Brian Freemantle - Dead End

‘I just got back from an FBI interview. I don’t think I did very well.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me you were going? Ask me to come along?’

‘It didn’t occur to me. Didn’t think it was necessary.’

‘Why don’t you think it went very well?’

‘I couldn’t tell them anything!’

‘Of course you couldn’t.’

‘It sounded like… oh, I don’t know what it sounded like, as if I could even have been hiding something.’

‘I should have come with you.’

‘You’re probably right. But wouldn’t it have appeared that I did have something to hide, needing my lawyer beside me?’

‘Representation’s your legal right. We’ve already proved in a court that you’re not involved.’

‘In murder. They’re concentrating on terrorism! They said they’ll probably need to speak to me again.’

‘Next time I’ll come along.’

‘They said something else, too. That I might be in physical danger. Not from the Metro DC police, although they agreed with your warning. From whoever killed Rebecca. They told me to be careful.’

‘Sounds like good advice.’

‘You agree with them, that it’s a possibility.’

‘Of course it’s a possibility. I would have thought that was obvious.’

‘It hasn’t been, until now. It’s not a very comforting thought.’

‘It’s not intended to be. It’s intended to be advice you should take.’

‘I’m trying.’

‘Don’t stop. And don’t try going alone any more. Talk to me. That’s what eventually you’re going to pay a lot of money for.’

Parnell was conscious of Kathy Richardson through the glassed separation, intently watching for him to replace the telephone, so he turned the movement into a welcoming gesture, opening his closed door to admit her.

The woman said at once: ‘Dwight Newton wanted to see you, the moment you got back…’ She offered a strong, sealed manila envelope. ‘And this came from Dr Spacey.’

Parnell weighed the choices as well as physically testing the envelope, and decided upon the vice president first. On his way further into the Spider’s Web, he thought he should have telephoned ahead but continued on anyway. He was admitted immediately, to a reception in distinct contrast to the previous day. The white-coated man remained hunched forward over his desk and said at once: ‘You didn’t tell me you were going to the FBI!’

‘When we spoke, I didn’t know I was.’

‘I should have known! Been told! Dubette are being dissected in the media, in connection with it all. I should have known.’

‘It was my oversight. I’m sorry.’

‘What was it all about?’

‘They wanted to interview me, obviously.’

‘Someone from Dubette should have been with you.’

‘I don’t think so, Dwight, do you?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘The lawyer you chose for me would have railroaded me into God knows what sort of situation if I’d let him represent me. If I’m accompanied for any further meetings, it’ll be by the man who got me freed, on the spot.’

‘Rebecca Lang’s tape would have been found,’ insisted the other man.

‘Not by me. Or a court official.’

Newton coloured. ‘So, how was it? The interview, I mean.’

‘Still very preliminary. There wasn’t a lot I could tell them.’

‘What was said about Dubette?’

‘Nothing, specifically. As I said, everything was preliminary.’

‘They got any leads?’

Parnell looked steadily at the other man for several moments. ‘Preliminary,’ he repeated, for the third time. ‘No leads, no nothing. Just mystery.’ The greatest of all was when and how – and by whom – will an attempt be made to kill me, he thought, and wished he hadn’t, because he was back into a B-movie mindset.

‘Your people working on the flu request?’ abruptly switched Newton.

‘The current samples were only due today. I haven’t yet had time to check if they’ve arrived. I’m going to head it up, with three others.’

‘I want everyone involved,’ insisted Newton. ‘And I want to be kept in the closest touch. About everything.’

‘I hear the message,’ said Parnell. It would be difficult not to, so often had it been repeated.

Back in his office, the door secured again, Parnell sat for several moments gazing down at Barbara Spacey’s sealed report, wondering if the man he had just left had read it before their confrontation, confused by Newton’s pendulum mood swings. Impatiently Parnell tore open the envelope, not expecting the brevity of the woman’s assessment. In Barbara Spacey’s opinion the events to which he had been subjected had profoundly affected him psychologically. He was making every effort, much of it subconsciously, to suppress any obvious reaction, but would be overly worried by the reaction of others towards him. She was unsure of the true depths of his feelings towards Rebecca Lang and believed Parnell felt, although he might be unable to identify the reason, a deep sense of guilt. There was a marked absence of the overconfidence that she had commented upon in her first report. She wanted another interview in the near future.

She might, thought Parnell. He didn’t.

There appeared to be no resentment at Parnell’s announcement that he was joining the expanded flu research team and it was automatically accepted that he would be its leader. From Tokyo there were frozen specimens of the current bird flu virus, as well as quite separate – and unexpected – samples of SARS from the masked palm civet cat, the wild animal species considered a culinary delicacy in China, and suspected of being the source of a renewed but so far limited outbreak of the disease that became an epidemic in the Far East in 2003. There were also cultures from two human victims of the new SARS outbreak in China’s Guangzhou city. The inconclusive research notes on both from Dubette’s Japanese subsidiary ran to forty pages and included warnings from the World Health Organization of a potential pandemic from both respiratory illnesses.

‘We didn’t know we were getting the additional severe acute respiratory syndrome material?’ queried Parnell.

Ted Lapidus shook his head. ‘Maybe Tokyo is treating them as allied conditions to examine in conjunction.’

Parnell said: ‘And if the viral composition is different, we could confuse ourselves.’

‘It could be something Russell Benn and his merry men want to work on at the same time,’ suggested Beverley Jackson.

‘I’ll find out,’ said Parnell. ‘And if it is, then let them. Here, for the moment, we’ll leave the WHO worrying about SARS pandemics. We’ll concentrate on avian flu and come back to SARS as a separate project.’ A part of his mind was still preoccupied, which he guessed it would be for a long time to come, but Parnell believed the majority of his concentration to be back upon the work at hand and it pleased him. It made him feel in charge of himself, which he’d always been supremely sure of but hadn’t felt for the last few days, needing to be reliant on – or at the mercy of – others. Which, he acknowledged, had been Barbara Spacey’s psychological assessment.

‘We could have a boost for our flu experiments,’ said Sean Sato. ‘Did a Web surf yesterday while I was waiting for the Tokyo stuff to arrive. The Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, working with the National Institute for Medical Research in England, have found how the 1918 influenza transferred from birds to humans. The importance of the discovery, from our point of view, is that it’s genetic.’

‘Take us through it,’ said Parnell.

‘They worked with genes from the 1918 virus recovered from an Inuit woman whose body was preserved in a frozen Alaskan tundra grave, and from kept samples from US soldiers who died in the pandemic,’ recounted Sato, enjoying the audience. ‘And isolated the bird-flu viral protein, haemagglutinin. It’s got spikes, like darts. It’s the darts that locked it on to human cells, like spears, and by which it gained entry to cause the infection…’