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 w
as 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.
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