Gagged & Bound Read Online Free Page B

grew weaker and weaker. When three had died, he knew he had to do something. As a first step he approached the doctor in charge of the local charitable clinic, who was as puzzled as he.
    It took them several weeks to see a correlation between the strange collection of symptoms and a drug given to the children whenever they suffered a flare-up of a painful and disfiguring skin infection endemic to the area. Jeremy wrote up careful notes of his interviews with twenty of the affected children and their parents, as well as recording everything the doctor told him of the generosity of the pharmaceutical company that provided the drug at less than cost price.
    Suspicious, and deeply concerned for all the village’s children, Jeremy returned to England at the end of his two-year stint, determined to find out more. It didn’t take much research in medical journals to find out that the forerunner of this particular drug had been abandoned because of its rare tendency to induce auto-immune disease in people who took it, turning the body’s natural repair system against its own healthy organs and tissue. By this stage, no one in the UK or America was being treated with the drug, and he was outraged to think that the African children might be being used in the place of experimental animals to test a modified version.
    Once he was sure of his facts, Jeremy wrote to every major newspaper, but none of his letters was published. He wrote to the pharmaceutical company itself and got back a bland letter, telling him there was nothing to worry about and that everything the company did complied with the law.
    He spent most of his first two terms at Oxford trying to make someone take an interest in his campaign. Friends and enemies began to jeer whenever he raised the subject in the pub or lab. He lost his confidence and hardly ever went out any more. Eventually his tutor, while expressing sympathy and admiration for his humanitarian instincts, reminded him that
he was at university to work and get his degree. This kind of protest should be the province of journalists, not undergraduates.
    Feeling more sympathy for Jeremy than ever, Trish turned to the next chapter:

    It was at the start of Jeremy’s third term at Oxford that the man who operated under the codename Baiborn came into his life. The leader of a group of radical activist students, he followed the familiar terrorist practice of keeping its separate cells well away from each other so that none could lead – inadvertently or with malice – to any of the others. No real names were ever used and no one knew details of any operation in which he – or she – was not directly involved.
    Jeremy had originally planned only to chain himself to the front door of the pharmaceutical company’s headquarters, but Baiborn said no one would care; any man who did that would be dismissed as a ‘harmless loony’. Baiborn said only a bomb would do.
    In the end Jeremy agreed, but he still insisted that no one should be hurt. He didn’t mind a hole being blown in a wall or two, but he wasn’t prepared to take risks with people’s lives. While Baiborn organised the making of the bomb itself, Jeremy watched the comings and goings at the headquarters building. He decided the safest time to do anything would be between ten and eleven in the morning. Everyone who worked there was well inside by ten and no one left for lunch before twelve at the earliest. Deliveries were all made at the back of the building, from a separate slip road.
    When Baiborn asked why they couldn’t do it at night, Jeremy explained that there were randomly patrolling guard dogs and he couldn’t risk any harm coming to one
of them. Baiborn laughed and told him there was no place for sentimentality in their world, but Jeremy wasn’t prepared to risk an animal’s life any more than a human being’s.
    Even when he’d found what he thought was a safe time, he didn’t risk putting the bomb in the building itself, afraid the