The Seventh Vial

By Ian Wynne

Welcome to the world of genetic terrorism – a place where evil knows no boundaries.
A bird flu outbreak on Australia's remote Palm Island finds journalist Ryan Helzinger in the right place at the right time – and presents him with a chance to break the biggest story of his career.
But the headlines are scarcely dry on the page before there's a target on Ryan's back as hard-line extremists and an international hit-man seek to stop him finding out the real reason twelve people had to die in agony.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ian Wynne
• Release date: Jul 28, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311745200

Ian Wynne

Ian Wynne has worked as a journalist, magazine editor and publications manager. He was a news reporter in South Africa under anti-apartheid newspaper editor Donald Woods (who was featured in the movie Cry Freedom). He became a news editor then magazine deputy editor before emigrating to Australia, where he has worked in journalism, in public relations, as publications manager of a large university and later as publications manager at Amnesty International Australia. He was also editor of their Human Rights Defender magazine. Ian currently writes fiction and works part-time in media and communications. He has written four novels and a book of short stories. His first novel, The Pawn was set in South Africa during the apartheid era and won third prize in Australia's largest fiction competition. It was first published by Random House in 1989. Shadow by my side was published by Zeus Publishing in 2008, Gavel and The Seventh Vial have subsequently been published (along with his other works) online with Smashwords.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

1988 Office of the Coroner, Pretoria, South Africa.

The man’s skin was chocolate black, tough and rubbery. It resisted the scalpel and Doctor Charl Bezuidenhout pushed harder to make the big Y incision for his autopsy. He had already completed the first corpse and, after this one, would be finished for the day.

‘Commencing autopsy on Prisoner 352781,’ he said into the microphone pinned to his lapel, bending to read the number off the tag on the dead man’s toe. ‘The subject is a black male approximately forty years old, executed at …’ he paused to look at the paperwork ‘… 7.30 am today, 26 August 1988.’

The pathologist was, as usual, annoyed at having to do an autopsy on a prisoner executed by the State. The absurdity of it irritated him. He could dictate the cause of death now, without the lengthy procedure. ‘The man died of asphyxiation following complete paralysis caused by the fracture of the third (or fourth or fifth) vertebra. Ligature marks on the neck show considerable impact, probably resulting from a drop of approximately two metres before his fall was arrested by the noose,’ he would dictate in due course. People who were sentenced to death invariably had a broken neck if the sentence had been carried out correctly. South Africa followed the traditional British system of hanging by the supposedly humane ‘long drop’ method where the eyelet of the noose is positioned under the left jawline of the prisoner and the drop distance calculated from the condemned man’s weight to ensure a ‘striking force’ of approximately a thousand foot pounds. This, Bezuidenhout had read but had flatly refused to witness first-hand, was sufficient to ensure a complete fracture of the neck which resulted in immediate paralysis and unconsciousness. Death, the literature said, followed shortly afterwards as the lungs and heart ceased to function. You didn’t have to be a genius to work that out and if the autopsy showed they’d died of anything other than a broken neck it would be pretty damned surprising.

But under South African law all prisoners who died while under the State’s care had to be autopsied. As the junior coroner in Pretoria, Bezuidenhout was assigned to the job. He had no choice but to go through the full process, recording all the details as if the man on the table were a victim of a crime or an accident. It was probably good training – learning the job by performing autopsies that were unlikely to be the subject of court cases – but Charl Bezuidenhout had been doing them for three years now and felt he was ready for bigger things.

The pathologist didn't know or care about the background of the men he autopsied – and the vast majority of those executed were men. The body on the table had been in exceptional health before the execution, he recorded through the dictaphone. 'The arteries, lungs, heart and kidneys show no sign of disease.' But when Doctor Bezuidenhout examined the liver he paused the recording. ‘Now what are the chances of that?’ he said to himself in a low voice as he examined two clearly visible tumours in the otherwise healthy liver tissue. This corpse, like the one this morning, showed advanced liver cancer.

