Читать книгу: «Sweet Talking Money»
SWEET TALKING MONEY
HARRY BINGHAM
COPYRIGHT
This novel is a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Dedication quotation from Selected Poems, 1923–1958 by e.e. cummings, published by Faber and Faber
HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
This edition published in 2001
Copyright © Harry Bingham 2001
The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780006513551
Ebook Edition © JANUARY 2013 ISBN 9780007441006
Version: 2016-07-22
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DEDICATION
For my beloved N.
lady through whose profound and fragile lips the sweet small clumsy feet of April came into the ragged meadow of my soul.
EPIGRAPH
Books are books. But if books were films, then I was the writer and director, while the producer, editor and assistant director was my wife, Nuala. This is an acknowledgement in the most straightforward sense: a formal recognition of her part in the forming of this book. This book was written by one, but created by two.
CONTENTS
COVER
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
EPIGRAPH
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
THIRTY-ONE
KEEP READING
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY THE AUTHOR
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
ONE
1
Sometimes you have to go crazy before you can come to your senses. Sometimes you have to lose everything to find the one thing that really matters. Sometimes – Hell, forget about sometimes. Here’s what happened.
2
It was eight thirty-five on a chilly Boston evening, and the scientists were beginning to ramble. Enough.
‘Let’s call a halt,’ said Bryn. ‘Who’s writing up?’
He knew the answer. A scraggy scientist, looking like something put together from rags and pipe-cleaners, raised his hand. ‘Dr Lewinson. Excellent.’ Bryn turned on his smile, maximum beam. His show of goodwill was brief and insincere. Of the eighteen people in the room, fourteen would be fired as soon as the deal concluded. Bryn knew that because he was the architect of the whole transaction. The others didn’t, because they weren’t.
The meeting broke up.
As Bryn began to pack away, a further racking cough rumbled painfully from his chest. It was his second trip across the Atlantic that week, so his jet lag, coming at him from both sides, was having an echo effect on his battered system.
‘Dammit, look, I wonder if you can help,’ he said, grabbing one of the departing scientists. ‘I really ought to see a doctor.’
‘A medical doctor? Hey Steve, you’re not a doctor, are you?’
‘No. Why don’t you try what’s-her-face, Dr Dynamite downstairs?’
‘You think that’s safe?’ The scientist laughed. ‘Only kidding, really. She’s great, just … No, really, she’s great.’
As he spoke, the scientist fussed around with pass keys and swipe cards, taking Bryn downstairs, past empty laboratories, silent storage rooms, the hum of computers. They emerged on to a corridor on the ground floor, dark except for the glow of streetlamps spilling in from outside. They raced along until they arrived at a lighted doorway, where a brass plate advertised its owner, Cameron Wilde, MD, PhD. ‘Here you go,’ said the scientist, shaking hands. ‘Good luck.’
Bryn raised his eyebrows in enquiry. ‘Dr Dynamite, huh?’
‘She’s kind of explosive. That’s part of the reason, I guess.’
‘And the other part?’
‘Nobel prizes. Built on the profits old Freddie Nobel made out of dynamite.’ He nodded at Wilde’s door. ‘She’s a future winner, if ever I’ve seen one. And I have, actually. Several.’
Through a frosted pane in the door, lights burned. There was a dark shape, which might or might not have belonged to a future Nobel Prize winner. Bryn put his hand to the door and knocked.
3
The room was a good size, thirty foot by twenty, lit by three or four anglepoise lamps. On the wall where Bryn entered was a small pool of tidiness, somebody’s workstation, a secretary’s, probably. Everywhere else was chaos. Stacks of paper on every surface. Sheaves of computer print-out. Journals, textbooks, e-mails, binders. Yellow Post-it notes tacked anywhere and everywhere. There was a workbench jammed with two PCs, a portable, a couple of printers, a scanner, and wiring arrangements designed by a five-year-old. There were two further work areas crowded with microscopes, two high-capacity clinical fridges, boxfuls of needles, blood collection tubes rolling around loose in cardboard trays, plus other equipment Bryn didn’t recognise. The room’s built-in shelving had long ago buckled beneath the deluge, and sheets of chipboard standing on concrete blocks acted as emergency reinforcements. There were four chairs in the room and on one of them sat Cameron Wilde, MD, PhD.
‘Dr Wilde?’
‘Uh-huh.’
The doctor sat in a pool of light cast by one of the lamps, her face partly hidden by the hair which fell across it. She was pale-skinned, skinny, not much to look at.
‘I apologise for disturbing you. I’ve been working with the team upstairs and I needed a doctor urgently. One of them suggested you might be able to help.’
Wilde was working on a stack of documents. She didn’t seem over-anxious to greet her new arrival. Holding her pen in her mouth as she sorted papers, she said, ‘What’s the problem?’
‘Flu. Had it for weeks. I got a prescription in England, but didn’t have time to fill it before I left.’ He held out the piece of paper, which was no good to him in an American pharmacy. ‘I apologise for bothering you.’
She looked at the prescription, and let the pen drop from her mouth. ‘It’s no bother.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Your doctor gave you this? For flu?’
‘Right.’
‘Uh.’
‘Anything wrong?’
‘Wrong? Depends on what you want. If you want to get rid of your flu, this won’t help at all. If you just want to cover up the symptoms so you can go right on doing whatever it was that gave you flu in the first place, then this is just the stuff.’
‘Right. OK. I’ll take my chances. Thanks.’
‘And the more you go right on doing whatever it is you do, the longer the flu will stay.’
‘Like I said, I’ll take my chances.’
She shrugged. ‘OK.’
The pen went back into her mouth and her hands went back to sorting her papers. Bryn couldn’t see a prescription pad anywhere, but then again there might be five hundred of them hidden round the room.
‘You can give me the prescription?’
‘Can. Sure. But won’t.’ Each word came out with a little puff, as she began shifting big piles of paper to get at documents stuffed away at the bottom.
‘Won’t?’
Bryn was incredulous. At thirty-four, he was a Managing Director of Berger Scholes, one of the world’s biggest and most successful investment banks. Last year, his bonus had been £625,000 and his group, which handled company acquisitions in the pharmaceutical industry, had advised clients on transactions worth over sixty billion dollars. That wasn’t all. If he looked brutish on a bad day, he was handsome on a good one. He weighed two hundred and ten pounds, not much of which was flab. He was broad, heavy, strong; a corporate bruiser with brains. A Welsh farmer’s son, Bryn had taken himself to Oxford University, then for the last fourteen years crashed successfully through the investment banking jungle. The way he saw it, he’d go crashing on for years to come. If he wanted a prescription to relieve him of flu, he wasn’t going to let some self-righteous doctor with a face that last saw daylight in the Reagan administration stop him.
He pressed his chest with thick fingers, coughing as he did so. He wouldn’t plead, but he would make his point.
‘Dr Wilde, I understand that you would like to cure my flu outright, and I respect you for it. Unfortunately, to the best of my understanding, there is no cure for flu. But right now, this very minute, I am tired, I am in pain and I have a full day of work ahead of me tomorrow. I must therefore insist that you, please, give me the medication specifically designed to relieve people in my situation.’
Wilde quit doing whatever it was she was doing, and swung around to face Bryn. The anglepoise lamp was directly behind her head, so her face was more or less invisible to view.
