Sweet Talking Money
Harry Bingham
In the bestselling tradition of Jeffrey Archer and Dick Francis comes a hot new commercial talent.A young scientist, Cameron, has an idea which could revolutionise medicine. She believes that, once published, her findings will change the world.A maverick financier, Bryn, sees the potential, but convinces her that truth alone is never what secures change: it’s money, nous and competitive savvy.He persuades her to go into business with him. Their aim: to build a stockmarket company worth a hundred million pounds – big enough to survive assault; strong enough to market Cameron’s technology to the entire world.Corinth, a corporation worth a hundred billion dollars, sees Cameron’s technology as a threat and aims to wipe out the fledgling enterprise.The story becomes a race to the stockmarket – and a battle to survive.
SWEET TALKING MONEY
HARRY BINGHAM
COPYRIGHT (#ulink_0c028da7-fda0-5450-bfa7-bd75cace1761)
This novel is a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Dedication quotation from Selected Poems, 1923–1958 by e.e. cummings, published by Faber and Faber
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This edition published in 2001
Copyright © Harry Bingham 2001
The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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DEDICATION (#ua523cb6e-6184-5f67-bc33-c9755055e1c0)
For my beloved N.
lady through whose profound and fragile lips the sweet small clumsy feet of April came into the ragged meadow of my soul.
EPIGRAPH (#ua523cb6e-6184-5f67-bc33-c9755055e1c0)
Books are books. But if books were films, then I was the writer and director, while the producer, editor and assistant director was my wife, Nuala. This is an acknowledgement in the most straightforward sense: a formal recognition of her part in the forming of this book. This book was written by one, but created by two.
CONTENTS
COVER (#u883732f3-2237-5fd9-8dfe-2062d308f45b)
TITLE PAGE (#u4474e4f9-49bd-50a8-9977-46e709ebdc91)
COPYRIGHT (#u93360b9c-c36a-564c-b892-fc48fb41a0e8)
DEDICATION (#u5daa01cf-026f-5541-b370-746b72951ebb)
EPIGRAPH (#u0e26c3d1-2de8-578e-94e8-712b9f16e8cb)
ONE (#ua6309806-fea0-5be6-9f07-a8d0b2031729)
TWO (#u9a301b34-7af7-52b9-92e7-dd791035ac0b)
THREE (#u36b3b1bf-3f8a-5706-9d83-794d7904646d)
FOUR (#ud6e108e8-8ad8-58ed-9491-416d92f3f8ec)
FIVE (#u1a96d455-04f8-5759-a6f5-9001ac32191f)
SIX (#u485bd700-8185-5bec-808b-f28ed75760b8)
SEVEN (#uf4358a13-0e34-56b3-9ad9-9246ef62ace2)
EIGHT (#uc1f881e0-5abe-52d6-a952-191a97007150)
NINE (#uc9a82099-ce26-5edd-a493-219572c60744)
TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)
THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
FOURTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
FIFTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
SIXTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
SEVENTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
EIGHTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
NINETEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
TWENTY (#litres_trial_promo)
TWENTY-ONE (#litres_trial_promo)
TWENTY-TWO (#litres_trial_promo)
TWENTY-THREE (#litres_trial_promo)
TWENTY-FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
TWENTY-FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
TWENTY-SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
TWENTY-SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
TWENTY-EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
TWENTY-NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
THIRTY (#litres_trial_promo)
THIRTY-ONE (#litres_trial_promo)
KEEP READING (#litres_trial_promo)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR (#litres_trial_promo)
ALSO BY THE AUTHOR (#litres_trial_promo)
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER (#litres_trial_promo)
ONE (#ulink_5b0207c8-2d81-507c-a254-93a990e4fe01)
1
Sometimes you have to go crazy before you can come to your senses. Sometimes you have to lose everything to find the one thing that really matters. Sometimes – Hell, forget about sometimes. Here’s what happened.
2
It was eight thirty-five on a chilly Boston evening, and the scientists were beginning to ramble. Enough.
‘Let’s call a halt,’ said Bryn. ‘Who’s writing up?’
He knew the answer. A scraggy scientist, looking like something put together from rags and pipe-cleaners, raised his hand. ‘Dr Lewinson. Excellent.’ Bryn turned on his smile, maximum beam. His show of goodwill was brief and insincere. Of the eighteen people in the room, fourteen would be fired as soon as the deal concluded. Bryn knew that because he was the architect of the whole transaction. The others didn’t, because they weren’t.
The meeting broke up.
As Bryn began to pack away, a further racking cough rumbled painfully from his chest. It was his second trip across the Atlantic that week, so his jet lag, coming at him from both sides, was having an echo effect on his battered system.
‘Dammit, look, I wonder if you can help,’ he said, grabbing one of the departing scientists. ‘I really ought to see a doctor.’
‘A medical doctor? Hey Steve, you’re not a doctor, are you?’
‘No. Why don’t you try what’s-her-face, Dr Dynamite downstairs?’
‘You think that’s safe?’ The scientist laughed. ‘Only kidding, really. She’s great, just … No, really, she’s great.’
As he spoke, the scientist fussed around with pass keys and swipe cards, taking Bryn downstairs, past empty laboratories, silent storage rooms, the hum of computers. They emerged on to a corridor on the ground floor, dark except for the glow of streetlamps spilling in from outside. They raced along until they arrived at a lighted doorway, where a brass plate advertised its owner, Cameron Wilde, MD, PhD. ‘Here you go,’ said the scientist, shaking hands. ‘Good luck.’
Bryn raised his eyebrows in enquiry. ‘Dr Dynamite, huh?’
‘She’s kind of explosive. That’s part of the reason, I guess.’
‘And the other part?’
‘Nobel prizes. Built on the profits old Freddie Nobel made out of dynamite.’ He nodded at Wilde’s door. ‘She’s a future winner, if ever I’ve seen one. And I have, actually. Several.’
Through a frosted pane in the door, lights burned. There was a dark shape, which might or might not have belonged to a future Nobel Prize winner. Bryn put his hand to the door and knocked.
3
The room was a good size, thirty foot by twenty, lit by three or four anglepoise lamps. On the wall where Bryn entered was a small pool of tidiness, somebody’s workstation, a secretary’s, probably. Everywhere else was chaos. Stacks of paper on every surface. Sheaves of computer print-out. Journals, textbooks, e-mails, binders. Yellow Post-it notes tacked anywhere and everywhere. There was a workbench jammed with two PCs, a portable, a couple of printers, a scanner, and wiring arrangements designed by a five-year-old. There were two further work areas crowded with microscopes, two high-capacity clinical fridges, boxfuls of needles, blood collection tubes rolling around loose in cardboard trays, plus other equipment Bryn didn’t recognise. The room’s built-in shelving had long ago buckled beneath the deluge, and sheets of chipboard standing on concrete blocks acted as emergency reinforcements. There were four chairs in the room and on one of them sat Cameron Wilde, MD, PhD.
‘Dr Wilde?’
‘Uh-huh.’
The doctor sat in a pool of light cast by one of the lamps, her face partly hidden by the hair which fell across it. She was pale-skinned, skinny, not much to look at.
‘I apologise for disturbing you. I’ve been working with the team upstairs and I needed a doctor urgently. One of them suggested you might be able to help.’
Wilde was working on a stack of documents. She didn’t seem over-anxious to greet her new arrival. Holding her pen in her mouth as she sorted papers, she said, ‘What’s the problem?’
‘Flu. Had it for weeks. I got a prescription in England, but didn’t have time to fill it before I left.’ He held out the piece of paper, which was no good to him in an American pharmacy. ‘I apologise for bothering you.’
She looked at the prescription, and let the pen drop from her mouth. ‘It’s no bother.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Your doctor gave you this? For flu?’
‘Right.’
‘Uh.’
‘Anything wrong?’
‘Wrong? Depends on what you want. If you want to get rid of your flu, this won’t help at all. If you just want to cover up the symptoms so you can go right on doing whatever it was that gave you flu in the first place, then this is just the stuff.’
‘Right. OK. I’ll take my chances. Thanks.’
‘And the more you go right on doing whatever it is you do, the longer the flu will stay.’
‘Like I said, I’ll take my chances.’
She shrugged. ‘OK.’
The pen went back into her mouth and her hands went back to sorting her papers. Bryn couldn’t see a prescription pad anywhere, but then again there might be five hundred of them hidden round the room.
‘You can give me the prescription?’
‘Can. Sure. But won’t.’ Each word came out with a little puff, as she began shifting big piles of paper to get at documents stuffed away at the bottom.
‘Won’t?’
Bryn was incredulous. At thirty-four, he was a Managing Director of Berger Scholes, one of the world’s biggest and most successful investment banks. Last year, his bonus had been £625,000 and his group, which handled company acquisitions in the pharmaceutical industry, had advised clients on transactions worth over sixty billion dollars. That wasn’t all. If he looked brutish on a bad day, he was handsome on a good one. He weighed two hundred and ten pounds, not much of which was flab. He was broad, heavy, strong; a corporate bruiser with brains. A Welsh farmer’s son, Bryn had taken himself to Oxford University, then for the last fourteen years crashed successfully through the investment banking jungle. The way he saw it, he’d go crashing on for years to come. If he wanted a prescription to relieve him of flu, he wasn’t going to let some self-righteous doctor with a face that last saw daylight in the Reagan administration stop him.
He pressed his chest with thick fingers, coughing as he did so. He wouldn’t plead, but he would make his point.
‘Dr Wilde, I understand that you would like to cure my flu outright, and I respect you for it. Unfortunately, to the best of my understanding, there is no cure for flu. But right now, this very minute, I am tired, I am in pain and I have a full day of work ahead of me tomorrow. I must therefore insist that you, please, give me the medication specifically designed to relieve people in my situation.’
Wilde quit doing whatever it was she was doing, and swung around to face Bryn. The anglepoise lamp was directly behind her head, so her face was more or less invisible to view.
‘I didn’t say there wasn’t a cure.’
Barely holding on to his temper, Bryn said, ‘OK. If you’d prefer to try me on something else, I’d be happy to trust your judgement.’
Wilde consulted her watch, angling it to catch the light. ‘I don’t have much time. Maybe half an hour.’
‘Half an hour …?’ Bryn wondered what prescription could possibly take half an hour to write. ‘Sure. OK. Whatever.’
‘And no guarantees. I don’t do too much human work these days.’
Things had gone beyond strange, Bryn decided, and he let this remark pass without comment. Just as well. Wilde had her head buried in one of the clinical fridges, searching for something. In the light streaming from the open door, Bryn could see rows of glass beakers, stoppered vials, glass trays, and neatly labelled cartons. Wilde emerged with a glass tray divided into twelve compartments. In each compartment, a little fluid sloshed around.
‘Any health problems? Serious ones, I mean.’
‘No.’
‘Any history of illness in the family?’
Bryn had injured his knee playing school rugby. His brother had been invalided out of the Pontypridd scrum with a femur fractured in three places, and his dad had damaged his ankle so badly in a game of pub rugby that when the bones healed, they had all fused together and the foot ended up as stiff as a board. Even Bryn’s grandfather had twice ended up in hospital having his stomach pumped after post-match celebrations that had started too early and ended too late. But still … ‘Nope. All healthy,’ he said.
‘OK. Good. Thumb, please.’
‘My thumb?’
Bryn held out his hand. Wilde picked up a cylinder just about big enough to hold a toothpick, held it to his thumb and clicked a button. Bryn felt nothing, but when the cylinder came away, blood welled from a small puncture wound.
‘Good. One drop in each compartment, please.’
She peeled away a cellophane cover from the tray, and Bryn held his hand out, dripping blood into each compartment. As he did so, his chest was racked by a deep and painful cough, and blood splattered untidily around the tray.
‘One drop per compartment. Please.’
Bryn held his thumb steadier as his cough subsided. ‘Can I ask what you’re doing? Is this for diagnosis?’
‘Diagnosis? I thought you said you had flu?’
‘Yes, but …’
‘What’s to diagnose? You get stressed, you get flu.’
‘I am not stressed.’
Bryn hated that. He hated it when those without the balls for the job assume that every successful banker must be stressed just because they’re successful. Bryn was successful, but he wasn’t stressed. Those who worked for him might be, but that was their lookout.
‘Sure you are. Stand.’
Bryn’s thumb had completed its duties, but nobody had mentioned the fact to his circulatory system, which continued to push blood out through the miniature wound. Since no cotton wool was on offer, Bryn stood up, thumb in his mouth to stop the bleeding. Meantime, Wilde stood up too, surprisingly tall in her flat shoes, lanky as anything, her labcoat looking as if it hung on a hanger.
‘May I feel?’ She approached Bryn, putting out her hand.
He opened his jacket, making it easy. With a sudden movement, her hand balled into a fist and shot forwards into the dead centre of his chest. The pain astonished him, rocking him backwards and momentarily winding him. He gripped the edge of the table behind him, careful not to’ dislodge any of its tottering piles.
‘Jesus!’ he said, as soon as his voice had emerged from a fit of agonising coughs. ‘Jesus Christ!’
‘Stress. That’s stress. Biological stress. Unhappy cells.’
Bryn held his hands over his heart. The pain in the rest of his body had mostly washed away, although a general ache still sang its reminder. He was about to make some comment, demand some explanation, but Wilde had already moved away from him and was bending over the glass tray with a pipette. Following the drop of blood into each compartment was another drop of something else.
‘OK. Let’s look.’
She thrust Bryn in front of the microscope and he forced his bleary eyes to focus through the eyepiece, as a glass slide slid into view. Round balloons swam in some kind of fluid, along with bigger, more ragged-looking shapes, gently shifting position in the warm currents generated by the microscope bulb. What the hell was he doing here, he wondered.
‘See the macrophages? Keep an eye on them.’
‘Macro- …?’
‘Macrophages. Not the round ones, they’re your red blood cells. The big, irregular white blood cells. They’re what protect you against flu.’
‘Right. Only not.’
‘Watch.’
Wilde took the slide, added something from her pipette, and slid it back beneath the light. Little strands of blue had joined the throng beneath the lens, and Bryn watched as slowly, slowly, the macrophages sought out the little blue strands and began to engulf them.
‘They’re eating the little blue things. Is that good?’
Wilde pushed him away and peered through the scope. ‘Hardly. Your white cells are barely moving. I’ve just sprayed them with a ton of foreign protein and they ought to be going crazy. They don’t know if I’ve given them AIDS, or just a bit of chicken.’
‘And?’
‘And what?’
‘AIDS or chicken?’
She glanced at him briefly, as though not taking the question seriously. ‘Chicken-derived polypeptides,’ she said. ‘It’s the reason why you got flu, now it’s the reason why you can’t shake it.’
Bryn was blurry with illness, tired from too much work, and disconcerted by this strange doctor. His mind felt foggy and dull. ‘Chicken?’
‘Your white cells. They’re exhausted. We need to juice them up.’
Rudely shoving Bryn aside, she began working with the glass tray. She’d scraped her dull, sandy-coloured hair away from her face and secured it at the back with a rubber band plucked from some packaging discarded in the wastebin. Unconscious of her appearance, unconscious of anything except her work, she took a few drops from each compartment, dropped them on to a slide, and studied the slide under the microscope. She took about five or six minutes, working in silence, with little tuts of dissatisfaction emerging as she failed to find what she was looking for. Bryn looked around for somewhere to sit. The chairs were mostly either inaccessible or piled high with research documents, so he eventually settled for a stack of paper tottering somewhere in the darkness. He watched Cameron working intently in her pool of lamplight, and as he watched, he felt the ache from the punch settle down and begin to mingle with his other aches, disappearing into them, making itself at home. Eventually, with the eleventh compartment tested, she looked up.
‘We’ve got something. Not a perfect match, but the best I’ve found.’ She looked him up and down, like a butcher at a cow. ‘And you’re not in such awful shape. It shouldn’t take too much.’
She shoved him across to the microscope, as she went over to the larger of her two fridges. In the round image picked out by the lens, Bryn saw the same thing as before, only massively different. The lethargic white blood cells had gone hyperactive. As soon as they located a blue protein strand, they enveloped it and gobbled it, then went charging off to look for the next one. Even as Bryn watched, the microscope slide cleared of all invaders.
‘Wow,’ he said. ‘And what if that had been AIDS, not chicken?’
But Wilde wasn’t listening. Her hands pattered down rows of glass bottles in the fridge, then stopped and pulled out a beaker. Next she found a syringe which looked like a church steeple joined to a zeppelin, and began to fill it.
‘What’s that?’ asked Bryn.
‘Same solution as I used to beef up your white cells under the scope. It’s a mix of nutritional factors. Fuel for blood cells.’
She swabbed his arm with alcohol, and Bryn felt the familiar cooling sensation.
‘Is this what you do? Your research area, I mean?’
‘Huh? This? God, no,’ she said, waving her needle. ‘This is crude, painfully, painfully crude.’ The alcohol had evaporated away, and Cameron wiped the vein a second time. The syringe looked bigger close up, huge in fact. ‘With real diseases, serious disease, you actually need to reprogram the white blood cells, literally write strings of program code to remind them how to do the job.’ She poked at his vein to make it stand out. ‘Not silicon chips, obviously, the body needs chemical code. Amino acids. Peptides.’ She levelled the syringe. ‘Little prick.’
‘I have not,’ muttered Bryn, trying not to watch.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Nothing. Forget it.’
Dr Wilde had found the vein without difficulty, and with calm expertise, slowly and smoothly injected the solution into his arm. It was almost totally painless.
‘Done,’ she said. She pulled the rubber band from her hair and shook it into its previous uncombed mess.
‘Thanks. Like I say, I have a full day of meetings tomorrow, so anything which helps …’
‘Tomorrow?’ She snorted out through her nose, possibly her version of a laugh. ‘You’ll need to cancel.’
‘I can’t cancel. That’s the point. That’s why I came.’
