by Hammond, Ray
‘I was watching the entire basket and nothing twitched,’ offered Joe. ‘I’ve got the recording.’
‘Even if it had, you’d have been too late,’ growled Morgenstein. ‘You should have cleared out the moment you realized what was happening.’
Joe shook his head. ‘I calculated that even following the markets I could have cleared everything out with only a five per cent discount.’
‘What would that have cost our clients?’ asked the partner.
Joe swallowed. ‘Just over sixty billion dollars,’ he said quietly.
‘My guess is closer to seventy,’ sighed Morgenstein, his anger held tightly to his chest.
He put the paper down on his desk and leaned back in his high-backed swivel chair. He turned so that Joe could no longer see his face. Everything about the partner’s office spoke of the vast volumes of money that passed through Rakusen-Webber every day, and of the value even of the tiny percentages that got left behind. The pedestal desk was of gleaming mahogany with brass edging, a nineteenth-century antique. The walls were panelled in the same wood, stained to match the desk and the fine Hepplewhite chairs that were scattered around the Georgian conference table. The air smelled of polished leather, but Joe guessed that was artificially enhanced.
‘We’re letting you go, Joe. As of this minute,’ Morgenstein said quietly from behind his chair back. He swivelled round to meet Joe’s shocked gaze.
‘I’ve spoken to Richard Rakusen and he agrees. We will not carry the sort of risk you have exposed us to. We’d rather be without the returns you have produced if this is the potential downside. You’ve forgotten the golden rule: every dollar lost in our business is worth every ten gained. It’s a matter of reputation. You are dismissed for gross negligence.’
Joe was stunned. He could think of nothing to say.
‘Security staff are waiting for you in your office. Please collect your personal things and leave the building. Do not speak to anyone on your way out and make no attempt to contact anybody here after you leave. Our lawyers will be in contact to discuss severance terms. Remember you are still bound by SEC confidentiality.’
Joe stood, rooted to the spot.
‘Goodbye,’ said Morgenstein and he turned his chair again so that Joe was left staring at its back.
The fund manager turned and walked from the room.
*
The reverberating sounds of an ancient cathedral pipe organ filled Calypso’s comfortable living room. She found herself drifting into tranquillity with the gentle pedetentous descent of Bach’s Air No. 3 in D major.
Tommy had seemed pensive on the drive back to Calypso’s bungalow so the doctor had let him be, understanding that it was the shock of the assault, the affront to his male dignity rather than any of his minor injuries that was occupying his thoughts. He had been so sheltered from the rough-and-tumble – so unlike normal boys, so less emotionally mature. She shrugged mentally as she realized that with his wealth and his father’s phobic obsessions such isolation was almost inevitable.
Tommy reached the end of the piece, allowed the final D-major chord to die, mellow on the air, and slowly lifted his hands from the keyboard of her synthesizer.
He turned, grinned and was suddenly a little boy again, much younger than his seven years. He spun round on the old revolving piano stool: round and round. He laughed as it reached the top of its thread and he spun the other way until it reached its lowest point.
‘That was beautiful,’ breathed Calypso, when he finally stopped. ‘Beautiful. I haven’t heard you play that before.’
‘Miss Duckett only gave me the music yesterday,’ said Tommy. ‘I like it.’
‘I like it very much, too,’ agreed Calypso. ‘You play so beautifully, Tommy.’
She too had enjoyed playing the piano when she was a child. But she knew that she had never played an instrument the way Tommy could. It was both his feel and his technique that marked him out. Despite his youth and size, his ambidexterity and his exceptionally long fingers enabled him to span more than an octave and somehow he injected such emotion into his playing that it was almost impossible to believe he was so young. And his memory for a piece was remarkable.
‘So what did happen at school Tommy?’ she asked.
The boy frowned and then gave a massive shrug, much too big for his little frame. ‘I don’t know. I just got Emilio into checkmate and he shouted at me. Then Maurice Dennis joined in. They banged me against the wall.’
‘Do you play chess with them often?’ probed Calypso gently. Tommy shook his head. ‘I’ve never played anyone before. Only my ChessMate program. I must have done something wrong.’
