Sweet Talking Money

by Harry Bingham

  ‘Nice,’ said Cameron, who hadn’t seen the finished article until now. ‘Very you.’

  ‘Yeah, thanks,’ said Bryn. ‘It’s a welcome change, to be honest. Cecily’s taste was – well, she was talented, very House & Garden, but it was all a bit dainty for me. I don’t like a room you can’t belch in.’

  Cameron went momentarily boss-eyed, then produced a small but definite belch. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘It works.’

  He grinned at her and belched back, like a donkey braying. The burp happened to coincide with the bow-wave from a passing boat, and so the barge rocked up and down as though in awe of Bryn’s prowess. ‘Show-off,’ said Meg. A couple of wrought-iron candlesticks made by his father’s blacksmith threw a flickering yellow light on to stacks of documents beneath. They helped themselves to drinks – beer for Bryn, red wine for Kati and Cameron, white for Meg – took dried fruit and nuts from bowls on the table, then turned to business.

  ‘OK,’ said Bryn. ‘Now, we know that Corinth became aware of Cameron’s work about a year or two back. They understood that she threatened to knock out a medicine based on carpet-bombing everything that moves, and the way they saw it, she put at risk every single cent of their hundred billion dollar market value. Now, imagine you’re Brent Huizinga, the Corinth chief exec. What would you have done?’

  Kati shrugged, thinking about Bryn’s face, how it looked by candlelight, how the shadows moved across him as he moved or the candles sputtered.

  ‘We know what they did,’ she said. ‘They tried to ruin Cameron’s career. As far as they know – or knew, rather – they succeeded.’

  ‘OK. But if it had been you, wouldn’t you have done something else as well? You’d have tried to take out Cameron, definitely, but meantime wouldn’t you also begin to reorient your company, steering it away from what you know is a dangerous area?’

  ‘I guess, maybe. But I don’t …’

  Kati tailed off, her mind still half on her new boyfriend’s appearance. You couldn’t really call him handsome, but he was seriously attractive in a second-hand-bulldozer sort of way. She put her finger to her mouth in an unconsciously flirtatious gesture.

  ‘Well now, that’s the point exactly,’ he said. ‘You don’t see it. Think about it … We’ve got data here on the last dozen acquisitions they’ve made. Every single one has been in the realm of slash-n-burn medicine. Solano Virology Inc, Velmar Pharamaceutech … You name it, their acquisitions pushed them ever further into the danger zone.’

  Bryn paused, assuming he’d made himself clear, but Cameron, Kati and Meg were waiting for him to finish.

  ‘The point is, they’re not changing strategy, they’re hardening strategy. If they’ve got products in the softer end of the market, they’re actually looking to ditch them.’

  Kati nodded, but Bryn continued lest any doubt remain.

  ‘So once again, if you’re Huizinga, and you’re determined to hold fast to your original strategy, what do you do when Cameron disappears from your radar screens, then re-emerges in a blaze of publicity?’

  Kati shook her head. She didn’t know.

  In a soft voice, Bryn spoke again. ‘Well, that’s just it. We don’t know.’ He gestured out of the open windows, where night air floated in from the Thames and a dark city spread out beneath a fluorescent sky. ‘But they’re out there somewhere. Working to destroy us, cost no object.’

  Throughout all this Cameron had been sitting, a picture of concentration, red wine disregarded in her hand. Then, as the silence began to fold round Bryn’s last speech, she began to shake her head, first just a little, then stronger and stronger as her thoughts took hold.

  ‘Cameron …?’

  She looked up to find the others staring at her. Her grey eyes were huge and solemn, her voice low and grave.

  ‘Oh, we know,’ she said. ‘We know alright. This is Corinth, remember, Corinth. They’re doing the one thing that we can’t handle. The one thing that’ll kill us.’

  3

  ‘Anita Morris,’ she said. ‘That’s what gave it away. She was a professor out at Yale. Pretty good, but real ambitious, totally focused on her own personal bottom line. A perfect candidate. Just who I’d have picked if I were Huizinga.’

  She helped herself to some of the dried apricots which Bryn had set out. They were unsulphured organic ones, and their dark-as-black-tea complexion gave no clue to the sunburst of sweetness within. ‘Uh, good,’ she commented, before pulling a magazine from the stack in front of her and waving it at Bryn.

  ‘Pharmaceutical News,’ she said, ‘a trade magazine. Date –’ she checked the cover –’two months back.’ Clearing her voice, she began to quote, ‘“Anita Morris, well-known Yale immunologist has been hired by Corinth Laboratories to head up a new research team at Corinth’s Norwalk, Connecticut facility. The exact nature of the research has not been revealed, but both parties commented on the exciting and ground-breaking nature of the work. Professor Morris will have a substantial working budget, and will report directly to corporate office.”’

  Bryn froze for a moment, not understanding what he was being told. Then it clicked.

  ‘Oh, shit,’ he commented, with feeling.

