NH3

by Stanley Salmons

  Terry slipped an arm round her shoulders.

  “Maggie” he said softly.

  “We have to save him, Terry,” she said, without taking her eyes off Zak. “He was just talking to me and the next thing he was flying backwards onto the floor. I didn’t think, I just threw myself down, too.”

  “You were lucky you weren’t hit too. The bastard managed to squeeze off another shot before I nailed him.”

  She looked round and started as she saw his face. “Terry, you’re hurt!”

  He ran the tip of his tongue over a split lip, then gently fingered the welt that was swelling under one eye. “He was very fast. I expect I’ll be sore for a few days.”

  Then, seeing Zak’s eyelids flicker, he said, “Hold on, there, my friend. Ambulance is on its way.”

  Milner came over. He looked at Zak and shook his head. Then he gripped Terry’s shoulder.

  “What do you think of this guy?” he announced to no one in particular. “Joe Englehardt says he’s sending me a couple of British boffins and what do I get? Frigging James Bond.”

  Terry shrugged self consciously. “I just got lucky.”

  “We owe you, Terry, we owe you good. That guy was ready to take all of us out.”

  A murmur came from Zak. Maggie put her ear close to his mouth. He murmured again. She frowned and shook her head.

  Dominguez came in. “Ambulance is here,” he said. Then he saw Zak and muttered, “Oh, shit.”

  Maggie said, “I’m going with him”

  “I’ll come with you.”

  “No, Terry,” she said. “You and Sam need to go through the house. See if he kept his lab books here. I’m sure he’s trying to tell me something.”

  The paramedics came in at a run. They checked Zak briefly, then one put a line in and they started to transfer him to a stretcher.

  Maggie got up. She said simply “I’m with him” and followed them out to the ambulance.

  CHAPTER 53

  As the paramedics carried Zak out of the house and down the path Maggie noticed that they had to step around something. Looking down as she followed them she realized with a shock that it was a body, covered with a blanket. At the side of the entrance a blue cap with a badge had lodged between the branches of a dead rose bush. A round-toed black shoe protruded from under the blanket. She bit her lip and swallowed, then hurried to the ambulance. Behind her the uniformed officers were already taping off the entire area.

  By the time she climbed in they had Zak on some sort of gurney and the drip was on a stand. One of the paramedics was holding an oxygen mask to his face while the other went round to drive or to sit with the driver – she couldn’t see which. She sat on a bench next to Zak and put her hand out to steady herself as they took off rapidly with a brief burst of the siren. She looked at Zak and then at the paramedic, who gave her a brief smile.

  The ambulance slowed, sounded the siren, accelerated and turned.

  Zak’s eyelids flickered and her heart leapt.

  “Are his lips moving?” she asked anxiously.

  The man lifted the mask for a moment.

  “They are,” she exclaimed, “he’s trying to speak to me…”

  The paramedic replaced the mask.

  “Lady, he needs oxygen. Chances are he’s got a collapsed lung, maybe worse.”

  “Please, what he’s trying to say, it’s terribly important. Believe me, you have no idea how important it is.”

  He looked at her dubiously and lifted the mask. Zak’s lips moved and she craned to hear.

  “The Achilles’ Heel…” he murmured.

  At that moment the siren sounded in a long, continuous, two-note wail. She shook her head in disbelief.

  “For God’s sake, can’t you tell him not to use that thing for a moment...?”

  The man’s eyebrows lifted. “Lady, we’re shooting red lights as it is! Do you want to get us all killed?”

  Zak’s lips were still moving. The siren stopped. The paramedic promptly replaced the mask.

  Maggie was about to say something, then she gave up. This man’s number one priority was to keep his charges alive until they reached the hospital. It would be pointless to argue with him.

  She clenched her fists until her nails bit deep into the palms, and suffered her frustration in silence.

  Terry finished going through the house with Milner, then arranged to be taken to the hospital in a patrol car. The driver told him he’d wait outside.