‘Do you win when you play your ChessMate at home?’
‘I used to,’ Tommy sighed. ‘But then my father put it on the top level and I haven’t won a game for a week.’
Introduction – insertion
I can also reveal for the first time that Thomas Tye has a son who is being brought up in a strictly controlled scientific environment on Hope Island. Thomas Richmond Tye IV was born to an unknown mother approximately seven years ago. Sexual intercourse was not involved and the ‘mother’ had no genetic input to her apomictic1 [1 Apomictic is a biological term: pertaining to or produced by apomixis; reproducing without sexual fusion.] ‘son’. Tye’s son is the world’s first enhanced human clone, born by a process that can best be described as ‘cryptogame eutelegenesis’ – a combination of eugenics and genetics, achieved secretly and remotely – and I describe the enhancements that his ‘father’ selected for him in Chapter Seven.
Haley sat back and stared at her central text-composition screen. It seemed so bald, so cold, so academic, so undramatic. But how else could she put it? She felt like writing it in capitals, giving it a sexy, newsy sans-serif typeface, so she did:
THOMAS TYE HAS CLONED HIMSELF, WORLD, DO YOU HEAR?
NOT ONLY DOES HE WANT TO LIVE FOR EVER,
HE’S GROWING HIS OWN SUCCESSOR!
But ordinary text would have to do. She deleted her fantasy headlines. All she had to do now was find a publisher.
The second report had arrived that morning in the mail. Once again it was a paper document but this time it had been posted in Paris. She had read through the sixty pages at speed. Then she reread them slowly, with the help of on-line medical dictionaries and the world’s science archives.
When she’d finished she took off her glasses and stared blankly at the pile of papers. This report was either an ingenious hoax or a godsend.
Haley was tempted to scan the document and forward it to Barry. She checked his location and saw that he was now in his lab; but she wasn’t sure whether others there might have access to his encryption key. She contented herself by reading the report again, adding her own questions and interpretations of the technical jargon as margin notes. She knew Barry would be amused by her bumbling efforts at interpreting the technicalities.
Then, because she couldn’t wait, she had written the draft insert for her book’s introduction.
When Barry finally arrived back, shortly after seven, his mood was foul. He had been forced to stand in a packed Underground carriage all the way from Euston to Stockwell, he told her. The heat had been intolerable, everybody around him shouting into the networks. His first words as he came through the door had been ‘I stink.’
While he showered Haley turned the air-conditioning up, put on some gentle Mozart and punched up his favourite ScentSim aroma, New Car Interior; as compensation for his experience on London’s public transport system. She then made him a large gin and tonic. Wordlessly, she held it with an outstretched arm around the bathroom door as he towelled himself dry. He took it without acknowledgement.
She recrossed the hall and threw herself full-length on the white sofa, her arms crossed, getting ready for any type of argument he fancied.
A few minutes later Barry emerged pink and steaming into the cool living room. A large white towel was wrapped around his ample waist, and he was rub
bing his sparse red hair one-handedly with a small hand-towel that he had removed from beside the bathroom sink. In his left hand he still held his drink. He looked down at her, blinking.
‘Sorry, baggage, bloody awful day,’ he apologized, as he inhaled the cool, scented atmosphere. ‘Broke a bloody culture dish after three weeks of good festering.’
He took a large swig of his drink and burped. The towel at his waist unfolded in slow motion and fell to the ground.
‘Oh, vision of the Northern Line, come to me,’ laughed Haley as she held out her arms. He came and sat beside her and she kissed him hard on the lips, their taste fresh with gin, tonic and lime.
‘How did you get on today, sweetheart?’ he asked, more out of duty than genuine interest.
She scooped up the report from the floor beside the sofa and dropped it onto his naked legs. ‘I need your help again, Doctor Evans. This arrived this morning. I’ll get you a tracksuit to wear.’
It took Barry half an hour to read it the first time. Then he flicked through it again, to underline points that seemed important.
‘You understand I’m no reproductive biologist?’ he said finally. She sat opposite him at her circular dining table.
‘Well?’