Two today and four last month – all with advanced liver disease. And that made ten in the past three months out of twenty-four executed males that he’d autopsied. But what was more remarkable was that the bodies of both men today, and of all but one of the others with liver tumours, were otherwise completely free of cancer. Metastatic tumors in the liver were generally much more common than primary cancers and the pathologist knew that without proper analysis – which he was forbidden to do on the tissue of executed patients – he couldn’t prove these were primary cancers. But in his own mind he had no doubt. And the chances of nine out of ten diagnosed liver tumours being primary cancers were almost as miniscule as the chances of ten in twenty-four people from the general, healthy population having advanced liver cancer.

Switching the dictaphone back on, Bezuidenhout continued to record his findings. ‘The patient’s liver shows advanced signs of what appears to be primary liver cancer,’ he dictated in a deadpan voice, recording what had to be recorded without adding comment on the statistical anomaly. An autopsy report was no place for speculation on cancer groupings. But he was surprised his superior hadn’t already picked up on it. Doctor Dirk Basson checked all the autopsy findings and was quick to point out anything he felt had not been handled correctly. ‘It’s mistakes like these that let criminals go free,’ he was fond of saying, although he flatly refused to let Bezuidenhout handle active criminal cases.

The young pathologist completed the autopsy rapidly, leaving the dictaphone with an administrative assistant to type up his report. Then, with a sense of dread, he sat down at the desk in his cubbyhole of an office and began typing a memo to his superior notifying him of the cancer cluster he’d discovered. The Chief Pathologist didn’t mind making work for others but he liked the office running smoothly, without controversy. A cancer cluster in a prison could only be bad news. It meant investigation and blame – and inevitably the pathologist who raised the issue would be very unpopular with the prison service.

* * *

‘What’s this crap!’ Basson shouted at the hapless Bezuidenhout the next morning, slamming the memo down on the desk in front of him. ‘Who do you think you are, calling a few cases of spotty liver a bloody cancer cluster, you jumped up little prick? You’re barely wet behind the ears and you try to tell ME how to do MY job.’ Basson was standing up, waving his hands around and almost spitting in fury. He was tall, rail-thin and looked a bit like an angry stork stamping his feet and flapping his wings. Bezuidenhout suppressed a smile at the image. He had known his memo wouldn’t go down well but he hadn’t expected this!

‘You bloody well record what you find. It’s not your job to comment on anything else, you hear me!’ Basson was shouting and Bezuidenhout heard his secretary discretely close the door so the rest of the building didn’t have to hear him being put in his place.

‘But what about causative factors. What if there’s something in the prison environment …’ he argued.

‘Just do your bloody job and keep your nose out of it, you hear! If there’s a cancer cluster it’s my job to report on it, not yours. Now get the hell out of my sight before I demote you to morgue assistant.’ Basson theatrically tore up Bezuidenhout’s memo and threw it in the rubbish bin as he spoke.

The young pathologist was shocked but he knew when to stop. There was no future in trying to tell the Chief Pathologist how to do his job. And it was, after all, only the condemned prisoners that seemed to be affected. He hadn’t heard of any other cancer cluster at the prison.

Reluctantly, he turned and left without another word. But that night he made a note in his private diary, recording the two new cases with his previous notes and the fact he’d been instructed by Basson to take it no further. For good measure, he folded the carbon copy of his memo and put it in the back of the diary. Clearly it would be professional suicide to go over his superior’s head – and he wouldn’t have known who to speak to anyway as Basson was the country’s most senior pathologist. But he wanted to be damned sure that if news of the cluster came out later he wasn’t blamed for keeping it secret.




April 2013. Palm Island, Queensland, Australia.

I was half pissed when I talked Reef into taking me to Palm Island.

Now Reef's in hospital and I'm locked in a cell in a place that even the locals believe has been forsaken by everyone, God included.

We were fifty kilometres north, on the beach at Mulligan Bay, near the southern end of Hinchinbrook Island, when I heard the news that led me to break the biggest story I'd ever covered. We'd had a couple of beers while cooking a two-kilo mangrove jack over the coals, just about the best eating fish you'll find this side of a barramundi – and we'd eaten a couple of those over the week we'd spent on the idyllic waters around Hinchinbrook. It was just Reef and me after another mate of his pulled out at the last minute, Reef showing off the area where he'd been born and the two of us catching fish and chucking most of them back because we didn't have a freezer and frozen fish taste crap anyway; and solving the world's problems over a few beers each evening, like we used to do when I was a uni student ten years ago, only now the problems were more complex and the solutions a whole lot less clear.

