Dick Francis - Shattered

I vaguely remembered Martin mentioning the dinner but hadn’t paid much attention. It was typical of Martin, though, to make friends in unexpected places. I had myself, after all, met him in a jury room.

After a while Lawson-Young said, “We searched absolutely everywhere for proof that Adam had in his possession material that belonged to the laboratory. We know... we’re ninety percent certain... that he recorded every relevant detail onto the videotape that he entrusted to the care of Martin Stukely.”

There was nothing, I heard with relief, about trying to make me reveal its whereabouts through the use of black mask methods or threats of unmerciful dentistry. I was aware, though, that the former tension in the professor’s muscles had returned, and I wondered if he thought I was fooling him, as Adam Force had done.

I said simply, “Force has the tape. Ask him. But yesterday he told me he’d recorded a sports program on top of your formulae and conclusions, and all that remained on the tape now was horse racing.”

“Oh God.”

I said, “I don’t know that I believe him.”

After a few moments the professor said, “How often can you tell if someone’s lying?”

“It depends who they are and what they’re lying about.”

“Mm,” he said.

I glanced back in my mind to a long line of half-truths, my own included.

“Discard the lies,” George Lawson-Young said, smiling, “and what you’re left with is probably the truth.”

After a while he repeated, “We’ve searched absolutely everywhere for proof that Adam had in his possession material that belongs to the laboratory. We believe that he recorded every relevant detail onto the videotape because one of our researchers thought he saw him doing it, but as he works in an altogether different field he believed Adam when he said he was making routine notes. Adam himself entrusted a tape into the care of Martin Stukely at Cheltenham races. When Stukely died we learned from asking around that his changing room valet had passed the tape on to Stukely’s friend, as previously planned.” He paused. “So as you are the friend, will you tell us where best to look for the missing tape? Better still, bring it to us yourself... as we believe you can.”

I said baldly, “I can’t. I think Force has it.”

Lawson-Young shivered suddenly in the cold damp wind, and my own thoughts had begun to congeal. I proposed that we find somewhere warmer if we had more to say and the professor, after cogitation and consultation with his microphone, offered me a visit to his laboratory, if I should care to go.

Not only would I like to go, I felt honored to be asked, a reaction clearly visible on my face from the professor’s own return expression. His trust however didn’t reach as far as stepping into my car, so he went in one that arrived smoothly from nowhere, and I followed with Jim.

The professor’s research laboratory occupied the ground floor of a fairly grand nineteenth-century town house with a pillared entrance porch. Antiquity stopped right there on the doorstep: everything behind the front door belonged to the future.

George Lawson-Young, very much the professor on his own turf, introduced me to his team of young research doctors whose chief if not only interest in my existence lay in my having long ago invented a way of making perfect glass joins between tiny tubes of differing diameters so that liquid or gasses would move at a desired speed from one tube to the next.

They hadn’t much else of my work there, but the words Logan Glass etched on mini pipettes and a few specialized test tubes got me accepted as a sort of practitioner rather than simply a sightseer. Anyway, my ability to identify things like vacutaires, cell separators, tissue culture chambers and distillation flasks meant that when I asked what exactly had been stolen the second time by Adam Force, I got told.

“Actually, we now think it was the third thing,” a young woman in a white coat murmured sorrowfully. “It seems likely that he also took out of here the formula of our new asthma drug aimed at preventing permanent scar tissue occurring on the airways of chronic asthmatics. Only recently did we realize what had happened, as at the time, of course, we believed his assurances that he was borrowing some finished work from last year.”

The nods all around were indulgent. In spite of all, there were friendly faces for Adam Force. It was the professor himself, whose eyes had opened, who told me finally what I’d been in need of knowing all along.

“The videotape made and stolen by Adam Force showed the formation of a particular tissue culture and its ingredients. The tissue culture was of cancer cells of the commoner sorts of cancer like that of the lung and the breast. They were concerned with the development of genetic mutations that render the cancer cell lines more sensitive to common drugs. All common cancers may be curable once the mutated gene is implanted into people who already have the cancer. The tape probably also shows photographs of the chromatography of the different components of the cancer cell genetic constituents. It is very complicated. At first sight it looks like rubbish, except to the educated eye. It is, unfortunately, quite likely anyone might override the ‘Don’t record on top of this’ tab.”

He lost me halfway through the technical details, but I at least understood that the tape that could save the world contained the cure for a host of cancers.

I asked the professor, “Is this for real?”

“It’s a significant step forward,” he said.

I pondered, “But if Force is going around asking millions for it, is it worth millions?”

Somberly, Lawson-Young said, “We don’t know.”

Adam Force had said the same thing, “I don’t know.” Not a lie, it seemed, but a statement that the process hadn’t yet been extensively tested. The tape was a record of a possibility, or ot an almost certainty whose worth was still a gamble.

I said, “But you do have backup copies of everything that’s on that tape, don’t you? Even if the tape itself should now show horse racing?”

Almost as if he were surrendering to an inevitable execution, the professor calmly stated the guillotine news. “Before he left with the videotape, Adam destroyed all our at-present irreplaceable records. We need that tape, and I hope to God you’re right that he’s lying. It’s two years’ work. Others are working along these lines, and we would be beaten to the breakthrough. We’d more likely lose the millions we might have earned.”

Into a short silence the telephone buzzed. George Lawson-Young picked up the receiver, listened and mutely handed it to me. The caller was Jim in a high state of fuss.

He said with lively alarm, “That medic you saw yesterday, the one with the white beard?”

“Yes?”

“He’s here in the street.”

“Bugger him... What’s he doing?”

“Waiting. He’s in a car parked fifty yards up the road, facing towards you, and there’s a big bruiser sitting next to him. He’s got another car waiting and facing towards you, but coming the other way. It’s a classic squeeze setup, with you in the middle. So... what do you want me to do?”

“Where exactly are you?” I asked. “To reach you, do I turn left or right?”

“Left. I’m four cars in front of White-Beard, pointing towards the door you went in at. I’m parked there, but there’s a parking warden creeping about. I’m in a no-parking zone here, which White-Beard isn’t, and I can’t afford another ticket, it’s not good for my business.”

“Stay where you are,” I said. “Move only if you have to, because of the parking warden. Doctor Force saw you and your car yesterday. It can’t be helped.”