“I spoke to Bob Cabot. I think he’ll iron it out.”
“What was the problem?”
“I don’t know. Something in his background. Could have been student protests years ago. The cold war may be over but since 9/11 they’re touchy.”
“You can’t blame them. What about you? How are you getting on?”
“We’re doing okay.” He lowered his voice. “The President’s set up a national emergency fund. He did it for the hurricane disaster in the Southern States so nobody will raise an eyebrow about having another. But this one will fund your group. And Chris has managed to get some of it piped into the NSF. It’s gone via the Director’s Reserve of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, but it’s earmarked for me. It’s separate from their normal funding so it can bypass their committee structure. I’m commissioning additional flights, covering a larger geographical area and a whole range of altitudes.” He gave her a quick smile.
“You’ll be able to get a more detailed picture.”
“Yes, but not only that. When you and your fellow geniuses drop your magic potion into the waters we’ll be able to monitor exactly what effect it’s having.”
“Wonderful.” She looked up as the handsome, dark-skinned waiter came over to collect their empty appetizer dishes and waited until he’d gone, although there was enough music and noise in the Latin-American restaurant to cover their conversation. Then she reached across the table and took Terry’s hands in hers.
“It’s all coming together now, isn’t it? We’re really going to beat this thing.”
CHAPTER 23
On Sunday evening Maggie phoned to say she’d be delayed and Terry should eat without her. He replaced the receiver and looked at it for a few moments, frowning. Then he shrugged, went downstairs for a quick snack, and returned to his room to work. By nine o’clock he was glancing at his watch, finding it increasingly hard to concentrate. Finally he heard sounds of movement from her room and moments later there was a light knock and she came through the communicating door.
She dropped onto the sofa.
“You look beat. What’s the matter?”
She sighed. “We spent the whole day working on a schedule – all of us.” She leaned right back, gazing at the ceiling, one hand on her forehead. “We looked at every stage, estimated how long it would take, and then Matt and I drew out the entire project.”
“Right…”
She straightened up and looked at him.
“It told us we’ll have a solution – in one year.”
He blinked. “As long as that? Surely not.”
She closed her eyes. “Terry, these people are experienced; they know what’s involved.” She opened her eyes and seemed to register what was on his face. “I know. I made them go over it again and again, but unless we have a lucky break that’s the way it comes out. The trouble is, there are a lot of unknowns, so we have to work through it one step at a time, each step building on the result of the previous one.”
“A whole year?”
“I’m afraid so. And that’s just how long it’ll take to reach a solution in the lab; after that it still has to be produced in bulk and distributed.”
“Well, we should throw more money at it, more people.”
She shook her head. “That’ll help at the production stage but it won’t help with the research. The chart looks like a goods train with a series of wagons. Adding a train to the track each side won’t make it any shorter. ” She lowered her head into her hands. “Oh, I’ll never get to sleep. My brain’s red-hot with it all.”
“I think you need a drink.”
A few moments later he placed a glass of brandy on a small table at the side of the sofa and she picked it up. He clinked his own glass against hers.
“Cheers.”
“Cheers.” She took a good mouthful, savoured it, then swallowed. She looked up at him. “You don’t seem all that bothered.”
“About the timescale? Not really.”
“Why?”
“Well, two reasons. First, your project management chart is only as good as the data you’re putting into it. You have a bunch of world-class people in that lab. It’s hard to believe they won’t find the odd short cut here and there, and that will shave weeks, maybe months, off your timescale.”
She sighed. “Oh God, I hope so.” She took another mouthful of brandy. “What’s the second reason?”
“You’re forgetting the mixing in the atmosphere. It’s taking a while but when it starts the ammonia levels are bound to go down. That should give us extra time. I’m not saying it won’t be a close-run thing, but I still think we’ll make it all right.”
She reached out and gripped his hand. “I feel better already. You’re a good man, Terry McKinley.” Then she looked into the empty glass. “Either that or it’s the brandy.”
He smiled. “It’s probably the brandy.”
CHAPTER 24
Next morning Maggie was in the main lab when Pieter came in.
“Yes, Pieter?”
“Maggie, while we are waiting for the cultures Ulrich and I want to search the literature on line, just in case any new sequences have been published. Does Matt have bioinformatics software here?”
Outside there was a distant sound of police sirens; it was part of the background noise out here, and they paid no attention to it.
“I’m sure he does. Let’s ask him – ”
She stopped short. Sara Tennant, Silvia’s postgrad, was standing there
“Excuse me, Maggie,” she said. “I think we have visitors.”
She walked over to the window and Maggie went with her. A small motorcade had pulled up in the road outside, a black sedan about a hundred yards in front of a black limousine, with a second black sedan about the same distance behind it. The cars at the front and rear each disgorged two men wearing suits and dark glasses who scanned up and down the road and over the building. Then a chauffeur opened the rear door of the limousine and a man emerged. He stood there for a moment adjusting a silk pocket handkerchief. A woman came out and joined him and they took the path leading up to the research Center. Maggie narrowed her eyes, then hurried down the stairs to the foyer to let them in.