The batteries in our lantern were almost dead so we'd cooked early, while there was still plenty of light, and I'd moved on to our last bottle of red while we ate. To tell the truth, after a week in the sun and beers or wine every evening I was feeling used up as well. Too much relaxation can do that to a man and it was time to get back to work and to Lisa, the woman I'd been dating in a weird, sexless kind of way for the past year and who, I had realised during the endless nights on the island, was threatening to crack the carapace I had painstakingly constructed around myself over seven long years. A week of absence, mobile switched off, had made me realise I wasn't being fair to Lisa. It was decision time … if I hadn't already left it too late.

Reef and I had become totally at ease in each other's company and Reef was lying belly-up on his swag smoking some weed and looking very relaxed with his size twelves pointing at the sky and his big round head resting comfortably on his pack. I had nicked his camera and was trying to sneak a shot without him noticing. I wanted his feet huge in the foreground and his face wreathed in smoke, and was down on my knees in the sand waiting for him to take another drag when I heard the announcement on the 5:30 news.

'The Queensland Government today placed Palm Island under quarantine following an outbreak of what is believed to be bird flu. All travel to and from the island has been suspended,' said the announcer.

'Hey Reef, listen up.' I almost dropped the Nikon in the sand as I reached to turn up the volume.

'This is what the Queensland Premier Jason Callahan had to say at a press conference half an hour ago,' the announcer continued.

'There have been five confirmed cases of the H5N1 strain of bird flu diagnosed on Palm Island. On the advice of Queensland Health we have placed the island under quarantine as a precautionary measure.' Callahan's voice was as dry and emotionless as ever. He was obviously reading from a script. I closed my eyes and tried to visualise him saying the words. If only I'd brought my old portable TV and the generator so I could actually see the interview, I would have known if the bastard was hiding something. Just listening to him on the radio, it wasn't so easy.

'Inspectors from Queensland Health were this afternoon flown to the island to assess the situation and establish the cause of the outbreak,' Callahan continued. 'At this point we do not have reports of wild or domestic bird deaths that usually accompany such an outbreak but this is not unusual. Often these are reported only after the humans that came into contact with them are taken ill.

'There is no cause for alarm but as a precautionary measure all domestic birds on the island will be culled and we are making contact with all visitors to the island over the past week, requesting them to come into voluntary quarantine until their status can be assessed. Meanwhile all travel to and from the island has been suspended. A treatment and quarantine centre has been set up at the island's hospital to handle confirmed cases of the disease and to quarantine those who have been in close contact with them. Another will be established at the Townsville Hospital for those who have recently travelled from the island.'

'Does that mean you believe the disease has become human-to-human transmissible?' The interruption, presumably from a reporter, was only just picked up by the radio microphone.

'No, I am not saying that at all,' Callahan answered sharply – too sharply said my inbuilt lie detector.

He went on answering some questions and evading others as I searched for and found my pen and notebook. Palm Island was visible from where we'd been fishing earlier that day and we'd seen two military choppers going over – presumably taking in the medical staff Callahan was talking about. I'm a reporter on the Courier-Mail, Queensland's largest newspaper, and I notice these things. And Reef's a great photographer when he isn't out working with the homeless or other disadvantaged groups. He is also the most intensely alive, totally complete bloke I've ever met, with a smile that almost bisects the perfect sphere of his close-shaven head. I just can't believe what's happened, and it's entirely my fault.

The news item was much longer than usual and included an interview with an international bird flu expert from the US who had studied the outbreaks between 2006 and 2008 that had necessitated the slaughter of poultry stocks across Asia.

I knew very little about bird flu so scribbled frantically as she spoke. An idea was already forming in my mind and the background would be essential if I were to put it into action. I knew a lot about Swine Flu after reporting on the so-called Swine Flu Pandemic of 2009 and was a bit cynical about the media hype surrounding such outbreaks. When the swine flu pandemic blew over and the figures were analysed they found it hadn't killed many more people than the regular flu that goes around each winter.

The disease expert, a Doctor Kaminsky from the World Health Organisation, explained that Influenza A subtype H5N1, more commonly known simply as bird flu, had killed tens of millions of wild birds and caused authorities to cull hundreds of millions of domestic ducks and chickens as they battled to contain its spread. But it had only killed people who came into contact with, or who ate, infected birds. There was never a proven case of human-to-human transmission.

