Lethal Profit by Alex Blackmore Page B

had really interested her was produced by the organisation Doctors Without Borders and reported in 2010 on one of the worst disease outbreaks in the region for eight years. The outbreak was described as a humanitarian crisis, one that had been made worse by a lack of basic sanitation or access to proper medical care. Eva tried to think back but she didn’t remember seeing anything on the news about it. The disease was thought to be a strain of Kala-azar – fatal in almost 100% of cases – but there were parts of the report that questioned whether it wasn’t some kind of new epidemic. The report interested Eva because it didn’t seem able to make up its mind about the disease and yet it had still been published.

    Other than the Sudan pile, Eva had tidied piles on ‘Paris’ (more maps, photos and directions to places in the French capital), ‘Photos’ (a collection of mug and action shots of people who she assumed could be Sudanese, mostly taken in Paris from what she could tell), ‘Paraguay’ (more maps and aerial shots of some remote location between Brazil and Paraguay), ‘PX 3’ (a pile of scientific formulas that she didn’t grasp at all), ‘meetings’ (a list of times and dates with apparent code names such as ‘Mr C’ listed alongside them), ‘phone calls’ (reams of print-outs of telephone conversations that she hadn’t read all of but that seemed harmless enough) and ‘ACORN,’ the biggest pile which seemed to be made up of almost completely useless documents about a company called ACORN that, as far as she could tell, was an all-purpose shelf company. Eva felt as if she had read and absorbed a hell of a lot of information but was still none the wiser as to what she had found. The only link with anything that had happened to her was Leon’s reference to ‘the Africans’, but he hadn’t explained it so she couldn’t realistically connect it to anything here. The heaviness of tiredness began to pull her downwards so she turned away from the papers, curled up on the bed with her mobile phone clutched in one hand and went to sleep.

EIGHT
    T HE NEXT MORNING E VA AWOKE with a start. Sophie. The name Sophie was running through her head and suddenly, as clear as a bell, she started to make connections. The face she had seen in Jackson’s ‘friends’ on Facebook and also in the picture Leon had shown her whilst at his flat; the name Valerie had mentioned as the suspected person with whom Jackson had been having an affair and now… she rolled over, bent down and rifled through one of the piles of paper on the floor. There… Sophie Vincent. The name was written in stark, black type along the bottom of one of the sheets of paper she had been sorting through the night before. Sophie Vincent had printed out these documents. Eva propped herself up on one elbow and stared at the name on the bottom of the sheet of paper as she realised that she had seen it on a huge number of the documents she had leafed through the night before. She threw back the bed sheet, slid off the bed into a crouch on the floor by all the piles of paper and started sorting through them again, this time looking for that name. Within thirty minutes more than half the papers previously divided into neat stacks were on the ‘Sophie’ pile.

    â€˜We can’t find her.’
    It was obvious to Nijam that his brother was not happy even before Wiraj had turned his narrow features to face his brother’s broad face.
    â€˜We must find her.’
    â€˜She is impossible to find.’
    â€˜I thought we had a tail on her.’
    â€˜We did. And we found the man she spoke to yesterday – a journalist, Terry Dowler. But she slipped away and has not come into work today, Wiraj.’
    â€˜She cannot have just disappeared in the middle of the night.’
    â€˜It seems that she has.’
    â€˜And what about her