Brian Freemantle - Dead End

He said: ‘How do you figure it’s a Bureau thing?’

‘They’re lawyers and I know lawyers, remember? They’re cloned in a lawyer factory, somewhere hidden in Ohio.’ Beverley had the bench space next to him for the avian-flu investigation.

‘Barry doesn’t look like that.’

‘He was a prototype that didn’t work – they abandoned the model.’

‘He sure as hell worked for me,’ said Parnell, uncaring at the American phraseology. He felt better. Not totally better, convinced as he once had been that he could climb mountains and swim oceans, but the cotton-wool feeling had gone from his head, and every moving part of his body didn’t ache at the slightest motion. The previous night had again been more of an exhausted collapse than sleep, but it had been rest of sorts, and that morning, alert as he now had to be, there hadn’t any longer been the confused disorientation of making monsters out of shadows.

‘Pity he didn’t work so well for me.’

It was more a throwaway line than an inviting complaint – an invitation Parnell wouldn’t anyway have accepted – but he thought it confirmed that Beverley Jackson was someone who always demanded the last word in any one-to-one conversation. He decided to allow it to her, because he wasn’t interested in trying to out-talk the woman.

What he was far more interested in was configuring something from the earlier influenza pandemics with the current outbreak, which yet again he accepted to be an illogical expectation but for which he’d hoped after Sean Sato’s initial, seemingly encouraging discoveries. Tokyo’s response to Parnell’s SARS query was as Lapidus had predicted, that their research was predicated on a connecting transmission link between that and avian flu, and that they had anticipated the exploration would be duplicated in America. Parnell copied the email to Russell Benn, together with his reply that the pharmacogenomics unit were treating the two respiratory conditions separately. As an afterthought he made a separate copy to the vice president, towards whose office he’d just seen the legal procession head.

By then he, Beverley Jackson, Ted Lapidus and Sato had exhausted every microscope comparison with the limited Tokyo samples without finding anything approaching a visual match to the spiked 1918 haemagglutinin gene or the structure of the 1968 Hong Kong virus. It was because there was a momentary hiatus in their work that Beverley had been looking out into the corridor, and it was the woman who said again: ‘And then there were more!’

Parnell looked up in time to see Howard Dingley and David Benton passing. Parnell almost expected them to be walking in step, but they weren’t. As he went by, Dingley looked into the unit and gestured. Parnell said: ‘They’re FBI.’

‘So I was right,’ insisted Beverley.

Definitely a last-word syndrome, thought Parnell. He said: ‘It was set up at the funeral.’

‘What’s our next step forward?’ impatiently broke in Sean Sato.

There was something proprietorial in the way the Japanese-American spoke, as if his earlier findings qualified him above the other two under Parnell’s supervision. Parnell said: ‘The obvious one, animals. We’ll try to synthesize, in mice to begin with. See if we can bring about a mutation and then monitor it, to find the bridge the virus crosses.’

‘All of us?’ queried Lapidus.

‘We don’t need to be involved, all of us, this early,’ acknowledged Parnell. ‘You three kick it off. I want to go back on that research Sean found, see if we can take it further and open up a separate path. We’re going to need more samples from Tokyo, too. We’ll jointly discuss each day’s progress.’

‘You’re second-checking?’ seized Lapidus.

Parnell was surprised at the interjection. ‘Of course. Nothing’s going to leave this department unless it’s been second and third and fourth time checked. And that’s before it goes into the statutory three-phase licensing process.’

‘We going to manage that in our lifetime?’ asked Lapidus.

‘It’s somebody else’s lifetime we’re concerned with,’ reminded Parnell.

‘I didn’t mean…’ started Lapidus, disconcerted.

‘I’m talking about what emerges from this unit, not anything else,’ Parnell halted him, sparing the man. ‘We all clear on what we’re doing?’

The two other men nodded. Beverley said: ‘Perfectly.’

Kathy Richardson looked up at Parnell’s emergence from the restricted laboratory, shaking her head at his enquiring look as he approached, to let him know there were no messages. Inside her office the woman was enclosed behind the battlement of file boxes, some already filled, many more waiting to be filled with the raw data she was in the process of sorting.

He said: ‘It’ll get better.’

‘You promise?’

‘I promise. And I’ll send my own emails.’

‘You needn’t.’

‘Democracy rules in the Dubette pharmacogenomics unit.’

‘I’ll get the T-shirts and the fender stickers printed.’

Parnell laughed openly at the gradually emerging independent irony, convinced he’d made the right choice in Kathy Richardson, as he had with everyone else. His email to Tokyo was brief, a simple request for more samples. Parnell experienced a nostalgic deja vu of his open-minded, free-exchange period in pure research when he began communicating with the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego and the National Institute for Medical Research in London. Literally within an hour, there were enthusiastic acknowledgements from the directors of both, each promising the raw experimental data of their respective findings that had not appeared either on the Internet or in the scientific journals. From each it was flatteringly obvious the quickness of their responses came from their recognition of his name and reputation on the genome project. Parnell wondered, and quickly wished he hadn’t, whether the notoriety of the past week might also have contributed.

So immersed was he that Parnell had forgotten the presence of the FBI investigators further along the corridor until Kathy Richardson’s warning arrival, Dingley and Benton hovering close behind. She said: ‘They’re asking for a minute or two.’

Parnell waved them in.

‘That’s all, just a minute or two,’ promised Dingley.

Benton said: ‘How’s it going?’

‘Better than it was,’ said Parnell. ‘But only just.’

‘How’s that?’ said Dingley.

‘Trying to adjust. Getting used to things,’ said Parnell.

Both men nodded, as if they understood.

‘You wanted a minute or two,’ prompted Parnell.

‘Trying to fit in, to everyone’s convenience, is all,’ said Dingley.

‘Any progress?’ asked Parnell, offering seats.

‘A lot of people still to see. Nothing clear yet.’

‘When’s there going to be anything that’s clear?’ pressed Parnell.

Benton made an open-handed gesture of uncertainty. ‘A lot of people still to see,’ he echoed his partner.

‘How’d it go with the vice president?’ asked Parnell, directly.

There was another hands-spread movement from Benton. ‘He had counsel with him. That’s why we stopped by. We’re certainly going to need to speak to you again, in the next little while. Your lawyer told us he wants to come along.’

Parnell reminded himself, as he had at the moment of his premature arrest, that America was the land of litigation and that he didn’t know anything whatsoever about the law. ‘I’ll warn him to be ready.’

‘That’ll be helpful,’ thanked Dingley.

‘What about the forensic examination of Rebecca’s house?’ demanded Parnell. ‘Was there any evidence of it having been searched, before you?’

‘Still being gone over,’ avoided Dingley.