  He ran in and queued with growing impatience at the reception desk. A bored receptionist tapped at a computer and announced that she had no record of the admission but the patient would have been taken to the Emergency Department and he could ask there. Then he was bounced from pillar to post by a succession of people, all of whom seemed far too busy to help him. Eventually he was directed to a waiting area that contained nothing more than a water cooler, an overflowing waste bin, and some brown, wall-mounted, plastic-covered seats, many of them slashed.

  And there was Maggie, hunched over, sitting on the end of the row. There was no one else around. The room seemed altogether too large for her.

  “Maggie?” he said.

  She looked up. Her eyes were red-rimmed. His heart dropped.

  “When did it happen?”

  “He died in the ambulance. They worked hard on him but he never recovered consciousness.”

  She stood and he took her in his arms. Her shoulders were quaking.

  “That’s three people dead,” she sobbed, “and it’s all our fault. They’d be alive now if it weren’t for us.”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  She lifted her tearful gaze to him. “They got Challoner because they were afraid we’d speak to him. But first they made him say where Zak was. Or did they just follow us? I don’t know. All I know is, Zak was safe enough before we came, and now he’s dead too. And that poor young policeman at the door…” She buried her head in his chest.

  His voice was gentle. “Maggie, stop torturing yourself. We had no choice: we had to find Zak. He thought he was helping to alleviate poverty; instead he’s put the whole of mankind at risk. He didn’t mean to, but that’s the reality. We have to keep an eye on the bigger picture. Thousands have died already. Billions more could die if we don’t stop this thing.”

  She responded between sobs. “I – know – I – know.”

  He rubbed her shoulder and after a while her body relaxed. She took a deep breath and straightened up. As she looked at him her eyes became wider and darker. She reached out, touching her fingers lightly to his bruised face. “He hurt you badly.”

  Her fingers were cool, their touch soothing on the inflamed skin. He tried to take the hand in his but she drew away, then searched her handbag for a tissue and blew her nose. Her voice was muffled by the tissue.

  “Did you search the house?”

  “Yes, it didn’t take long. The house was almost bare, Maggie: no computer, not a single bookshelf or filing cabinet or chest of drawers. He kept a few clothes in a suitcase. We looked under the bed and in the kitchen cupboards, found some bread and cheese and several bottles of whisky, nothing more. There were a couple of paperbacks and some bills in the desk, not in his name. That was it. He must have been going out of his mind with boredom, a brilliant young man like that, with nothing to do except keep himself hidden. No wonder he took to drink.”

  “That’s it, then. The end of the trail. He told us it was a plasmid and that’s about all we’ve learned from this entire escapade.”

  “Didn’t he say something about the organism having an Achilles’ Heel?”

  “Yes, he said it again in the ambulance but if it meant anything we’re never going to find out now.”

  Terry’s phone rang. He took it out and answered the call. He listened for a long moment in silence before saying: “Ok, I’ll be back tonight.”

  He turned slowly to face her.

  “That was Chris. We’ve crossed the threshold.”

  CHAPTER
54

  Silvia Mussini was still in her lab when they arrived back at the Institute that evening. She led Terry and Maggie into her office and gestured to the chairs before sitting down herself. She shook back thick, dark hair and smiled. “You’ve been gone a while. We missed you.” Then her eyes settled on the red and purple bruise high on Terry’s cheek, which had by now acquired a spreading penumbra of brownish-yellow. Her smile faded. “What happened to you?”

  Terry gave a small grimace. “We thought we could make a real contribution to the research effort, Silvia. We’ve been working with the FBI, looking for the guy who created the organism. And we found him. His name was Dr. Zak Gould.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “He spread the organism?”

  “No, he only created it. The people responsible for spreading it wanted to silence him so he’d gone into hiding. We finally tracked him down and Maggie got him talking.”

  Silvia’s face lit up. She turned to Maggie. “Really? What did he say?”

  “He confirmed that he’d engineered the organism by introducing a plasmid. He started to tell me what was in it. Then he was shot dead.”

  Silvia raised fingertips to her mouth.

  “They’d have killed the rest of us, too, if it hadn’t been for Terry.”

  Silvia’s voice was a whisper. “My God.”

