Brian Freemantle - Dead End

‘I told you we tested on mice,’ insisted Benn. ‘There was no harmful effect whatsoever.’

‘Mice have a control mechanism. Why or how hasn’t been isolated…’ He looked directly at the black scientist. ‘I’ve tested everything you gave me, made up from the new French formulae, on human blood. Everyone else in my department has done the same today, independent blind tests. All with the same unequivocal results. In about two hours there is a rapid increase in the production of HPRT… an increase a human body couldn’t control. Administration, quite obviously, will be fatal. Production in France has got to be stopped, immediately. I hope to God distribution hasn’t already begun…’

‘There must be more… different… independent experiments,’ blustered Benn, all truculence gone.

‘Production, distribution, has got to be stopped right away,’ insisted Parnell. ‘I extended my tests, separately upon liulousine, beneuflous and rifofludine. By themselves they don’t cause any HPRT increase. There has to be some chemical effect when they’re combined in the cocktail, or maybe with the colouring agents, although I doubt the colorants contributed.’ Parnell hesitated, unsure if he’d left anything unsaid. Quickly he added: ‘I’ve obviously kept all the tests, all the cultures, for you both to examine.’

‘Why did you do this?’ asked the virtually silent Newton, still quiet-voiced. ‘You – your unit – had been given a specific assignment.’

Parnell felt the rising anger but suppressed it, having hoped the absurd demand wouldn’t be made but, deep within himself, believing himself adjusted now to Dubette thinking and Dubette rationalizing, he was not truly surprised that Newton had asked it. Tightly, careless of their inferring contempt or disgust in his tone, Parnell said: ‘Which we have been working upon, uninterrupted, except for two or three hours today. And that interruption was upon my very definite instructions, to confirm my initial personal findings. I worked here on Saturday. Russell had made the samples available to me after our conversation, Dwight, about France. I did the tests on impulse, because the samples were there, right in front of me. You really want to talk about why I did it – my having just told you there was no positive reason – when I’ve just also told you what Dubette are manufacturing in France? And what the result of that manufacture will be?’ He didn’t feel like the explaining schoolboy any longer. Instead he very much felt himself the castigating schoolmaster addressing careless, culpably inattentive students. They even looked like caught-out, culpable, inattentive students, no longer unchangeable senior pharmaceutical executives. It didn’t give Parnell any satisfaction.

Newton said: ‘It’s late in France. Gone midnight.’

‘Wake people up,’ insisted Parnell.

‘I think…’ began Newton, but stopped.

‘What?’ demanded Parnell.

‘I should talk to New York,’ finished the skeletally thin research vice president.

‘You do whatever needs to be done. If the French production isn’t stopped it will destroy Dubette as an international pharmaceutical conglomerate.’

‘Yes,’ accepted Newton, dully.

Just as dully, practically to himself, Benn said: ‘We cleared everything as safe.’

Caught by a sudden uncertainty, Parnell said: ‘Did I have everything? Or was there more?’

‘More,’ admitted Benn, unhesitatingly. ‘Some children’s decongestants. Some linctuses.’

‘It’s all got to be stopped. Withdrawn,’ demanded Parnell, frustrated by their apparent failure to understand the urgency.

‘Yes,’ said Newton again.

The other two men were virtually shell-shocked, Parnell decided. Careless now of patronizing or challenging or even demanding, he said: ‘It will be done, won’t it? You will speak to New York or Paris or whoever you need to warn? Tonight?’

Newton made a physical effort to recover, straightening in his chair, although yet again all he managed to say was, ‘Yes.’

‘Do you want me to be part of any link-up, technically to explain what’s happened – and the effect of it?’ asked Parnell.

‘No,’ refused Newton, recovering further. ‘It’s scarcely technical.’

‘I think my unit should examine all that we haven’t so far tested of what France was going to distribute,’ persisted Parnell, a tiny, irritating sand grit of doubt settling in his mind. He looked once more directly at Russell Benn. ‘And that you should start again, from the beginning.’

‘You’ve made your point well enough,’ bristled the man, emerging from his lethargy. ‘You want me to tell you we fucked up? OK, we fucked up! Satisfied?’

‘I will be when I’m sure nothing’s being distributed throughout Africa. Or that anything that has is being withdrawn and destroyed,’ said Parnell. ‘I’m not scoring points, looking for admissions of mistakes. I’m trying to stop a potential disaster.’

‘I accept that. And thank you,’ said Newton.

‘What about the cultures?’ asked Parnell. ‘Do you want to examine them now?’

‘I’m prepared to take your word for the moment,’ said the vice president. ‘The calls I’ve got to make are more important.’

Only Beverley Jackson was in the pharmacogenomics unit when Parnell returned. She said: ‘By yourself?’

‘Dwight has calls to make.’

‘We thought they’d want to see for themselves – that it would be more discreet if as few as possible were around.’

‘It is eight o’clock,’ Parnell pointed out. He calculated that it would be two a.m. in Paris.

‘From the way you talked on Saturday, you’re an authority on the bars of Georgetown. You fancy buying a girl a drink on her way home?’

‘Sure,’ accepted Parnell, surprised as well as pleased.

‘I’ll follow you.’

It meant he didn’t have to worry about lights in his rear-view mirror, Parnell supposed, as he led the way back into the city. One thought prompted another. Apart from the first two or three days after having his lawyer’s warning confirmed by the FBI, Parnell had increasingly found it difficult completely to believe he was in any physical danger, the more so as the days passed, although he still did what he considered to be taking care. But the FBI had been serious. So, too, had Beverley’s ex-husband. From which it was logical that anyone was exposed by association with him. He took his normal route home, crossing at the Key Bridge, but didn’t find any convenient parking in Georgetown itself, so he continued on to his reserved slot at Washington Square. There was a second space for Beverley practically outside the apartment.

He held her door open for her and said: ‘I hope you don’t mind the walk.’

‘It hardly counts as a walk.’

She took his arm almost automatically as they went back into Georgetown. He chose the bar he’d found on his first few days in the city. The student he’d got to know wasn’t there any longer. Beverley asked for beer and he had the same.

She said at once: ‘I didn’t wait on at work accidentally. I’m the elected spokesperson.’

To say what?’

‘To ask what,’ she corrected. ‘Why’d you test that particular batch of stuff, rather than anything else?’

The question brought Parnell’s mind back to his thoughts about inherent danger on the way in from McLean. ‘I was thinking, on the way here. Rebecca was murdered. The Bureau and Barry both think I could be targeted, too.’

‘Why?’

Parnell humped his shoulders. ‘No one’s worked out yet why Rebecca was killed. Or why anyone would want to kill me. But if I’m at risk, then so must be anyone who’s with me.’

‘Me, you mean!’ She sounded surprised.