She shrugged. It wasn’t her problem. ‘Try to eat properly while you’re recovering. That means no caffeine, no alcohol, no sugar, no dairy, nothing processed, not much fat, no additives, no allergens.’
‘Grass. I’ll eat grass.’
‘Organic, where possible. Thirty bucks for the injection, please. You can give me another twenty for the consultation, if you feel like supporting my research.’
Bryn rolled down his sleeve and groped for his jacket.
‘It’s nice to work on humans every now and then,’ she continued. ‘Mostly I just stick needles into rats.’ Her words came out in grunts as she cleared her microscope bench of the litter. The compartmented tray, now rejoicing in twelve drops of finest Welsh blood, she waved in the air. ‘Human blood. A prized commodity. Can I keep it?’
‘Be my guest. Punching people is part of your research? Or was that just for fun?’
Wilde was nonplussed. She didn’t understand jokes, it seemed.
‘It wasn’t research. I just wanted to explain … Sorry.’
Bryn pulled a hundred bucks from his wallet. ‘Can you give me a receipt?’ He needed it to claim his expenses. She looked vacantly round the mountainous paper landscape in its inky darkness and pools of light. She didn’t do receipts. ‘OK. Don’t worry. Just keep it. Good luck with your research.’
‘Thanks. Sorry I hurt you.’
‘That’s OK. Not to worry. It’s fine. Thank you.’
‘Here, have this,’ she said abruptly. She found a business card and scribbled on the back of it, a hundred dollars, received with thanks. He took it and caught a taxi back to his hotel downtown, musing on what he’d witnessed.
He’d seen blood cells recharged and reinvigorated. He’d seen blood cells destroying invaders like Schwarzenegger on speed. He’d seen a failing immune system rebuilt under the microscope.
This time, of course, the invaders had been chicken, the magic show no more than a party trick. But if, as she’d implied, Dr Wilde could repeat her trick with serious illness, then it wasn’t just a trick she’d discovered. It was the Holy Grail.
4
Bryn had as much intention of spending the next day in his hotel room as he had of giving all his money away to charity, but there are times when things move beyond your control. By eleven p.m. his temperature had shot up to 105°F and hung there all night. Shivering underneath a mountain of duvets, he cancelled everything he’d had arranged and waited for the crisis to pass. By evening, his temperature had come down, his chest had cleared, and his appetite returned with a vengeance. Other than a little temporary weakness, he was as fit as a fiddle and ready for action.
Making a rapid check of flight times, he made a dash for the airport through rainswept streets, catching the last overnight flight into London. He slept well through the journey, woke sufficiently refreshed to manage a king-sized breakfast, and was first off the plane on arrival.
Strictly speaking he should have gone straight into work, but it was a grey and chilly morning at a grey and ugly Heathrow, and he found himself asking the cabbie to take him home instead. He’d shower, shave and have a second full-size breakfast, before going into the office.
And there was another motivation. For several years his marriage had been poor, possibly even collapsing. He and his wife, Cecily, had their fair share of relationship problems, of course, but on top of that, theirs was a banker’s marriage. It wasn’t that Bryn cared about his career and Cecily didn’t. On the contrary, she had been brought up to consider money to be more important than oxygen. But there was a cost: work came first, the marriage came second. Out of their last fifty-two weekends, only five had been completely free of work.
And so a stop for breakfast and a shower wouldn’t just be pleasant, it would be Bryn’s way of showing Cecily that she still mattered to him, a small step towards reconstructing their relationship. He’d been taking a lot of such steps recently, hopeful that they were clawing their way towards something better.
Outside his tall, white-fronted Chelsea home, he paid off the cabbie, climbed the steps, let himself in, called upstairs and downstairs, got no answer – and then saw it, a note, folded on the hall table. He opened the note and read it.
5
And read it again, in a mounting blur. ‘Dearest Bryn,’ – that was nice, wasn’t it? A good affectionate start. No problems there. ‘This is just to say that I’ve decided to leave you.’ Bryn gripped the banister and collapsed heavily down on the lower stair. What do you mean, ‘just to say’? What’s just about that? ‘Dearest, this is just to say I’ve burned the house down, murdered the kids, slaughtered the neighbours, eaten the cat.’ Bryn breathed deeply. Maybe he was missing a trick here. Maybe she’d meant to say something else altogether. ‘Dearest Bryn, I’ve decided to leave you … some breakfast in the oven, some gloves in your pocket, a photo, a love letter, a billet doux.’
No, it didn’t say that. Definitely not.
He rubbed his eyes roughly, and blinked to focus. Try though he might, he missed the next few sentences and only caught up with Cecily’s beautiful handwriting several lines later. ‘I’m sorry, darling, I could see you really trying to mend things, but I believe it wasn’t meant to be. I’ve realised that it’s important to me to begin again, and that’s what I intend to do. Please don’t be silly and try to pursue me – it won’t work. You know me well enough by now, to know that my decisions are for ever.’
He did, and they were.
6
For a long time, at the foot of the long staircase, Bryn sat stunned and stupid, yet in a way not even surprised. These last few months, he’d felt like a man trying to rebuild a house during the earthquake-volcano-hurricane season: heroic, maybe; a loser, for sure. He crumpled the letter and threw it away. The scrumpled ball hit Cecily’s bow-legged rosewood table and made one of her Meissen vases ping with amusement.
Work. There was always work. At least at Berger Scholes he could harness all his energy into bullying the world into submission. It didn’t compensate for a failed marriage, but, by God, it was a good distraction. He heaved himself up and stumbled off to work.
A mistake.
On his desk waiting for him was a corporate memo, sent from Head Office, addressed only to him.
TWO (#ulink_a6b54864-62f5-5b44-9c2c-0478f3de371d)
1
‘What the hell is this?’
Bryn shook the memo furiously at his boss, a Dutchman, Pieter van Ween, head of the bank in Europe. Van Ween – blue eyes, fine silver hair swept back over a clear complexion – spoke calmly.
‘I’m sorry you found out this way. I tried to phone. I couldn’t reach you, so I thought it better to drop you a line –’
‘I don’t care how I found out! I do care about Rudy Saddler coming to piss on my patch.’ Bryn’s voice came across as unnecessarily gruff – the voice of a man two hours after getting off an overnight flight, forty minutes after finding his wife had left, three minutes after finding out his job was dissolving. He rubbed his chin, which was rough and unshaven.
‘No one’s going to be pissing anywhere.’ Van Ween was puritan enough to dislike foul language, banker enough to tolerate it. ‘The pharmaceutical industry is a big area. Plenty of transactions. What was it? Sixty billion dollars’ worth we did –’
‘I did –’
‘The bank did last year. Saddler’s going to co-operate, not steal your show. He’s already told me how much he welcomes your local knowledge. I know he respects your work.’
‘Respect, bullshit. I’ve built the best pharma team in Europe and he gets to put his name on the door. Are you trying to send me a message?’
Van Ween understood this game. He played it often. He played it well.
‘There’s no message. I didn’t ask for Saddler. He wanted to come. I have guys I wanted to send to New York. It was all part of the deal.’
‘You traded me.’
‘This is a bank, Bryn. I did what was best for the bank.’
‘I don’t know about that. I do know that I work my arse off and my reward is to be demoted –’
‘There’s no demotion –’
‘– demoted to second in command of the team I built. You may say there’s no message, but I’ve got to tell you, Pieter, I’m hearing one.’
‘Are you saying you will not accept the position which is being offered?’
The question shifted things into van Ween’s favour. Bryn could act the martyr, but unless he had something lined up elsewhere, he couldn’t afford to reject anything. Van Ween wanted to make him say it. Bryn sighed. He was devastated by his wife’s disappearance, shocked by the news about his job. ‘I’m not here to give you any ultimatums,’ he said wearily. ‘I just wanted to let you know I was unhappy.’
‘I understand. It had occurred to me you might not be altogether happy. There is something else I had in mind. It’s a critical area. Something we’re keen to expand. Begin to make some real money. And from your point of view, I think it’s a good career move. It’s the kind of position that gets noticed in New York.’
Bryn opened his hands to invite more information. He didn’t want to sound excited. In truth, he wasn’t excited. Pieter van Ween would have pitched the position the same way whether it was running the trading floor or counting paperclips. The Dutchman paused to register the fact that Bryn was making a request, then continued.
‘It’s emerging markets: Russia, former Soviet Union, all of Eastern Europe, Asia as far as India, Africa. You’d have the biggest territory of anyone in the bank and everything except trading would report to you. You’d report directly to me. I’d give you time to get to know the area, then we’ll sit down and talk. If you think the business flow will justify increased resources, you can have them.’
‘Do we have lending authority?’
‘We can lend money in Poland, the Czech Republic, Turkey. Maybe South Africa, I’d have to check.’
‘Not Russia? Not India?’ Van Ween stayed silent. He wouldn’t participate in Bryn’s effort to belittle the job. ‘How much did we make last year?’
‘In emerging markets? About fifteen, twenty million bucks. But focus on the future.’
‘That’s less than I made on the Claussen deal alone.’
‘The job’s about possibilities, Bryn. You’re giving reasons why we need to beef up our effort, why we need you.’
Bryn thought about it. Half the world under his command, but the wrong bloody half. If the bank wouldn’t risk its money – for fear of coups, collapse, or craziness – then there wasn’t much Bryn could do to earn it. There was always consultancy work, but in these Godforsaken markets the businesses were too small, too cheapskate to stump up real cash. He was being offered an empire, but it was an empire of sand, a dirt track into the desert.
Van Ween noticed the hesitation. It was a lousy deal, he understood that. But he needed to accommodate Saddler’s arrival and he needed somebody to do the emerging markets job. Hughes was a good guy, headstrong and cocky for sure, but most decent bankers were. Van Ween decided to offer some more inducement.
‘If it’s the travel that’s worrying you, then I understand that. It’s demanding. We’ve got some big energy projects in Kazakhstan right now. A privatisation in South Africa. We’ll need you to be there on the ground, of course, but I don’t want you to compromise your family life. Take time off when you need to. I know I can trust you to strike an appropriate balance.’
‘Jesus, the travel. I hadn’t even thought …’
Bryn trailed off. Nothing on earth could afford less pleasure than business travel to the places van Ween had outlined. He’d heard nightmare stories – true stories – about bankers stranded on an airfield someplace in Russia, minus fifteen outside and falling, the plane’s pilot pointing to an empty fuel gauge, telling the Westerners to buy fuel or stay grounded. Mobile phone two thousand kilometres from the nearest signal. Company Amex card a stupid joke. Dollops of cash, pushed across a table in a green-painted hut; men shouting in an alien language, arguing over maps and cash and vodka; and all the time the temperature outside falling.
‘I hadn’t even thought about the travel.’
‘As I say, I know you’ll want to talk it through with your wife …’
Those words – ‘your wife’ – almost sent an unaccustomed spurt of tears through Bryn’s rusted-up tear ducts. His wife. He’d had his problems with Cecily, no question, but she was his wife – or, rather, had been. He felt desolate and betrayed. ‘There’s nothing else?’
‘We’d like you to work with Rudy Saddler as his number two, if you could see your way to sorting things out with him. But either way … it’s your call. Let me know when you’ve talked to your wife. Cecily, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. Cecily.’ Bryn was stuck in his seat for a moment, cloddish and uncertain. He was a skilled negotiator, but van Ween was no pushover and van Ween held all the aces. Bryn could give up half his empire and more than half his glory to a newcomer he didn’t get on with, or travel the world’s least glamorous corners slogging his guts out for a penny here, a nickel there. ‘Thanks, Pieter. I’ll think about it. Get back to you.’
There was a third option which neither of them mentioned but both were aware of. Bryn could call a headhunter. Clear out. See what he could get somewhere else. It didn’t feel great, but it was an option.
‘OK.’ It was a dismissal, but friendly. ‘And believe me, Bryn. You have a good career here. Think long-term. Don’t make the mistake of moving on because of – because of a hiccup.’
‘Yeah. OK.’ He stood up to go.
Van Ween watched him carefully, appraising his man, knowing that Bryn’s ‘yeah, OK’ was as good as meaningless.
‘And Bryn, I understand your frustration, but we’ve put a real offer on the table. We won’t be sympathetic if … if you choose to head elsewhere.’
Bryn understood van Ween’s meaning. As with any senior banker, much of Bryn’s wealth was tied up in deferred bonuses, a hostage kept to encourage loyalty. The money was Bryn’s as long as he stayed with the bank, but it became the bank’s money if he chose to quit. Sometimes, if the bank nudged people out, it was generous, it decided not to add to the misery by hanging on to the precious cash. But van Ween was telling Bryn not to hope. If Bryn called a headhunter and quit, he’d wave goodbye to three quarters of a million pounds.
2
‘There’s one more here. The last of our hepatitis controls.’
‘Oh no, really?’ exclaimed Cameron. ‘That’s too bad.’
She went over to the cage – hardly a cage, even, more like a rat playground, full of fluffy white sawdust, plastic toys, feeding trays and hidey holes. The last of its inhabitants lay stretched out, nose just poking out of the darkened night area. Cameron snapped off her latex gloves, opened the cage door and reached in, picking out the little white corpse and stroking it, smoothing its whiskers. ‘Dammit,’ she said. ‘It’s Freddie. We didn’t need that. I was hoping that at least Freddie would survive.’
Cameron’s lab assistant, a delightful graduate student called Kati Larousse, rubbed Cameron’s shoulder and said gently, ‘At least it improves the stats, Cameron. And the experiment’s over now. This is the one hundred and eightieth day.’
‘We didn’t need the stats to look any better. They’re good enough already. Hell. I wish I’d stopped all this at a hundred and twenty days. Even ninety. We were way into statistical significance already by then.’
Larousse gave her boss a hug. ‘You’re the only researcher in the world who’d react like this. You carry out the most successful animal experiment ever undertaken in this field, and all you do is worry about your controls dying on you.’
‘How are the others?’
Cameron reached for the door to the neighbouring cage. A sign above it read ‘Herpes’, along with warnings about animal handling.
‘Gloves, Cameron. Careful.’
‘Damn my gloves.’
Cameron reached into the cage. This group of rats had been deliberately infected with the herpes virus one hundred and eighty days ago, and all but four were now dead. The ones that were still alive were lethargic and glassy-eyed, about to follow the twenty-six rats that had preceded them to the pearly gates. Cameron stroked the rats regretfully, apologetically even.
‘How about the others?’ she asked after a while.
‘HIV, you know. All dead. Hantavirus and Ebola virus, we’ve got eight and six left respectively.’
‘And the treated rats? No problems there?’
Larousse moved to the cages on the opposite wall. The cages were identical, except for one thing. The rats weren’t dead, they weren’t even dying. One hundred and eighty days before, they had all been injected with the exact same deadly viruses that the control groups had received, but nothing had happened. The rats bounced around their cages, coats glossy, eyes sparkling, squabbling over toys and fighting their way through tunnels and up ladders, like so many healthy puppies. They didn’t know it, but they owed their lives to Cameron’s Immune Reprogramming. Larousse used her hands to check inside the sleeping area, but they came away empty.
‘Nothing. No problems at all. Oh, except that this one has lost part of its tail.’
Cameron inspected the rat. It was thinner than the others, a constant target of playground bullying. ‘Benito. Shame. He had such a nice tail.’
Larousse let her boss linger round the cages a little longer before interrupting. The end of an experiment is the busiest part, collecting all the data which records the precise success or failure of the work. ‘I guess I should start taking blood samples from all the survivors?’
‘Right. Get it centrifuged and refrigerated. We can begin the lab analysis tomorrow.’
‘OK, sure. And … the controls, Cameron. These little guys are dying. You want me to …?’
‘Oh, sure, yes, of course. I mean, right away.’
‘How do you want me to do it?’ Larousse was gentle. Most experimenters didn’t care what happened to their animals at the end of an experiment, but Cameron Wilde wasn’t like that. There were different injections you could give to put a rat to sleep, and Cameron was bound to have views on the kindest method.
‘You know,’ said Cameron, ‘exactly like we did the others.’
‘I don’t understand. We didn’t do the others. They just died.’
Cameron stared at her assistant, slowly understanding what she had meant. ‘Oh, no. We’re not putting them down, Kati. I’d never … No way. We’re going to try and get the little guys well. Build them up again. We’re going to do the full Immune Reprogramming on all of them.’
‘Do the whole thing?’ Larousse was astonished. After a long and complex development period, Cameron’s Immune Reprogramming technique had been put to the test in this one amazing experiment. Nothing in scientific history had ever worked better – not on rats, anyway – but it was still time-consuming, laborious and expensive. ‘Do we have the funds, even?’
Cameron’s eyes flashed with anger. ‘I don’t care if we’ve got the funding. I’m not going to let these little guys die just because we can’t be bothered to cure them. Christ, if we don’t owe it to them by now … We’re going to get them better, and then they’re all going to go off to PEACH. If I can’t afford that, I’ll keep the little guys myself.’ PEACH was the Post-Experiment Animal Care Hostel – a pricey but deluxe outfit run by a couple of dedicated Boston animal-lovers.
‘Yeah, sure, Cameron. That’s fine. Actually, I’m delighted. That’s great news. God, I love working with you.’
Cameron stared around the room. Since the discovery of penicillin, medical history has all been about the search for the magic bullet: pills which wipe out a bug, leaving everything else intact. With bacteria, the search was successful. One by one, killer diseases like tuberculosis, scarlet fever, whooping cough and diphtheria began to fade out of existence – slain by the magic bullets of antibiotics. There was a time when scientists were optimistic that all diseases would follow suit, that infectious disease would literally be eliminated.
But then the failures began. Viruses began to shrug off vaccinations. Bacteria grew resistant to antibiotics. New diseases sprang up out of nowhere. Scientists don’t say so out loud, but they’re worried. The drugs companies won’t admit it, but their bullets are failing.
