Brian Freemantle - Dead End

Parnell shrugged. ‘You know how I feel about it.’

‘You’ll support Deke, too?’

‘It’s hardly likely I’d back you and not Deke, is it?’

‘I think Deke’s worried a refusal might go against him, at Dubette.’

‘I thought Barry told you there was a legal right to refuse?’

‘It was a knee-jerk. He needs to check to be sure,’ said the lawyer’s former wife. ‘I’m going to ask him to make sure.’

Would the extent and intrusiveness he’d discovered in the personnel files help their objections? wondered Parnell. He wouldn’t say anything now, but he’d remind Jackson if it became a problem for either of them. ‘You sure it’s just Deke who’s worried?’

‘I told you my only concern.’

‘And I told you I wasn’t worried about it.’

A separation of silence came down between them. Hurrying to fill it, Beverley said: ‘You’re becoming quite the star television performer.’

‘Not from choice,’ said Parnell.

‘What are you going to do with ten million dollars?’

‘Pay your ex-husband’s bill,’ said Parnell, glad of the well-rehearsed joke. ‘We had lunch at your favourite midtown restaurant today. I told him we’d eaten there.’

‘Who paid?’

‘He did.’

‘It’ll go on your bill. I told you he knew – not about the restaurant but that we’d been out a couple of times.’

It was best they confront it, Parnell supposed. ‘He said you’d only ever lied to each other once.’

‘That’s off-limits,’ she refused, instantly.

‘OK,’ accepted Parnell, just as quickly. ‘We talked about it, you and I being seen together. He said it wouldn’t play well if it became public – talked about losing the sympathy vote.’

Beverley let more silence build up, but with a purpose. Looking very directly at him, she said: ‘Are we going to risk being seen together?’

‘I feel a total shit,’ Parnell confessed, needing to purge himself, raising his hand to just beneath his chin. ‘I’ve got guilt up to here.’

‘You and me both,’ she said. ‘What are we going to do about it?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Parnell, another admission he didn’t like making.

‘I don’t want to jeopardize anything. Cause any embarrassment. Or disrespect to Rebecca.’

‘You and me both,’ echoed Parnell. ‘Although I don’t actually give a damn about any ten-million-dollar court case.’

‘You tell me you don’t care about ten million bucks, I’ll try to believe you, but it won’t be easy.’

She was trying hard, Parnell acknowledged. He said: ‘We’re avoiding the question.’

‘Let’s take everything very slowly,’ suggested Beverley. ‘We’re talking like people with a secret, and there’s nothing to be secretive about! At the moment it’s no more than we like being with each other and seem to understand each other’s jokes, although we could possibly do with more of those.’

‘If there was more to laugh about,’ said Parnell.

‘You like big band, Glen Miller music?’

‘I could find out.’

‘There’s a concert at the Kennedy Centre at the weekend.’

‘I’ll get tickets.’

‘I already got them.’

‘You always this forthright?’ So much for excuses about spur-of-the-moment detours. And his undertaking – and understanding – with Barry Jackson.

‘Not always. I figured you already had a lot to do.’

‘You want more wine?’

Beverley shook her head, rising from the chair. ‘I’m driving. And I’m going now. Like I said, everything nice and slow.’

The duty private investigator from the agency – hired cash in advance, under a false name and using an equally anonymous cut-out procedure – let two cars come comfortably between him and Beverley Jackson for the short ride to Dupont Circle. The light had been bad but the man was sure he’d managed at least two identifiable photographs of her leaving Parnell’s apartment building.

When Parnell got to McLean the following day, there was a waiting memorandum that the half-yearly seminar had, without any given reason, been postponed until after the forthcoming annual stockholders’ meeting. It was to be the first of several memos he received that day.

Overnight the pendulum swung and Parnell’s day began with the mountains seeming higher and the oceans wider. Richard Parnell’s unsettling disappointment in himself was compounded by what he’d so easily agreed with Beverley the previous evening, which scarcely made sense because he wasn’t in any way disappointed or depressed by the thought of being with her the coming weekend. He wanted very much to be with her, and that wish outweighed all the rest of the conflicting doubts, like guilt and concern at their being seen together or at his being accused of hypocrisy, or whatever the accusation might be, if the outing – or any that hopefully followed – became public. In fact, the biggest contradiction of all, for someone with so many conflicting emotional confusions, was that, for the first time for a very long time, he felt remarkably happy by the time he arrived at McLean. And that had everything to do with the idea that had come to him after Beverley left, a thought that had so excited him he’d even considered calling her, needing someone with whom to talk about it. He hadn’t, though, because it would have appeared too much like an excuse, and by then he hadn’t rationalized his uncertainties as he believed he had, finally, on his way to North Virginia the following day.

Ted Lapidus was the first to arrive after Parnell, and told him at once that the previous day’s meeting with Russell Benn hadn’t shown any chemical research progress, adding that his impression had been that Benn’s unit were expecting a lead from pharmacogenomics.

‘Which, from the way it’s going so far, they’ll be lucky to get,’ remarked the dolefully moustached Greek scientist.

‘Let’s talk, when everyone else arrives,’ suggested Parnell. ‘I’ve had a thought.’

Beverley was once more the last, although it was still only just past eight. She smiled and said, ‘Hi!’ when the Greek geneticist led his group into Parnell’s instantly overcrowded office.

Parnell said: ‘I’ve been thinking about approaches. So far we’ve been trying to follow how the flu virus attaches itself and enters a host cell, like the spiky little bastard of 1918, right?’

‘That’s the A, B, C, D system,’ confirmed Lapidus.

‘Why don’t we try D, C, B, A?’ proposed Parnell. ‘Offer up a host target molecule, coloured so we’ll be able to trace which, if any, get hit.’

‘You get the idea from the colorants the French introduced?’ seized Pulbrow, at once.

‘As a matter of fact, I did,’ admitted Parnell. ‘This time the mutation, if it occurs, will be beneficial, not the other way around. I can’t understand why the method didn’t occur to me earlier.’

‘Or any of us,’ accepted Lapidus, doubtfully. ‘It’s worth trying.’

‘If going backwards gets us forwards, then let’s try it,’ said Beverley. ‘It’s the only idea in town.’

‘It’ll be a slow process of elimination,’ warned Deke Pulbrow.

‘It was always going to be that,’ Parnell pointed out. ‘But it doesn’t necessarily have to be that slow. Influenza is basically respiratory – that narrows our genetic field.’

‘By a few thousand,’ said Beverley.

‘We’ll need more samples. And a lot more mice,’ said Lapidus.

‘Get as many samples as you need from Tokyo,’ said Parnell.

‘We’ve got enough to start already,’ said Beverley, enthusiastically. ‘Kathy’s the mouse mother.’

‘Then start,’ urged Parnell.