Brian Freemantle - Dead End

‘I wanted a change from eating crow,’ said Parnell. ‘And it was a good day until the Newton episode. I think they’re all going to come together very well.’

‘Shouldn’t you give it more than a first-day impression, like you should have given the website idea more thought?’ cautioned the woman.

‘I am only talking first-day impression,’ said Parnell. ‘And I’ve already admitted to the other mistake. I still don’t believe it represented more than a one or two per cent danger. Five tops.’

‘Darling! To a company like Dubette the one or two per cent possibility of a competitor getting into its research is a major drama. Five per cent registers ten on the Richter scale. You’re not involved in pure science any more. You’ve got to remember that.’

‘I will, in future. Believe me!’ Parnell didn’t like losing, certainly not to someone like Newton, whom he judged to be a bully. But it had been an ill-considered mistake and he was determined not to make another.

‘I asked outright,’ suddenly blurted Rebecca.

‘What?’ frowned Parnell, totally confused.

‘My section head, Burt Showcross. I asked him outright what all the secrecy was about between France and us.’

‘What did he say?’ His mind blocked by the humiliating confrontation with Newton, Parnell had forgotten his earlier conversation with Rebecca about back-channelled secrecy from Dubette’s French division.

‘That he didn’t know either but that it sometimes happened and that I wasn’t to concern myself with it – any of it – again.’

Parnell was about to say that she should let it go at that but was halted by a sudden thought. Instead he said: ‘If Paris has come up with something they’re excited about – something to which they’re attaching such a degree of priority and secrecy – it could be something which has an application to pharma-cogenomics?’

Rebecca shrugged. ‘Who knows? But guess what?’

Parnell wished Rebecca didn’t so often conduct conversations like a quiz game. ‘What?’

‘There was a mistyped report from Paris, a good enough excuse to telephone them direct. While I was chatting to the girl I normally deal with, I was told the chief executive had been recalled to New York… along with the research-division head who misdirected that one message that no one, not even Showcross, was supposed to see.’

‘I think you should do what Showcross told you. Forget about it.’

‘Maybe it’s been a bad day for both of us.’

‘Forget about it,’ repeated Parnell. He wasn’t sure he would, though.

Edward C. Grant said: ‘I needed to speak to you like this, just the two of us. Discreetly.’

‘Of course,’ agreed Dwight Newton, who had caught the first shuttle from Washington that morning, wanting to be at the Dubette corporate building before the president. He’d failed. He’d been careful to wear his seminar suit, which matched the dark grey of Grant’s. And to enter, as instructed in the summons, by the special penthouse-only elevator.

‘We’re talking risk assessment,’ announced the Dubette president.

‘I understand.’ Newton thought the football-pitch size of Grant’s desk accentuated the man’s bantam-cock shortness.

‘It was a good idea to have security check everything out as thoroughly as they did.’ It was a safeguard to let the other man imagine he’d initiated the precaution, which he hadn’t. After what Grant regarded as the one and only mistake of his life – relegating that in his mind to a lapse more than a mistake – he now took no risks.

That amounted to praise, Newton decided. ‘I thought so.’

‘I had the same done in Paris. That was useful, too.’

‘You’ve seen everything I sent up, about the website proposal?’

Grant nodded, tapping a folder on the left of his desk. ‘You did good there, too, Dwight. I wish others had.’

Newton was quite relaxed, which he rarely was in Grant’s presence, certainly on a one-to-one basis. But he’d calculated the situation from every which way and concluded that he was probably the only person who couldn’t be accused of mistake or misjudgement. It certainly seemed that way from the conversation so far. Guessing the other man’s reference, he said: ‘What’s the take from Paris?’

‘Buck-passing,’ replied Grant, at once. ‘I hauled Saby back, for a personal explanation. And Mendaille, obviously.’

Newton was surprised, properly realizing how seriously the president was treating the misdirected communication. Henri Saby was the chief executive of the French subsidiary. Georges Mendaille was head of research in Paris and the man personally responsible for the mistake. ‘What do they say?’

‘Saby entirely blames Mendaille. Mendaille says it was a simple but understandable mistake, that out of habit he mishit the automatically logged email address, sending it to Washington in the normal way instead of personally to you, which was the specific instruction.’

‘If it was the specific instruction, Mendaille shouldn’t have been hitting keys from habit,’ said Newton. ‘He should have been concentrating.’

‘Exactly!’

Toadying bastard, thought Grant. But hadn’t he made everyone with whom he had to deal a toadying bastard?

‘You firing him?’

Grant shook his head. ‘Dismissed, he’d be resentful, wanting to hit back, a potential whistle-blower. I want him where I can see him, know what he’s doing all the time…’ The man paused. ‘Mendaille’s our hostage, we’re not ever going to be his. That’s the way it always works.’ There was another pause. ‘Which brings us back to your problems.’

Newton shifted uncomfortably at it being described as his problem, recognizing that no blame or culpability for anything would ever be traceable to Edward C. Grant. There’d be no record, not even a diary entry, of this meeting. Newton accepted, too, that despite everything being already set out in the file upon Grant’s desk, it all had to be talked through.

‘Rebecca Lang’s in a relationship with Parnell,’ he began. ‘Sometimes she stays at his place, sometimes – usually weekends – he stays over with her in Bethesda…’

‘We got photographs?’ cut in Grant, who already knew the answer from his direct contact with Harry Johnson, the head of Dubette security. The question was to bind Newton into any future action that might be necessary.

‘Coming and going from both places,’ confirmed Newton. That wasn’t in the file, so perhaps there was after all a purpose in talking it through. ‘She asked Showcross outright what was going on. He told her it was beyond her clearance and nothing to do with her…’

‘But then she rang Paris?’ cut in Grant, again.

‘On a cockamamie excuse about a transmission screw-up that could have been sorted out in a second by email.’

‘We know who she spoke to in Paris? What was said?’

Newton humped his thin shoulders. ‘Just the phone log, recording the outgoing call. It lasted six and a half minutes.’

‘Long time to sort out a simple transmission misprint,’ judged Grant.

‘Too long,’ agreed Newton. ‘You think we should get Saby or Mendaille to find out who she spoke to – what was discussed?’

‘We need to know,’ said Grant. ‘But I don’t want any more curiosity in Paris than might already have been aroused by my bringing Saby and Mendaille back.’

Not my problem or my decision, thought Newton, thankfully. ‘I think we’ve got to assume Rebecca will have told Parnell.’

‘Told him what?’ seized Grant, at once. ‘Is there any way she could have seen anything other than that one misdirected message?’

Newton didn’t answer at once, trying to assess the commitment being forced from him. Then he said: ‘No. No, I’m sure she couldn’t.’