“Well,” she said, as she opened the door to Robert Cabot and Elaine Zanuck. “This is a surprise.”
“We apologize for the intrusion, Dr. Ferris,” Cabot said. “The President asked us to drop by. You know Dr. Zanuck, of course.”
“Of course. Do come in, you’re most welcome,” Maggie said. “Would you like to see the labs?”
“Yes, if it’s not too inconvenient. The President is pretty tied up with the hurricane business right now, but he’s anxious to know how things are going.”
Maggie led the way to the stairs. “I’m afraid the lifts – er, elevators – aren’t working. We’re on the third floor.”
The research staff looked up with interest as the visitors came in.
“People,” Maggie said. “This is the Director of National Intelligence, Mr. Robert Cabot, and the Director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Elaine Zanuck. They’re here to take a look at what we’re doing.”
She began to show them around, introducing them to each member of the team. When they met Matt Oakley, Zanuck pointed at the equipment.
“Is this sequencer okay for you?” she asked.
Maggie noticed that she didn’t need to be told what the equipment was.
“Yeah, actually it’s a more recent model than the one I left behind in New York State. Real nice. It’ll do the job.”
“Do you have any results yet?” Cabot asked.
Maggie held her breath. Matt had a tendency to speak his mind, and in language other people would find a little too colourful.
Matt’s eyebrows shot up briefly, then he recovered. “Ah no, we’re only just operational. Any case we can’t start sequencing the cyanobacteria until we’ve extracted the DNA; they’re working on that next door. Meanwhile we’re running standards, jus
t making sure everything’s working properly.”
Cabot nodded, and Maggie experienced the mental equivalent of a sigh of relief. Zanuck went over to the chart on the wall and examined it. “What’s this?”
“It’s a project management chart,” Maggie explained, “so we can all keep an eye on where the work’s got to.”
“It’s pretty linear.”
“I’m afraid so. As Matt just said, he can’t start sequencing until we’ve grown up more organisms and extracted the DNA. And Silvia Mussini can’t work on gene silencing until we know the sequence, and so on. Shall we go next door?”
In the lab next door Maggie introduced Pieter van der Rijt and Ulrich Lunsdorfer, and they showed the visitors the culture facilities where they were trying to grow up the cyanobacteria.
Cabot turned to Zanuck. “All right, Elaine, seen enough?”
“Yes, I think so.”
They went down the stairs and paused in the foyer.
Zanuck said, “The timeline on that chart: it looked like you’ll need a full year to get to the solution.”
Maggie swallowed, then nodded. “That’s right. We may be able to shave some time off with short cuts, though. Of course that’s hard to predict at this stage.”
“I thought we only had six months.”
“Do you remember Terry – Dr. McKinley – mentioned mixing in the upper atmosphere? We’re counting on that to give us more time.”
“I see. Your team’s smaller than I expected. Could you use more people?”
“Not really – right now they’d be hanging around with nothing to do. Once things get under way we can expand the operation. We’ll be getting a very good biochemistry group from France, led by Professeur Alain Laroche. And there’s Sergei Kolesnikov – Mr. Cabot, has there been any progress on his transfer?”
“The checks are still going on. I don’t think there’s anything major; it’s more a question of gaps in what we know about him. If we can get some assurances on one or two issues we can issue a temporary visa.”
“I understand there are procedures in place for this sort of thing, but I can’t stress how important it is that we get him here as soon as we can. Sergei and his expertise are vital to this project.”
He nodded. “I’ll try to hurry things along as best I can. So you have everything you need right now? Equipment, personnel? Barring Kolesnikov, that is.”
“Yes, thank you. It’s all here. It’s just a matter of getting on with the job.”
He smiled. “Very good. We’ll tell the President. And you be sure to let us know if anything’s holding you up.”
“Thank you, sir.”
She opened the door and they walked briskly down the path to where the chauffeur was already holding open the door of the black limousine. The suited men were still looking up and down the road. She watched them all get into their cars and drive off. Then there was the sound of motorbikes starting up, followed by police sirens, and a cruiser came past. She realized that the road must have been closed temporarily at both ends. She returned to the lab.
Back at the hotel she knocked lightly on the adjoining door and entered Terry’s room. They both started to speak at once.
“Hi! Guess what?”
They laughed.
“You first,” he said.
“We had a visit this morning – from Robert Cabot and Elaine Zanuck.”
“That’s interesting, he visited me, too.”
“Really? With Dr. Zanuck?”
“No, with a guy called Noel Harrison. He’s only the Director of NASA.”
“My, we are moving in elevated circles these days!”
“Come and sit down. What’s it to be tonight: juice or brandy?”
“Oh, juice would be fine.”
She took a seat on the sofa. While he was getting out the glasses she unrolled the Washington Post, a copy of which was hung on the door in a plastic bag every morning.