Cameron wasn’t surprised. The way she figured it, drugs can never defeat infectious disease. Bacteria reproduce every twenty minutes, five hundred generations in a week. In the time it takes a new drug to be developed, approved and marketed, the bacteria it was designed to kill have evolved far, far away from the original specimens.
Cameron’s alternative was simple. What’s the only known way of killing all viruses and all bacteria, no matter how weird and wonderful, no matter how foreign or strange? Answer: the human body. Most of the time, our bodies deal with everything: viruses and bacteria, prions and moulds, insect bites and toxins. You can put fifty people in a room packed full of influenza virus, but only five of them will come down with flu – the five who are stressed, or unhappy, or malnourished, or sleep-deprived, or recovering from some other illness. The other forty-five just deal with it.
And that was Cameron’s answer. To reprogram the human immune system to deal with its failures. To teach the immune system to do what it does best. This had been her mission in life ever since entering Harvard Medical School as an exceptionally gifted sixteen-year-old. Now aged just twenty-nine, she had carried out the most ambitious experiment in the history of viral disease, and come away with the most brilliant results ever achieved. But that was rats. The next step was to repeat the trick with humans.
Cameron looked at the rat cages once again: the empty ones where the controls had been, the others where the treated rats hurtled round in skidding clouds of sawdust.
‘Let’s make this the last animal experiment we ever do, OK, Kati?’
Larousse grinned approval as she busied herself with needles and collection bottles. ‘Have you thought more about publication?’ she asked.
‘Uh-huh,’ said Cameron. ‘The Journal of the American Academy of Medicine are quite keen, I think.’
‘Keen? They’ll bite your hand off.’
‘I hope so. The next phase of this is going to be pricey. We’ll need a decent write-up to secure our funding.’
Larousse put down her rats, needles and bottles.
‘Listen,’ she said. ‘There are a hundred and fifty rats in this room who ought to be dead or dying, and just look at them. Not a trace of disease. None of them. Not in half a year. Your problem isn’t going to be getting money. It’ll be how to fight it off.’
Larousse was wrong, of course. Dead wrong. As wrong as wrong could be. But don’t blame her. Larousse was a scientist, and what do they know about money?
THREE (#ulink_35479dc8-6be2-55e5-9afa-22f1baf4f538)
1
The loneliest place in the world is easy to find: a luxury hotel in a foreign city and a phone with no one to call.
It was six weeks now since Bryn’s life had broken to pieces on the rocks. Cecily had promised him that her decisions were for ever – or, to put it bluntly, that she was as stubborn as a donkey. Bryn knew this. He’d have been less surprised to meet Mount Rushmore on walkabout than to find Cecily changing her mind. All the same, he’d done what he could. On the assumption that she’d gone home to her parents, he’d tried to call her there. It was Cecily’s mum who answered.
‘Oh God, Bryn, it’s you,’ she’d said, not unkindly.
‘Yes, I was hoping that I could maybe speak to –’
‘Yes, yes. Of course you were.’
Her voice was sympathetic and unhappy and Bryn then knew straightaway that Cecily hadn’t just left him, she’d left him for somebody else. ‘He’s a rich sod,’ her mum went on to say. ‘Taken her off to some horrible mansion in the Caribbean. I met him once, Bryn, hated him. I’m so sorry.’
But sympathy from his about-to-be-ex-wife’s mother was little comfort, as he began to search the ruins of his life for a path leading out.
Once, that path would have been work. He was still at Berger Scholes, of course – back in Boston finalising his biotech deal – but his career there was coming to an end. He wasn’t going to knuckle down as Rudy Saddler’s number two, and he wasn’t going to trudge the world of emerging markets, hunting for nickels. He’d called a headhunter, who was even now lining up new places, new jobs. Bryn Hughes would start out all over again: new job, new start, and in time, perhaps, a new woman, perhaps even a family.
Meantime he was lonely. No one to visit. No one to call. It wouldn’t be different tomorrow or the next day. Welcome to life without a family. Welcome to life without direction.
He wasn’t hungry, but ordered a giant salad from room service anyway, giving himself something to pick at. Putting his hand in his pocket, searching for a couple of dollars to tip the waiter, his fingers met the sharp rectangular edge of a business card. He pulled it out with the money. A receipt for a hundred bucks, received with thanks, scribbled in pencil on the back of a card. Cameron Wilde, MD, PhD. Bryn tipped the waiter and stared at the card.
A Boston number, someone to call.
2
Over on the university campus, a phone rings in the surrounding silence. Cameron Wilde, working late, answers it.
‘Cameron Wilde.’
‘Dr Wilde, it’s Bryn Hughes.’
‘Brandon …’
‘Bryn. Bryn Hughes. A patient of yours.’ Still no recognition. Bryn gave her the help she needed. ‘I came to you with flu and you punched me in the chest.’
‘Oh. Sure. You were the guy who said he wasn’t stressed.’
‘Right. It was around then you started hitting me … I was calling to say that you totally sorted me out. One day in bed, then as right as rain.’
‘As right as what?’
‘Rain. A British expression. Something to do with our love of bad weather, I suppose.’
‘You’re welcome.’
‘I wanted to thank you. Perhaps I could take you out to dinner somewhere. That is,’ he added, joking, ‘if you know anywhere which doesn’t serve coffee, alcohol, sugar, fats, additives or dairy.’
‘No, sorry.’ Her no was flat, no hint of apology.
‘No?’
‘No. I don’t know anywhere. Uh … you could eat at my place if you wanted. Did you mean tonight?’
‘Yes. Tonight. Unless you’re doing anything.’
‘No. Sure. Fine.’
And shortly Bryn was in a cab crossing Boston, watching the darkened winter streets pass by, feeling as he hadn’t done for years.
For the first time since his life had smashed upon the rocks, here was an edge of excitement, a tiny nibble of adventure, a step into the unknown. He sat forward in his seat, unaccountably excited by what lay ahead.
3
The air that night had come down from Canada, and shivered with the possibility of snow. Bryn stamped his feet in the lamplight spilling from the apartment block’s lobby, careful with his once-injured right knee on the frozen pavement. When, following his second ring, the buzzer buzzed the door open, he made his way across the over-heated lobby towards the stairs and Cameron Wilde’s apartment.
‘Here. I brought this.’ Bryn held out a bottle of champagne he’d bought at the hotel before leaving. Cameron looked at it, but made no move to take it. Her face was white, drawn, shocked. ‘Are you OK? Is this a bad time?’
She shook her head, turned, and walked into her living room, leaving the door open for Bryn to follow.
The room was pleasant enough. Pale floorboards, strewn with rugs. A couple of lavender-blue sofas. Walls stone-washed and decorated with a handful of anonymous prints. No TV. You could look at the room for an hour and know nothing of the person who owned it. Until, that is, your eye arrived at the corner devoted to Cameron’s work: paper stacked high on shelves and the surrounding floor; PC and printer; graphs, notes, equations tacked up on the wall above. If the room was coloured according to the intensity of life in its various parts, then the whole large living space would be a pale, almost icy blue; the study area, a vivid, glowing scarlet. Cameron crashed down on one of the sofas, looking like death.
Bryn read the situation quickly and crouched in front of Cameron, squatting awkwardly with his weight skewed on to his stronger knee.
‘Dr Wilde, I don’t know what’s happened in between my phone call and now, but I can see you’re in shock. If you want me to go, please say.’
She said nothing.
‘Right. I’m going to stay. Now I can help you best if I know what’s going on. What is it? Some kind of attack? An intruder?’
There was no sign of forced entry, and Cameron was on the third floor, but it was best to be sure. The scientist gave no response.
‘An intruder? No intruder?’
Bryn bashed at her with his voice, studying her face carefully for information. It seemed to him she was telling him ‘no’.
‘OK. What else? Perhaps …’ Bryn was about to try other avenues when he noticed a fixity in Cameron’s expression. She was staring at a letter lying open on her table. ‘This letter? You came home from work, found this letter, and it gave you a shock? May I read it?’
There was no sign in her face, so Bryn went ahead. It was a short note, from the editor of the Journal of the American Academy of Medicine: ‘Thank you for your recent submission to this office. Unfortunately, we do not consider this paper to be of sufficient interest to our readership at this present time.’ There was another sentence or two of blah-blah. A pretty standard rejection, as far as Bryn could tell.
‘You submitted an article to the Journal and it was rejected.’ Bryn hesitated. The American Academy of Medicine published the world’s most prestigious medical journal. If medical science was athletics, then publication in the Journal was like running in the Olympic finals. ‘Cameron,’ he said, using her Christian name for the first time, ‘it’s not surprising to get a rejection like this. Even great scientists get rejected sometimes. There are tons of other places where you can get your article published.’
‘Right. The Redneck County Medical Gazette. The Baldhead Mountain Parish News.’ Cameron’s eyes were large and smoky-blue, but the skin around them was puffy and grey, and the eyes themselves red-rimmed and desolate.
‘No. Real journals. Respected ones.’
Cameron slowly shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No. You don’t understand.’ Then, after a long pause, finding what she had to say almost impossible to speak, she continued. ‘They told me … they said they …’ Just as it seemed she had petered out, she burst into life. ‘Oh, goddamn it! They told me my results weren’t acceptable. They thought I’d fixed my data.’
‘Fixed? They thought you cheated?’
But she had snapped shut again, her screen of hair falling forwards over her face. All the same, you didn’t need to be much of a psychologist to see that Cameron had no more fixed her data than she had swum the Atlantic. He gripped her by the shoulders and forced her face up towards him, brushing her hair back from her eyes.
‘They thought you cheated, but you obviously haven’t. So there’s a mistake. And mistakes are fixable.’
‘Fixable?’
Bryn wished he’d used another word. ‘Correctable. Mendable. They think you fixed your data. You didn’t. So sort it out. Ask for independent checks, whatever.’
Cameron shook her head. ‘There’s an ethics committee,’ she said. ‘Apparently, I’ve got to collect my work. Hand it over for investigation.’
‘First step,’ said Bryn, ignoring her. ‘Find out how the mistake happened. What did they say? What did they think went on?’
Cameron stared at him, trying to make up her mind whether to trust this battering ram of a stranger. In that instant, Bryn realised that her silence up till now had been less because of her shock, and mostly because of her uncertainty over him. Still uncertain, she continued. ‘They didn’t say. They wouldn’t say, but personally I …’ She shook her head, reluctant to continue.
Bryn took her by the shoulders again. ‘Speak, Cameron. I do better with words. What are you saying? You have a suspicion about something? You don’t know, but you have a suspicion?’
She nodded, slowly.
‘Who? You have colleagues, co-workers, lab assistants? Anyone you argued with? Had a fight? Fired?’
‘No. Kati, my lab assistant, she’s my best friend. She wouldn’t. Not her. But …’
‘Yes? But? But, who?’
‘Look, I don’t know, but …’ She shook herself, as though physically shrugging away her shock, as though literally stepping into a more aggressive, defiant state of mind. ‘Listen. Our Head of Laboratory Services used to be a creepy guy named Duaine Kovacs. One night I found him down with my rats. Late at night. I don’t know what he was doing there. I screamed at him.’
Bryn didn’t quite follow. ‘You think he knifed you, because you screamed at him once?’
Cameron shook her head. ‘When I found him, he was clearing up a spillage. Blood. He’d cut himself. After he left, I looked at a few drops under the microscope. Good stuff, blood, it tells you everything.’ She sighed. ‘Anyway, Kovacs was in a state. Unhappy blood. Like, way worse than yours. I ran some tests. Alcohol. Dope. Cocaine. Prozac. Tons of stress factors. I reported him, of course. I mean, I wouldn’t care. If someone wants to take coke, that’s their problem, but in a laboratory – in my laboratory, messing around with my rats … I wasn’t having it. He was fired.’
‘OK. So we have our mole. Question is, why on earth would the Journal believe him rather than you? He was fired after all.’
Once again, Cameron’s face clouded and Bryn probed hard to read what was written there. ‘Something else, Cameron. There’s something else you’re not telling me.’
She sighed, a sigh which began down in the soles of her feet. ‘Damn right, there’s something else.’ She paused again, gauging her little-known visitor. ‘The night Kovacs was fired, he was drunk, high, I don’t know what. He burst in on me, yelling abuse, how my experimental results would never see the light of day, how they were going to see to it.’
‘They who?’
Cameron shrugged. ‘I don’t know. That’s the point. They … whoever.’
Bryn felt a flicker of excitement flashing from nerve to nerve across his body, like a lightning flash that briefly illuminates an entire landscape. He didn’t know why or what, but he knew he was on to something important. He leaned forward. ‘Let me understand. When you send a paper to the Journal or any other scientific publication, they get it reviewed, right? Half a dozen independent reviewers comment on whether the article is good enough to be accepted. Did your paper go out to reviewers, or was this rejection just based on the editor?’
‘Oh, no. The editor, he was keen – I mean, was keen.’
‘Do you know who he chose to review your paper?’
‘Sure. I’m not supposed to, but I found out.’ Cameron gestured at the mountains of paper surrounding her desk. ‘In the yellow binder, there.’
Bryn found the binder and pulled it out. Pasted to the inside flap was a list of six reviewers, names and numbers.
‘Good.’ He brought the list back to the sofa. ‘Now, I need you to think. Look at these six names. Tell me if you can think of any reason why they might be hostile to you or your paper.’
Cameron looked at the list for about two tenths of a second, then shook her head. ‘No. Why be hostile? It’s only science, for God’s sake.’
Once again, Bryn did his bully-boy act, squeezing Cameron’s shoulders so that she was forced to look up into his eyes. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Nothing: in the world happens without a reason. Nothing. If a handful of intelligent scientists chooses to believe some coked-up laboratory manager without even checking with you, then there’s a reason. Once we work it out, we probably know who’s behind all this. OK?’
Cameron looked back at the list, more intently now. But the names still revealed nothing to her. She dropped the list. ‘I can’t think of a reason.’
‘OK. Who does your paper hurt? It’s about – what? How to juice up rat blood?’
‘It doesn’t hurt anyone,’ she said, a little sharply. ‘My medicine is about helping people.’
‘Helping people, right. But what about your rats? What was in your article?’
Cameron shrugged, as though unimpressed by her own achievements. ‘I took a hundred and fifty rats, gave them five kinds of killer disease, then treated their immune systems. Reprogrammed them. Programmed them to be incredibly good at killing whatever virus it was I’d given them. I wrote up my results and sent ’em to the Journal.’
‘And what about the rats?’
‘They lived, of course. Otherwise my paper wouldn’t have been very interesting, would it?’ Bryn gripped Cameron’s arm, tightly, more than was polite. He delivered his next question with barely controlled intensity. ‘To cure your rats. Did you use drugs? Were their recoveries in any way drug-dependent?’
‘Oh, who cares?’
Cameron sought to free her arm, but Bryn tightened his grip, as his nerves danced with urgency. ‘Please, Cameron. It’s critical that you tell me.’
She quit struggling. ‘Some of the rats benefited from very small doses of immune stimulant pharmaceuticals. In real life, not an experiment, I might have wanted some further drug support. But in general, no. The rats didn’t get better because of any drugs.’
Bryn’s flicker of excitement burst into flame, seizing hold of his entire body. He leaped back as though on fire. ‘Jesus Christ! Jesus, Cameron, I thought you said your paper didn’t hurt anyone. There are billions – no forget that – there are tens, hundreds of billions of dollars invested in drug technologies which you could be putting at threat. It’s not if, frankly, it’s who … Let me think. Jesus.’ He took the list of names again, thrusting them in front of the scientist, inches from her face. ‘Do you recognise any of these names? Is there a common link? Any company, or organisation?’
Cameron looked at the names. ‘They’re all OK. This guy, Professor Durer, he’s quite good. Had a real interest in my work. Rucci … The name rings a bell, but … Now, Freward. He’s a grade-A creep, but an OK scientist … The others, hell, the others, who cares?’ Her insightful analysis stumbled to a close.
Bryn drummed briefly on the table. Then, pulling out his phone, he began to dial.
4
First London, where it was two o’clock in the morning. He called three of his junior analysts, two of whom were asleep in bed, one of whom was at work, finishing up a spreadsheet for one of Bryn’s other projects. Bryn began to bark instructions, getting the two sleepy analysts into work as soon as possible, pulling the third off his existing project for the time being. He thought briefly, then, for the sake of completeness, he called a couple of associates in New York and set them the exact same task, with the same urgent deadline as he’d given the others. What one group missed, the other might find, and vice versa. Before he was done, he interrupted himself briefly. ‘Fax?’ he asked Cameron. ‘E-mail?’ Wordlessly, she pointed to her filofax which lay on the desk. Bryn flipped to the contact information, and gave it to the associates on the other end of the line. He switched off his phone and tossed it down.
‘There we go. We’ll have some answers pretty soon.’
‘Answers to what? Except whether you’re a nice guy to work for.’
Bryn allowed himself a tiny smile. ‘We pay ’em enough.’
‘Can I ask you something?’
Bryn looked up in surprise. ‘Of course.’
‘Who are you? How come you know about the pharma industry? More to the point, what the hell made you come see me tonight?’
With a jolt, Bryn realised that Cameron knew nothing about him. She’d shown no personal curiosity in him the night they first met, and this evening the normal social exchanges had been obliterated by the steamroller of Cameron’s distress. ‘I’m an investment banker,’ he said, briefly explaining who he was and how come he was in Boston.
‘That doesn’t explain how come you’re in my apartment.’
He shrugged. Why was he here? Because his wife had left him and he thought that some weird Dr Dynamite scientist type was going to make him feel all warm and cuddly again? He shook the question away, and crossed to Cameron. ‘We should have some data coming in by now.’
He booted up Cameron’s PC and went into her e-mail. Before long, e-mails began to fly in from London and New York. ‘Data dumps,’ he said. ‘Everything you ever wanted to know about your six reviewers, plus the Journal’s editor. Everything which has ever appeared in print, anywhere in the world. Pharma company appointments, educational bulletins, research reports, internet stuff, you name it.’