‘I didn’t say there wasn’t a cure.’
Barely holding on to his temper, Bryn said, ‘OK. If you’d prefer to try me on something else, I’d be happy to trust your judgement.’
Wilde consulted her watch, angling it to catch the light. ‘I don’t have much time. Maybe half an hour.’
‘Half an hour …?’ Bryn wondered what prescription could possibly take half an hour to write. ‘Sure. OK. Whatever.’
‘And no guarantees. I don’t do too much human work these days.’
Things had gone beyond strange, Bryn decided, and he let this remark pass without comment. Just as well. Wilde had her head buried in one of the clinical fridges, searching for something. In the light streaming from the open door, Bryn could see rows of glass beakers, stoppered vials, glass trays, and neatly labelled cartons. Wilde emerged with a glass tray divided into twelve compartments. In each compartment, a little fluid sloshed around.
‘Any health problems? Serious ones, I mean.’
‘No.’
‘Any history of illness in the family?’
Bryn had injured his knee playing school rugby. His brother had been invalided out of the Pontypridd scrum with a femur fractured in three places, and his dad had damaged his ankle so badly in a game of pub rugby that when the bones healed, they had all fused together and the foot ended up as stiff as a board. Even Bryn’s grandfather had twice ended up in hospital having his stomach pumped after post-match celebrations that had started too early and ended too late. But still … ‘Nope. All healthy,’ he said.
‘OK. Good. Thumb, please.’
‘My thumb?’
Bryn held out his hand. Wilde picked up a cylinder just about big enough to hold a toothpick, held it to his thumb and clicked a button. Bryn felt nothing, but when the cylinder came away, blood welled from a small puncture wound.
‘Good. One drop in each compartment, please.’
She peeled away a cellophane cover from the tray, and Bryn held his hand out, dripping blood into each compartment. As he did so, his chest was racked by a deep and painful cough, and blood splattered untidily around the tray.
‘One drop per compartment. Please.’
Bryn held his thumb steadier as his cough subsided. ‘Can I ask what you’re doing? Is this for diagnosis?’
‘Diagnosis? I thought you said you had flu?’
‘Yes, but …’
‘What’s to diagnose? You get stressed, you get flu.’
‘I am not stressed.’
Bryn hated that. He hated it when those without the balls for the job assume that every successful banker must be stressed just because they’re successful. Bryn was successful, but he wasn’t stressed. Those who worked for him might be, but that was their lookout.
‘Sure you are. Stand.’
Bryn’s thumb had completed its duties, but nobody had mentioned the fact to his circulatory system, which continued to push blood out through the miniature wound. Since no cotton wool was on offer, Bryn stood up, thumb in his mouth to stop the bleeding. Meantime, Wilde stood up too, surprisingly tall in her flat shoes, lanky as anything, her labcoat looking as if it hung on a hanger.
‘May I feel?’ She approached Bryn, putting out her hand.
He opened his jacket, making it easy. With a sudden movement, her hand balled into a fist and shot forwards into the dead centre of his chest. The pain astonished him, rocking him backwards and momentarily winding him. He gripped the edge of the table behind him, careful not to’ dislodge any of its tottering piles.
‘Jesus!’ he said, as soon as his voice had emerged from a fit of agonising coughs. ‘Jesus Christ!’
‘Stress. That’s stress. Biological stress. Unhappy cells.’
Bryn held his hands over his heart. The pain in the rest of his body had mostly washed away, although a general ache still sang its reminder. He was about to make some comment, demand some explanation, but Wilde had already moved away from him and was bending over the glass tray with a pipette. Following the drop of blood into each compartment was another drop of something else.
‘OK. Let’s look.’
She thrust Bryn in front of the microscope and he forced his bleary eyes to focus through the eyepiece, as a glass slide slid into view. Round balloons swam in some kind of fluid, along with bigger, more ragged-looking shapes, gently shifting position in the warm currents generated by the microscope bulb. What the hell was he doing here, he wondered.
‘See the macrophages? Keep an eye on them.’
‘Macro- …?’
‘Macrophages. Not the round ones, they’re your red blood cells. The big, irregular white blood cells. They’re what protect you against flu.’
‘Right. Only not.’
‘Watch.’
Wilde took the slide, added something from her pipette, and slid it back beneath the light. Little strands of blue had joined the throng beneath the lens, and Bryn watched as slowly, slowly, the macrophages sought out the little blue strands and began to engulf them.
‘They’re eating the little blue things. Is that good?’
Wilde pushed him away and peered through the scope. ‘Hardly. Your white cells are barely moving. I’ve just sprayed them with a ton of foreign protein and they ought to be going crazy. They don’t know if I’ve given them AIDS, or just a bit of chicken.’
‘And?’
‘And what?’
‘AIDS or chicken?’
She glanced at him briefly, as though not taking the question seriously. ‘Chicken-derived polypeptides,’ she said. ‘It’s the reason why you got flu, now it’s the reason why you can’t shake it.’
Bryn was blurry with illness, tired from too much work, and disconcerted by this strange doctor. His mind felt foggy and dull. ‘Chicken?’
‘Your white cells. They’re exhausted. We need to juice them up.’
Rudely shoving Bryn aside, she began working with the glass tray. She’d scraped her dull, sandy-coloured hair away from her face and secured it at the back with a rubber band plucked from some packaging discarded in the wastebin. Unconscious of her appearance, unconscious of anything except her work, she took a few drops from each compartment, dropped them on to a slide, and studied the slide under the microscope. She took about five or six minutes, working in silence, with little tuts of dissatisfaction emerging as she failed to find what she was looking for. Bryn looked around for somewhere to sit. The chairs were mostly either inaccessible or piled high with research documents, so he eventually settled for a stack of paper tottering somewhere in the darkness. He watched Cameron working intently in her pool of lamplight, and as he watched, he felt the ache from the punch settle down and begin to mingle with his other aches, disappearing into them, making itself at home. Eventually, with the eleventh compartment tested, she looked up.
‘We’ve got something. Not a perfect match, but the best I’ve found.’ She looked him up and down, like a butcher at a cow. ‘And you’re not in such awful shape. It shouldn’t take too much.’
She shoved him across to the microscope, as she went over to the larger of her two fridges. In the round image picked out by the lens, Bryn saw the same thing as before, only massively different. The lethargic white blood cells had gone hyperactive. As soon as they located a blue protein strand, they enveloped it and gobbled it, then went charging off to look for the next one. Even as Bryn watched, the microscope slide cleared of all invaders.
‘Wow,’ he said. ‘And what if that had been AIDS, not chicken?’
But Wilde wasn’t listening. Her hands pattered down rows of glass bottles in the fridge, then stopped and pulled out a beaker. Next she found a syringe which looked like a church steeple joined to a zeppelin, and began to fill it.
‘What’s that?’ asked Bryn.
‘Same solution as I used to beef up your white cells under the scope. It’s a mix of nutritional factors. Fuel for blood cells.’
She swabbed his arm with alcohol, and Bryn felt the familiar cooling sensation.
‘Is this what you do? Your research area, I mean?’
