George Bartram - Under the Freeze

“Are you armed?” Carrington said.

“No. I didn’t think you’d want me to be.”

“I’d only have had to take it away, yes. We’re armed.” Tarp was thinking of the last time Carrington had been around guns. His people had been armed then, too.

“Here he comes,” Carrington whispered.

“How can you tell?”

Carrington smiled wanly. “I know the car.”

Tarp watched a maroon BMW coast down the ramp and turn into an empty space. Two men were standing at the rear of a Renault sedan, and the driver of the BMW waited for them to leave. After two minutes, however, they had still made no move to go, and the driver got out of his car with elaborate casualness and made his way slowly along the oily concrete between the cars.

It was Ramsey Matthiessen, the man who had given Tarp the lecture at Prong’s and Carrington’s superior at MI-5.

“Wait until he has the tube,” Carrington said.

“I know.”

“We must have his fingerprints on it and the photo of him taking it.”

“I know.”

Tarp watched Matthiessen stroll toward the hiding place. He stopped and tied his shoe. As he straightened, the two men who had been talking with such vitality raised their hands in almost military salutes and jumped into their cars; engines roared, and the smell of exhaust grew stronger. Then, with waves and grins and blasts from their horns, they pretended to lunge at each other with the vehicles and then went up the ramp and were gone. Matthiessen watched them go, for some reason with a smile on his unhealthy face. Only then did he go to the hiding place and take down the tube. He slipped it into a pocket and turned back.

Tarp let Carrington go ahead of him as they moved between Matthiessen and his car. He saw them at once. He gave Carrington an odd smile, almost of condescension, but he could not keep the smile up when he looked at Tarp. “I’d rather it was almost anybody than you,” he said to Tarp.

“Keep your hands where we can see them,” Carrington said briskly. “The entrances are blocked. We are armed.”

Matthiessen’s face seemed to darken and the discolored pouches under his eyes looked purple. “I won’t give any trouble,” he said. He glanced at Carrington’s empty sleeve. “I always knew I’d be—” His grin turned sickly, yet he seemed genuinely amused. “We all say the same thing in this spot, don’t we.”

“I’m very sorry, Ramsey.” Carrington went close to Matthiessen. “Ramsey Matthiessen, I charge you with violation of your oath of fidelity to Her Majesty and her government; I charge you with crimes grave and heinous; I warn you that anything you say at this time may be used against you when these matters are brought before a magistrate. I suggest you engage counsel at once.” His voice fell for the last sentence, becoming conversational and almost intimate.

“I know how it goes, Carrington,” Matthiessen said with artificial weariness, trying to recover some of the supercilious hauteur that had marked his behavior in office. One of the MI-5 men came down from the entrance to their right and began to search Matthiessen, murmuring his apologies but going ahead resolutely. “I don’t have a gun, you fool,” Matthiessen said with contempt.

The man used white tissue to extract the tube, which he wrapped in clear plastic. Matthiessen watched it hungrily.

“There’s nothing in it this time,” Tarp said.

Matthiessen looked at him with hatred.

“I suppose they’re for your wife?”

Matthiessen looked at him with hatred. Matthiessen’s wife had multiple sclerosis. “I think if you’ll cooperate with some information, you’ll be able to go on taking care of her.”

“That’s despicable.”

“Yes.” Tarp looked back without expression. “I’m a bit of a swine.”

It was still afternoon in the eastern United States, and Tarp was able to put through a call from Carrington’s office to a biological researcher in New Jersey. It was to her that Gance had taken the phials Tarp had given him.

“What’s in them, then?” Tarp said when the necessary greetings were done.

“I haven’t really done a job on them yet.” The woman had a remarkably nasal voice, and really sounded like the screeching of brakes.

“Do you have any idea?”

“Oh, sure. It’s a live virus vaccine of some kind. Was a live virus vaccine; it was mostly dead when it got to me. The temp is very critical. Real critical. Actually, you sent me two samples and they were different. Different viruses. Different structure, you know? Do you know viruses?”

“Not at all.”

“Well, I won’t go into all that. Actually, I’m pretty puzzled by some of it. Really oddball stuff in some ways. You know anything about the background of this stuff?”

Tarp thought of the habitat, the drawers, the dead fetuses. “I suspect there was some genetic doctoring done.”

“ Yeah ! Now that would resolve just a lot of problems!” She began to talk in technical jargon Tarp could not understand, and he interrupted her and said, “Would there be a reason to experiment with such a vaccine on — live human beings?”

She thought about that. “Well, if you were really out to lick one of the big ones — cancer and like that — on an individual basis, you could be trying to turn on an individual’s immune system with stuff like this. Do you follow me? What I mean is, not go for something that would work on just anybody, but tailor it to the individual and his/her immune system. You follow?”

“Yes.”

“And then you’d do a lot of testing to make sure you weren’t going to get a reaction for the same reason. Like organ-transplant syndrome. You follow?”

“I think so.”

“And you’d want to find a way to test on individuals just like your individual; I mean, with the same genetic fingerprint. Except it would be very dangerous for your individuals, you follow? You could kill people.”

“Yes, I see.”

“Could you fill me in on this stuff and where it came from, Mr. Tarp? I mean, it’s real strange stuff. And very unique. Could you give me some background?”

“No, I’m afraid I couldn’t. Thank you.”

“There’s lots more I haven’t said.”

“Yes, I’ll take a written report. Later. That’s enough for now…”

Matthiessen told them that he had served for more than two years as the go-between for Buenos Aires and Moscow, signaling Maxudov when Pope-Ginna was in London and ready to make a delivery; at the same time, he placed a call to Buenos Aires and left a message with an answering machine.

It was well after midnight when he had gone through it. Tarp had come in only toward the end, when most of it was clear and Matthiessen’s dislike for him would not get in the way.

“Did you order the attempt to kill me in London?” Tarp said.

“Certainly not. I was told to keep track of you if I could, and when the meeting was set up at Prong’s, I passed that along.”

“To whom?”

Matthiessen hesitated. He looked at Carrington, who was lying on a sofa, awake but tired out. “A telephone number in London. I’ve already given all of that.”

“We’re checking it,” Carrington said from the couch. “It’s probably long since abandoned. “They were in an office in the MI-5 annex, which was rather rundown and whose seediness suggested that it belonged to a firm of not very respectable lawyers.

“Do you know who Maxudov is?” Tarp said to Matthiessen.

“Certainly not.”

“Do you know whom you were dealing with in Buenos Aires?”

“Never.”

“How was the arrangement set up?”