‘You have systems which do that?’
‘Not systems, people. The information is out there, it’s finding it which is hard. Now, let’s see …’
For two and a half hours he worked, expertly skimming the mass of information flooding in, printing, marking and putting to one side anything he thought possibly relevant. Before long, seven piles mounted up: Durer, Regan, Rucci, Czarnowski, Booth, and Freward – the six reviewers – plus Goldbach, the editor.
At length, he took a break.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘I think I’m close. Of the six reviewers, I can connect four to one company, Corinth Laboratories. Durer is the one who connects tightest. His research lab has a major multi-year contract with Corinth. I doubt if Durer would stay in business if Corinth moved away. Regan and Czarnowski have both done paid experimental work for the group, plus Regan – no, Czarnowski – has done paid lectures, expert witness work with the FDA, that kind of thing. Then Booth is working to get a hospital extension funded. His co-chairman on the committee is an ex-CEO of Corinth. It’s not a strong connection, but if they’re hoping for funds, you never know. That leaves Freward and Rucci. I can’t find anything. Not yet. But there’s more stuff coming.’
He carried on speaking, but Cameron had turned to stone.
‘Rucci,’ she said. ‘I’ve just remembered where I heard the name.’ She walked to a shelf and pulled down an old edition of an industry magazine, Pharmaceutical People. She flicked through the pages and found the item she was looking for: a sickly-sweet mother-daughter feature, adorned with a cheesy photo. ‘The mom, Paula Rucci, was my reviewer. Her daughter, Gabriella, is Vice President in Corinth’s Veterinarian Division.’
‘Ha!’ barked Bryn, flying back to his sheaves of paper. He flicked quickly through his stacks and came away with a sheet. ‘Gabriella Rucci has recently been promoted to Executive VP. How nice. Her mum may be clean, but her daughter certainly isn’t. And if dear little Gabby comes home one day and tells her mum all kinds of crap about you, who’s she going to trust? That just leaves Freward.’
Cameron shook her head. ‘Uh-uh. Freward’s the worst.’ From a pile on her desk, she pulled a photocopied research piece, Quantificational errors in omega pathway modelling of digestive enzymes. Among the list of authors, Freward’s name had been circled with a handwritten comment next to it, ‘Pillock!’ Bryn looked blankly at the page.
‘Freward’s a good scientist,’ said Cameron, ‘but he devotes his life to these kind of knocking pieces, always trying to shoot good work down. He’s a director of – what’s the name again? – the Katz-Jacoby Research Foundation and –’
‘And Katz-Jacoby is exclusively funded by Corinth.’ Bryn finished her sentence, triumphantly. ‘We’ve got it, then. The smoking gun. The only weird thing is the coincidence. The editor seems clean, so how come he ends up with six Corinth stooges out of six? That doesn’t add up.’
‘Uh-uh. It figures. The editor will most likely pick one lead reviewer first, and talk to him about a possible slate of names. The most likely guy on this list is Freward. Like I say, he’s a jerk, but a good scientist with a decent reputation. Maybe the editor comes up with some suggested names, maybe Freward comes up with them all. Any case, by the time they’re done talking, Freward has packed the jury.’
‘Plus they’ve got Mr Smack-head Kovacs running around spreading rumours about you, just in case.’ He looked at Cameron admiringly. ‘They really took care to sabotage you,’ he said. ‘They must really respect your work.’
‘Thanks.’
‘No, really. You can’t beat the compliment … And Corinth. It makes sense. I might have guessed.’
‘You mind telling me why?’
Bryn paused to inspect his questioner. She was dressed in old jeans and a thin T-shirt which ran into puckered ridges at the shoulders. She was pale and thin, hair a mess, tear-stained eyes a visual disaster area. All the same, she wasn’t exactly bad-looking. All that high cheekbone stuff that women are meant to have, she had.
‘Corinth Laboratories,’ said Bryn. ‘An outstanding company. A decade ago it was a bit-part player. Some good drugs. Some bad drugs. Nothing much in the pipeline. But then they struck gold. They hired this guy Huizinga from outside the industry. Chemicals, I think, was his background. He shook up the company, top to bottom. He began licensing drugs, buying up small biotech outfits, research labs. And focus, he gave it focus. Before Huizinga, Corinth did a bit of everything. A chemo drug. A bit of respiratory stuff. Some anxiety medications. He ditched all that. The one good product they had was an anti-viral, Zapatone. It was big in AIDS –’
‘Zapatone? God, it’s toxic. Toxic as hell. There was a British study which showed –’
‘There was a British study which showed it shortened the lives of three quarters of the patients who took it. But that was Huizinga’s brilliance. He boasted about the study, made his salesmen lead with it. He went out and told the world that no drug in the history of the world had ever had such impressive anti-viral properties –’
‘Anti-patient properties –’
‘Whatever. They made a few tiny modifications to the drug administration protocol. Meaningless changes, but enough that they could say the British study was irrelevant to the way the drug was now administered. And that was that. Zapatone took off, and that was Huizinga’s cue. Ninety per cent of Corinth’s sales are now in anti-viral drugs, with just a couple of other sidelines they haven’t yet bothered to sell. Mostly now, the drug industry is looking for less toxic solutions. It’s a kinder, gentler industry, that’s the idea. But not Huizinga, not Corinth. They recognise that there are plenty of doctors out there who like the macho stuff. Toys for the boys, and guns for their chums. They put out these publicity handouts for Zapatone, overlaying a picture of the drug with photos of B-52 bombers.’
‘It’s criminal.’
‘Genius. Corinth was worth a couple of billion dollars when Huizinga came in. It’s worth fifty times that today – a hundred billion dollars, no less. If there were Nobel prizes for business, Huizinga would be a cert.’
‘I do not believe you!’
‘I’m not saying I approve, I’m just telling you how the world works. And say what you like, they’re smart. They’ve got the world’s biggest stable of anti-viral drugs. Your medicine is a threat. You said it yourself: under certain circumstances, your technology might be complemented by conventional drug therapy, but by Corinth’s slash-n-burn stuff? No way. As Huizinga sees it, it’s him or you.’
It was a tactless phrase on which to finish. Cameron’s eyes skated back to the letter still lying open on the table.
‘Right,’ she said grimly. ‘And at the moment, it’s him.’
And it was then, at that precise moment, that Bryn took leave of his senses.
FOUR (#ulink_473237f5-373a-581c-a8df-8f3f76b35b26)
1
To begin with, the only sign of the craziness which had come over him was a very rapid beating of his hand on the table, accompanied elsewhere by the focused stillness of concentrated thought. For three whole minutes, he stood there, oblivious of Cameron, unconscious of the world.
Then: ‘I’m a bloody fool!’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Fool,’ said Bryn, thumping his chest. ‘Moron. Cretin. Idiot. You mentioned an ethics committee. Tell me about it.’
‘I don’t know. Where bad scientists go to be interrogated, I guess.’
Bryn shook his head and stared wildly at her. ‘Kati. Your co-worker, Kati. Can we go and see her?’
‘It’s gone midnight.’
‘Is it? Damn. Well, come on then. There’s no time to lose.’
Cameron had no car, so they took a taxi over to her offices. The night was freezing, and frost sparkled on the grass. Above them, the sky was bright with stars, but a dark band in the north spoke of a weather front moving in.
‘Do you mind letting me know what’s going on?’ Cameron hurried along in Bryn’s turbulent wake, frightened by his bulldozer energy but also reassured.
‘Due diligence,’ said Bryn, storming up the steps leading to Larousse’s apartment. ‘That’s banker-speak for look before you buy.’
‘Honestly, she’ll be asleep,’ said Cameron. ‘Can’t we wait?’
‘Uh-uh,’ Bryn disagreed, pressing the doorbell solid for fifteen seconds. ‘She’s awake.’
A bleary Larousse came to the door in tartan flannel pyjamas, and stumbled through to her small living room, blinking to get the sleep from her eyes. She was one of those enviable souls, pretty even when caught in the worst possible moment. Clear-skinned and petite beneath a mass of dark-rosewood curls, she twisted her hair into a tie at the back so that it hung in a Pre-Raphaelite halo around her face. Cameron’s looks worsened in contrast. It wasn’t that there was so much wrong with her – apart from maybe her limp, mousy hair drooping down in front of her eyes – but she seemed to want invisibility, to avoid being looked at or admired. Bryn obeyed the silent instruction and concentrated his gaze on Larousse.
Cameron talked her through the events of the past few hours, ending with the broken-hearted admission: ‘They don’t believe us. They think we cheated. We’re under investigation, Kati … Oh, Kati!’
Bryn studied her carefully as Cameron recounted the story, but it was absolutely plain that Larousse was totally shocked, stunned by the very suggestion that they might have twisted their facts. Larousse and Cameron huddled up on the sofa together, cuddling and tearful. Bryn was almost totally sure of what he was about to do, but there was one last check he wanted to make.
‘Cameron, would you mind getting me some coffee, please?’
Larousse looked hard at her visitor. Cameron had barely introduced him and here he was, like some bear out of the Maine forest, bursting into her apartment at one in the morning, ordering her boss to make him coffee. ‘I’ll go,’ she said, starting to get up.
‘No. Please. I want a word alone. I have three – no four – questions to ask you privately. Cameron, would you mind …’
Cameron left to go into the kitchen, and Bryn turned to stare directly at Larousse.
‘OK. First question. Did you and Cameron cheat on that experiment? In any way at all? At any time?’
Colour rose in the young scientist’s face. ‘No. Absolutely not. Never. No way.’
‘OK. Good. I believe you, but I needed to ask. Second question. Your Immune Reprogramming worked on rats. Are you sure you can get it to work on humans? I mean, assuming you’ve got time and money.’
Larousse wetted her lips. It was unnerving, this giant man, his unwavering stare, his barely controlled intensity. ‘Not certain, no. Nothing in science is certain until you’ve done it. And one critical difference is that the peptide chains we rely on are species- and disease-specific.’
Bryn looked blank.
‘What I mean is, our Reprogramming works by using little bits of chemical code, which literally floats around the body instructing it how to fight disease. Trouble is, every species has got its own way of coding these things. That means all the work we’ve done on rats has to be done over with humans.’
‘So the answer is?’ prompted Bryn.
Larousse shrugged. ‘It’ll be a lot of work. The experimental protocols will be way more complex, for one thing. You can’t just give hepatitis to humans and see how they do. But I don’t want to be too cautious. I’d say we had every chance of success. Every chance in the world.’
Bryn nodded. It seemed like he hadn’t blinked since sending Cameron from the room. ‘Good. Third question. The way Cameron talks, you and she are on the cutting edge of research in this area. How do you know? Maybe there are scientists in, I don’t know, California, Germany, Japan who are ahead of you.’
‘Possible. That’s always possible. All I can say is, we’ve never heard anything of the sort. There are others in the field, of course, but no one even approaching our level of success. And then, of course …’
‘Of course?’
‘There’s Cameron. She’s not just good, you know. She’s extraordinary. Passed out in the top two per cent of every exam she’s ever taken. She got bored during her Harvard medical training – would you believe that? She got bored – and did a PhD in biochemistry at the same time. The same time. Without even telling them. It’s unbelievable. She’s not just good, she’s the best.’
Bryn breathed out and sat back. The glare left his eyes, and Larousse began to relax. Cameron, peering round the corner from the kitchen, re-entered the room.
‘A fourth question,’ said Larousse. ‘You said you had four questions.’
‘Right, you’re quite right. Kati, do you know anywhere round here we can get some pizza?’
2
Despite the hour, the pizza restaurant was busy. It was as though, all across the city, the snow pattering down outside had stimulated people to go out into the whitening streets in search of food. They took seats in the window, and watched cars glide by them in silence across the dim, phosphorescent snow. Kati had just pulled warm clothes over her nightwear, and the flannel collar of her pyjama top poked upwards out of her jumper.
The two women claimed not to be hungry, and agreed to share a no-cheese, no-flavour, thin crust Marinara, while Bryn ordered a fourteen-inch Massachusetts Gobbler Special and a pitcher of beer. The two scientists sat together, wondering why they were here, wondering about Bryn.
He wolfed the first slice of pizza and downed a long draught of beer. ‘That’s better,’ he said with a belch. ‘Cameron, you ought to be famished. No? OK. You want to know what on earth is happening. More to the point, you want to know what the bloody hell I’m doing here.’
Kati nodded, and Cameron looked alert.
‘First the bad news. Brent Huizinga and Corinth Laboratories have sabotaged your research. They’ve done it once. They’ll do it again. They’ll go on doing it until they’ve driven you from the scene.’ Bryn gestured broadly with a wedge of the Massachusetts Gobbler. Dollops of ground beef and chilli dropped off on to the melamine table. He took another bite, and with his mouth full asked, ‘That night you found Kovacs in your laboratory, you know what he was doing?’
Cameron shook her head.
‘He was planning to screw up your experiment. Kill off your rats, or whatever. Don’t know, doesn’t matter. Wherever you go, whatever you do, Huizinga is after you. He’s got a hundred billion dollars to protect, so even if it costs him a few million bucks to do it, he’s going to silence you.’ He prodded at her with his lump of pizza. ‘This time. Next time. The time after that and the time after that.’
The colour – what little colour there was – emptied from Cameron’s face in less than a second.
‘How dare you –’ began Kati, but Cameron interrupted her with a gesture.
‘It’s not true what you say,’ she said icily. ‘From here, our next step is human research. Nobody’s going to believe that we fake results there. Every single patient we work with will be able to corroborate us.’
‘Yes.’ Bryn took another vast bite. ‘And how much will it cost, the next phase?’
‘Five million bucks, maybe ten,’ said Cameron.
‘And who’s paying?’
‘Anyone,’ said Cameron, ‘anyone at all.’ She tore a crust off her pizza and rolled it into a ball, rolling it round and round her palms like a six-year-old with Plasticine.
‘As far as the world believes, you did some experiments with rats which failed. You faked the results, wrote them up, and had your paper rejected. That’s not worth five million bucks. That’s not worth anything at all.’
‘For God’s sakes,’ said Kati to Cameron, ‘we don’t need to sit and listen to this.’ But once again, Cameron motioned her silent. This was a duel she had to fight.
‘So who?’ said Bryn. ‘Who’s going to fund you?’
‘OK,’ she whispered. ‘It’ll be tough. Either the people funding me at the moment will go on doing it, or else I’ll need to repeat my animal work using independent labs and outside experimenters. That way, no one can possibly accuse me of cheating.’
‘To repeat your animal work elsewhere you need money, which you don’t have. And Huizinga can infiltrate outside labs even more easily than he can get into your own. Wherever you go, whatever you do, he’ll make sure he finds a Duaine Kovacs to foul up your experiments. No one will need to accuse you of cheating, because your tests will fail.’
Cameron’s voice had shrunk away to nothing. It was the ghost of a whisper, the echo of a croak. ‘Then the people who are funding me now, the biotech crowd, will go on. They’ll believe me, not Kovacs.’
‘Cameron, I know for a certain fact that your funding is about to be cut off.’
Her voice had vanished, but her eyes asked how.
‘Go easy,’ warned Kati. ‘Take care.’ But Bryn ignored and overrode her.
‘I know, because I’m working for the buyers, remember? I’ve worked on their acquisition plans. I’ve sat in on their strategy meetings. They’re going to cut you off.’
‘That’s not what they … Every decision … its own merits.’ Her voice faded in and out of audibility.
Bryn bashed away one last time. The family motto: if at first you don’t succeed, thump it. ‘Of course they say that. They want to close the deal. They’ll say anything. I tell you, I know their plans. They’re doing the whole deal for one drug, Biloxifan. They’re going to sell a couple of the other drugs in development. They’re going to relocate some research staff. Then –’ He snapped his fingers. ‘They’ll fire everyone else, sell the buildings. I know, Cameron, I know. I’m their banker.’
‘It was your idea, wasn’t it?’ said Kati, eyeing him sharply. ‘You told them what to do and they’re doing it.’
Bryn denied nothing. ‘I advised them in their commercial best interest. It’s my job. When I advised them, I hadn’t met Cameron and I hadn’t met you.’
‘I’m finished,’ said Cameron. ‘You’re quite right. Thanks to you, I’m totally finished.’
Her voice began to turn into a yell, and from round the restaurant people began to stare.
‘You should be ashamed of yourself!’ said Kati furiously. ‘Don’t you think she’s suffered enough tonight without you rubbing her face in it?’
‘Rubbing her face in what?’ asked Bryn, tearing off another gigantic slice of pizza. ‘Don’t you even want the good news?’
3
And so, at a quarter past two on a snowy night in Boston, Bryn outlined his plan.
Crazy as it sounded, Bryn had made up his mind. He wouldn’t stay at Berger Scholes. He wouldn’t take the jobs his headhunter was bringing him. He’d quit. Wave goodbye to his deferred bonuses. Wave goodbye to banking, where every year is a bumper year, every bonus bigger than the last.
‘I don’t get it,’ said Cameron. ‘I see why I benefit. I get funding. I get to carry on with my science. But I don’t understand what’s in it for you?’
Bryn bent across the melamine table, pushing his pizza crusts to one side. Two o’clock Boston time was seven in the morning London time. Bryn’s time-zone-delirious body was long past caring. The brain called the shots, and the body was happy just to swallow the pizza and guzzle the beer.
‘I set up a company. The company employs the pair of you to carry out your research. I’ll fund you. I’ll give you all the support you need. In return, I get to exploit your findings. We’ll push your discoveries so hard that they’re doing your Immune Reprogramming in every hospital from Tokyo to Toronto.’
‘Exploit my findings? You mean, like, commercially exploit?’
‘Yup.’
‘Patents, and royalties, and the stockmarket, and all that stuff?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Right. OK. I get you. No.’