‘Huh? This? God, no,’ she said, waving her needle. ‘This is crude, painfully, painfully crude.’ The alcohol had evaporated away, and Cameron wiped the vein a second time. The syringe looked bigger close up, huge in fact. ‘With real diseases, serious disease, you actually need to reprogram the white blood cells, literally write strings of program code to remind them how to do the job.’ She poked at his vein to make it stand out. ‘Not silicon chips, obviously, the body needs chemical code. Amino acids. Peptides.’ She levelled the syringe. ‘Little prick.’
‘I have not,’ muttered Bryn, trying not to watch.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Nothing. Forget it.’
Dr Wilde had found the vein without difficulty, and with calm expertise, slowly and smoothly injected the solution into his arm. It was almost totally painless.
‘Done,’ she said. She pulled the rubber band from her hair and shook it into its previous uncombed mess.
‘Thanks. Like I say, I have a full day of meetings tomorrow, so anything which helps …’
‘Tomorrow?’ She snorted out through her nose, possibly her version of a laugh. ‘You’ll need to cancel.’
‘I can’t cancel. That’s the point. That’s why I came.’
She shrugged. It wasn’t her problem. ‘Try to eat properly while you’re recovering. That means no caffeine, no alcohol, no sugar, no dairy, nothing processed, not much fat, no additives, no allergens.’
‘Grass. I’ll eat grass.’
‘Organic, where possible. Thirty bucks for the injection, please. You can give me another twenty for the consultation, if you feel like supporting my research.’
Bryn rolled down his sleeve and groped for his jacket.
‘It’s nice to work on humans every now and then,’ she continued. ‘Mostly I just stick needles into rats.’ Her words came out in grunts as she cleared her microscope bench of the litter. The compartmented tray, now rejoicing in twelve drops of finest Welsh blood, she waved in the air. ‘Human blood. A prized commodity. Can I keep it?’
‘Be my guest. Punching people is part of your research? Or was that just for fun?’
Wilde was nonplussed. She didn’t understand jokes, it seemed.
‘It wasn’t research. I just wanted to explain … Sorry.’
Bryn pulled a hundred bucks from his wallet. ‘Can you give me a receipt?’ He needed it to claim his expenses. She looked vacantly round the mountainous paper landscape in its inky darkness and pools of light. She didn’t do receipts. ‘OK. Don’t worry. Just keep it. Good luck with your research.’
‘Thanks. Sorry I hurt you.’
‘That’s OK. Not to worry. It’s fine. Thank you.’
‘Here, have this,’ she said abruptly. She found a business card and scribbled on the back of it, a hundred dollars, received with thanks. He took it and caught a taxi back to his hotel downtown, musing on what he’d witnessed.
He’d seen blood cells recharged and reinvigorated. He’d seen blood cells destroying invaders like Schwarzenegger on speed. He’d seen a failing immune system rebuilt under the microscope.
This time, of course, the invaders had been chicken, the magic show no more than a party trick. But if, as she’d implied, Dr Wilde could repeat her trick with serious illness, then it wasn’t just a trick she’d discovered. It was the Holy Grail.
4
Bryn had as much intention of spending the next day in his hotel room as he had of giving all his money away to charity, but there are times when things move beyond your control. By eleven p.m. his temperature had shot up to 105°F and hung there all night. Shivering underneath a mountain of duvets, he cancelled everything he’d had arranged and waited for the crisis to pass. By evening, his temperature had come down, his chest had cleared, and his appetite returned with a vengeance. Other than a little temporary weakness, he was as fit as a fiddle and ready for action.
Making a rapid check of flight times, he made a dash for the airport through rainswept streets, catching the last overnight flight into London. He slept well through the journey, woke sufficiently refreshed to manage a king-sized breakfast, and was first off the plane on arrival.
Strictly speaking he should have gone straight into work, but it was a grey and chilly morning at a grey and ugly Heathrow, and he found himself asking the cabbie to take him home instead. He’d shower, shave and have a second full-size breakfast, before going into the office.
And there was another motivation. For several years his marriage had been poor, possibly even collapsing. He and his wife, Cecily, had their fair share of relationship problems, of course, but on top of that, theirs was a banker’s marriage. It wasn’t that Bryn cared about his career and Cecily didn’t. On the contrary, she had been brought up to consider money to be more important than oxygen. But there was a cost: work came first, the marriage came second. Out of their last fifty-two weekends, only five had been completely free of work.
And so a stop for breakfast and a shower wouldn’t just be pleasant, it would be Bryn’s way of showing Cecily that she still mattered to him, a small step towards reconstructing their relationship. He’d been taking a lot of such steps recently, hopeful that they were clawing their way towards something better.
Outside his tall, white-fronted Chelsea home, he paid off the cabbie, climbed the steps, let himself in, called upstairs and downstairs, got no answer – and then saw it, a note, folded on the hall table. He opened the note and read it.
5
And read it again, in a mounting blur. ‘Dearest Bryn,’ – that was nice, wasn’t it? A good affectionate start. No problems there. ‘This is just to say that I’ve decided to leave you.’ Bryn gripped the banister and collapsed heavily down on the lower stair. What do you mean, ‘just to say’? What’s just about that? ‘Dearest, this is just to say I’ve burned the house down, murdered the kids, slaughtered the neighbours, eaten the cat.’ Bryn breathed deeply. Maybe he was missing a trick here. Maybe she’d meant to say something else altogether. ‘Dearest Bryn, I’ve decided to leave you … some breakfast in the oven, some gloves in your pocket, a photo, a love letter, a billet doux.’
No, it didn’t say that. Definitely not.
He rubbed his eyes roughly, and blinked to focus. Try though he might, he missed the next few sentences and only caught up with Cecily’s beautiful handwriting several lines later. ‘I’m sorry, darling, I could see you really trying to mend things, but I believe it wasn’t meant to be. I’ve realised that it’s important to me to begin again, and that’s what I intend to do. Please don’t be silly and try to pursue me – it won’t work. You know me well enough by now, to know that my decisions are for ever.’
He did, and they were.
6
For a long time, at the foot of the long staircase, Bryn sat stunned and stupid, yet in a way not even surprised. These last few months, he’d felt like a man trying to rebuild a house during the earthquake-volcano-hurricane season: heroic, maybe; a loser, for sure. He crumpled the letter and threw it away. The scrumpled ball hit Cecily’s bow-legged rosewood table and made one of her Meissen vases ping with amusement.
Work. There was always work. At least at Berger Scholes he could harness all his energy into bullying the world into submission. It didn’t compensate for a failed marriage, but, by God, it was a good distraction. He heaved himself up and stumbled off to work.
A mistake.
On his desk waiting for him was a corporate memo, sent from Head Office, addressed only to him.
TWO
1
‘What the hell is this?’
Bryn shook the memo furiously at his boss, a Dutchman, Pieter van Ween, head of the bank in Europe. Van Ween – blue eyes, fine silver hair swept back over a clear complexion – spoke calmly.
‘I’m sorry you found out this way. I tried to phone. I couldn’t reach you, so I thought it better to drop you a line –’
‘I don’t care how I found out! I do care about Rudy Saddler coming to piss on my patch.’ Bryn’s voice came across as unnecessarily gruff – the voice of a man two hours after getting off an overnight flight, forty minutes after finding his wife had left, three minutes after finding out his job was dissolving. He rubbed his chin, which was rough and unshaven.