Doctor Kaminski said that in December 2009 the World Health Organisation had put the number people to have died from the disease at two hundred and sixty-three of four hundred and forty-seven people infected. Given the high population densities in the countries where bird flu had broken out, I didn't see four hundred and forty-seven cases as being a lot of people – but well over half of them dying was a scary figure that would probably have stopped me in my tracks if I'd been completely sober.

I turned to Reef who, like me, was listening intently. 'Come on. Let's do it!' His face was in shadow but his eyes went wide, the whites standing out against his dark skin despite being bloodshot from the combined effects of weed and the campfire smoke.

'You're serious aren't you? There's coral reefs and rocks and no moon worth talking about, and you want me to take my tinny to an island almost fifty kilometres away that, for all we know, is being patrolled by trigger-happy soldiers in assault craft. And you want us to go in there and interview a bunch of people dying from something worse than the plague, just so you can get a story!'

The wild exaggeration showed me that Reef was seriously thinking about it – that in fact he may have thought of it before I did and was just waiting for me to suggest it. Reef had grown up on Palm Island and boasted that he knew every channel and fishing spot within a hundred kilometres of his home by the time he was thirteen and was jailed for the first time.

'Don't bullshit me. It's nowhere near that far! We saw it from the water this afternoon. We can be there in a couple of hours, check your family is okay, and with your contacts I can get the real story, not the shit that Callahan was feeding the media at that press conference. If we leave now we can be in by 8 pm and out again to file a story by midnight. We can sleep back here at the campsite with nobody any the wiser until they read tomorrow's paper.'

'You newspaper people are fucking crazy. Just because I pointed out a mountain sticking out of the ocean you think you can pop over for a swim! Go look at the map. Greater Palm Island is twenty-five kilometres long and the settlement's half way down the western side. Why don't I just phone my Uncle Harry and you can get the story from him? Then we can listen to it on the radio like real people instead of running around in the dark dodging the coral and pretending to be super-sleuths.'

'Because, from everything you've told me, your Uncle Harry will be dead drunk by now and is totally unreliable, even when he's sober.'

'You have a point,' conceded Reef with a smile. 'But let me make a couple of calls first so we know what we're getting ourselves into.'

I knew that I'd won then and began putting things we might need into Reef's eighteen-foot tinnie. With the 125 horsepower Honda four-stroke on the back it would get us there in no time at all – provided the wind didn't come up. I checked that the fuel tank was full – we filled it every afternoon after the day's fishing but I wasn't taking chances – and the lifejackets still stowed in the hatch under the front seat. I also put in two extra ten-litre containers of petrol just in case. Our tents and camping gear could stay where they were for now. We'd be back by the morning.

'I can't get through,' said Reef as I returned to the campsite. 'My phone says it has reception but I can't get a ring tone from anyone I know over there.'

'Bastards! They must have blocked off the cell towers.' I scratched in my pack for my iPhone, switched it on and waited for it to boot up.

'Why would they do that? I mean what about people who want to check on their relatives like I'm trying to. You can't just switch off communications for a whole island. There are more than three thousand people living there. What about the internet, landlines, radio. A lot of the boats have radio these days. You can't shut them all down.'

'I don't know. Perhaps the volume has simply crashed the network or something. After this evening's announcement there will be a media frenzy, let alone all the people like you phoning in to see if their relatives are affected.

'Look, I've got four bars. Let's try the newsroom first and see if we can get through to that.'

I speed-dialled the newsdesk in Brisbane and sure enough I got a ringing tone that was picked up immediately with a curt, 'Newsdesk'.

'This is Ryan Helzinger. Who's the night editor on the Palm Island story? I need to talk to him urgently.'

'Hang on Ryan. I thought you were on holiday. I'll put you through to Dan, he's stayed on to handle this one.' This time I recognised the voice of Joe Collins, the regular night news editor.

'Bickerman,' came the response as the Chief of Staff Dan Bickerman picked up. He too sounded stressed.

'This is Ryan and I think I can get to Palm Island and file something tonight.' I looked at Reef and he gave a brief nod, as I'd known he would.