‘No?’
‘No. I didn’t go into medicine to make money. If you have a discovery which benefits patients, you just have to put it out there. Let people use it for themselves. Not try to make a dollar every time somebody gets sick. I’m sorry. I don’t know what I’m going to do next, but not that. No way.’
She glanced across at her neighbour, asking for support. Kati gave it. ‘I agree. What we’re doing is for the good of humanity. It’s not for sale.’
‘You’re crazy, absolutely crazy,’ he said. This was the one sort of opposition he hadn’t expected, and for a moment he was utterly unsure of how to handle it. It was like a modern astronomer trying to argue with someone who thought the world was flat, that the sun orbited the earth, that the heavens were full of angels singing. ‘You’re making a mistake,’ he said lamely.
‘I appreciate all that you’ve done –’
‘Why should you?’ asked Kati. ‘He hasn’t done anything, except cut off your funding.’
‘But I think I should go. Really.’
The two women stood up, Cameron tall, skinny and evasive; Kati, with her halo of hair and her deep-brown spaniel eyes. They were getting up to go.
‘No. Stop. You’ve got to hear me out.’ His voice had a desperate edge, and he ordered himself to master it, adding more calmly, ‘Sit down, just listen to the arguments.’
The two women looked at each other, and, taking the lead, Cameron sat, followed by Kati. But it was edge-of-the-seat sitting, nothing more than a hair’s breadth away from leaving again. Anything Bryn said would have to be good.
With a hoarse voice, he spoke. ‘In the medical world, when it comes to choosing how to care for patients, what does it come down to really, truth or money?’
Cameron took a moment to absorb the question. Then, calmly, ‘It’s truth, of course. One bunch of scientists does its best to come up with solutions. Another bunch of scientists tests them out. They publish their results. And that’s it. Doctors adapt their treatments. Patient care improves. It’s that simple. It’s got nothing to do with money, whatever you might like to think.’
‘Really?’ asked Bryn. ‘Really? Then tell me, how much money do we spend on preventing disease, as opposed to treating? Two per cent of the total? Three per cent?’
Cameron laughed, a kind of snort as though dismissing the question. ‘Well, OK, we don’t spend anything like enough on prevention, it’s true. But –’
‘But what? What’s that statistic again?’ He appealed to Kati for help. ‘If you take Vitamin E, it reduces your risk of heart disease by … by how much?’
Kati pondered the question in silence. It was as though she had the answer at her fingertips but was wondering whether to release it. After a long pause, she made her decision and spoke. ‘There was a big study done recently,’ she said with a sigh. ‘Ninety thousand patients followed over two years. All taking Vitamin E. Heart attack risk was reduced by nearly half –’
‘Half!’ said Bryn.
‘But other studies have been done using bigger doses of the vitamin. Those studies suggest the real figure is more like three quarters.’
‘Exactly,’ said Bryn. ‘So there you go. If we wanted to, tomorrow, we could cut heart attack deaths by three quarters. Three quarters. With one simple little vitamin. So how come we don’t? How come people still die needlessly? Hundreds of thousands, every year. What’s stopping us?’
His question was greeted by silence. Pizza crust cooled on the melamine table, but at least up above, in the glassy heavens, the angels had stopped their singing. Cameron licked her lips which had gone dry. She was listening.
‘I’ll tell you how come,’ he continued. ‘There’s no damn money in it. Vitamins aren’t patented. Anyone can make ’em. The profit margins are no better than you get from selling potatoes. But – surprise, surprise – drugs aren’t like that. Profit margins can be ninety per cent or better. You know that. Annual revenues in the US cancer trade are a hundred billion dollars. Each year, every year. The heart disease business comes a good second. Who cares that we can prevent most of that disease? Who cares if people die? Why should some bloody little vitamin salesman be allowed to poop that party?’
The silence continued. Bryn wondered if he’d done enough, or gone too far. It was Kati who spoke next, and when she spoke, Bryn realised she’d become an ally.
‘It’s true. And it’s not just drugs. It’s surgery. It’s been estimated that eighty per cent of heart bypass operations are unnecessary, arguably nearly all of them.’
‘Right,’ agreed Bryn. ‘Absolutely right.’
‘And then there are the drugs which actually do you harm,’ continued Kati. ‘Cholesterol-lowering drugs which give you cancer. AIDS drugs that have been shown to shorten your life. Chemotherapy drugs which shrink tumours but have no impact whatsoever on life extension, though the doctors never tell you that.’
Cameron was very pale, and Kati too stopped, wondering if she’d pushed things too far. But again, when Cameron managed to find words, they were words of support. ‘Arthritis,’ she whispered. ‘My grandmom suffered really badly from arthritis. I was real mad when I found out in med school that standard drug treatment actually makes the illness worse.’
‘Exactly. My granddad, too. Good example,’ Bryn encouraged her.
‘Best-practice treatment of arthritis,’ said Cameron, ‘would be diet, plus allergy interventions, plus maybe some natural cartilage-builders.’
‘Right.’
‘But no drugs.’
‘Nope.’
‘So no profits from drugs.’
Silence.
‘Anti-depressants,’ said Kati sadly, after a while. ‘The best ones are all non-pharmaceutical, but no one uses them.’
Bryn nodded in agreement. ‘No one.’
‘No money in them, right?’
‘None at all.’
Silence.
Cameron looked out at the snow. As they had been speaking, a soft blanket had fallen, muffling the city. People and cars, when they appeared at all, moved slowly, treading cautiously, slowing right down at the bends. Then she brought her gaze back into the room, first down at her hands, then up, sadly, very sadly, to Bryn’s face. The white tabletop reflected chilly light on to the underside of her face, as though she too was wandering outside, lost in the moonlight and the snow.
‘Well, I guess this has been my night of lost illusions.’
‘It must be hard.’
‘You always do this when you invite a girl out to dinner?’
He smiled. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘So tell me again. What you want us to do.’
Bryn repeated his ideas, going slowly, making sure he brought Cameron along with him this time. ‘I’ll set up a company which will help you to develop your research, and then market it when it’s ready. You say you hate the way Corinth does business. OK. So put them out of business. Not by publishing research papers. Who’s ever heard of a corporation going under because of some damn research paper? Hit ’em where it hurts: their bottom line. We’ll pitch our salesmen against their salesmen, our results against theirs.’ He put his hand on Cameron’s arm and said very gently, ‘It sounds mad, I know, but the stockmarket is your friend. You fight them in the laboratory, and I’ll fight them in the marketplace. If we get it right, the whole world will be reprogramming its immune system and nobody, but nobody, is going to be popping Corinth’s little poison pills.’
The scientist paused. ‘Why are you doing this? You want to save the world? Or do you just want to make your million?’
‘Make a million?’ Bryn smiled sympathetically. ‘No. I’d like to get rich, seriously rich, a hundred million rich. If I do a little good along the way, then that’s great. But I don’t pretend that I’m doing this for the good of my soul.’
‘Uh. Well, that’s clear enough, anyway.’
The world fell silent as Cameron thought. This was the biggest decision of her life, the hardest, the most painful. But also, as she thought about it, the easiest. Her reputation was gone, her funding, her hopes of scientific acclaim. Her only hope was sitting in front of her, a battered-looking steamroller of a man, someone she scarcely knew.
‘OK,’ she said. ‘You win. I give up. Let’s do it.’
4
The U-Haul depot opened at dawn and Bryn was first in line. He was about to sign out a mini-van, but Cameron shook her head. ‘Too small,’ she said. So Bryn hired a truck and bought a hundred and twenty orange crates at five bucks each.
‘You an experienced driver?’ asked the boiler-suited rental guy. ‘Them streets outside are an inch of snow laying atop of an inch of ice.’
‘Finalist in the Welsh all-terrain truck-drivers’ championship,’ said Bryn. ‘Would’ve won ’cept some bastard shunted me.’
‘You don’t say?’ The rental guy took a different set of keys from the board behind him. ‘Here, take the Toyota. Transmission on the Volvo is shot to shreds. Same price. Don’t mention it. Finalist, huh?’
It was a good job the rental guy chose to stay reading his Off-Road Biker inside his oppressively warm glass booth, else he’d have seen Bryn slide twice coming out on to the road and only miss a negligence suit by the fewest of inches as an outraged motorist swerved angrily away from the outcoming truck.
‘You even know how to drive?’ said Cameron.
‘I’m a quick learner.’
Once in Cameron’s office, they worked fast, with Cameron’s spirits rising rapidly as her sense of adventure took hold.
‘Kati?’ she said.
‘Uh-huh?’ Kati shifted a stack of paper into a crate and stood up, flexing her back.
‘Our new colleague, Bryn. Part crazy, wouldn’t you say?’
‘You’ve found a part that’s sane?’
‘Paranoiac, for sure, and what do you think? A little hypomanic, could be?’
‘Uh, I guess. Mental health. Not my field.’
Bryn said nothing, just worked to clear the office as fast as he could. He’d filled sixteen crates and already his back was beginning to sing out warnings.
‘Bryn?’ said Cameron.
‘Yes?’
‘There are some pretty good drugs these days. I could put you on something.’
‘Lithium,’ said Kati. ‘Have you thought about lithium?’ ‘Yeah, good, start you on lithium, maybe? Or you want me to refer you to a specialist?’
Bryn dropped the crate that he was holding.
‘Your ethics committee.’ he said. ‘The one that was going to investigate you. Have you ever heard of it in your life before?’
‘I’ve never been framed in my life before,’
‘They wanted you to collect up all your research data, protocols, everything.’
‘Just like a committee, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Then hand it to them.’
‘Not much point collecting it otherwise.’
‘Corinth. Not an ethics committee. Corinth. Fantastic idea. They just ask you to collect everything significant from your last five years of research and hand it over to them. Perfect. That’s why we need to clear out tonight. Make bloody sure that they get nothing, nothing at all.’
Cameron paused. Then, ‘Not just paranoia, Kati. Schizophrenoform psychosis. Florid stage. Lithium, for sure. But I’d have to think about chlorpromazine. Maybe clozapine, risperidone.’
‘You think I’m nuts,’ said Bryn. ‘You find me any reference to that ethics committee, anywhere, ever.’
‘Kovacs had the run of this office and my lab,’ said Cameron. ‘If they wanted stuff, they could have just taken it,’
‘For God’s sake, woman,’ said Bryn, more impatiently than he’d intended. ‘Have you ever actually opened your eyes in here? Look at this place.’
Even after twenty-four crates of paper had been cleared and stacked, the room was still overflowing with paper. Cardboard trays of collection bottles sat on top of computer keyboards which rested on paper foothills that led up to the mountains all around. The four anglepoise lamps sat like herons pecking nourishment from the sea of clutter. Cameron looked around.
‘It’s kind of … crowded, I guess.’
They worked on for a while in silence. It was back-breaking labour, and one by one the two women, short of sleep and short of food, dropped out, leaving Bryn to finish. His own back complained angrily now, and his dodgy knee had twisted badly on the icy pavement outside. At length, with the office empty but for the computer hardware, the anglepoise lamps, the bare workbenches, and the sheets of chipboard idle on their concrete blocks, Bryn stopped. Cameron had collapsed with exhaustion and delayed-onset shock and was snoring away on one of the chipboard sheets, covered up with Bryn’s greatcoat.
‘OK, then. One at a time,’ said Bryn, beginning to load the PCs into crates.
Kati hesitated, instead of helping him. ‘Technically –’ she began.
‘I know. Technically, these PCs belong to the biotech crowd, not you. But then technically, as an employee of Berger Scholes, I shouldn’t be doing what I’m doing. And technically, Brent Huizinga didn’t do anything criminal by destroying your reputation and sabotaging your work.’
He yanked out the power cords and Kati, silently and solemnly, helped him to steal them.
5
The final stage was the laboratory. Kati took a quick inventory of the place where she’d spent so many hours.
‘This PC,’ she said. ‘And this.’
She placed her hand on a domed chamber about four feet in diameter. It was built of white metal, had a control panel at the side, and a number of leads connecting it to the computer.
‘And this would be … ?’
‘The correct term for this would be the White Blood Cell Immune Modulation and Reprogramming Facility.’ Kati stroked the domed surface with affectionate familiarity. ‘But since it’s where blood cells come to learn how to be better blood cells, we usually just call it the Schoolroom.’
Watched anxiously by Kati every step of the way, Bryn hefted the Schoolroom to the truck.
‘No, not on the crates. It needs cushioning. Don’t just drop it. Gently. There.’
Kati settled some old blankets under the Schoolroom and all around it, till it was swaddled like a baby on New Year’s Eve, peering up at them like a giant white eye.
‘D’you want to feed it?’ he asked. ‘Get it some treats for the journey?’
Kati looked at him, her face still clear and pretty after an exhausting night. ‘Don’t joke,’ she said. ‘The Schoolroom is your future now. You’d better take care of it.’
The comment shot home like a crossbow bolt. The Schoolroom is your future now … Was he really going to throw in one of the most lucrative careers open to a human being, in favour of … what? Some twenty-something scientist who did good things for rats, whom he’d met properly little more than twelve hours before, who’d had her paper rejected by a top American medical journal, who’d been accused of cheating and was unable to clear her name?
‘I must be mad,’ he said, settling the blankets more closely round the big white dome. ‘Mad as they come.’
6
There remained one last ritual of departure.
Bryn woke the sleeping Cameron, and let her blink and stretch her way into wakefulness.
‘Oh my God,’ she said. ‘If I’m not still dreaming, I’m in trouble.’
‘Good morning,’ said Kati, stroking her hair clear of her eyes.
‘What’s good about it?’ said Cameron, shaking it back again. ‘I am still dreaming, right?’
Kati ruefully shook her head.
‘Delirious? Suffering from a rare idiopathic brain disorder?’
Kati shook her head.
‘Maybe to all of those,’ said Bryn, ‘but we still need to get out of here.’
Cameron stared at him: the ultimate proof of the weird turn her life was taking. She stretched some more, allowing the kinks and pressure points down her spine to give a full report on their night’s entertainment. ‘God, could you guys really find nothing more comfortable than chipboard?’
Bryn gave her a sheet of paper and a pen. ‘You need to write a message,’ he said. ‘Everyone’s going to wonder why you’ve just upped and gone. You need to give them a reason.’
‘Reason? Well, hell, that’s easy. Dear Everyone, I cheated and now I’ve gone to hide. Or how about, Dear Everyone, this English guy I hardly know thinks that everyone’s out to get me and it turns out that paranoia is infectious.’
‘Welsh,’ said Bryn. ‘I’m Welsh. Say anything except the truth.’
Cameron ignored him and wrote fast, holding the paper so only she could see it. Once done, she folded it, addressed it, and left it in plain view for anyone to find. Despite her self-control, her hand trembled slightly and her ears burned at the shame of finding herself in this situation. Bryn didn’t ask to read the note, Kati gave her boss a supportive squeeze, and the three of them marched to the loaded truck.
Bryn put the key into the ignition, but before switching on, he made a speech.
‘From now on,’ he said, ‘secrecy. Our first and only rule. Other companies have assets. They have mines, or power plants, or aeroplanes, or shops, or miles of phone cable, or factories, or warehouses. We have none of that, just knowledge, the information that’s in this truck, and the genius that’s in your heads. We need to take care of it.’
‘Better get another driver, then,’ said Cameron.
‘Buckle up,’ said Bryn, doing as he advised and checking the empty road in his wing mirror. ‘Corinth went to considerable trouble to ruin you – trouble and expense. They’ll be watching carefully now, to see which way you jump.’
‘And?’ said Cameron. ‘Which way are we jumping?’
Bryn grinned at her, turning the key in the ignition until the big truck vibrated with the desire to leave. ‘You’re not just jumping,’ he said. ‘You’re going to disappear.’
FIVE (#ulink_aa77bac9-68eb-57c3-94e0-50fb3e2fcd11)
1
The Arctic Circle was having a good month for the export trade. Not content with dumping a shedload of snow on Boston, it had delivered a country-sized blanket overnight express to the British Isles, with further deliveries already in transit. At London Heathrow, nervous air traffic controllers watched their disappearing runways and reached for the panic buttons.
Somewhere off the west coast of Ireland, Bryn’s jet nudged its course northwards by a few degrees and a not-very-apologetic pilot informed the passengers that their new destination would be Birmingham, not Heathrow. A ripple of conversation flowed through the economy seats at the back of the plane, but up in business, where Bryn sat, there was barely a flutter of interest as the travel-hardened veterans of the air revised their plans and helped themselves to sausage and egg.
At Birmingham International, Bryn hired a car and pointed it not south-east down the M40, but southwards down the M5. Six weeks since Cecily’s departure, he still hadn’t admitted the fact to his parents, and the time had now come.
As he drove into Wales, climbing out of the Wye valley into the Brecon Beacons, the snow on either side of the road thickened to a mantle six inches, sometimes a foot deep. For all his initial swerve in the truck in Boston, Bryn was well used to driving through snow, and he negotiated the ascending lanes skilfully, coming to rest at a farm on the top of the road, the last farmland before the open hills. He honked his horn, a clear note in the crystal air.
Hearing the sound, his mother came anxiously to the door of the slate-roofed farmhouse. She looked at the unknown car with suspicion, before lightening into a flurry of smiles and greetings as Bryn swung his bag out of the boot. Welcoming him, scolding him, offering food by the bucket-load, she bundled him indoors.
‘If only you’d told me, I’d have got something ready. As it is, there’s nothing except a couple of pasties and last night’s shepherd’s pie and a bit of beef left over from the weekend and I could warm up –’
‘Mum, please. It’s eleven o’clock in the morning, and I had breakfast on the plane.’
‘On a plane again? There was a crash last week. In Delhi, was it? I wish –’
‘Not last week, the week before. And it wasn’t a crash, it was a near-miss. And as you say, it was in Delhi.’
‘So not Delhi, then?’