He poured a glass of orange juice and set it on the low table. Then he poured one for himself and sat in the chair by the writing desk. He sipped the juice. “So what was your visit about?”
“Oh, they just wanted to look over the labs. They met the people and saw the equipment and the cultures. I think they were satisfied. They seemed to expect a bigger operation but it’s just not realistic at the moment. Zanuck spotted the wall chart and I had to explain why it’s going to take longer than we thought. I asked Cabot about Kolesnikov and he thought there wouldn’t be a major problem. I stressed how important it is that we get him here ASAP and then they took off. What about you?”
“I think Harrison mainly wanted a rundown on what’s been happening, because he missed the White House meeting. I showed him NASA’s own images and our latest results. He asked me if I needed more staff and I told him I was expecting a few more climate people soon, and otherwise we had what we needed.”
“What’s this all about, Terry? Are they being supportive or checking up on us?”
“Both, I imagine. The President did say he wanted to monitor the whole thing closely.”
“Well, he’s using some pretty high level people to do it.”
“He’s got no choice, has he? Not if he wants to keep a tight lid on the whole thing.”
She sipped her juice and began to flick over the pages of the newspaper.
“And why didn’t Kramer put in an appearance?” she asked. “You’d have thought he’d at least be around for visits like that.”
“No idea. He seems to be leaving everything to us. Maybe he sees his job as just keeping an eye on the budget.”
She’d been flicking the pages as she spoke but now she stopped, set the glass down and sat forward.
“Hey, Terry, look at this.”
He came over. She was pointing to a single column: the brief round-up of international news. The short item was headed “Mystery smog hits Bangkok.” They read it together.
“It’s a white smog,” she said.
“In Bangkok? Can’t be.”
“White dust, pungent, choking fumes, hundreds in hospital with breathing difficulties… It certainly sounds like it.”
He read the article again, frowning.
“Shall we see if there’s any more on the internet?”
He straightened up. “I’ve got a better idea. You remember when I used the NASA program and stepped it back in time so we could see when and where the organism escaped?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Well, I only ever looked at Bermuda and the Eastern seaboard of the U.S.A. It never occurred to me to look at the rest of the world.”
She blinked. “That’s right. But there was no reason why – ”
“I’m going to have a look now.”
He picked up his laptop from the desk and sat back down on the sofa next to her. He clicked to start the program, then took the NASA data disk from his brief case and fed it in. Maggie was at his shoulder now, watching. He looked up at her. “The most recent pictures won’t tell us anything; we’ll just get that purple haze from the ammonia in the stratosphere. But that’s not relevant anyway: you’d only expect to get a white smog where the organisms are well established. It can’t be any earlier than we were looking at before so we’ll start two-and-a-half years ago.”
The program came up on screen and he set the date. Then he entered coordinates for Bangkok, made sure the land mass they were looking at was Thailand, and switched to the ammonia spectrum. There was nothing. He stepped forward one month, two months… Broad concentric circles of purple, blue, and green expanded. His jaw dropped.
“Good grief!” He switched back to the conventional view. The rings were centred in Central Thailand.
Maggie craned forward. “That’s not Bangkok,” she said.
“No, it’s north of Bangkok but if the stuff was well established there it wouldn’t take long before it was washed down the rivers to the sea. That’s where it would really thrive and Bangkok would get the ammonia with any good on-shore breeze.” He ran h
is fingers through his hair. “I don’t believe this! Two-and-a-half years ago that stuff appears on the Eastern seaboard. A month or two later it’s on the other side of the world. Could migrating birds have taken it there?”
“From North America to Thailand? Not that I know of.”
“We’d better widen the search.”
He switched back to the conventional view and changed the scale until it extended from India to Eastern China. Then he returned to the ammonia view. On this scale the rings in Thailand had shrunk in size. But now circular bands of purple, blue, and green showed up in north-east India and purple, blue, green, and yellow in China’s northern provinces. It was as if a handful of stones had been thrown into a pond.
She gasped. “It’s all over the place! Terry…?”
He barely heard her. He was staring at the screen, a feeling of cold dread crawling through his body and coalescing in the pit of his stomach.
He rose slowly to his feet and faced her. “I’m sorry, Maggie. Looks like we won’t be getting that extra time after all.”
“What do you mean? We have to! You thought…”
He ran his tongue round his lips. “Yes, I know; I thought mixing up there in the atmosphere would give us an extension. I’m afraid that’s not going to happen. Mixing may go on – for all I know it’s going on right now – but it won’t make a blind bit of difference. The atmosphere’s as thick with ammonia on the other side of the world as it on this.”
Her face fell. “Well how long have we actually got? Chris said six months. That’s worst case, right?”
He shook his head. “Ammonia’s accumulating fast. To judge from the reports I’m seeing now, six months is optimistic, if anything. You need to get back to your schedule, find the corners and cut them fast. There’s no way you have twelve months?”
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