Sweet Talking Money

by Harry Bingham

  ‘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 wo
rld 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 colleag
ues, 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?’