  ‘That’s not all,’ said Cameron, ignoring them all. She tugged another sheet of paper from her pile, this one a print-out from one of Bryn’s innumerable databases. ‘“FDA listings of human trials cleared for implementation.” Blah, blah, blah. “Institution: Corinth Laboratories. Project Director: Anita Morris. Type of Project: Human Trial, non-product, confidential.”’

  ‘Non-product? You mean it’s not a drug?’

  ‘Exactly. Isn’t that nice? Corinth interested in something it can’t sell.’

  ‘Oh shit. Isn’t that exactly like Huizinga? Hell, damn, bugger and blast!’

  ‘Will someone please tell me what’s going on,’ said Meg, as a sudden sharp breeze whirling in through the windows caused the candles to gutter and shrink.

  ‘As Cameron says, this is the worst news of all. They’ve hired Anita Morris to do what we’re doing. Research into human Immune Reprogramming. They want to race us.’

  ‘So what? They can’t own knowledge.’

  Bryn snorted. Oh yes, they bloody well can. They’ll patent their findings. Then they’ll work on alternatives and patent those. Everything. They’ll patent everything.’

  The London night all of a sudden seemed darker and more menacing than before. The gentle lapping of water against the boat’s hull no longer seemed like the rhythm to a lullaby, it sounded like the tap-tap-tap of destiny, a soundtrack from a horror film.

  Then Kati spoke again. ‘I’m really sorry to say this, and I know there’s a possible financial issue for us, but strictly from a medical perspective … in a way, isn’t it good news that a big company has gotten interested in this? If Corinth is serious about Reprogramming, it’d be amazing.’

  Dear Kati. Dear, sweet, pretty Kati, who could never be as nasty or duplicitous as the world she lived in. Bryn looked at her with fond incredulity. ‘Well, for one thing,’ he said, ‘that possible financial issue is the difference between my financial destruction and … But put that aside. Think about it. Corinth is worth a hundred billion dollars. Immune Reprogramming will never be worth that. Never. They don’t want the patents so they can use them. They want them in order to bury them.’

  ‘You mean, not use them? They’re allowed to do that?’

  ‘Of course they’re allowed to do that.’

  Kati swallowed. Bryn’s world was a rougher, nastier one than she had ever bargained on encountering. It was the one discordant factor in their otherwise happy young relationship. He was so familiar with the cynical brutality of the pharmaceutical industry that it often seemed as though he shared its logic, agreed with its assumptions. Cameron’s mouth had tautened too, her gaze unblinking and hard.

  ‘But surely,’ said Kati, ‘Immune Reprogramming is better medicine, so it must be worth more money. Why …?’

  Bryn
softened his jaw a little, trying to make sure that his anger towards Corinth didn’t come across as aggression towards Kati.

  ‘Take AIDS,’ he said gently. ‘How long does Reprogramming take to eliminate the virus?’

  Kati shrugged. ‘We don’t have any human data. But in rats, it takes around two weeks. Sometimes three if we have trouble.’

  Bryn nodded, still keeping his voice low and soft. ‘Right. Now, medically speaking, that’s a great result, wonderful, fantastic, just what the doctor ordered. But commercially speaking, if you don’t mind me saying, it’s a disaster. Corinth doesn’t want drugs that cure you. They want you to live long, be sick, and take drugs. Think about it. AIDS drugs, anti-depressants, certain types of heart drugs, Viagra, for heaven’s sake – the most profitable medications are all ones which don’t cure you, but just make you go on taking them. Reprogramming is a wonderful thing, Kati, and it’ll make us plenty of money. But Huizinga will never sell it instead of his drugs. Never.’

  The silence grew louder.

  Upriver to the west of London, a band of low pressure gathered and intensified, and the breeze increased in strength and force. The draught plucked at the papers on the desk, it twitched at Cameron’s unbound hair, it snatched at the candle flames, causing them to tremble and smoke.

  ‘What do we do?’ asked Kati.

  It was Cameron who answered. ‘Only one thing we can do. We race ’em. We get there first.’

  ‘More specifically,’ said Bryn, ‘we have to beat them to the Patent Office. And that means you two have got to forget about your blood juicing, and forget about the Schoolroom. It’s the peptides that matter now.’

  Although Cameron was nodding with big arcs of the head, Kati was still puzzled. ‘That’s not logical,’ she said. ‘Scientifically –’

  ‘Forget science. Think economics,’ said Bryn.

  ‘Think …?’

  ‘Think about it, Kati,’ said Cameron. ‘Corinth can’t patent the Schoolroom, because we already own it.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’

  ‘And they can’t patent blood juicing, because there’s nothing there to patent. All we do is inject a whole bunch of natural substances, and you can’t patent vitamins and you can’t patent injections.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘But peptides – well, they may be natural and we haven’t invented them, but for some reason some damn fool bureaucrat decided that people could patent them –’

  ‘Precisely,’ nodded Bryn.