  “Unfortunately,” Maggie went on, “it seems it was all for nothing. He said the organism had an Achilles’ Heel but he didn’t tell me what it was.” Her shoulders sagged. “He knew everything there was to know about that organism. I’d have brought him back here, got him to help us.” Her eyes met Silvia’s. “We could have been leaps ahead! Now he’s dead, and we learned nothing.”

  Silvia placed a hand over Maggie’s. “Don’t be too disappointed, Maggie. You had to try.”

  Maggie nodded sadly, “thanks, Silvia.” She straightened up. “Were you able to make any progress?”

  “I have some more data from the sequencing teams.” She shrugged. “I must say it would have been useful if that man was with us now. What we have is so hard to understand.”

  “Oh? Why?”

  “Well, I have been studying the biochemical pathway for making ammonia from nitrogen. It is not simple – it takes a number of enzymes to do it. Maggie, there is nowhere near enough DNA in the construct to encode the genes needed to make those enzymes.”

  Maggie blinked rapidly. This was so contrary to her expectations she could scarcely absorb it. She cast her mind back to what the poor, half-drunken Zak Gould had said to her in the house. It wasn’t hard; she must have gone over it a hundred times. “I took sequences from a nitrogen-fixing species, and I put them in an organism that doesn’t normally fix nitrogen.” That’s what he’d said. She’d always assumed that meant he’d transferred all the material needed to create an ammonia pathway. Now Silvia was saying there wasn’t enough material in the construct to do that. She replayed the entire conversation in her mind yet again.

  And then she frowned.

  “Silvia, there was something else Dr. Gould said, something I didn’t understand. ‘It was in there already.’ Then he laughed. Does it mean anything to you?”

  Silvia blinked, then turned to stare out of the window. They waited, motionless, watching her in silence. Suddenly she turned back to them. “Ma certo! The necessary genetic material is there already! It must be in a primitive form buried somewhere in the chromosomes. Normally it is activated only in nitrogen-fixing bacteria. So – ”

  She pointed to Maggie and they shouted together. “The plasmid is a switch!”

  Terry looked from one to the other. “You’ve lost me.”

  Silvia’s smile was enigmatic. “The basic gene sequences are already present in other cyanobacteria. This man found out how to activate them. So that is what he did. What he put in the plasmid does not encode the whole pathway; it makes some sort of regulatory factor that sets it going.”

  “Well I’ll be damned,” Terry said. “That’s what Zak meant by an Achilles’ Heel! His plasmid is just a switch. And switches can be turned off as well as on!”

  Maggie was breathing quickly. “Silvia, that makes the job easier, doesn’t it?”

  “Much easier.”

  “Right, then. Where do we go from here?”

  “We have two possible targets,” Silvia said. “We can either stop the plasmid making this regulatory factor or we can stop the factor acting on the chromosomal DNA.”

  “Which would be quickest?”

  “It’s hard to say. To stop the plasmid from making the factor we need to identify the DNA construct which he has put in it. To stop the factor from acting we have to find out how or where it binds to the chromosomal DNA.”

  “Do you have enough people to try both approaches?”

  Silvia pursed her lips. “No. But after the sequencing teams are finished they will have nothing more to do. Perhaps some of their people can come in and join us.”

  “Excellent. I’ll tell them.”

  As they hurried downstairs Terry smiled to himself at the change in Maggie. She’d said next to nothing during the whole flight back but now she was positively brimming.

  She turned to him. “Terry, you’ve got to take this to Washington. Convince them to give us more time. We can beat this.”

  “The threshold’s been crossed, Maggie. I’m not sure I can stall them. I’m not sure I want to. Even with this new information, it’ll take a long time to work up a solution.”

  “Please, Terry. Thousands of people don’t have to die. Try to convince them.”

  He looked at her, then nodded. “I’ll do everything I can.”

  CHAPTER 55

  Terry took a cab straight from the airport to the NSF building. Trish picked him up from reception and Chris Walmesley was standing outside his office, waiting to greet him. Clearly he already knew about the incident in Boston. He was full of apologies.