‘No one’s going to be pissing anywhere.’ Van Ween was puritan enough to dislike foul language, banker enough to tolerate it. ‘The pharmaceutical industry is a big area. Plenty of transactions. What was it? Sixty billion dollars’ worth we did –’
‘I did –’
‘The bank did last year. Saddler’s going to co-operate, not steal your show. He’s already told me how much he welcomes your local knowledge. I know he respects your work.’
‘Respect, bullshit. I’ve built the best pharma team in Europe and he gets to put his name on the door. Are you trying to send me a message?’
Van Ween understood this game. He played it often. He played it well.
‘There’s no message. I didn’t ask for Saddler. He wanted to come. I have guys I wanted to send to New York. It was all part of the deal.’
‘You traded me.’
‘This is a bank, Bryn. I did what was best for the bank.’
‘I don’t know about that. I do know that I work my arse off and my reward is to be demoted –’
‘There’s no demotion –’
‘– demoted to second in command of the team I built. You may say there’s no message, but I’ve got to tell you, Pieter, I’m hearing one.’
‘Are you saying you will not accept the position which is being offered?’
The question shifted things into van Ween’s favour. Bryn could act the martyr, but unless he had something lined up elsewhere, he couldn’t afford to reject anything. Van Ween wanted to make him say it. Bryn sighed. He was devastated by his wife’s disappearance, shocked by the news about his job. ‘I’m not here to give you any ultimatums,’ he said wearily. ‘I just wanted to let you know I was unhappy.’
‘I understand. It had occurred to me you might not be altogether happy. There is something else I had in mind. It’s a critical area. Something we’re keen to expand. Begin to make some real money. And from your point of view, I think it’s a good career move. It’s the kind of position that gets noticed in New York.’
Bryn opened his hands to invite more information. He didn’t want to sound excited. In truth, he wasn’t excited. Pieter van Ween would have pitched the position the same way whether it was running the trading floor or counting paperclips. The Dutchman paused to register the fact that Bryn was making a request, then continued.
‘It’s emerging markets: Russia, former Soviet Union, all of Eastern Europe, Asia as far as India, Africa. You’d have the biggest territory of anyone in the bank and everything except trading would report to you. You’d report directly to me. I’d give you time to get to know the area, then we’ll sit down and talk. If you think the business flow will justify increased resources, you can have them.’
‘Do we have lending authority?’
‘We can lend money in Poland, the Czech Republic, Turkey. Maybe South Africa, I’d have to check.’
‘Not Russia? Not India?’ Van Ween stayed silent. He wouldn’t participate in Bryn’s effort to belittle the job. ‘How much did we make last year?’
‘In emerging markets? About fifteen, twenty million bucks. But focus on the future.’
‘That’s less than I made on the Claussen deal alone.’
‘The job’s about possibilities, Bryn. You’re giving reasons why we need to beef up our effort, why we need you.’
Bryn thought about it. Half the world under his command, but the wrong bloody half. If the bank wouldn’t risk its money – for fear of coups, collapse, or craziness – then there wasn’t much Bryn could do to earn it. There was always consultancy work, but in these Godforsaken markets the businesses were too small, too cheapskate to stump up real cash. He was being offered an empire, but it was an empire of sand, a dirt track into the desert.
Van Ween noticed the hesitation. It was a lousy deal, he understood that. But he needed to accommodate Saddler’s arrival and he needed somebody to do the emerging markets job. Hughes was a good guy, headstrong and cocky for sure, but most decent bankers were. Van Ween decided to offer some more inducement.
‘If it’s the travel that’s worrying you, then I understand that. It’s demanding. We’ve got some big energy projects in Kazakhstan right now. A privatisation in South Africa. We’ll need you to be there on the ground, of course, but I don’t want you to compromise your family life. Take time off when you need to. I know I can trust you to strike an appropriate balance.’
‘Jesus, the travel. I hadn’t even thought …’
Bryn trailed off. Nothing on earth could afford less pleasure than business travel to the places van Ween had outlined. He’d heard nightmare stories – true stories – about bankers stranded on an airfield someplace in Russia, minus fifteen outside and falling, the plane’s pilot pointing to an empty fuel gauge, telling the Westerners to buy fuel or stay grounded. Mobile phone two thousand kilometres from the nearest signal. Company Amex card a stupid joke. Dollops of cash, pushed across a table in a green-painted hut; men shouting in an alien language, arguing over maps and cash and vodka; and all the time the temperature outside falling.
‘I hadn’t even thought about the travel.’
‘As I say, I know you’ll want to talk it through with your wife …’
Those words – ‘your wife’ – almost sent an unaccustomed spurt of tears through Bryn’s rusted-up tear ducts. His wife. He’d had his problems with Cecily, no question, but she was his wife – or, rather, had been. He felt desolate and betrayed. ‘There’s nothing else?’
‘We’d like you to work with Rudy Saddler as his number two, if you could see your way to sorting things out with him. But either way … it’s your call. Let me know when you’ve talked to your wife. Cecily, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. Cecily.’ Bryn was stuck in his seat for a moment, cloddish and uncertain. He was a skilled negotiator, but van Ween was no pushover and van Ween held all the aces. Bryn could give up half his empire and more than half his glory to a newcomer he didn’t get on with, or travel the world’s least glamorous corners slogging his guts out for a penny here, a nickel there. ‘Thanks, Pieter. I’ll think about it. Get back to you.’
There was a third option which neither of them mentioned but both were aware of. Bryn could call a headhunter. Clear out. See what he could get somewhere else. It didn’t feel great, but it was an option.
‘OK.’ It was a dismissal, but friendly. ‘And believe me, Bryn. You have a good career here. Think long-term. Don’t make the mistake of moving on because of – because of a hiccup.’
‘Yeah. OK.’ He stood up to go.
Van Ween watched him carefully, appraising his man, knowing that Bryn’s ‘yeah, OK’ was as good as meaningless.
‘And Bryn, I understand your frustration, but we’ve put a real offer on the table. We won’t be sympathetic if … if you choose to head elsewhere.’
Bryn understood van Ween’s meaning. As with any senior banker, much of Bryn’s wealth was tied up in deferred bonuses, a hostage kept to encourage loyalty. The money was Bryn’s as long as he stayed with the bank, but it became the bank’s money if he chose to quit. Sometimes, if the bank nudged people out, it was generous, it decided not to add to the misery by hanging on to the precious cash. But van Ween was telling Bryn not to hope. If Bryn called a headhunter and quit, he’d wave goodbye to three quarters of a million pounds.
2
‘There’s one more here. The last of our hepatitis controls.’
‘Oh no, really?’ exclaimed Cameron. ‘That’s too bad.’
She went over to the cage – hardly a cage, even, more like a rat playground, full of fluffy white sawdust, plastic toys, feeding trays and hidey holes. The last of its inhabitants lay stretched out, nose just poking out of the darkened night area. Cameron snapped off her latex gloves, opened the cage door and reached in, picking out the little white corpse and stroking it, smoothing its whiskers. ‘Dammit,’ she said. ‘It’s Freddie. We didn’t need that. I was hoping that at least Freddie would survive.’
Cameron’s lab assistant, a delightful graduate student called Kati Larousse, rubbed Cameron’s shoulder and said gently, ‘At least it improves the stats, Cameron. And the experiment’s over now. This is the one hundred and eightieth day.’