‘No, Mum – coffee, please, yes, but no beef, honestly – I was in America. Boston.’ Gwyneth Hughes’ expression puckered in a look of renewed concern, as America was, to her, a land awash with gangsters, guns and drive-by shootings; the only place on earth more dangerous than London. ‘And yes, I was careful. And yes, I did get Dad some Jelly Beans.’
Her next two questions having been taken care of, her frown smoothed away, although a hint of caution remained in the eyebrows as though reserving the right to be worried at any time. ‘And Cecily?’ she asked. ‘How is she? No news, I suppose?’
The question meant, ‘Have you got her pregnant yet?’ As the daughter of one sheep farmer and wife of another, Gwyneth had always known that fertility is the first and most important property of the female.
‘No, nothing like that, anyway.’ Bryn breathed out in a long sigh. His mother’s anxiety to be hospitable had released itself in his coffee. Six spoonfuls of coffee granules, a splash of water, and milk so thick it was virtually cream. He sipped it, knowing that he had to finish, even though he had a passion for real coffee, carefully blended, properly made. ‘Cecily and I have decided to separate. She’s gone her own way. We’ll get a divorce through in time.’
‘Oh, I see.’ Gwyneth stood at the sink, apron on, tap full on, staring out on to the farmyard, her last dark hairs turning grey. ‘You’re sure, are you? Maybe she just needed a holiday. Goodness knows there are times I’ve wanted one.’
‘No, Mum. It had stopped working. It’s final.’
‘Final, is it? Bryn …’ Gwyneth tailed off, but her son knew what she wanted to ask.
‘No, it wasn’t anything I did. There wasn’t another woman involved. Cecily did find … She’s with another man now. Lives in the Caribbean.’
‘The Caribbean? Oh, Bryn.’ She rinsed her hands and composed her face before turning round. ‘My poor love.’
Bryn nodded, a bit too choked to respond. As the weeks had passed, he’d come to see that Cecily had been right. Over the years since their wedding, they’d floated too far apart for any amount of emergency repair work to mend the damage. If you leave a hill farm neglected for too long, the hill will claim it back, no matter what you do at the last. All the same, however sensible it might be to cut his losses, the fact remained that he had to start out all over again. He turned his head away and set his jaw against the possibility of tears.
‘It’s all OK at work, though?’ said Gwyneth, tactfully reading the need for a different subject. ‘It can be a blessing, work, staying busy.’
‘Work’s fine,’ said Bryn, regaining control of his vocal cords. ‘But I don’t know, I’m thinking of leaving, to be honest.’
A surge of relief swept into his mother’s voice. ‘Oh, I do hope so. Your dad could use the help, Bryn. He’s not been so well lately and I know Dai has his hands full.’
Bryn’s elder brother Dai, the family success story, had retired from professional rugby a few years ago through injury and started up a construction company, specialising in agricultural buildings for local farmers. Nothing would please his mother more than Bryn joining forces with Dai and helping his dad out on the farm in his spare time.
‘Lord, no. Not that. I’ve got a lot of options, but I’ll probably end up setting up on my own.’
‘Oh … I didn’t know you could do that.’
‘Do what?’
‘You know, set up your own bank, just one person. I thought you needed …’
Bryn laughed. In the fourteen years of his banking career, his mother had understood nothing about how he earned his living beyond the fact that he worked for a bank. ‘No, I won’t set up my own bank. I’m thinking of going into health technology. Medicine.’
Gwyneth searched her repertoire for an appropriate response, but came away empty-handed. She raised her eyebrows, put her hands to her perfectly set hair, and gave her son a big multi-purpose smile. ‘Medicine,’ she said. ‘That’s nice.’
Meanwhile, outside, the first flakes of a new snowfall began to cover up the tyre tracks and footprints that had speckled the yard outside with black.
2
‘You’re kidding.’ Cameron wasn’t fazed.
‘I know. I ought to be joking. I bought it over the phone. I was snowed up in Wales, and all I had was my dad’s blurry fax machine. It looked OK in the photo.’ He gestured around, trying to explain how he’d got drunk with his brother Dai one lunchtime, stumbled across to the farm office, peered at a string of small and fuzzy fax images of buildings, selected one on the basis of price alone, and then faxed through a signature on the contract before he’d had time to take a second look.
‘You’re not kidding? Seriously?’
They were standing inside, but their coats were on and their breath built castles in the freezing air. From a hole in the roof water dripped, joining the pools of water covering the floor.
‘It’s not all bad,’ said Bryn. ‘It’s cheap. We can fix it up. And it’s big. We wouldn’t have got this much space, if –’
‘If you’d actually bought, like, a building. You know, those things with walls, a roof, lighting, heating –’
‘No water on the floor,’ said Kati. ‘No concrete slipway heading into a river.’
‘No boats. No smell of muck that’s been allowed –’
Oh my God,’ said Kati, as a fat black rat ambled out of a stack of rotting timber and lolloped across the floor to a hole in the wall before disappearing. ‘No rats, for heaven’s sake. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I like rats, but there are limits.’
They had a point. Cameron and Kati had obediently done what Bryn had begged them to do. They’d gone home to their parents, in Chicago and Vancouver respectively, and spun some yarn about looking to start the next phase of their work with a new research institution, possibly in Europe. They’d sent out letters to a handful of American colleges and research companies, deliberately weak applications that would be quite likely rejected even if Corinth wasn’t quick enough to stamp on them.
And then they’d disappeared. They took holiday flights down to Mexico City, went by bus north to Tijuana, then via a couple of further flights moved on into Latin America before catching a mainline British Airways flight direct from Rio to London. As Bryn had said, ‘Not even Corinth is going to keep up with your movements. They’ll probably catch at least some of your application letters, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they snoop around your parents’ neighbourhoods, trying to pick up your trail. All they’ll see is a story of failure. Most likely, they’ll assume you got some research post in Europe. As far as your folks are concerned, you should let them think the same thing. Corinth will keep an ear to the ground, but they’ll never find you. Not here.’
Cameron poked an oil-spattered tarpaulin with her foot. Water sloshed around in the folds, but at least any wildlife under the surface stayed put. ‘You can hardly blame them,’ she said. ‘This isn’t exactly where you’d expect to find us.’
Bryn sighed. The Fulham Boathouses had certainly been cheap, and yet, in Bryn’s half-inebriated state, the estate agent’s photo had been deeply misleading. In the foreground of the picture there had been an old Victorian wharf reconfigured as modern offices, and it was this Bryn thought he’d been buying. Dominating the rear, the boathouses had stood untouched since the Fulham Boating Association had gone bankrupt in 1973. The wooden walls were wet to the touch, and large areas of timber were so rotted away that Bryn could easily enough have put his fist through the side of the building. Inside, apart from the rats, there was little enough: rowing-boat hulls covered with tarpaulins or left to rot along with everything else. The only object of any grace was a lofty barge-style houseboat, of the sort that the Oxford colleges used to keep.
And yet, there were compensations. The boathouses were located amidst a cluster of wharves, where the Thames sweeps south from Hammersmith. They were only a brisk walk from Fulham Broadway and the King’s Road, and not more than a stone’s throw from the heart of London. At the end of the main boathouse, wide double doors twenty feet high opened out on to the river. Thrown open, and assuming a warm summer’s day instead of the miserable February weather that actually surrounded them, the view would be spectacular, the far side of the Thames a mass of elderflower and rosebay willowherb, tumbling down the cobbled bank into the water.
‘You know, it’s not so bad. My brother’s a builder and he’ll help sort this out. He won’t charge much, and besides, buildings are easy. We’ve got a much more immediate problem.’
‘We have?’ said Cameron. ‘Do I want to know?’
‘You certainly do,’ said Bryn, and told her.
3
‘Pick a disease, pick any disease.’
It was certainly an excellent selection that the young man had to choose from. A small cupboard tinkled with glass-stoppered ampoules, each one labelled with an acronym denoting the killer disease inside.
‘We’ve got a good range of retro-viruses in at the moment,’ continued Cameron. ‘Our spuma viruses are a little short, but we’ve got all the herpetic viruses, filoviruses, a very nice O’nyong-nyong fever … How about the arbovirus? You get some really interesting brain diseases, you know, generally fatal. I can offer you a wonderful Venezuelan equine encephalitis, some Russian spring-summer encephalitis, a pretty fair Japanese –’
The young man began to look pale as Cameron rambled on. He was a venture capitalist called Malcolm Milne and Bryn was hoping that Milne, or one of his competitors, would be able to solve the young company’s most immediate need – funding. But while there was every reason to impress Milne, there was no need to terrify him.
‘Why don’t you choose, Cameron? This one, for example.’ Bryn grabbed an ampoule at random.
‘Kuru virus!’ she exclaimed in delight. ‘New Guinea laughing sickness. Ex-cellent choice. Slow-acting. Fatal. Virtually wiped out the poor old Foré tribe. Not something we see so much now. Transmitted exclusively via cannibalism, you know. All those raw brains lying around. Mm-mmm. Very tempting.’
Jiggling the ampoule in pleasure, she bounded off to the temporary microscopy bench set up in Bryn’s living room. Cameron’s scientific clutter looked incongruous amidst Cecily’s carefully chosen furniture and costly paintings. On the whole, Bryn knew which he preferred, and he watched contentedly as Cameron drew blood from Milne, and added it to the virus solution. When she was done, Kati took the tube and slid it into the white dome of the Schoolroom, checking the connections into her PC. They were short of tables, so the Schoolroom just sat on the Persian carpet, like a mosque in miniature. ‘OK to start,’ she said.
‘OK,’ said Cameron, ‘get this. Inside the Schoolroom now, in that tube of blood, there are good cells and bad cells. The good cells are going to munch up the kuru virus, the bad cells are going to sit on their butts.’ She moved to the PC monitor, where a crowded data panel was being continually updated. ‘Look here. The Schoolroom is calculating your percentage of successful cells. This number here shows your score.’
Milne looked. ‘Two per cent?’ he said, obviously gutted. ‘Isn’t that awful?’
‘Against a real nasty kuru virus? No, no, I’d say that wasn’t bad at all. But, OK, you need to do better. Now, tell me, what would you do about it?’
‘What would I do?’
‘Sure. Think of your immune cells as soldiers, as a miniature army. What would you do?’
Milne thought about it. ‘I guess an army needs guns and ammunition. It needs equipment. Food, obviously …’ He shrugged. What do armies need? ‘Boots?’
Cameron was nodding vigorously, as though Milne was expounding some brilliantly technical scientific theory. ‘Pre-cise-ly,’ she enthused. ‘That’s it. Guns, ammo, food, boots. And that’s what your immune system needs. Vitamins, minerals, amino acids, antioxidants, catalysts, enzymes, co-factors. You name it. The right amounts, in the right mixtures.’
‘That’s your technique?’ said Milne, disappointed. ‘You dole out vitamins?’
Cameron shook her head. ‘No. Think about the army again. You’ve got it equipped, rested, fed. What next?’
‘Next? You attack the enemy, I suppose. “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.”’
Shakespeare hadn’t been on the Harvard med school syllabus and Cameron looked momentarily puzzled. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Exactly. You attack. But how? You’ve got tanks, planes, infantry – I don’t know, what do they have in armies? – artillery, missiles, all kinds of stuff, but do you just blaze off with everything, or is there some sequence you’re meant to follow? Do you just charge in, or do you co-ordinate things?’
Now it was Milne’s turn to look puzzled. ‘Well, you have a commander-in-chief, I suppose. He gets information, develops a strategy, sends out orders …’ He shrugged again.
Once again, Cameron looked radiant, as though one-to-one with Einstein. ‘Pre-cise-ly. Exactly right. Communication. Armies use radio, computers use program code. The human body uses – well, a whole bunch of stuff, but among other things, it uses peptides.’
Milne began to nod. ‘Peptides, right … program code. This is the Immune Reprogramming part, correct?’
Cameron nodded and tapped the Schoolroom on its baby-smooth dome. ‘Now watch.’
Cameron nodded to Kati, who hit some keys on the PC and threw a switch on the Schoolroom. The Schoolroom’s hum increased, and its faint vibration could be felt working its way through the thick carpet on the floor, creeping out towards Cecily’s expensively tasteful wallpaper.
‘Like I say, we can’t promise much,’ said Cameron. ‘The peptide sequences are very specific. We don’t know the code for humans, and we certainly don’t know the code for kuru viruses in humans.’
‘So what are you doing?’
‘We can get your army properly equipped. Vitamins, minerals, all the rest of it. And we know some parts of the code, peptides which seem to be associated with a generalised performance in immune activity. It’s kind of basic, like getting your plan of attack from a training manual. But still, at this stage it’s as good as we can do.’
Milne nodded.
The Schoolroom hummed in the surrounding silence. On screen, the percentage of good cells ticked slowly upwards: 3%, 4%, 5%, 6%, 6.5%. The rate of increase slowed to a halt. It stopped. Cameron glanced across at Kati, who caught her intention and instructed the Schoolroom to stop. The hum died away. A grey cardboard tray of needles stopped its tiny glassware chatter.
‘That’s it?’ said Milne.
Cameron peered intently at the screen, reading the hundred-and-twenty or so data parameters caught and measured by the Schoolroom. ‘This virus pretty much wiped out the Forés of New Guinea. I told you it was nasty.’
‘And don’t underestimate what we’ve just done,’ added Kati. ‘Your immune system was at two per cent competence. It’s now at six and a half per cent. You’re already three times better at fighting this disease, and that’s our most basic possible treatment programme.’
‘We could try to juice things up a little,’ said Cameron. ‘Now, if you were a rat, of course …’ She spoke briefly with Kati, discussing the on-screen data, and they agreed on some changes. Kati removed one tray of fluids from the Schoolroom and slotted another one home.
Their guess seemed to be an accurate one. The percentage of reprogrammed cells began to creep upwards once again: 7%, 8%, 10%. Then, all of a sudden, the numbers shot upwards: 25%, 67%, 98%. Error messages flashed on-screen and Cameron and Kati sighed in simultaneous disappointment.
‘Isn’t that good?’ asked Milne. ‘Ninety-eight per cent? That virus is dead meat.’
‘True,’ said Cameron, ‘but so are you. We overcharged your immune system and it’s gone crazy. Your army isn’t just attacking the enemy, it’s attacking you. You’ve now got a highly serious auto-immune disease. If you were a patient, you’d be dead.’
Kati typed an instruction on the PC, and the Schoolroom’s hum died away. A little click of glassware indicated the arrival of a bottle in a dispensing chamber. Cameron withdrew it and shook it up against the light from the broad sash windows, then dropped it regretfully into a clinical waste bin.
‘OK. We failed. Shame you’re not a rat.’
‘And if I were?’
‘Then instead of throwing away that bottle, I’d have injected it back into your arm.’
‘Reprogrammed cells only, right?’
‘Right. We chuck the bad ones. And we wouldn’t take a little ten-millilitre sample from you, we’d take half a pint. Every day. Until you’d licked the disease.’
‘And it’s OK just to throw away the cells that don’t make it?’
‘It’s not OK, it’s actually good. It stimulates the body to grow more cells. And since we’re saving the good ones and chucking the bad ones, you head towards a situation where most of the cells in your immune system are highly trained at destroying kuru viruses.’ She raised her hands, as though to show that she could do no more. ‘There’s no way you can stay ill under those circumstances. None at all.’
Silence fell.
Bryn looked at Milne. Milne looked at Bryn.
‘OK,’ said Milne, at last. ‘I’m interested.’
4
‘Ha, ha, ha, Bryn, you’re a right berk, you are.’ Dai, Bryn’s brother, the former glory of the Pontypridd rugby pack, swung his leg back and kicked a hole right through the collapsing timber. ‘I must be a bloody ghost, like,’ he said, crashing against the side of the shed with all his weight and emerging in a shower of rotten wood on the other side. ‘I can walk through walls. Here, look here.’ He was about to give another demonstration of his supernatural powers, when Bryn intervened.
‘OK, OK, Dai, I can see the wall’s rotten, thank you. I was wondering whether you might be able to fix it up as well as knocking it down.’
Dai clambered back through the hole he’d made, meditatively ripping off another chunk of planking on his way.
‘That all depends on the load-bearing timber.’
He used a pocket knife to scrape at one of the main timbers supporting the roof. There was a layer of green slime on top, but underneath the wood was hard and good. He walked along the wall, testing the thick oak pillars. ‘Seems OK. Have you looked in the roof?’
‘Yes. The beams and roof trusses are basically fine. The rest of it’s a disaster.’
‘Ha, ha, ha, by God, Bryn, it’s a good job you didn’t get really drunk, otherwise God knows what you’d have bought. Dad’s cow barn looks a bloody palace compared.’
He laughed, but all the time his eye was assessing what needed to be done. It wasn’t long before he delivered his verdict. ‘I’d say we can clean up the main structural timbers, rip away the rest of it – that’ll be a short bloody job, and all – and just put up a new shell, tongue and groove, shiplap, whatever. Then the roof basically the same. What do you want? Cheapest would be sheets of ply with weather-proofing. ‘Course, you’d have to –’
‘Insulation.’ Kati had appeared from one of the rooms to the side of the main boathouse. She was wearing gumboots and was wadded like a doughnut in fleece-and-down jackets. Her perfect curls were stuffed away into a woolly hat and her cheeks shone pink and clear with the cold. ‘Insulation,’ she said. ‘Lots of it.’
Insulation, Bryn? I’ll use eighteen-mill tongue and groove. Can’t see you wanting insulation as well.’
Kati opened her mouth to protest, but Bryn waved her quiet. ‘My brother’s idea of a joke. We’ll stick in a ton of fibreglass.’
‘Mineral wool’s better,’ said Kati. ‘Non-carcinogenic.’
She explored the building’s timbering with her hands, trying to visualise how the insulation would work, and Bryn stepped close to her, not touching, but working alongside her, their breath forming one cloud which rose above them into the vastness of the roof. ‘Mineral wool it is,’ he said, without stepping away from her side.
