Brian Freemantle - Dead End

‘What type of changes?’

‘Colourings, mostly. For better recognition. All placebos, but we had to check them out chemically, of course. That’s what it was, safety checks.’ Newton was sweating now under the regulation white coat, again glad he was wearing it.

‘At the seminar I thought the president referred to it as a way of preventing piracy of our products?’ persisted Parnell.

There was nothing dangerous in the truth, Newton thought. ‘That too. It’s a winner, every which way. If the formula is pirated, it makes it more expensive than our competitors. If the products are bought genuinely, it makes them easier to recognize by people who can’t read too well.’

‘I looked on my list – everything made available to check out genetically,’ pressed Parnell. ‘I couldn’t find anything as up to date as that.’

Newton smiled. ‘Wasn’t that list provided before we checked out the French stuff?’

‘Only for our French subsidiary? Nowhere else?’

‘No.’

‘Why not across the board?’

‘I told you, specifically targeted. It’s in the Third World where the piracy is greatest and where the literacy and comprehension is the lowest.’

‘I’ll ask Russell for some samples, shall I?’

Newton’s frown return. ‘What the hell for?’

‘I thought I was getting everything? That’s the arrangement, isn’t it?’

‘And I thought your unit had been very specifically tasked.’

‘It has. And we’re working on it in every way that’s open to us. I’m not for a moment suggesting we break away, certainly not on something like placebo infusion you’ve already cleared to be totally safe. I just want to stick with the working arrangement we agreed when we set my unit up, to get everything and look at everything over the course of time.’

There was no danger, Newton told himself again. He shrugged. ‘Sure, get samples from Russ. Just don’t take your eye off the main ball, OK?’

‘I won’t take my eye off the main ball,’ promised Parnell, an assurance more for his satisfaction than Dwight Newton’s.

Parnell tried to seize the moment and see Russell Benn that afternoon, talking generally of comparing their separate progress – not disclosing his lack of it – but the chemical research director pleaded pressure of work and postponed a meeting until the following day, which Parnell guessed to be a delay to consult with Dwight Newton, and which lost him his hoped-for advantage. Benn was waiting when Parnell arrived, his desk cleared, the coffee prepared. Once again Parnell had gone into Benn’s territory, and he continued the concession, providing his empty account first. Benn declared himself impressed by what he called the generosity of the Scripps Research Institute and the National Institute for Medical Research in sharing their research material more or less in its entirety, disclosing in return his division’s equal failure even to know where to start upon a commercial vaccine after Parnell further conceded his department hadn’t yet succeeded in synthesizing a gene from the Tokyo samples, nor produced anything worthwhile from their animal testing.

‘What about the complete mapping of the poultry genome?’ asked the black scientist, displaying his medical-publication awareness.

Once more, fleetingly, Parnell had the impression of being tested. ‘It gives us – and every other researcher and group trying to do what we’re attempting – three thousand million bases, to compare against three thousand million human genetic bases, to find one, just one, that might provide a mutating-inviting host cell.’

‘Which you’re doing?’

‘Of course we’re doing it,’ said Parnell, although refusing to rise to the other man’s challenge. ‘But there are at least six different strains of domestic chicken farmed in China, quite apart from all the other global test species. But let’s just stay with China. Which, alone, gives us a multiplication of eighteen thousand million.’

‘I can work out the mathematics for myself,’ patronized Benn.

‘But not, chemically, a quicker way towards a treatment!’

‘Maybe neither of us will be the lucky ones,’ Benn said, with forced philosophy.

‘I didn’t believe we were allowed to think like that here at Dubette.’

‘We’re not,’ smiled the other man. ‘Don’t tell anyone I ever said it.’

‘I spoke with Dwight yesterday, about the work you both did on the French stuff,’ announced Parnell, impatient with the sparring.

‘It was just placebo additions to existing formulae,’ dismissed Benn, the confidence confirming Parnell’s belief of prior consultation with Dwight Newton.

‘Dwight explained. He agreed the improvements should be added to everything else I’ve been given, to be looked at genetically some time.’

‘Not sure we’ve got any batch samples left,’ said Benn. ‘Once we established the safety, I think they were all destroyed.’

‘Could you check?’

‘Sure.’

‘And if you don’t have made-up samples, you’d have the old and new formulae? And I could get shipped from Paris the old against the new, couldn’t I?’ insisted Parnell.

‘Sure,’ said Benn again. ‘Like I said, I’ll check.’

By noon the following day, Parnell received fifteen differently name-marked phials, with the comparable number of Dubette commercially packaged and identified bottles previously produced in France. Using that comparison he quickly discovered the major differences between the old and new formulae were liulousine and beneuflous, which the pharmacological register described as expectorants, and a flavouring agent called rifofludine, which in hot climates had a limited function as a preservative when refrigeration was unavailable. There were also six colouring agents, all of which were listed as simply that, non-medically-active colourants.

Also that day, the raw research material, each with its research notes, arrived from San Diego and London, both far more extensive and detailed than Parnell had anticipated. Parnell stored everything from Russell Benn’s division under refrigeration, separating the rifofludine for later temperature match. The whole operation took him less than an hour and was completed long before Russell Benn unexpectedly came into the pharmacogenomics unit.

‘Get everything you wanted?’ greeted the man.

‘If fifteen samples are everything I wanted, then yes, I have. Thanks.’ Parnell saw Benn looking at the just-opened packages occupying virtually all of his desk. ‘And it took all of this to discover the haemagglutinin protein of the 1918 flu epidemic.’

‘What are you going to do with it?’

‘Study it. Hope to get an idea – a possible path to follow at least. Somewhere among all this is the specific attempt by the Scripps Institute and the London School of Medicine to match the chicken genome. If they’d done it already, it would have been announced. I’m hoping we’ll get a lead from everything they’ve done, from which we might find a different approach for our particular needs.’

‘And if you don’t?’

‘We go on stumbling about in the dark.’

‘You get a lead I could follow as well, I’d appreciate your telling me…’

‘If I get any sort of direction, I’m not going to keep it to myself,’ assured Parnell.

There was an overwhelming temptation to start on the material at once, but Parnell remained strictly professional, actually helping Kathy Richardson make duplicates not just for the four seconded to the specific influenza team, but for Mark Easton and Peter Battey as well. He included the two men in the regular end-of-day general discussion, offering each their full dossier cases and suggesting their spare-time input.