‘We didn’t need the stats to look any better. They’re good enough already. Hell. I wish I’d stopped all this at a hundred and twenty days. Even ninety. We were way into statistical significance already by then.’
Larousse gave her boss a hug. ‘You’re the only researcher in the world who’d react like this. You carry out the most successful animal experiment ever undertaken in this field, and all you do is worry about your controls dying on you.’
‘How are the others?’
Cameron reached for the door to the neighbouring cage. A sign above it read ‘Herpes’, along with warnings about animal handling.
‘Gloves, Cameron. Careful.’
‘Damn my gloves.’
Cameron reached into the cage. This group of rats had been deliberately infected with the herpes virus one hundred and eighty days ago, and all but four were now dead. The ones that were still alive were lethargic and glassy-eyed, about to follow the twenty-six rats that had preceded them to the pearly gates. Cameron stroked the rats regretfully, apologetically even.
‘How about the others?’ she asked after a while.
‘HIV, you know. All dead. Hantavirus and Ebola virus, we’ve got eight and six left respectively.’
‘And the treated rats? No problems there?’
Larousse moved to the cages on the opposite wall. The cages were identical, except for one thing. The rats weren’t dead, they weren’t even dying. One hundred and eighty days before, they had all been injected with the exact same deadly viruses that the control groups had received, but nothing had happened. The rats bounced around their cages, coats glossy, eyes sparkling, squabbling over toys and fighting their way through tunnels and up ladders, like so many healthy puppies. They didn’t know it, but they owed their lives to Cameron’s Immune Reprogramming. Larousse used her hands to check inside the sleeping area, but they came away empty.
‘Nothing. No problems at all. Oh, except that this one has lost part of its tail.’
Cameron inspected the rat. It was thinner than the others, a constant target of playground bullying. ‘Benito. Shame. He had such a nice tail.’
Larousse let her boss linger round the cages a little longer before interrupting. The end of an experiment is the busiest part, collecting all the data which records the precise success or failure of the work. ‘I guess I should start taking blood samples from all the survivors?’
‘Right. Get it centrifuged and refrigerated. We can begin the lab analysis tomorrow.’
‘OK, sure. And … the controls, Cameron. These little guys are dying. You want me to …?’
‘Oh, sure, yes, of course. I mean, right away.’
‘How do you want me to do it?’ Larousse was gentle. Most experimenters didn’t care what happened to their animals at the end of an experiment, but Cameron Wilde wasn’t like that. There were different injections you could give to put a rat to sleep, and Cameron was bound to have views on the kindest method.
‘You know,’ said Cameron, ‘exactly like we did the others.’
‘I don’t understand. We didn’t do the others. They just died.’
Cameron stared at her assistant, slowly understanding what she had meant. ‘Oh, no. We’re not putting them down, Kati. I’d never … No way. We’re going to try and get the little guys well. Build them up again. We’re going to do the full Immune Reprogramming on all of them.’
‘Do the whole thing?’ Larousse was astonished. After a long and complex development period, Cameron’s Immune Reprogramming technique had been put to the test in this one amazing experiment. Nothing in scientific history had ever worked better – not on rats, anyway – but it was still time-consuming, laborious and expensive. ‘Do we have the funds, even?’
Cameron’s eyes flashed with anger. ‘I don’t care if we’ve got the funding. I’m not going to let these little guys die just because we can’t be bothered to cure them. Christ, if we don’t owe it to them by now … We’re going to get them better, and then they’re all going to go off to PEACH. If I can’t afford that, I’ll keep the little guys myself.’ PEACH was the Post-Experiment Animal Care Hostel – a pricey but deluxe outfit run by a couple of dedicated Boston animal-lovers.
‘Yeah, sure, Cameron. That’s fine. Actually, I’m delighted. That’s great news. God, I love working with you.’
Cameron stared around the room. Since the discovery of penicillin, medical history has all been about the search for the magic bullet: pills which wipe out a bug, leaving everything else intact. With bacteria, the search was successful. One by one, killer diseases like tuberculosis, scarlet fever, whooping cough and diphtheria began to fade out of existence – slain by the magic bullets of antibiotics. There was a time when scientists were optimistic that all diseases would follow suit, that infectious disease would literally be eliminated.
But then the failures began. Viruses began to shrug off vaccinations. Bacteria grew resistant to antibiotics. New diseases sprang up out of nowhere. Scientists don’t say so out loud, but they’re worried. The drugs companies won’t admit it, but their bullets are failing.
Cameron wasn’t surprised. The way she figured it, drugs can never defeat infectious disease. Bacteria reproduce every twenty minutes, five hundred generations in a week. In the time it takes a new drug to be developed, approved and marketed, the bacteria it was designed to kill have evolved far, far away from the original specimens.
Cameron’s alternative was simple. What’s the only known way of killing all viruses and all bacteria, no matter how weird and wonderful, no matter how foreign or strange? Answer: the human body. Most of the time, our bodies deal with everything: viruses and bacteria, prions and moulds, insect bites and toxins. You can put fifty people in a room packed full of influenza virus, but only five of them will come down with flu – the five who are stressed, or unhappy, or malnourished, or sleep-deprived, or recovering from some other illness. The other forty-five just deal with it.
And that was Cameron’s answer. To reprogram the human immune system to deal with its failures. To teach the immune system to do what it does best. This had been her mission in life ever since entering Harvard Medical School as an exceptionally gifted sixteen-year-old. Now aged just twenty-nine, she had carried out the most ambitious experiment in the history of viral disease, and come away with the most brilliant results ever achieved. But that was rats. The next step was to repeat the trick with humans.
Cameron looked at the rat cages once again: the empty ones where the controls had been, the others where the treated rats hurtled round in skidding clouds of sawdust.
‘Let’s make this the last animal experiment we ever do, OK, Kati?’
Larousse grinned approval as she busied herself with needles and collection bottles. ‘Have you thought more about publication?’ she asked.
‘Uh-huh,’ said Cameron. ‘The Journal of the American Academy of Medicine are quite keen, I think.’
‘Keen? They’ll bite your hand off.’
‘I hope so. The next phase of this is going to be pricey. We’ll need a decent write-up to secure our funding.’
Larousse put down her rats, needles and bottles.
‘Listen,’ she said. ‘There are a hundred and fifty rats in this room who ought to be dead or dying, and just look at them. Not a trace of disease. None of them. Not in half a year. Your problem isn’t going to be getting money. It’ll be how to fight it off.’
Larousse was wrong, of course. Dead wrong. As wrong as wrong could be. But don’t blame her. Larousse was a scientist, and what do they know about money?
THREE
1
The loneliest place in the world is easy to find: a luxury hotel in a foreign city and a phone with no one to call.
It was six weeks now since Bryn’s life had broken to pieces on the rocks. Cecily had promised him that her decisions were for ever – or, to put it bluntly, that she was as stubborn as a donkey. Bryn knew this. He’d have been less surprised to meet Mount Rushmore on walkabout than to find Cecily changing her mind. All the same, he’d done what he could. On the assumption that she’d gone home to her parents, he’d tried to call her there. It was Cecily’s mum who answered.
‘Oh God, Bryn, it’s you,’ she’d said, not unkindly.