  “Terry, I am so sorry about what happened. Are you okay?”

  “Not so bad.”

  “And Maggie?”

  “She’s fine.”

  “If I’d only known…”

  “How did you find out?” Terry asked.

  “From Bob Cabot. Your FBI agent made a glowing report to Joe Englehardt, and he passed it up the line. You’re a bit of a celebrity! Well done.”

  “Thanks, let’s hope it was worth it.”

  “Indeed. Noel’s inside. We’ll take a quick look at the data and then we’d better get over to the White House.”

  By the time Sarah Bethany showed them into the Oval Office, Herbert Kramer and Robert Cabot were already there with the President and Vice-President.

  Cabot jumped to his feet and pumped Terry’s hand. “Dr. McKinley, my congratulations! Joe Englehardt told me all about it. You’re a brave man.”

  “News gets around.”

  “Good news is in short supply at the moment.”

  President Kinghorn patted the sofa to his right. “Have a seat, Terry.”

  Terry noticed that Kramer was sitting slightly apart from the others and his gaunt features looked even more strained than usual. He made no eye contact.

  “We’re indebted to you, Terry,” the President continued. “Your action saved several lives, including your own. Great job.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  The President scrutinized Terry’s bruised face, then pointed under his own eye. “Does that hurt?”

  Terry shrugged. “Only if I touch it. Looks worse than it is.”

  He nodded. “Well, we’d better get on with it. Originally I wanted a progress report from you, but things have moved on since then. Apparently this organism was man-made and we now know who made it.”

  “Dr. Zak Gould, yes. Sadly he was fatally wounded in the attack, but Maggie did get some information from him beforehand. It’ll shorten the development time considerably.”

  “Question is, will that be enough? We’re over the threshold, people. We have white smogs now in Buffalo and Detroit. The one i
n Detroit hasn’t shifted yet. People are demanding to know what’s going on. Where are we with that biological solution, Terry?”

  “From the preliminary sequence data and the hints Dr. Gould gave us we now know that the plasmid he used is a kind of switch. All we have to do is design another plasmid that stops it from working. It makes the whole task easier.”

  “Terry,” Chris said gently. “What we need to know is whether we have something right now, something we could distribute widely so as to get these ammonia levels down.”

  Terry took a deep breath. “Right now? No, not right now. Not exactly.”

  “How long’s it going to take?” Cabot asked.

  “The teams are working flat out. I think they’re only weeks away.”

  “But that’s just the beginning, isn’t it?” Cabot said. “The way I understand it, even after they’ve come up with something that works we have to manufacture it in bulk and start delivering it all over the world. That means we won’t be ready to take positive action for months. None of us are going to be around by then!”

  Noel Harrison chimed in. “Bob’s right. Chris and Terry and I have reviewed the data. The ammonia levels aren’t simply above threshold; they’re rising more and more steeply. We’re seeing smogs in more places, covering larger areas and lasting longer. More people are dying. We can’t wait.”

  Kramer spoke for the first time. His voice was heavy with disdain. “I know very well what all this is leading up to. It’s ridiculous to have to take such a crucial decision based on one type of measurement. These data have all been collected in the same way. A good scientist checks his results by getting to them via different routes.”

  Chris answered stiffly: “I think we’re aware of what good science is, Herbert; some of us have actually been practising it for some years.”

  Terry had to smother a smile but the President was not amused.

  “Come on you two, cut that out, we’ve got enough problems here without bickering among ourselves.”

  Chris said, “I’m sorry, sir, but we need to be clear about this: it’s not just atmospheric measurements; you can see it in other ways. You have the severe weather systems like the hurricanes and those tropical cyclones. You have the worsening white smogs. You have reports of wildlife in trouble: in India and China it’s flocks of birds falling out of the sky; elsewhere it’s rafts of dead fish washing up along the beaches; mammals, too – bats and whales seem to be particularly susceptible. Pretty soon people are going to start dying everywhere, not just in the major cities with the smogs. It’s a consistent picture. The monitoring’s necessary, but all we’re doing is putting numbers on a situation we already know to exist.”