up to the business class upper deck. The target area.

  Davies placed his feet slowly, to make sure the metal stairs didn’t ring as he climbed. Three stairs below the top, he stopped. Wide soft seats, reclined with bodies upon them. Soft, vulnerable, sleeping. He lifted the box from the bag. Took one last glance above him. No-one stirred. No-one was watching. Carefully, he took off the lid.

  ‘Hey Max! I’m here.’

  Max hadn’t even spotted Erica when she threw herself out of the Amsterdam arrivals crowd into his arms. ‘I’ve missed you so much.’ Her English accent sent waves of delight down his spine as he lost himself in her embrace and perfume.

  ‘God, it is so good to see you,’ Max said. He kissed her neck and ran his hands through her bobbed black hair, then he held her face and gazed into the improbably green eyes and the wide smile. Seeing her always thrilled him, as if ten days apart was time enough to forget how beautiful she was.

  ‘Here. I’ve got something for you.’ He rested a paper swan on her shoulder. She looked at it and grinned. ‘Thank you. I will add it to my ever-expanding origami aviary.’ She led him off to the airport restaurant. ‘I’ve found us a nice little hotel and Columbia University is footing the bill.’

  ‘Have you got your big paper ready for Sunday? I want to read the New York Times and see the headline “Erica Stroud-Jones gets Nobel prize”.’

  Erica smiled. Max had an artist’s view of science: a mystery of formulae and bubbling gas jars, punctuated by wild-haired professors shouting eureka in the middle of the night.

  ‘I’ve got some more revisions to make,’ she said. ‘The conference organisers are already on my case about getting them the paper, but I can’t afford to be tripped up by this loose end.’

  ‘My very own perfectionist,’ Max kissed the tip of her nose, and dumped his bags by a table. ‘Don’t let this get in the way of us having a good time. You can’t cancel on me any more. I will not allow it.’

  ‘Max, don’t.’ Erica pressed a finger to his lips, her eyes flaring. ‘Come on. We’ve been through this before. It has to be right, that’s why it has taken years…’

  ‘Years, no! Decades, surely. Without recognition, sitting on a broken chair, having to beg, borrow and scrape for a computer, sleeping in the office…’

  Erica arched an eyebrow in mock offence. ‘Did I give you permission to embellish my hard luck story?’

  By the time the waitress came for their order they were laughing, hands clasped over the table. Max had never come second to anything in a woman’s life, but if he wanted this beauty he knew there was no other way. His whole life, at school, college, seven years in the U.S. Coast Guards, he had fought to be number one, without thinking of the consequences. He was thirty-eight years old on Sunday, it seemed a good age to acquire a little grace.

  ‘I’ve got something special planned for your birthday,’ Erica said, stroking Max’s hair.

  ‘I can’t wait.’ Max had prepared his own surprise for Erica. In his pocket his fingers tapped the tiny oystershell box. Just to check it was still there, just as he had every few minutes since leaving New York. Inside the box, on a lining of purple satin, was a ring. It was the only time he had ever worked gold, or set a diamond. Ready for Sunday, which would be the only time he had ever asked a woman to marry him.

  This morning, Thursday, our first in Amsterdam, Max and I arrived together at our lovely little hotel, the Erwin, with its beautiful curved staircase and wood panelled lobby. The room was wonderful and to us it didn’t matter that the lift was only big enough for luggage. On the way down we saw a woman lift her disabled husband out of his wheelchair and try to carry him up those steep stairs. Max rushed down to help her, and carried this tiny, shrivelled little man in his arms up the stairs. It was a very touching thing to see.

  (Erica’s Diary)

  Chapter Three

  Don Quiggan and Bob Mazzio were sitting in the restaurant of the Krasnapolsky Hotel in Amsterdam’s Dam Square watching pretty girls on bicycles and the lunchtime drug dealers approaching tourists.