‘Yes, I was hoping that I could maybe speak to –’
‘Yes, yes. Of course you were.’
Her voice was sympathetic and unhappy and Bryn then knew straightaway that Cecily hadn’t just left him, she’d left him for somebody else. ‘He’s a rich sod,’ her mum went on to say. ‘Taken her off to some horrible mansion in the Caribbean. I met him once, Bryn, hated him. I’m so sorry.’
But sympathy from his about-to-be-ex-wife’s mother was little comfort, as he began to search the ruins of his life for a path leading out.
Once, that path would have been work. He was still at Berger Scholes, of course – back in Boston finalising his biotech deal – but his career there was coming to an end. He wasn’t going to knuckle down as Rudy Saddler’s number two, and he wasn’t going to trudge the world of emerging markets, hunting for nickels. He’d called a headhunter, who was even now lining up new places, new jobs. Bryn Hughes would start out all over again: new job, new start, and in time, perhaps, a new woman, perhaps even a family.
Meantime he was lonely. No one to visit. No one to call. It wouldn’t be different tomorrow or the next day. Welcome to life without a family. Welcome to life without direction.
He wasn’t hungry, but ordered a giant salad from room service anyway, giving himself something to pick at. Putting his hand in his pocket, searching for a couple of dollars to tip the waiter, his fingers met the sharp rectangular edge of a business card. He pulled it out with the money. A receipt for a hundred bucks, received with thanks, scribbled in pencil on the back of a card. Cameron Wilde, MD, PhD. Bryn tipped the waiter and stared at the card.
A Boston number, someone to call.
2
Over on the university campus, a phone rings in the surrounding silence. Cameron Wilde, working late, answers it.
‘Cameron Wilde.’
‘Dr Wilde, it’s Bryn Hughes.’
‘Brandon …’
‘Bryn. Bryn Hughes. A patient of yours.’ Still no recognition. Bryn gave her the help she needed. ‘I came to you with flu and you punched me in the chest.’
‘Oh. Sure. You were the guy who said he wasn’t stressed.’
‘Right. It was around then you started hitting me … I was calling to say that you totally sorted me out. One day in bed, then as right as rain.’
‘As right as what?’
‘Rain. A British expression. Something to do with our love of bad weather, I suppose.’
‘You’re welcome.’
‘I wanted to thank you. Perhaps I could take you out to dinner somewhere. That is,’ he added, joking, ‘if you know anywhere which doesn’t serve coffee, alcohol, sugar, fats, additives or dairy.’
‘No, sorry.’ Her no was flat, no hint of apology.
‘No?’
‘No. I don’t know anywhere. Uh … you could eat at my place if you wanted. Did you mean tonight?’
‘Yes. Tonight. Unless you’re doing anything.’
‘No. Sure. Fine.’
And shortly Bryn was in a cab crossing Boston, watching the darkened winter streets pass by, feeling as he hadn’t done for years.
For the first time since his life had smashed upon the rocks, here was an edge of excitement, a tiny nibble of adventure, a step into the unknown. He sat forward in his seat, unaccountably excited by what lay ahead.
3
The air that night had come down from Canada, and shivered with the possibility of snow. Bryn stamped his feet in the lamplight spilling from the apartment block’s lobby, careful with his once-injured right knee on the frozen pavement. When, following his second ring, the buzzer buzzed the door open, he made his way across the over-heated lobby towards the stairs and Cameron Wilde’s apartment.
‘Here. I brought this.’ Bryn held out a bottle of champagne he’d bought at the hotel before leaving. Cameron looked at it, but made no move to take it. Her face was white, drawn, shocked. ‘Are you OK? Is this a bad time?’
She shook her head, turned, and walked into her living room, leaving the door open for Bryn to follow.
The room was pleasant enough. Pale floorboards, strewn with rugs. A couple of lavender-blue sofas. Walls stone-washed and decorated with a handful of anonymous prints. No TV. You could look at the room for an hour and know nothing of the person who owned it. Until, that is, your eye arrived at the corner devoted to Cameron’s work: paper stacked high on shelves and the surrounding floor; PC and printer; graphs, notes, equations tacked up on the wall above. If the room was coloured according to the intensity of life in its various parts, then the whole large living space would be a pale, almost icy blue; the study area, a vivid, glowing scarlet. Cameron crashed down on one of the sofas, looking like death.
Bryn read the situation quickly and crouched in front of Cameron, squatting awkwardly with his weight skewed on to his stronger knee.
‘Dr Wilde, I don’t know what’s happened in between my phone call and now, but I can see you’re in shock. If you want me to go, please say.’
She said nothing.
‘Right. I’m going to stay. Now I can help you best if I know what’s going on. What is it? Some kind of attack? An intruder?’
There was no sign of forced entry, and Cameron was on the third floor, but it was best to be sure. The scientist gave no response.
‘An intruder? No intruder?’
Bryn bashed at her with his voice, studying her face carefully for information. It seemed to him she was telling him ‘no’.
‘OK. What else? Perhaps …’ Bryn was about to try other avenues when he noticed a fixity in Cameron’s expression. She was staring at a letter lying open on her table. ‘This letter? You came home from work, found this letter, and it gave you a shock? May I read it?’
There was no sign in her face, so Bryn went ahead. It was a short note, from the editor of the Journal of the American Academy of Medicine: ‘Thank you for your recent submission to this office. Unfortunately, we do not consider this paper to be of sufficient interest to our readership at this present time.’ There was another sentence or two of blah-blah. A pretty standard rejection, as far as Bryn could tell.
‘You submitted an article to the Journal and it was rejected.’ Bryn hesitated. The American Academy of Medicine published the world’s most prestigious medical journal. If medical science was athletics, then publication in the Journal was like running in the Olympic finals. ‘Cameron,’ he said, using her Christian name for the first time, ‘it’s not surprising to get a rejection like this. Even great scientists get rejected sometimes. There are tons of other places where you can get your article published.’
‘Right. The Redneck County Medical Gazette. The Baldhead Mountain Parish News.’ Cameron’s eyes were large and smoky-blue, but the skin around them was puffy and grey, and the eyes themselves red-rimmed and desolate.
‘No. Real journals. Respected ones.’
Cameron slowly shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No. You don’t understand.’ Then, after a long pause, finding what she had to say almost impossible to speak, she continued. ‘They told me … they said they …’ Just as it seemed she had petered out, she burst into life. ‘Oh, goddamn it! They told me my results weren’t acceptable. They thought I’d fixed my data.’
‘Fixed? They thought you cheated?’
But she had snapped shut again, her screen of hair falling forwards over her face. All the same, you didn’t need to be much of a psychologist to see that Cameron had no more fixed her data than she had swum the Atlantic. He gripped her by the shoulders and forced her face up towards him, brushing her hair back from her eyes.
‘They thought you cheated, but you obviously haven’t. So there’s a mistake. And mistakes are fixable.’
‘Fixable?’
Bryn wished he’d used another word. ‘Correctable. Mendable. They think you fixed your data. You didn’t. So sort it out. Ask for independent checks, whatever.’
Cameron shook her head. ‘There’s an ethics committee,’ she said. ‘Apparently, I’ve got to collect my work. Hand it over for investigation.’
‘First step,’ said Bryn, ignoring her. ‘Find out how the mistake happened. What did they say? What did they think went on?’