‘Eh, eh, Ewan,’ said Dai. ‘We need to sort out some rooms in here. No point putting in insulation if you’ve got a thirty-foot ceiling. And what d’you want to do about the observation tower? Rip it down or fix it up?’
Bryn reluctantly left Kati’s side and continued round the derelict buildings with his brother, identifying problems, suggesting solutions. He was a good builder, Dai, and his business would have done well even if it hadn’t been the automatic choice of every Pontypridd fan within forty miles.
‘We going to use local labour, or d’you want me to bring my men?’
‘Use yours,’ said Bryn. ‘I don’t want to pay London wages if I can help it.’
‘I’ll tell that to my lads, see if they want to come.’
‘They’ll come.’
‘And they’ll have to stay somewhere.’
‘They can stay with me.’
‘I’ll try, I promise, but no guarantees.’
‘How many men d’you need!’
Dai looked around. ‘Half a dozen, plus trades. Sparky, plumber, decorator.’
Bryn pulled three wads of tickets from his pocket. ‘Six Nations rugby,’ he said. ‘England-Wales at Twickenham, Ireland-Wales at Lansdowne Road, Wales-France at the Millennium Stadium. I’m still trying to get Wales-Scotland, and the Italy game. Transport and beer thrown in as well.’
‘By damn,’ said Dai, fanning out the tickets in admiration. ‘You’re right, they’ll come. Bloody hell, Bryn, we’d even get Dad up to London for this, except he’s under the weather all the time now.’
After Dai had left, notebook crammed with notes, rugby tickets cosseted like the Crown Jewels in his breast pocket, Kati spoke to Bryn.
‘Nice guy, your brother.’
‘Salt of the earth, and just as thirsty.’
‘He called you Ewan. Why?’
‘We had a sheepdog called Ewan when we were lads. It’s just a nickname.’
Ewan was the name of a sheepdog, alright, but not just any old dog. Of all the many collies bred and trained by Bryn’s dad, Ewan was without question, beyond a doubt, and past dispute the randiest of them all. Dai had noticed Bryn’s not-so-casual closeness to Kati, and the nickname was invoked by either brother when they saw the other in pursuit of a skirt.
Kati nodded solemnly as though Bryn’s bland explanation made sense, knowing that it didn’t. Later that day, when Bryn took advantage of Cameron’s absence to take a meal alone with Kati, she laughed at his jokes, was merry and outgoing, was happy to talk about herself and her family, and showed a warm interest in Bryn and his family. But when the meal ended, she refused a ‘cup of coffee at my place’, kissed Bryn high on the cheek, and took a separate cab home to her Notting Hill flatshare.
‘Eh, eh, Ewan,’ said Bryn to himself as he watched her go, ‘never give up, boy, never give up.’
5
Starting in business is like jumping a ravine. Getting it right is terrific. Getting it nearly right is so bad, you’d better not have jumped at all.
Bryn knew that. He’d seen businesses take the run up, make the jump, lose their footing ever so slightly on take off – and then sail through the air, destined never to make the other side, destined to fall in appalled slow motion a thousand feet to the boulders and thorn bushes strewing the canyon floor.
He didn’t want to be like that. He took precautions, and one night he drew up a contract and brought it to Cameron, who was sitting in Bryn’s living-room-turned-laboratory.
‘Hey there, Money Man,’ she greeted him.
‘Hey there, Medicine Woman.’
‘Found me my money yet?’
‘Nope. Still looking. Found a cure for AIDS yet?’
‘Nope. Still looking.’
They laughed. Because he was laughing, Bryn spilled his coffee (Jamaican roast, double espresso, a hint of sugar). The coffee splurged out on to the sofa, staining the pale yellow silk. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said as Cameron leaped up, ready to mop it up. ‘Leave it.’
‘You don’t like the sofa? It’s kind of nice to spoil.’
‘It’s OK.’ Bryn shrugged. ‘But Cecily wants it back. As well as that,’ he said, pointing to a little Venetian chess table. ‘And that, that, that and that,’ he said, pointing to most of the other objects in the room.
‘She’s cleaning you out, huh?’
‘She’s helping herself to the contents of one pocket. The business is taking the contents of the other.’
‘So what does that leave you?’
Bryn laughed. ‘I don’t know. My trousers? Here. I’ve got a contract.’ He handed it over.
Before she took it, she held his gaze a little longer. ‘Don’t drive yourself too hard,’ she said. ‘You need to look after yourself.’
‘Don’t worry, I will. I am.’
She dropped her eyes and peered at the agreement. ‘I thought I already signed a contract.’
‘An employment contract, yes. This is an assignment of intellectual property rights. It transfers your research to the company. It’s required for insurance purposes. Doesn’t mean anything.’
‘If it doesn’t mean anything, why do it?’
‘Because it’s required for insurance purposes.’
‘I hand over everything I’ve worked on for the last five years, because some damn insurance company wants me to?’
‘Cameron, there’s no problem in signing this. I won’t stop you doing what you want with your research, absolutely anything that’s reasonable.’
‘I can still publish what I like?’
‘If you want to tell Corinth what’s going on, you can.’
‘But in principle. If I wanted, I could publish?’
Bryn shrugged. ‘If Corinth weren’t a factor, then as far as I’m concerned you could publish whatever the hell you wanted.’
Cameron peered again at the contract, hoping it would say something in plain English so she could understand it. It didn’t. Bryn had taken care to draft it that way. She shrugged and signed.
That was a mistake.
Bryn had lied.
The insurance company cared a lot about a lot of things. It cared about fire extinguisher maintenance records and whether there was going to be non-slip matting in the bathroom. The insurance company didn’t give a twopenny damn about Cameron’s research, but Bryn did. Since he had staked everything on Cameron’s genius, he’d decided he’d better make sure of her. An employment contract wouldn’t keep her from walking. Holding on to her research would.
It seemed like a minor deception. Bryn felt bad about it, but not too bad. How was he to know that everything, but everything; would one day be set at risk?
SIX (#ulink_3b4e218b-6b70-5d40-b89f-b4976784da40)
1
Five weeks later.
The boathouse now more than a third of the way towards total renovation, Dai and his men working dawn to dusk, foul timber all stripped and burned, new walls flying up, a smell of wood primer and sawdust, gathering excitement, and huge views out over the river filling their new world with light. So far, so good.
The medical side had been attended to as well. Cameron and Kati drew up a wish-list of lab equipment, expecting Bryn to argue every single item, as their old employers always had. But not a bit of it. ‘Sure this is all?’ he’d said, waving a chequebook, and now, every day, vans arrived at the boatyard, asking repeatedly if this was really the right place, and unloading crate after crate of beautiful new equipment: blood spectrometers from Germany, medical glassware from Sweden, computers from California, centrifuges from Canada, clean air filtration systems from France and Britain, and clinking bottles of chemicals from Italy, Japan, Switzerland and America. The boathouse had an old observation tower – formerly the spot from which the jolly old Fulham rowers watched the jolly old boat race – and Cameron had seized upon it as her office, and was already nine tenths of the way towards filling it with junk. So far, so good.
By now, several venture capitalists had been introduced to the emerging technology under conditions of the strictest secrecy, enforced by the fiercest confidentiality agreement Bryn had ever drawn up. Two of the finance houses were still thinking, the third – Malcolm Milne’s – had come back with a strong positive response and an offer of funding on excellent terms. So far, so excellent.
Buoyed up by the signs of success, Bryn had incorporated the company, drawn up articles of association, registered for VAT, opened accounts and done all of the hundred other things that a young company needs. They were now officially Fulham Research Ltd, described in official documents as a company ‘involved in research and development in the area of human biology’. The vaguer the better, as far as Bryn was concerned, anxious to hide from Corinth as long as he was able. But of Corinth, there was no sign at all. So far, so good.
Romantically, Bryn had been making the most of his brother’s hint and had done what he could to woo Kati. Kati liked him well enough, that much was clear, but she’d just been dumped virtually at the altar by a cheating fiancé, and she was in no hurry to get started with anyone else, least of all her boss. Bryn was disappointed, but didn’t lose hope. He took care over his appearance (as far as was possible when he had half a dozen Welsh builders sharing his bathroom) and went out of his way to be charming. He liked Kati, and wasn’t in a rush. So far, so satisfactory.
Adding to his workforce already, he brought across Meg Tillery, his former secretary, from Berger Scholes. To Bryn’s delight, Meg had taken only about half a minute to listen to his proposal before saying yes, and only about half an hour from saying yes to Leaving Berger Scholes with her personal belongings tucked into the traditional black bin-liner. So far, so good.
Of Corinth’s henchmen, there was no sign. Cameron and Kati had cautiously sounded out their parents and it had transpired that, just as Bryn had predicted, there had been a stranger snooping round their home neighbourhoods, asking for information. Since Kati and Cameron had been vague and unspecific, Corinth would have learned nothing of value. Bryn felt sure Huizinga would keep an ear to the ground, but without knowing where Cameron was, there was little more he could do. So far, so good.
But all was not well. In fact things had grown so bad, Bryn was beginning to wonder if he’d committed the worst mistake of his entire life.
2
‘Let me get this straight,’ said Bryn, clamping down hard on his voice so he didn’t actually yell. ‘I’ve found twenty million pounds’ worth of funding, and you’re telling me you don’t want it?’
‘Right.’
Muscles fought in Bryn’s jaw as he composed a reply. ‘Cameron, you do understand that we need this money? That the company relies on obtaining this money?’
‘Wrong. We need money. Not twenty million pounds, maybe only a quarter of that. But whatever the amount, we don’t need this money. Not from Milner.’
‘Milne.’
‘Whatever.’
It was late at night in the boathouse, the only time it was usable, when Dai and his lads had downed tools and were doing their worst in London’s nightspots. A couple of the smaller downstairs rooms were all but finished and Cameron had been setting them up the way she wanted: bloodwork facility, microscope workshop, computer pods, library. She was dressed in her working outfit: jeans and a T-shirt, with a labcoat flung on top, hanging from her skinny shoulders as from a broomstick scarecrow. A thick rubber band of the sort dropped on the pavement by postmen twisted her hair away out of sight. Once, as Bryn had watched, an end of hair escaped its grip once too often, and she reached for a pair of surgical scissors and snipped it off at the root. ‘Damn hair,’ she muttered.
Now, ignoring Bryn, she pulled over an unpacked shipment of dyes and solvents and began to rip away the brown packaging tape. Bryn reached for the box and tugged it from her grasp.
‘Please stop that,’ he said. ‘We need to talk.’
She looked irritated, glance wandering around the room, visibly thinking through how best to arrange her stores. ‘Now?’
‘Yes, now.’
She gazed round the room again, before grunting, ‘Uh, OK,’ figuring that the quickest way to get rid of Bryn was to hear him out. ‘Upstairs, then. I’ve left my tea.’
They walked up the spiral staircase to Cameron’s office. Windows looked out in each direction: north and east over central London, south and west over the river. ‘You’ll be a bloody princess in here,’ Dai had said as he’d finished the room, ‘all you need now is the knight in shining armour.’ The tower room did have something of the fairy-tale about it, but what Bryn thought of was ivory towers, academic scientists cut off from the real world, out of sight and out of touch. Cameron rummaged amongst her rapidly growing mounds of papers and found a long-cooled cup of camomile tea. ‘Ugh,’ she sipped it and put it down. ‘Forget that. OK. Shoot.’
‘Good.’ Bryn found a wooden storage cupboard that hadn’t yet been swamped by clutter and sat down. ‘First point, we need money, lots of it, I estimate twenty million pounds.’
‘So you keep saying. I don’t see us needing more than five.’
‘Look. Five million pounds only covers your human research phase. It gets you to where you’ve already got to with rats.’
‘Right. Which, as I recall, was a one hundred per cent cure of all viral diseases tested.’
‘Good. That’s the hard part, but not the most important part.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake. What’s this? A lecture on the profit motive? You’re confusing me with someone who gives a damn. Please get this. I – don’t – care.’
She stood up and reached for her tea, wanting to move it to a safer spot, but Bryn interrupted. He was in a fury of impatience. He was the boss, head of the company, chief executive. At Berger Scholes he’d been a Managing Director, able to snap orders at nearly anyone in the firm and have them obeyed. Yet here he was, for all his notional power, unable even to hold a conversation with his most critical employee. He leaped to his feet and, as Cameron reached for the tea, he grabbed it first and slammed it down on a window sill.
‘No,’ he snapped. ‘This is not about profits. It’s something you need to hear. Please.’
Cameron breathed out in a sigh. ‘OK. Go ahead.’
‘Good. Now, you just told me that you can cure all major viral diseases in rats.’
‘If we get ’em early. If the disease has progressed far, then –’
‘OK. If you get ’em early, a hundred per cent. Now, tell me, could I do that? Take the Schoolroom, cure your rats?’
What? You?’
‘Yes, me. Could I personally cure a rat with an early-stage viral disease?’
‘No way. Never.’
‘How about a doctor, let’s say an infectious diseases guy in a busy hospital? A nurse? A lab assistant?’
Cameron blew out through her nose and glanced unceremoniously at her watch. ‘Listen, Kati and I can cure those rats because for the last five years we’ve worked on nothing else at all. We know our rats. We know our blood. We know our viruses. We know the Schoolroom. We know –’
‘Exactly,’ said Bryn, holding up his hand. ‘Thank you. Now tell me, once you’ve finished your human work, and you and Kati are getting a close to one hundred per cent cure rate, it’s going to be the same, isn’t it?’
Cameron looked blank, unsure what he was getting at. He continued. ‘You’ve got a technique for curing people, but no one knows how to use it. By your own statement, it takes five years of training to use the Schoolroom competently, which is four years, eleven months and two weeks too long.’ Holding his hands in front of him like a conductor damping the orchestra’s sound, he said, ‘The point is your technology’s useless unless people use it. Me, a nurse, a busy doctor, a lab guy. With training, of course. A week or two. Even a month or two. But not five years, plus a medical doctorate, plus a research doctorate, plus a brain the size of a planet which everyone tells me is going to get a Nobel Prize one of these days.’
He stopped abruptly. It was an odd way to deliver a compliment. She wrinkled her mouth in embarrassed acknowledgement of the praise.
‘Uh. I see your point.’
‘Right. So five million pounds for your clinical trials. I’ve allowed eight million, because these things run over. Then another dozen or so for development. Turning the Schoolroom into a box of tricks which anyone can use, me, a nurse, a lab guy, whoever.’
‘Hence twenty million.’
‘And hence Malcolm Milne.’
Now that Bryn no longer had to force his words at his recalcitrant partner, the space between them had grown too narrow. Cameron swivelled to look out of the window, where the black Thames marched silently towards Chelsea, Westminster, and St Paul’s. London was a new city for her, a new adventure. She still didn’t know whether her escape from Boston was the smartest move she’d ever made, or the stupidest. Bryn moved back, scuffing some piles of books on the floor. Cameron glanced at her watch, then returned her gaze to Bryn. ‘OK. I get the money part. I take the point.’
‘I knew you’d –’
‘But Malcolm Milne, no way. Sorry, but no.’
3
‘I heard him,’ said Cameron patiently. ‘He was talking about exit. He was talking about selling the company.’
‘Yes, it’s how venture capital works. Milne has to sell out to repay his investors.’
‘How long before he sells?’
‘Five years, maybe seven, maybe one. It’s his call.’
‘Who’ll control the company? You, or Milne and his cronies?’
‘The Board controls the company. The shareholders appoint the Board.’
‘That’s a bullshit answer.’
‘OK. It depends how much of the business I sell. Since all we’ve got at this stage is an idea, I’ll probably have to sell seventy or eighty per cent to raise enough money. But even if I could persuade Milne to take just forty-nine per cent, he’d still require a say in all major decisions.’
‘So Milne either controls the company or he has a veto?’
‘It’s not in his interest to screw things up.’
‘His interest, huh?’ There was another, longer pause. Cameron found a rubber band on the bench beside her and pinged it out into the dark, out on to the sleeping river. ‘And when his time’s up, who does Milne sell us to?’
Bryn spread his hands at an impossible question. ‘Maybe he floats us on the stockmarket. Maybe he sells us to a company in a related business, maybe … Well, anyone, whoever offers most.’
‘Such as a drugs company scared by our technology?’
‘Cameron, he can sell us to anyone he wants. He needs to make a profit. It’s the rules of the game.’
‘The rules of the game say he can sell us to Corinth?’
Bryn shook his head. ‘Yes, that’s possible, but really –’
‘Really what? Back in Boston, you said that – what’s-his-face – Hosanna –’
‘Huizinga.’
‘– saw this as a him or us situation, a game worth one hundred billion dollars to him. Why wouldn’t he buy us? Buy us, then drop the technology? That’s a crazy risk to take.’
‘It’s a risk you won’t be able to take, without funding.’
Cameron stared out into the black night. Across the water, streetlights shone orange through a screen of winter trees while upriver, moored in a line below Hammersmith Bridge, a group of houseboats stirred slowly in the breeze, red lamps warning where their sterns jutted out into the current. Her breath misted the window.
Bryn let her think. There was no option except to take Milne’s money, none at all. She was a smart woman and she would see that, she’d have to. When she turned on her heel to answer him, he was ready for anything except what she actually said.
‘Then we have a problem, because I am not going to put my ideas into hands that I don’t trust.’
‘Milne’s OK. Don’t worry about Milne.’
‘I don’t care if he’s Mother Teresa, he’ll still sell to the highest bidder. He has to. You just told me he does.’
‘Cameron.’ Bryn’s voice was hard-edged again, hard and desperate. ‘You need to be realistic.’
‘True.’
‘You’re killing this company. This is the only way.’
She brought her face to within a few inches of his. Close up, you no longer noticed its pallor, the brusque way in which its owner treated it, all you saw were its commanding grey eyes, ablaze with intensity and passion.
