Brian Freemantle - Dead End

She went back to her wine glass like a clairvoyant studying a crystal ball. ‘Does that mean we’re moving on, into a commitment?’

‘You’re the resident judge of that – it’s your chosen word.’

Rebecca remained engrossed in her glass for several more moments. Then she said, crack-voiced: ‘It sounds like it is.’

‘You’re the judge,’ repeated Parnell. Was that what he was offering, a commitment? He didn’t think the conversation had started out in that direction. He pushed aside his own, now cold, pot roast, which wasn’t anyway an American speciality he liked.

‘I just delivered the judgement.’

‘You don’t sound very sure about it.’

‘It wasn’t supposed to come out that way… like… oh shit…!’ she stumbled.

‘You any idea where we’re going with this?’

‘No.’ Rebecca’s voice was now mouse-like.

Parnell wasn’t sure about anything: about how they’d stumbled into this quicksand in the first place. ‘Now we’ve got this far, beyond the refusal, why don’t we wait a while, decide what we both want?’

‘OK,’ accepted Rebecca, mouse-voiced still.

‘That was quite a loop.’

She smiled, uncertainly. ‘I guess it was.’

‘And now we’re back at the beginning.’

‘I’ve almost forgotten what that was.’

‘No you haven’t. No more spy games, OK?’

‘I keep saying that.’

‘Say it again.’

‘OK.’

‘Mean it. Don’t commit professional suicide over some stupid non-mystery.’

Rebecca opened her mouth to speak but stopped. ‘I won’t say OK one more time. I promise. But this time I really, really mean it. I’ll forget about France.’

‘Good.’

‘I know I shouldn’t be, but I feel… I don’t know… embarrassed, I guess… now that we’ve…’ She floundered to a halt. ‘What do you feel?’

Parnell only just stopped himself from saying OK, which wouldn’t have been right in any context. ‘I feel you and I have got to talk a lot and laugh a lot and, in our own time, without any hurry or pressure, decide a lot.’

‘You don’t like pot roast, do you?’

‘It’s not my favourite.’

‘We’re deciding already.’

Parnell supposed taking pot roast off the menu was a start.

Irrationally Parnell felt uncomfortable taking the weekend off, and compensated by getting to McLean around six every morning the following week, and on the Wednesday ran for the elevator that was taking Russell Benn to their shared floor.

‘Sorry. Didn’t mean to frighten you,’ apologized Parnell, surprised at the medical research director’s startled reaction to his door-thrusting arrival. ‘I had to wait more than five minutes for a car to come back yesterday.’

‘Not used to people this early,’ said the black professor, recovering.

‘This your usual time?’ asked Parnell.

‘Varies,’ said the man. ‘Usually try to make an early start.’

‘Came across the other day. But you were busy.’

‘I’m still going through your stuff. Look forward to talking about it.’

‘You on to something new?’ asked Parnell.

‘What?’

‘What you’re working on. I was told you couldn’t be interrupted. Which I understood.’

Benn made an awkward, arm-lifting gesture. ‘Seemed a possibility. Doesn’t appear to be working out.’

‘What?’ demanded Parnell, directly.

There was a hesitation. ‘It’s a respiratory thing: a chest-muscle relaxant. Like I said, doesn’t seem to be working out on mice trials.’

‘We going to get a look at it on our side of the fence?’

‘I’m not getting anywhere, so it looks like a no-no. I would have thought you’ve got enough with what we’ve given you.’

‘Always room for more.’ The man was lying, Parnell knew.

Dwight Newton observed the previous protocol, catching the first New-York-bound flight from Washington and entering the corporate building on Wall Street using the unobserved, code-controlled penthouse elevator intentionally shielded from CCTV range. As before, Edward C. Grant was there ahead of him, waiting on the other side of the overpowering desk.

‘You’ve finished the tests?’ demanded the hunched, diminutive man, not bothering with any formal politeness.

‘That’s for you to decide,’ said Newton. Knowing there was no possibility of lunch, he’d got up in time for the maple-syruped waffles that never added weight to his skeletal frame, but he had hoped for coffee. There wasn’t any.

‘And?’

‘We added all the French-recommended colouring and flavouring to a slew of their products: linctus, cough medicines, bronchitis and asthma treatments, analgesics – most of their range. Tests on mice and monkeys showed no adverse reaction whatsoever.’

‘You telling me we can go ahead?’ smiled Grant.

‘The French also experimented with liulousine, so we did too. It would add a good twenty per cent on to any pirating cost. Again, nothing adverse in any animal trial. Because it’s in the same classification, we went further and introduced our beneuflous: that would hike the copying cost up to thirty per cent: there’s no indigenous source, so both liulousine and beneuflous would have to be imported…’

‘They’d be buying beneuflous – our drug – to pirate us!’ sniggered Grant.

‘It would be more cost-effective to copy other manufacturers, which I thought was the strategy we’re trying to set up,’ said Newton. ‘But if they chose to use our formulae, then yes, they’d have to buy our drugs to manufacture their copies of our drugs!’

‘I like it. I like it very much. No bad reactions at all?’ There was always a near-orgasmic feeling at the thought of making money.

‘None.’

‘What are liulousine and beneuflous?’

‘Expectorants.’

‘So, you’re signing the whole thing off as safe! We can go ahead?’

‘Paris hasn’t tested on humans. Neither have we.’

‘I thought mice were comparable and compatible enough?’ questioned the non-medical president.

‘There could be minimal variations. We – or France – should test on human volunteers to be one hundred per cent sure.’

‘We’re talking Africa, not civilization.’

Dwight Newton, who’d believed himself beyond any reaction to anything Grant might say or do, was momentarily shocked into silence. ‘You know the three-phase testings,’ he managed.

‘Every preparation we’re talking about has gone through the French testing schedule and conforms to their licensing regulations,’ insisted Grant.

‘What about these additions?’

‘Georges Mendaille doesn’t anticipate any difficulty. Neither does Saby, providing none of it is sold on the domestic market.’

Once again Newton had to pause before speaking. ‘How can that be explained to the licensing authorities?’

‘Rifofludine,’ said Grant, shortly, having rehearsed the moment.

‘The French-recommended flavouring?’ queried Newton.

‘Saby described it as a preservative in hot climates.’

‘It would have helped if I’d spoken to Saby when he was here! I didn’t test for that!’ It was the nearest Newton had ever come to confronting the president, and his stomach lurched as he spoke.

‘You can test now, can’t you?’ said Grant, sharply.

‘What else did Saby claim?’

‘That the colouring agent is a total placebo.’

‘But very practicable among people who have difficulty reading or comprehending, but who can understand differences in colours?’ anticipated Newton. He felt physically nauseous.

‘Exactly!’ agreed Grant, enthusiastically. ‘We could even get some public health recognition for this.’