Cameron stared at him, trying to make up her mind whether to trust this battering ram of a stranger. In that instant, Bryn realised that her silence up till now had been less because of her shock, and mostly because of her uncertainty over him. Still uncertain, she continued. ‘They didn’t say. They wouldn’t say, but personally I …’ She shook her head, reluctant to continue.
Bryn took her by the shoulders again. ‘Speak, Cameron. I do better with words. What are you saying? You have a suspicion about something? You don’t know, but you have a suspicion?’
She nodded, slowly.
‘Who? You have colleagues, co-workers, lab assistants? Anyone you argued with? Had a fight? Fired?’
‘No. Kati, my lab assistant, she’s my best friend. She wouldn’t. Not her. But …’
‘Yes? But? But, who?’
‘Look, I don’t know, but …’ She shook herself, as though physically shrugging away her shock, as though literally stepping into a more aggressive, defiant state of mind. ‘Listen. Our Head of Laboratory Services used to be a creepy guy named Duaine Kovacs. One night I found him down with my rats. Late at night. I don’t know what he was doing there. I screamed at him.’
Bryn didn’t quite follow. ‘You think he knifed you, because you screamed at him once?’
Cameron shook her head. ‘When I found him, he was clearing up a spillage. Blood. He’d cut himself. After he left, I looked at a few drops under the microscope. Good stuff, blood, it tells you everything.’ She sighed. ‘Anyway, Kovacs was in a state. Unhappy blood. Like, way worse than yours. I ran some tests. Alcohol. Dope. Cocaine. Prozac. Tons of stress factors. I reported him, of course. I mean, I wouldn’t care. If someone wants to take coke, that’s their problem, but in a laboratory – in my laboratory, messing around with my rats … I wasn’t having it. He was fired.’
‘OK. So we have our mole. Question is, why on earth would the Journal believe him rather than you? He was fired after all.’
Once again, Cameron’s face clouded and Bryn probed hard to read what was written there. ‘Something else, Cameron. There’s something else you’re not telling me.’
She sighed, a sigh which began down in the soles of her feet. ‘Damn right, there’s something else.’ She paused again, gauging her little-known visitor. ‘The night Kovacs was fired, he was drunk, high, I don’t know what. He burst in on me, yelling abuse, how my experimental results would never see the light of day, how they were going to see to it.’
‘They who?’
Cameron shrugged. ‘I don’t know. That’s the point. They … whoever.’
Bryn felt a flicker of excitement flashing from nerve to nerve across his body, like a lightning flash that briefly illuminates an entire landscape. He didn’t know why or what, but he knew he was on to something important. He leaned forward. ‘Let me understand. When you send a paper to the Journal or any other scientific publication, they get it reviewed, right? Half a dozen independent reviewers comment on whether the article is good enough to be accepted. Did your paper go out to reviewers, or was this rejection just based on the editor?’
‘Oh, no. The editor, he was keen – I mean, was keen.’
‘Do you know who he chose to review your paper?’
‘Sure. I’m not supposed to, but I found out.’ Cameron gestured at the mountains of paper surrounding her desk. ‘In the yellow binder, there.’
Bryn found the binder and pulled it out. Pasted to the inside flap was a list of six reviewers, names and numbers.
‘Good.’ He brought the list back to the sofa. ‘Now, I need you to think. Look at these six names. Tell me if you can think of any reason why they might be hostile to you or your paper.’
Cameron looked at the list for about two tenths of a second, then shook her head. ‘No. Why be hostile? It’s only science, for God’s sake.’
Once again, Bryn did his bully-boy act, squeezing Cameron’s shoulders so that she was forced to look up into his eyes. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Nothing: in the world happens without a reason. Nothing. If a handful of intelligent scientists chooses to believe some coked-up laboratory manager without even checking with you, then there’s a reason. Once we work it out, we probably know who’s behind all this. OK?’
Cameron looked back at the list, more intently now. But the names still revealed nothing to her. She dropped the list. ‘I can’t think of a reason.’
‘OK. Who does your paper hurt? It’s about – what? How to juice up rat blood?’
‘It doesn’t hurt anyone,’ she said, a little sharply. ‘My medicine is about helping people.’
‘Helping people, right. But what about your rats? What was in your article?’
Cameron shrugged, as though unimpressed by her own achievements. ‘I took a hundred and fifty rats, gave them five kinds of killer disease, then treated their immune systems. Reprogrammed them. Programmed them to be incredibly good at killing whatever virus it was I’d given them. I wrote up my results and sent ’em to the Journal.’
‘And what about the rats?’
‘They lived, of course. Otherwise my paper wouldn’t have been very interesting, would it?’ Bryn gripped Cameron’s arm, tightly, more than was polite. He delivered his next question with barely controlled intensity. ‘To cure your rats. Did you use drugs? Were their recoveries in any way drug-dependent?’
‘Oh, who cares?’
Cameron sought to free her arm, but Bryn tightened his grip, as his nerves danced with urgency. ‘Please, Cameron. It’s critical that you tell me.’
She quit struggling. ‘Some of the rats benefited from very small doses of immune stimulant pharmaceuticals. In real life, not an experiment, I might have wanted some further drug support. But in general, no. The rats didn’t get better because of any drugs.’
Bryn’s flicker of excitement burst into flame, seizing hold of his entire body. He leaped back as though on fire. ‘Jesus Christ! Jesus, Cameron, I thought you said your paper didn’t hurt anyone. There are billions – no forget that – there are tens, hundreds of billions of dollars invested in drug technologies which you could be putting at threat. It’s not if, frankly, it’s who … Let me think. Jesus.’ He took the list of names again, thrusting them in front of the scientist, inches from her face. ‘Do you recognise any of these names? Is there a common link? Any company, or organisation?’
Cameron looked at the names. ‘They’re all OK. This guy, Professor Durer, he’s quite good. Had a real interest in my work. Rucci … The name rings a bell, but … Now, Freward. He’s a grade-A creep, but an OK scientist … The others, hell, the others, who cares?’ Her insightful analysis stumbled to a close.
Bryn drummed briefly on the table. Then, pulling out his phone, he began to dial.
4
First London, where it was two o’clock in the morning. He called three of his junior analysts, two of whom were asleep in bed, one of whom was at work, finishing up a spreadsheet for one of Bryn’s other projects. Bryn began to bark instructions, getting the two sleepy analysts into work as soon as possible, pulling the third off his existing project for the time being. He thought briefly, then, for the sake of completeness, he called a couple of associates in New York and set them the exact same task, with the same urgent deadline as he’d given the others. What one group missed, the other might find, and vice versa. Before he was done, he interrupted himself briefly. ‘Fax?’ he asked Cameron. ‘E-mail?’ Wordlessly, she pointed to her filofax which lay on the desk. Bryn flipped to the contact information, and gave it to the associates on the other end of the line. He switched off his phone and tossed it down.
‘There we go. We’ll have some answers pretty soon.’
‘Answers to what? Except whether you’re a nice guy to work for.’
Bryn allowed himself a tiny smile. ‘We pay ’em enough.’
‘Can I ask you something?’
Bryn looked up in surprise. ‘Of course.’
‘Who are you? How come you know about the pharma industry? More to the point, what the hell made you come see me tonight?’