‘Listen, I have a chance to develop a technology which will save lives. Potentially hundreds of thousands of lives, millions, even. The Schoolroom doesn’t have to be expensive. Peptides don’t have to be expensive. This is a medicine which can wipe out some of the nastiest diseases in not just the rich countries, but the poor ones, too.
‘You’re asking me to take a chance on Milne. Fine. If it was just me, just my career, just this company, I’d be happy to bet everything on him. But the patients? The AIDS sufferers, the hepatitis victims, all those grannies who die just because their poor old immune systems can’t cope with a simple flu bug?’ She shook her head. ‘I can’t do it, Bryn. I won’t.’
Bryn pursed his lips. He felt small for thinking the thought, but it bothered him when he heard Cameron talking about selling their technology cheaply. Not that he wanted to rip people off – not that he wanted the Third World to suffer – just … Well, after all, he was a businessman and this was his business.
He sighed. ‘I know, Cameron. I understand, believe me. But we have to face facts. We need the money.’
Cameron dropped her eyes and picked up the offer letter from Milne which had prompted the whole conversation. Tearing it into shreds and leaning far out of the window, she threw it into the river, where the white fragments began to float away, caught by the silent midnight ripples.
‘I agree,’ she said, ‘we need the money. But not from Milne. Not now. Not ever.’
SEVEN (#ulink_adccbe9b-0168-5003-9a0e-24ff1e9b3252)
1
The immense and mouldering college barge which had been sitting in the main boathouse had been hauled down the slipway to sink or swim, and after a brief hesitation, it had swum quite happily, moored up against the side of the boathouse, slapping against the wood at every change in the wind. It made a nice place to sit and watch life, and Bryn sat on the roof of the barge, protected from the green mould by a dustsheet left by Dai.
Meg, Bryn’s former secretary and a bouncy brunette who was just a few years younger than him, came round the corner of the boathouse, down the jetty, and scrambled breathlessly on to the roof. ‘Coffee,’ she said, dumping a bag down beside her. ‘And yes, it is from the Italian shop up the road, and yes, it is a double espresso, and yes it is continental roast, and yes, you are the most finicky coffee drinker in the whole world ever.’
Bryn took the coffee with gratitude, and began telling her about Cameron’s refusal to take money from the venture capitalists.
‘Twenty million quid,’ said Meg. ‘She tore it up?’
Scraps of the ripped-up offer letter still floated down by the side of the barge, trapped in a debris of floating twigs, plastic bottles and a kind of nameless oily scum. Bryn gestured at it with his coffee cup.
‘There it is. All gone. Shame.’
Meg had tried lying back on the roof to catch some early spring sun, but the sun was so feeble it was scarcely worth catching, and her head had poked over the edge of the dustsheet, quickly gathering an assortment of moulds, lichens and algae. Picking the green bits from her hair, she mused aloud. ‘Cammie had a point, though. It would have been gutting if you’d succeeded with everything, just for old Malcolm Milne to sell the whole kit an’ caboodle to Corinth.’
Bryn smiled wryly. ‘Right. Not that gutting, since I’d stand to make a bloody fortune from the sale. Besides, there’d be no reason for Milne to sell to the bad guys. It’s not as though he cares one way or the other.’
‘Cammie’s point exactly, sweetie.’ She looked at the green stuff collected in her hand and hurled it at a gull, missing by miles. She continued to gaze after it, then sprang to attention. ‘What the hell is that?’ she demanded, jabbing a finger downstream past the red-brick wharves towards the empty trees of Bishop’s Park.
‘It’s a tree, Meg, a willow tree.’
‘It’s what’s in the tree, matey. Look.’
Bryn rolled on to his elbow. In the bare branches of the willow tree, there was a blue-green smudge. ‘Bloody hell, you’re right. It’s a parrot.’ The blue-green smudge nodded its head and began to preen, as though to confirm the sighting.
‘Must have escaped,’ she said. Then, ‘Good on you, parrot!’ she screamed.
Bryn shook his head. ‘Actually, I doubt it. They’re meant to be quite common, apparently. Escaped parrots started breeding and London’s warm enough these days for the birds to survive through the winter. I’ll bet you we’re looking at a genuine wild parrot.’
‘Wild? Who’s wild? I don’t call you a wild Welshman, do I? It’s free, a free parrot.’
Bryn laughed and swigged at his rapidly cooling coffee. Meg continued gazing, mesmerised, at her find.
‘It’s a pity you had to go elsewhere for money,’ she said reflectively. ‘I know you. You wouldn’t sell out to the bad guys, however much you think you would.’
‘It’s a pity I’m not a multi-millionaire, Meg.’
She looked sharply at him, about to cross the unmentionable gap between banking secretary and banking boss. ‘You must be pretty close, though,’ she said. ‘Big swinger at Berger Scholes and all that.’
Bryn sighed. ‘I’ve had to split things with Cecily. She gets all the savings and most of the furnishings of any quality. I get the house, my deferred bonuses – ha, bloody ha – and sod all else. I’m not far off being a pauper.’
‘What’s ha bloody ha?’
‘All gone, Megsy, m’dear. You forfeit your deferred bonuses if you leave. I left. I forfeited them. Three quarters of a million quid.’
‘Bloody hell, you’re a madman.’ Meg pondered the notion of having three quarters of a million pounds and then losing it. ‘I wouldn’t have left if you’d dragged me by my hair. I’d have glued myself to my desk. I’d have nailed my –’
‘Yeah, well, your sympathy is duly noted.’ A pause. ‘That just leaves my house. It’ll fetch getting on for a million, though I had sort of planned to live in it … Anyway, even a million’s no good. This company needs way more than that.’
Meg rolled on to her belly, poking her head over the side of the barge, staring at her reflection in the turbid waters. ‘Why not borrow the money? Then we wouldn’t have to have horrible investors, just horrible banks.’
‘You can’t simply go out and borrow. You have to have assets to borrow against. If you don’t have assets, you have to have cash flows, revenues, profits. Old fashioned things like that.’
‘Well, there you go, then.’ Meg rolled round the other way and sat up. ‘First get some cash flows, then borrow some money. Honestly, some banker you are.’
Bryn swirled the last of his coffee round his cup. It was stone cold, but he drank it anyway. For the past forty minutes, the sun had shone like a pale disc through cloud, and the day was too cold for long periods on top of dank and festering barges. If he was a parrot, he’d stay indoors. He stood up to go.
‘Thanks for the brainwave, Meg. The Schoolroom works on rats. How about we charge them …’ As his voice tapered off, he suddenly froze. ‘By God, though, you never know …’ His posture changed; became charged with energy. At the end of the barge, there was a dried-out tin of paint left by one of Dai’s workmen. Bryn repositioned the tin with care, and took a few paces backwards. ‘That pleasure boat, there. One minute to go, two points needed for victory. Bryn Hughes to take the kick.’
Meg looked at the launch making its way upriver, twenty yards distant, its roof dotted with passengers. ‘What are you–?’
But Bryn ignored her. He checked his pacing and settled his eye on the distant boat. Taking a quick run up, he gave the tin an enormous kick and watched it sail in a huge arc into the air, narrowly clearing the upper deck of the startled boat. The splash into the water on the other side was hidden from view. A couple of passengers who’d been watching cheered and waved. In an imaginary stadium somewhere, fifty thousand Welshmen stood and applauded.
‘Is he Bryn Hughes, or is he Neil bloody Jenkins?’
‘Neil who?’
But he was off, leaping off the boat, on to the bits of planking which acted as a jetty, and on into the boathouse yard.
‘Cameron!’ he roared. ‘Cameron, Kati!’
Meg stood up. The wind was chilly. Her boss was mad. She tipped her coffee away and began to thread her way through the surrounding wharves towards the willow tree, watched by its exotic resident. ‘Hello, parrot,’ she said.
2
When Meg caught up, Cameron and Kati were already jammed into a pair of seats, watching Bryn as he strode around. Meg caught sight of the handsomest of Dai’s workmen, winked at him and sat down.
‘So that’s the whole idea,’ said Bryn. ‘We’re going to use your know-how to make some money, right here, right now. We pop the research and development outfit under the wing of a parent company, and use the parent company to generate cash. We’ll use the cash to fund our research, and once we’re making some serious money, we’ll go out looking for some loans as well. All we need is a way of putting your existing knowledge to commercial use.’
Ten minutes earlier, Cameron and Kati had been involved in a deep conversation about new methods of peptide fractionation. Since Bryn had whirled in like a storm demon, shoving them into chairs and haranguing them, they had understood virtually nothing. They exchanged glances.
‘You want us to sell something?’ asked Kati.
‘Yes. No. Well, OK, yes and no.’ Bryn took a deep breath and another step backwards into the realm of the intelligible. ‘Look, between the two of you, you know an awful lot about viruses and an awful lot about viral illness. Stuff which no one else knows.’
‘Loads of people know parts of it, but maybe no one knows all of it. No one except us. Right,’ said Kati.
Cameron sat imprisoned in her chair, writing chemical equations in biro on her white labcoat, and waited for something that Bryn said to make sense.
‘Good.’ said Bryn. ‘Exactly. Now I know for a certain fact that you can put that knowledge to use. I went to Cameron with flu and she cured me, no messing.’ Cameron groaned in pleasure, as she found what she was looking for in her chemical equations, then looked up to find everyone looking at her. ‘Flu, did you say? Sure, but that was easy. You were an easy case. We couldn’t begin to guarantee those kinds of results.’
‘No, I know that, but patients don’t need guarantees, they just need the best treatment available. That’s you. You and Kati. You two, plus other doctors who we’ll hire and train in your techniques. Obviously, we wouldn’t be doing the full Immune Reprogramming at this stage, we’d use conventional drug treatment, supplemented by everything else you guys thought was useful. As time goes by, and your research matures, your treatment methods will improve too. We won’t just have research papers to prove our results, we’ll have patients. Hundreds of them.’
Cameron wasn’t looking at her equations now, she was staring at Bryn. ‘You think I ought to spend time with patients?’
‘Yes. You spend time on them. They spend money on you. That’s business.’
‘But my research? Isn’t that more –’
‘More important? Yes. But we need to pay for it. This is a way to pay for it.’
‘And when you think about it,’ said Kati, ‘we’ve always wanted to have better access to patients. That way we can watch the clinical progress of disease, not just its blood chemistry.’
‘Uh, ‘s’true,’ said Cameron, still amazed. ‘But you know, Bryn, can you see me with patients? I mean, when you came to see me, I hit you.’
‘Did you?’ said Meg. ‘Good for you.’
Bryn ignored her. ‘OK, no hitting. No assaults of any kind. No doodling on your labcoat while your patient is telling you their life story. And we’ll make sure Kati or someone is there with you, so if you do accidentally lay into someone, there’s someone to say sorry.’
‘Uh, OK,’ said Cameron, still bemused. ‘Patients? Sure. Why not?’
3
And finally that week, a minor incident, hardly worth the mention.
Cameron’s father, a mathematician at Illinois State University, was extremely fond of Lewis Carroll. Following a suggestion of Bryn’s, Cameron bought him an expensive but special birthday gift: some early editions of Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass. Sending them special delivery, she dispatched them in good time for his birthday, but when the day arrived, the books had not. Another week or two passed, the gift was still mislaid, and Cameron ended up claiming compensation for the full amount from the Post Office. She didn’t mention the loss to Bryn or anyone else, not liking to appear naive or incompetent in her dealings with the outside world.
And that was all. A minor incident, hardly worth the mention.
EIGHT (#ulink_89884f28-20ce-5ae5-b699-9e0c12d76385)
1
For businesses as for people, childhood is meant to be a time of happiness and freedom from care. The funding is meant to be in plentiful supply, the business concept is still untarnished by excessive contact with reality, moods are good and tempers are sunny.
Meant to. The emphasis is on meant to. That’s not always how it works.
2
The boathouse was finished off. It looked glorious – better than glorious. The white-painted interior turned the palest spring light into a glory of watery fire, with ripples from the Thames reflected upwards through huge waterside windows on to the beams and trusses of the vaulted ceiling. A horseshoe of consulting rooms hung like a mediaeval minstrels’ gallery around the former boathouse, connected by a sweeping spiral staircase of natural oak. Round the back, Cameron had her laboratory, her library, her office up in the tower, her storeroom, and all the other requisites of a serious research programme. The building was a joy to look at and a joy to use.
Ordinarily, Dai and his crew would have been exhilarated at the end of a job. But as it turned out, the grandstand tickets supplied by Bryn had magnified a dismal Welsh performance in the Six Nations rugby to a disaster of such epic proportions that one of Dai’s men had looped a rope from the ceiling rafters and tied a noose in the end. A joke, of course, but only just.
Meanwhile, Bryn had put his house on the market. The estate agent had confidently valued it at a round million, delighting Bryn, who had expected less. Unfortunately, as things turned out, it was Bryn that proved to be right. When the buyers came to view, the house was still full of at least six large Welsh workmen, each of whom was like a kind of Shake-n-Vac dispenser for builders’ dust, and the kitchen, living room, bathroom, and bedrooms were full of enough beer cans to threaten a glut on the aluminium market. Offers when they came were scanty and low, and Bryn ended up settling for eight hundred and fifty, pleased to get even that.
‘Where are you going to live now?’ asked Meg.
Brandishing a wire brush, a boiler suit, and twenty-five litres of white paint, Bryn pointed from the reception room windows. Seagulls wheeled in the empty sky above while, beneath them, the barge they shat on, like a tarnished crone, swayed uneasily on the oily water.
‘You’re kidding,’ said Meg.
3
Like a cross-Channel swimmer hesitating at the waterside, the first two weeks had been spent with Cameron and Kati locked in anxious theoretical discussions about the best way to handle patients.
‘It’s a challenge for us,’ admitted Cameron during a rare interlude. ‘Rats can’t launch malpractice suits, and if you get it wrong, you don’t have to spend too much time worrying if someone else could have done it better. Patients are different. I mean, after all, they’re people.’
Kati’s big spaniel eyes blinked slowly in agreement. ‘On the other hand,’ she said, ‘it’s true, we do know a lot about nutrient therapy. Like, a lot. Combining that with conventional medical care could be of incredible benefit. But still …’ She shook her head, unhappy with the responsibility that came with looking after people instead of rats.
‘Maybe we should focus on a particular disease group,’ said Cameron. ‘Hepatitis A, perhaps. Even flu.’
‘Or how about just one patient a month?’ queried Bryn sarcastically. ‘Have you actually made any progress at all? Apart from working out that patients are people, that is.’
‘Got anywhere?’ repeated Cameron. ‘Sure. We’ve identified some real issues, a laundry list of points to get thinking about.’
‘OK,’ interrupted Bryn. ‘You know what? I think you should start seeing some patients, and soon. We’ll open for business on Monday.’
4
On the following Monday, they threw their doors open to a wondering public, ready for all comers. On Monday evening, they closed them again, not having admitted a single patient; no one except a lady who’d wandered in asking for directions, and a bloke from the Eternity Wharf industrial estate who’d cut his finger and wondered if they had any plasters.
On Tuesday it was the same, except that no one asked for directions, and the bloke next door now had a packet of Elastoplast and no further need of medical attention.
On Wednesday, Bryn got serious about advertising.
5
London is an expensive place in which to advertise.
You can buy space alright – space on hoardings, space in papers, space on the tube trains, space on radio, space on TV, space in the freebie magazines shoved in your face at Underground stations, space on those green or pink photocopied fliers that crowd London’s air like pigeons. There’s no shortage of outlets for your advertising pound, but that in itself becomes the problem. Londoners close off from advertising. They develop a kind of sight-blindness which cuts out the excess of noise. To catch their eye and hold it, to keep their reading gaze for enough seconds to transmit the required information, you need to buy a mountain of space, an unmissable island in the info-cluttered sea.
‘Damn it,’ said Bryn, slamming down the phone. ‘How the bloody hell do people get started round here?’
He picked up the sheets with his advertising budget and began to redo the numbers, trying to trim a number here, cut a figure there, knowing in his heart he should be doubling the numbers, not halving them. He was sitting with Meg in the new reception area. A cleaned-up boat hull topped with waxed oak boards formed a reception desk and Meg sat behind it reading a gossip magazine. ‘Maybe I should retrain as an aromatherapist,’ said Meg. ‘Most of the calls we get are from people who hope we do aromatherapy and that thing they do with feet. Foot poking.’
‘We’ll get patients. Just a question of time.’
‘Reflexology,’ said Meg. ‘That’s it. What you need, matey, is a bit of free publicity.’
‘Thanks, Meg. I’d stick to foot poking if I were you.’ Bryn’s voice skirted an edge of irritation. He wasn’t angry at Meg but he was frustrated with the way things were going and was worried that he’d miscalculated badly.
‘No, really. I mean it,’ she said, returning to her magazine. For a few minutes there was silence, then Cameron wandered in, distractedly, looking for Kati. Meg interrupted her.
‘Hey, Cammie. How good are you at fixing mysterious viral illnesses which have baffled literally dozens of America’s best doctors?’
Cameron shrugged. ‘Depends on the virus, depends on the blood.’
Meg passed over her magazine and Cameron read briefly before commenting, ‘Probably virally induced mitochondrial collapse. Enteroviruses, one of the retro-viruses, could be anything. Result is what we’d call CFIDS, what you guys would call ME. It’s a serious illness, in bad cases very nasty indeed.’
‘Can you fix it?’
Another shrug. ‘Look, with time and resources, I reckon Kati and I could fix pretty much anything. But we’ve only got three patients in the whole of next week and somehow I don’t think she’s one of them.’
Meg passed her magazine over to Bryn.
‘Free publicity,’ she said. ‘Always listen to your Auntie Meg.’
NINE (#ulink_594113bf-8294-51ad-bb85-32f10f843b16)
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