'Where the hell are you Helzinger? I thought you were on holiday until Monday. All the bloody phones to Palm Island are down or the government's blocking them or something and we can't get a thing out of the bastards beyond their prepared statement, and that tells us sweet fuck-all.'

'I'm on the southern tip of Hinchinbrook and I have a mate who knows these waters like the back of his hand. He has contacts on the island and we can be across and back by midnight if we leave now. If I can still get through I'll file from here, or from the boat on the way back as soon as I can get reception.'

'I don't know …' Bickerman was understandably hesitant. 'You'd be breaking the law if you go onto the island and what if you get bird flu or something. We'd be liable.'

'Oh bullshit Dan. You know it can't be transmitted between humans. I'm not going over there for a chicken dinner and I'm hardly likely to touch any dead wildfowl!'

'Okay … but if you get caught you're still officially on holiday and this was your own harebrained scheme. It isn't sanctioned by the paper.'

'But it will be if I get you a story! I get the picture. Just promise me page one and a byline and I'll be happy.'

'Get me some photographs, then I'll be happy too. Use that useless bloody iPhone of yours if you have to, but get me some real pictures of whatever is happening on that island and find a way to send them to me tonight!'

'I'll go one better,' I replied, full of bravado and alcohol. 'I have a photographer with me and he'll get you a front page picture if I have to drag him into a room full of dying patients.'

And of course that's virtually what happened.

It doesn't help that we couldn't possibly have known, as we boarded our tinnie in the sunset, that the disease had jumped species and was being passed from human to human. I should have paid more attention to my inbuilt lie detector!

As we left for Palm Island in the gathering dusk it never occurred to me that we were in danger of anything other than being caught by the authorities. Damn it, the Chaser program had breached security at the APEC conference in Sydney and pitched up at George Bush's hotel wearing an Osama Bin Laden outfit – and they had received nothing more than a rap across the knuckles from the courts. Surely we couldn't get into too much trouble for breaking quarantine to chase a story.

We ran without lights which, at the speed we were travelling, was probably a much more serious offence than breaching a quarantine order. Reef had been right about the weather and it was dead calm the whole way over. It was the perfect night to be out fishing, drinking beer and perhaps smoking a joint while waiting for the fish to bite, the heavens a spangled dome overhead. But we ignored nature's perfection as we belted across the ocean, the howl of the motor at full revs making conversation impossible. Reef had shown me the route on the chart before we left. 'The shortest route is straight past Lucinda and inshore of Orpheus and Fantome Islands. But if they're using radar to enforce the quarantine they'll pick us up the minute we come around the bottom of Fantome,' he explained. I could see what he meant. The populated section of the island faced west, towards the mainland – and towards the southern tip of Fantome Island.

'If it stays this calm the outside route will be almost as fast and I can come down behind Orpheus and Curacao Islands and sneak along the shoreline from the north. The tide will be full in about an hour so we won't even have to worry about the coral. If we stick really close to the shore coming down towards the town we should be okay.

So we stayed well out to sea at first, clear of the town of Lucinda with its brightly lit six-kilometre sugar-loading jetty clearly visible against the shoreline. Then we skimmed down the seaward edge of Orpheus and Curacao islands, black and threatening against the last glow of the sunset, until the bulk of Palm Island loomed up dead ahead. Reef hardly slowed for the narrow passage between Curacao and Greater Palm despite the lack of light and then hugged a coastline to our left that I could barely see but which felt ominously close.

Less than two hours after leaving Hinchinbrook Reef cut the throttle and we nosed in towards the shore. 'Get up in the bow and keep a sharp eye out,' he instructed. 'There's a coral bommie here that guards the only channel in to the beach. We should clear it at this tide but if we hit and break something we'll be spending a lot more time on the island than you bargained for.' Wherever the bommie was we missed it because in a few minutes we beached on the coarse sand near a group of boats that had been dragged above the high water mark. 'This is Clump Point and it's only a couple of kilometres from the town of Palm Island itself. I know some people here who will lend us bicycles,' Reef explained.

Taking the tinnie, he waded out to waist depth and put out the anchor on a short rope. 'We don't want to be stranded on shore if we need to leave in a hurry,' he half-joked.

I checked my watch. 'It's 7.45 pm. We need to be back here by 9.30 to give us time to get to the mainland or the campsite, phone through a story for the late edition and send them pictures. We'll be cutting it fine at best.'