‘OK. Look, it does seem kosher, but I can’t be sure. I’d have to show it to one of the real boffins at the lab.’
Haley shook her head. ‘We can’t show it to anybody,’ she said. ‘If this information is true, my book is made. The newspapers will be falling over themselves for serialization rights. We can’t risk the story getting out before publication.’
‘Well, obviously somebody else already knows,’ reasoned Barry, annoying her with this wholly unnecessary deployment of common sense.
‘Can’t you check it out without showing it to anybody else?’
Barry sighed – the patronizing display of weariness he always produced when about to explain scientific complexities to a lay person. Haley frowned.
‘There aren’t many people qualified to comment authoritatively on this,’ he said. ‘It’s a very specialized area.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Look, there are two sorts of cloning. The first is a simple process and we, that is biotechnologists, do it all the time, with cattle, rare animals, endangered species, et cetera. It’s a piece of cake. In this method we take an ideal nucleus that’s been created from the sperm of an ideal male and the nucleus of an egg from an ideal female. The genes are often manipulated and then they are inserted into a carrier egg from which the natural genetic material has been stripped out – it’s a procedure we call androgenesis. The fertilized egg is then duplicated and the results are implanted in a surrogate mother. This technique produces several animals that are identical – say, identical twins, like you and Felicity – but they’re not exact copies of any existing adult animal. When the subject of cloning comes up, the public mistakenly thinks that the offspring is an identical copy of some adult. That’s a very different story.’
‘But that’s what this report is about,’ urged Haley.
‘So it would seem,’ agreed Barry, flicking through the pages, unwilling to be hurried. ‘The main problem with cells taken from adult animals is that they have already differentiated. That is, they have already determined what they are and they have lost the embryonic ability to divide and to grow into specific types of new cell – like a heart muscle cell or nerve tissue.’
He turned back through the pages again. ‘Then they discovered that if they take a cow’s egg that has been stripped of its own nucleus and fuse it with an adult animal cell they get a blastocyst – an embryo that starts to grow in the test tube but that isn’t viable in the long run: it dies after a few days.’
‘Should I be making notes?’ asked Haley, but her sarcasm sailed straight over his head. He closed the report and sat back and folded his hands over his stomach as he prepared for the next part of his lecture. She could see the middle-aged academic he would become.
‘But if embryonic stem cells are taken from the blastocyst and they’re implanted as a nucleus into a carrier egg they can develop into any type of the two hundred and ten cells required and they carry the exact copy of the DNA that was present in the original adult-animal donor cell. That’s how a copy of an adult is made and that’s far more difficult.’
‘But it can be done,’ insisted Haley.
‘It can,’ the geneticist admitted. ‘It was done for the first time nearly twenty years ago, in Scotland. They made a successful copy of an adult sheep but, later, animals that were produced elsewhere using similar techniques aged too quickly. Once they solved that problem, they started cloning pets – dog, cats and so on – just at the turn of the century.’
‘But they’ve never done it with humans?’ she asked.
‘Well, not as far as we know. The nearest they’ve come is to grow human organs for transplant.’
‘Yeah, that’s what one of Tye’s companies concentrates on,’ said Haley. ‘So why no human clones?’
‘It’s illegal, since they’d have to use cells from real human embryos,’ explained Barry simply, picking up the report again. ‘Although I wouldn’t mind betting there’s been more than a few thousand human clones already knocked up in South American clinics and some of those dodgy Middle East states. Although why somebody would want to copy himself – or any other human – is beyond me. Anyway, there’s just no reason to want to do it now. Even infertile couples have better options these days.’
He flicked through the report again and laid it down on the table, open at one page he had marked.
‘It’s these genetic adjustments to the embryo, described here, that make this really interesting.’
‘Are such things really possible?’ asked Haley.
Chapter Nine
Suddenly Jack Hendriksen had new purpose, a new identity and a feeling he hadn’t experienced since he’d left government service. He felt he was once again doing something worthwhile.
Deakin had taken advantage of Jack’s loose vacation plans and had arranged a series of ‘refresher’ courses for him before his official swearing-in to UN service would take place. Three courses had been arranged in short order and none of his instructors were to know anything about their new pupil until the moment he arrived.
