Devil May Care - Sebastian Faulks [58]
‘What about Scarlett?’ said Bond.
‘ The girl? I’ve no interest in her. Though I imagine my workforce might.’
‘What have you done to my sister?’ said Scarlett.
‘Where’s Poppy?’
Gorner walked across his office and put his face against Scarlett’s. With his gloved monkey’s hand he cupped her chin and twisted her face one way, then the other. Bond saw the hair-covered wrist between the glove and cuff.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I think you’ve perhaps been listening to rumours. We have a way of dealing with people who listen to rumours.’
‘Where is my sister? What have you – ’
The back of the monkey’s hand whipped across her mouth with a crack.
Gorner raised the forefinger of his human hand to his lips. ‘Ssh,’ he said, as a trickle of blood ran out of Scarlett’s mouth. ‘No more talk.’
Turning to a guard, Gorner said, ‘Lock the girl in the cell till tonight when she can entertain the early shift.’
The man took Scarlett away, blood still running from her lip, and Gorner turned to Bond. ‘You come with me.’
He touched a spot on the crimson-draped walls, and a panel slid aside. Bond followed him on to a walkway whose sides and floor were made of glass. Below them was what looked like a chemical factory.
‘Analgesia,’ said Gorner, walking forwards. ‘I learned about it on the Eastern Front. How to take away pain. People talk a lot of nonsense about the horrors of chemical warfare. No one who fought at Stalingrad can be in any doubt that ‘‘conventional’’
warfare is far worse.’
The size of the works was astonishing. Bond calculated that there were almost five hundred men on the assembly lines or transporting raw materials to the stills and centrifuges.
‘When you have seen men with their faces missing,’
said Gorner, ‘literally sliced off by bullets that have spun and turned on the bones of the skull . . . When
you’ve seen men trying to hold their liver and intestines in their hands . . . Then you understand the need for the rapid relief of pain.’
They came to a junction in the walkway.
‘On that side, those large steel vats are processing poppy extracts into what will become painkillers and anaesthetics. Codeine, dihydrocodeine, pethidine, morphine and so on. Some products are transported through the Persian Gulf to Bombay for the Far East and Australasia. Some go overland to my plant in Paris, then to America and the West. And some, believe it or not, go through the Soviet Union and on to Estonia. In Paris and Bombay, some of the chemicals are further refined, turned into powders, liquids, tablets, whatever local markets want. The brand names and the packaging in which they are sold are different in Paris and Bombay. The client health services and the private clinics pay into offshore accounts and no one is able to connect all the operations. Otherwise I would be accused of running a cartel. In fact, the man in the emergency field hospital in Nigeria is receiving the same drug as the woman in the private clinic in Los Angeles. Only the box and trade name are different. Both come from here.’
‘What about the competition?’ said Bond.
‘I’m able to compete with the older companies because I have very low labour costs. In fact, my employees work for nothing.’
‘Nothing?’
‘No money. They’re all addicts. We find them in Tehran, Isfahan and Kabul. Some in Baghdad and further afield. Turkey. They work twelve hours a day in return for water, rice and heroin. They sleep on the sand. They never run away.’
‘You give them heroin?’ said Bond.
‘It’s cheaper and stronger than opium. They may come as opium addicts but we quickly change them over. Then we can just shoot them up once a day. They queue up like children for their injection. You should see their little faces.’
Gorner turned and walked a few paces. ‘On this side of the plant, we make heroin. Doesn’t look much different, does it? That’s because I