With a jolt, Bryn realised that Cameron knew nothing about him. She’d shown no personal curiosity in him the night they first met, and this evening the normal social exchanges had been obliterated by the steamroller of Cameron’s distress. ‘I’m an investment banker,’ he said, briefly explaining who he was and how come he was in Boston.
‘That doesn’t explain how come you’re in my apartment.’
He shrugged. Why was he here? Because his wife had left him and he thought that some weird Dr Dynamite scientist type was going to make him feel all warm and cuddly again? He shook the question away, and crossed to Cameron. ‘We should have some data coming in by now.’
He booted up Cameron’s PC and went into her e-mail. Before long, e-mails began to fly in from London and New York. ‘Data dumps,’ he said. ‘Everything you ever wanted to know about your six reviewers, plus the Journal’s editor. Everything which has ever appeared in print, anywhere in the world. Pharma company appointments, educational bulletins, research reports, internet stuff, you name it.’
‘You have systems which do that?’
‘Not systems, people. The information is out there, it’s finding it which is hard. Now, let’s see …’
For two and a half hours he worked, expertly skimming the mass of information flooding in, printing, marking and putting to one side anything he thought possibly relevant. Before long, seven piles mounted up: Durer, Regan, Rucci, Czarnowski, Booth, and Freward – the six reviewers – plus Goldbach, the editor.
At length, he took a break.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘I think I’m close. Of the six reviewers, I can connect four to one company, Corinth Laboratories. Durer is the one who connects tightest. His research lab has a major multi-year contract with Corinth. I doubt if Durer would stay in business if Corinth moved away. Regan and Czarnowski have both done paid experimental work for the group, plus Regan – no, Czarnowski – has done paid lectures, expert witness work with the FDA, that kind of thing. Then Booth is working to get a hospital extension funded. His co-chairman on the committee is an ex-CEO of Corinth. It’s not a strong connection, but if they’re hoping for funds, you never know. That leaves Freward and Rucci. I can’t find anything. Not yet. But there’s more stuff coming.’
He carried on speaking, but Cameron had turned to stone.
‘Rucci,’ she said. ‘I’ve just remembered where I heard the name.’ She walked to a shelf and pulled down an old edition of an industry magazine, Pharmaceutical People. She flicked through the pages and found the item she was looking for: a sickly-sweet mother-daughter feature, adorned with a cheesy photo. ‘The mom, Paula Rucci, was my reviewer. Her daughter, Gabriella, is Vice President in Corinth’s Veterinarian Division.’
‘Ha!’ barked Bryn, flying back to his sheaves of paper. He flicked quickly through his stacks and came away with a sheet. ‘Gabriella Rucci has recently been promoted to Executive VP. How nice. Her mum may be clean, but her daughter certainly isn’t. And if dear little Gabby comes home one day and tells her mum all kinds of crap about you, who’s she going to trust? That just leaves Freward.’
Cameron shook her head. ‘Uh-uh. Freward’s the worst.’ From a pile on her desk, she pulled a photocopied research piece, Quantificational errors in omega pathway modelling of digestive enzymes. Among the list of authors, Freward’s name had been circled with a handwritten comment next to it, ‘Pillock!’ Bryn looked blankly at the page.
‘Freward’s a good scientist,’ said Cameron, ‘but he devotes his life to these kind of knocking pieces, always trying to shoot good work down. He’s a director of – what’s the name again? – the Katz-Jacoby Research Foundation and –’
‘And Katz-Jacoby is exclusively funded by Corinth.’ Bryn finished her sentence, triumphantly. ‘We’ve got it, then. The smoking gun. The only weird thing is the coincidence. The editor seems clean, so how come he ends up with six Corinth stooges out of six? That doesn’t add up.’
‘Uh-uh. It figures. The editor will most likely pick one lead reviewer first, and talk to him about a possible slate of names. The most likely guy on this list is Freward. Like I say, he’s a jerk, but a good scientist with a decent reputation. Maybe the editor comes up with some suggested names, maybe Freward comes up with them all. Any case, by the time they’re done talking, Freward has packed the jury.’
‘Plus they’ve got Mr Smack-head Kovacs running around spreading rumours about you, just in case.’ He looked at Cameron admiringly. ‘They really took care to sabotage you,’ he said. ‘They must really respect your work.’
‘Thanks.’
‘No, really. You can’t beat the compliment … And Corinth. It makes sense. I might have guessed.’
‘You mind telling me why?’
Bryn paused to inspect his questioner. She was dressed in old jeans and a thin T-shirt which ran into puckered ridges at the shoulders. She was pale and thin, hair a mess, tear-stained eyes a visual disaster area. All the same, she wasn’t exactly bad-looking. All that high cheekbone stuff that women are meant to have, she had.
‘Corinth Laboratories,’ said Bryn. ‘An outstanding company. A decade ago it was a bit-part player. Some good drugs. Some bad drugs. Nothing much in the pipeline. But then they struck gold. They hired this guy Huizinga from outside the industry. Chemicals, I think, was his background. He shook up the company, top to bottom. He began licensing drugs, buying up small biotech outfits, research labs. And focus, he gave it focus. Before Huizinga, Corinth did a bit of everything. A chemo drug. A bit of respiratory stuff. Some anxiety medications. He ditched all that. The one good product they had was an anti-viral, Zapatone. It was big in AIDS –’
‘Zapatone? God, it’s toxic. Toxic as hell. There was a British study which showed –’
‘There was a British study which showed it shortened the lives of three quarters of the patients who took it. But that was Huizinga’s brilliance. He boasted about the study, made his salesmen lead with it. He went out and told the world that no drug in the history of the world had ever had such impressive anti-viral properties –’
‘Anti-patient properties –’
‘Whatever. They made a few tiny modifications to the drug administration protocol. Meaningless changes, but enough that they could say the British study was irrelevant to the way the drug was now administered. And that was that. Zapatone took off, and that was Huizinga’s cue. Ninety per cent of Corinth’s sales are now in anti-viral drugs, with just a couple of other sidelines they haven’t yet bothered to sell. Mostly now, the drug industry is looking for less toxic solutions. It’s a kinder, gentler industry, that’s the idea. But not Huizinga, not Corinth. They recognise that there are plenty of doctors out there who like the macho stuff. Toys for the boys, and guns for their chums. They put out these publicity handouts for Zapatone, overlaying a picture of the drug with photos of B-52 bombers.’
‘It’s criminal.’
‘Genius. Corinth was worth a couple of billion dollars when Huizinga came in. It’s worth fifty times that today – a hundred billion dollars, no less. If there were Nobel prizes for business, Huizinga would be a cert.’
‘I do not believe you!’
‘I’m not saying I approve, I’m just telling you how the world works. And say what you like, they’re smart. They’ve got the world’s biggest stable of anti-viral drugs. Your medicine is a threat. You said it yourself: under certain circumstances, your technology might be complemented by conventional drug therapy, but by Corinth’s slash-n-burn stuff? No way. As Huizinga sees it, it’s him or you.’
It was a tactless phrase on which to finish. Cameron’s eyes skated back to the letter still lying open on the table.
‘Right,’ she said grimly. ‘And at the moment, it’s him.’
And it was then, at that precise moment, that Bryn took leave of his senses.
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