He was flying first to Fort Mead in Maryland, to the headquarters of the National Security Agency, a US government facility in which UNISA had been able to negotiate a small sovereign space for its own communications laboratory. His passport, reservation, digital identity, value-transfer modules and new communications equipment were all in the name of Bruce D. Curtis, a thirty-nine-year-old attorney from Washington, DC. All details had been confirmed and registered with the World Certification Authority. Even his finger- and voiceprints had been matched to Curtis’s identity and he’d collected an instant but detailed biography and an impressive list of legal qualifications. The individual identified as John Edward Hendriksen was ‘still on vacation’ in Manhattan.
‘We keep a bunch of these IDs ready-made,’ Deakin had explained. ‘There are more lawyers on the road than management consultants these days. You’ll fit in – just try to look a bit more venal.’
Once in the air, Jack lifted his background file on the Tye Corporation from his new briefcase and extracted a few sheets at random. He wondered about the relevance of the first report.
Forwarded by: UNINET to Executive Officer R. Deakin, UNISA.
Automatic forwarding keywords: Tye, Erasmus
Qualification: 100%
UNITED NATIONS HIGH COMMISSION FOR REFUGEES
Report No.: HC/SA/10/207
To: Deputy High Commissioner Sherri Prasso, UNHCR, Geneva
From: Philip-Niël Shutte (HCR 4011)
Subject: Reon Albertyn, asylum applicant No. SA81956
Status: Highest Confidentiality
At the request of UNHCR Geneva, I completed a successful negotiation with Amnesty International, Johannesburg in order to use the accreditation of their organization to ca
rry out a visit to a maximum-security prison facility in Harare, Zimbabwe, June 11th last. Geneva had provided me with the names of three teenage prisoners in whom they have an interest, following appeals for information from the families of these boys and also local political representatives. During my visit I was told that two of the subjects had died during their internment. I was later able to obtain copies of their death certificates (copies attached).
The third prisoner on whom information was requested was Reon Albertyn, a 14-year-old South African citizen imprisoned for armed robbery and car theft, crimes found proven by a closed Zimbabwean juvenile court when he was 12.
I found Albertyn in poor health and imprisoned in appalling conditions in adult accommodation. This is the first visit UNHCR (or Amnesty International) has been able to make to this prison and, as far as I could tell, all inmates at Chikirubi Maximum Security Facility are held in conditions that breach UNHCR, UNESCO and WHO guidelines. I recommend that conditions at this facility should be officially classified by UNHCR as inhuman and degrading and confirmed as being in breach of the United Nations Declarations on Human Rights 1958, Article 7. I also recommend copies of this report are forwarded to the Ethics, Human Rights and Compliance committees at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. (My full assessment of the conditions for inmates of Chikirubi MSF are provided in a separate report, ref: HC/SA/10/207/CMSF.)
As UNHCR Financial Aid Auditor for Zimbabwe, I was granted an audience with Dr Kim Mnanke, President of the Republic, and he graciously granted Albertyn a presidential pardon on compassionate grounds. I then arranged for paramedic air transportation to Mount Zion Hospital, Pretoria where Albertyn has been undergoing tests and observations for 10 days.
Reports by Dr James Hughes and Professor Per-Ola Nieble of the Steve Biko Institute, Cape Town are attached to this report. I summarize their findings here:
Reon Albertyn is in the advanced stages of a condition that initially presents as a disease known as Werner’s Syndrome, a form of progeria or premature ageing. This condition, which is normally a chance mutation in one copy of a single gene, is known to be genetically inheritable, non-contagious, non-infectious and usually fatal before the patient reaches adulthood. Albertyn’s physical condition resembles that of a man in his eighth or ninth decade, but Professor Nieble has been unable to find a single mutant gene on the appropriate chromosome in DNA samples taken from the patient. He is continuing his investigations. Another unusual aspect of this case concerns Reon Albertyn’s skin colour. He is white, technically a ‘leucoethiop’ or albino negroid. This very rare condition is also wholly hereditary.