  Mazzio yawned extravagantly. ‘I always get lagged going west to east, whatever I do. In here it’s the middle of the night,’ he tapped his swarthy head with a hirsute finger. Then he looked at his watch and groaned. ‘Aw shit. Is that the date?’

  ‘Jet lag’s pretty bad when you don’t even know what day it is,’ Quiggan smirked, sipping his coffee. ‘Take some exercise, soak up a little natural light.’

  ‘Nah. I forgot it’s my son’s birthday.’ Mazzio pulled out a notebook computer and plugged in his mobile phone. ‘I better e-mail him.’

  ‘I thought he was only six or seven.’

  ‘Six years old today. He’s pretty sharp on a PC though.’

  ‘Let’s hire him then, Bob. Smart young guy like that.’

  Mazzio grimaced as he tapped at the keyboard. The last thing he wanted was for Kyle to sell his soul to Pharmstar. One in the family was enough. Three months ago, his first day at Pharmstar, Mazzio had sat in when Iron Jack briefed newly-hired business school graduates on strategy.

  ‘I want the next Prozac or Valium, the next Lipitor or Zantac,’ Jack had said, striding up and down, his big voice booming across the hall. ‘I want you to scour the world for billion dollar a year blockbusters. Between you and me you can screw the cure for cancer as a financial proposition. What we need are treatments, not cures. Treatments that patients take every day, year in, year out. The clinical areas are obvious: depression, migraine, backpain, arthritis, cholesterol control, weight control. And the target market is only one: first world and affluent.’

  Mazzio had been astounded by the facts and figures Jack produced, straight out of memory. It cost eight hundred million bucks and up to twelve years to bring a drug from test tube to market. A typical drug submission to the Food and Drugs Administration needs two trucks to carry the paperwork. So when a drug passes all the regulatory hurdles it has to reap huge rewards for the remaining eight years of its patent life, not just to repay its own development costs but to cover the other ninety-nine per cent of drugs that don’t make it. A candidate molecule can fail for all kinds of reasons. Maybe it works in the test tube, but not on a test animal, or works on a test animal but not a human, or fixes the ailment but gives the patient a d
ifferent ailment, or - the most frustrating of all - the molecule works perfectly but some college smartass writes a doctoral thesis showing a dime-a-day aspirin treatment works just as well.

  ‘You know something?’ Jack had told the assembled executives. ‘I want to shoot those two college sons of bitches who decimated the ulcer market by discovering that cheap antibiotics work just as well.’

  Mazzio had felt a little alienated by the laughter. But he needed the money, and no-one in the industry paid as well as Pharmstar.

  Quiggan coughed.

  Mazzio pushed the notebook computer aside. Jack Erskine was approaching the table. The CEO didn’t sit down, he just leaned over, resting his huge tanned hands between them.

  ‘Bob,’ Erskine said quietly, dark eyebrows squeezed low over hooded eyelids. ‘Why didn’t you tell me Henry Waterson had been sniffing around Utrecht Laboratories?’

  ‘I didn’t know, Jack. What’s he doing there?’

  ‘It’s your job to know these things. You did the groundwork here, right? Didn’t you know his consultancy has a contract there?’

  Mazzio shook his head. His wide brown eyes were soft like a chastised dog. ‘It must be small potatoes Jack, they would have told me otherwise.’

  ‘There’s $3.4 billion of our stock being offered in this acquisition. Nothing that affects it is small potatoes. I want his nose outta there. Get me copies of his contract from Utrecht Labs. I’ll need them later today for the lawyers to pick holes in.’

  And then Erskine was gone.

  Mazzio blew a sigh while Quiggan chuckled, the left hand side of his pale, austere face hoisted experimentally, revealing long, narrow, yellowed teeth, wet with saliva.

  ‘What is it with him and Waterson?’ Mazzio asked.

  ‘You know that it was Henry that built Pharmstar up, right?’

  ‘Sure. Started as Vitaledge Vitamins, in 1965 I recall.’