The Constant Gardener by John Le Carré

Author:John Le Carré [Carré, John Le]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction - Espionage
ISBN: 9780143053675
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2005-08-05T04:00:00+00:00

The Constant Gardener

“OK,” he announced.

“OK what?”

“Switch on,” said Guido in English, nodding at the wall socket at his feet. “Let's go.” And he handed Justin the cable to plug in. His voice, to Justin's oversensitive ear, had acquired an unpleasant mid-Atlantic twang.

“Can anything go wrong?” Justin asked nervously.

“Like what, for instance?”

“Can we wipe it clean or something, by mistake?”

“By switching it on? No way.”

“Why not?”

Guido grandly circumnavigated the screen with his scarecrow hand. “Everything that's in there she saved. If she don't save it, she don't want it, so it's not in there. Is that reasonable or is that reasonable?”

Justin felt a bar of hostility form at the front of his head, which was what happened to him when people talked computer gobbledygook at him.

“Then all right. If you say so. I'll switch on.” And crouching, gingerly poked the plug into the wall socket. “Yes?”

“Oh man.”

Reluctantly Justin dropped the switch and stood up in time to see absolutely nothing happen on the screen. His mouth went dry and he felt sick. I'm trespassing. I'm a clumsy idiot. I should have got an expert, not a child. I should have learned to work the bloody thing myself. Then the screen lit up and gave him a procession of smiling, waving African children lined up outside a tin-roofed health clinic, followed by an aerial view of colored rectangles and ovals scattered over a blue-gray field.

“What's that?”

“The desktop.”

Justin peered over Guido's shoulder and read: My Briefcase … Network Neighborhood … Shortcut to Connect. “Now what?”

“You want to see files? I show you files. We go to files, you read.”

“I want to see what Tessa saw. Whatever she was working on. I want to follow her footsteps and read whatever's in there. I thought I made that clear.”

In his anxiety he was resenting Guido's presence here. He wanted Tessa for himself again, at the counting table. He wanted her laptop not to exist. Guido directed an arrow to a panel on the lower left side of Tessa's screen.

“What's that thing you're tapping?”

“The mouse pad. These are the last nine files she worked on. You want I show you the others? I show you the others, no problem.”

A panel appeared, headed Open File, Tessa's Documents. He tapped again.

“She's got like twenty-five files in this category,” he said.

“Do they have titles?”

Guido leaned to one side, inviting Justin to look for himself:

PHARMA pharma-general pharma-pollution pharma-in-3rd world pharma-watchdogs pharma-bribes pharma-litigation pharma-cash pharma-protest pharma-hypocrisy pharma-trials pharma-fakes pharma-cover-ups

PLAGUE plague-history plague-Kenya plague-cures plague-new plague-old plague-charlatans

TRIALS Russia Poland Kenya Mexico Germany Known-mortalities Wanza

Guido was moving the arrow and tapping again. “Arnold. Who's this Arnold suddenly?” he demanded.

“A friend of hers.”

“He's got documents too. Jesus, has he got documents!”

“How many?”

“Twenty. M.” Another tap. “Bits and Bobs. That some kind of British idiom?”

“Yes, it's English. Not American, perhaps, but certainly English,” Justin replied huffily. “What's that? What are you doing now? You're going too fast.”

“No, I'm not. I'm going slow for you. I'm looking in her briefcase, how many folders she got. Wow. She got a lot of folders.

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