Hurrying up to the shacks, Reef told me that the people we needed to talk to were a distant relative who was a part-time nurse at the hospital and was sure to have been pulled in during the crisis, and one of the local elders who was a friend of his useless Uncle Harry and a member of the Palm Island Council. Hopefully, between them they could not only give us an accurate account of what was happening on the island but could give us access to the bird flu patients themselves. Feeling very sober now, I realised what we were doing was hit and hope and not well thought through at all, despite what I'd confidently told Dan Bickerman. But what the hell, I was in Reef's hands. Palm Island was his world, not mine.

I met Reef Nullanjar two years ago, soon after I joined the Courier-Mail. I wrote a feature about how he had brought together the mining sector, educators and town planners in Mount Isa to fund the fight against homelessness. We'd hit it off immediately and despite our difference in age – he was close to ten years older than I was – had become firm friends. I had researched his background for the article so knew that he grew up on Palm Island, but it was only later that he'd told me he had been brought up by an aunt who had died while he was still in primary school and a drunken uncle who meant well but had let him run wild. He wasn't joking when he said he'd been jailed for the first time at thirteen, and a few times since. It was something we had in common, the jail thing, but I'd never told Reef my story, or anyone else for that matter.

Palm Island, I had discovered in my Google research for the article, had been listed in 1999 by the Guinness Book of Records as the most dangerous place on earth outside a conflict zone. I could only imagine what Reef's life had been like in a community where ninety per cent of the adults were unemployed and drunkenness, violence and paedophilia were endemic. Google had painted a picture of a completely broken society, the majority of them descendants of Aboriginal troublemakers who had been sent to the unofficial penitentiary because mainland society would no longer tolerate them. 'I'm mostly Manbarra,' Reef had proudly told me at the time, and continued by way of explanation '… It's like with the descendants of the free settlers around Adelaide who think they're better than the rest of Australia. My mob think they're a cut above the rest of the islanders because we were always on the island and are not descendants of the crims banished from the mainland.'

But the Manbarra hadn't been treated any better than those sent to the island as punishment. From the time they were forced to work as unpaid labour through to the late 20th century they were oppressed, mistreated or simply ignored. More recently successive Queensland and Australian Governments had put strategic plans in place for the future of the Palm Island community and had brought in business investment. But almost every attempt failed and the cycle of unemployment, despair, low self-esteem and violence remain to this day.

The island’s reputation, always bad, took a nosedive in 2004 following the death in custody of a local resident – and the rioting and burning of the police station and public buildings that followed. Multiple inquests and an unsuccessful prosecution of the policeman believed to be responsible hadn't helped and Palm Island was still a place of simmering discontent waiting for an excuse to flare into violence. Reef hadn't told me much about his own childhood before he escaped to the mainland on an academic scholarship but I imagined I could feel the simmering violence as we approached the township at Clump Point, quiet except for an occasional voice raised in anger. The light of candles flickered in windows. Either there was no electricity to this part of the island, or it had failed.

Reef led the way to a run-down square of a house, a big tinnie on a trailer outside, it's motor in pieces on an old tarp. It was difficult to see as the moon hadn't yet risen, but one of the trailer tyres appeared to be flat and there was grass growing up around the wheels.

'Joe used to work on the oyster farm before it folded. He called himself a fisherman the last time I heard but it doesn't look like he's doing much fishing to me,' Reef whispered. The sound was enough to bring a large dog to life. It snarled and threw itself at us, only to be jerked short by a chain.

'Shut the fuck up, you stupid fucking mongrel,' came a slurred roar from inside the house.

'Nice to see you too Joe,' Reef shouted back above the noise of the dog, which had now switched to hysterical barking. 'Come and sort out this mangy thing before I kick its teeth in.' And to my amazement Reef walked up to the dog, which immediately stopped barking and lowered its head to have its ears scratched.

'Fuck me if it isn't Reef The Horrible! Hey Evie, come look what the tide washed ashore.' Joe was younger than Reef, tall and skinny with a wild mop of ragtag hair. I could see from the light of a pressure lantern streaming through the door that there was something wrong with one of his eyes and it gave him a wild, slightly crazed look.

'I see you've still