  ‘Presumably because the same damn fool bureaucrat cared more about the profits of pharma companies than he did about people’s health –’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Just like the same bunch of morons decided you could patent human genes, even though that’s kind of like taking out a patent on gravity –’

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘But either way, if we want Reprogramming to work, we need to patent our peptide sequences before Corinth gets anywhere close.’ Cameron shook her head at the size of the task ahead of them. ‘And that’s not going to be easy. Each disease has its own peptide encoding. It’s a massive undertaking.’

  The breeze ratcheted up another notch, and shadows began to swing around the room, like the banners of a mobilising army. On the walls, Bryn’s framed pictures began to rattle and shake. Once again, it was Kati who broke the silence, speaking to Cameron.

  ‘Anita Morris,’ she said. ‘How good is she? Is she good enough to beat us?’

  Pale and serious, Cameron nodded. ‘She’s OK and she’s got money. She’ll have a huge lab, as many research staff as she wants … If it was a fair race, we’d win it every time. But it isn’t and God help the sick, Kati, God help all of us, if they win.’

  And as she spoke, a moth fluttered in through the open window, helpless to control its movement through the unpredictable air. It staggered briefly around, as though looking for something to land on, a place of security. It was a short struggle. The breeze lifted it and drove it straight into one of the candles. The flame flared briefly as the wings caught light, then fell away.

  A smell of burning filled the room.

  4

  ‘Goddamn the goddamned – goddamn it!’

  The test-tube shattered in her hand as her legs skidded from under her, and a stray elbow caught a beaker full of fluid as she tumbled to the floor. She landed with a painful bump on her bottom, and the beaker tumbled with her, splashing her with betaine hydrochloride and smashing on the floor. ‘God – damn – IT!’

  Meg burst in, took a look at the scene. Cameron had tears in her eyes, which she scrubbed angrily away with the sleeve of her labcoat. Having corrected her eyes, her hand wrenched at the back of her head to make sure no hair had escaped the inevitable rubber band. In a voice loaded with rage and frustration she said, ‘It’s OK, Meg. I just slipped.’ She clambered upright, using her hand on the worktop to support her, then yelped in pain as a glass splinter stabbed her. ‘Ow, shit!’

  Meg bundled the scientist into a chair, and like a mother with a child, drew the splinter from her hand, forced Cameron to sit quiet as she washed the wound, then put a plaster on top. She swept the floor, disposing of the broken glassware in the sharps bin, and mopped up the betaine hydrochloride whose fumes were filling the room. She opened the door and window to allow a draught in.

  From outside, music coming from the barge drifted in on air laden with scents of an urban riverbank May evening: waterlogged wood and traffic fumes, river ooze and elderflower. A tinkling laugh – Kati’s laugh – rose above the Mozart, while the knocking of the barge against the jetty growled an answering rhythm.

  Cameron kept trying to help with the clean-up job, but Meg wouldn’t let her. ‘Not yet, babe, you’ll only break something else.’

  ‘I am not a six-year-old,’ muttered Cameron.

  Meg put her mop away and looked searchingly into the other woman’s intense grey eyes. ‘Time of the month, is it?’

  ‘No. I just broke something. That’s all. Jesus. What’s this, the Cockney Inquisition?’

  Pursing her lips in annoyance, Cameron rose and slammed the open window shut. The Mozart and the tinkling laugh were cut off with a bang. The room filled with silence, bringing a flash of startled understanding to Meg.

  ‘Oh my God,’ she said. ‘You’ve got the hots for Bryn, haven’t you?’

  ‘I have not.’ Cameron’s denial was instantaneous, but a rush of scarlet up her cheeks betrayed the truth.

  ‘Oh my God, you’ve really got a bad case of it.’ Cameron shook her head, but tears began to tumble from her eyes, confirming the truth beyond any doubt at all.

  Meg put her arm round the scientist and let her cry, big heavy tears penned in for too many weeks of silent suffering. Eventually, as the weeping began to die down, Meg asked gently, ‘How long has it been, sweetie? How long have you fancied him?’

  Gulping for words, Cameron answered. ‘I don’t know, really … When he crashed on to the scene, I thought … I thought … God, Meg, I don’t know what I thought. I guess I thought he wasn’t doing all this – you know, rescuing me, my work, everything – just for money. I didn’t think people did things like that. I thought it must be, just a little bit, even just a tiny bit, because of me. Shows what a dumb-ass I am.’

  Her voice trickled away as she battled with her tears, while Meg continued the story. ‘You thought he must have had some sort of attraction to you, because you didn’t believe him to be the self-centred, money-grabbing, male bastard that he turned out to be. Meanwhile, you’ve been working here right on top of him, seeing him every day, working yourself into a right big tizz over him, getting yourself more and more upset every time he and Kati spend a night together.’

  ‘Which seems to be every night at the moment.’

  ‘They’re not serious about each other, you know. They’ve both just come out of heavy relationships, and what they need is –’ Cameron’s gulping and eye-wiping became more anguished the longer Meg went on. In a hole of her
own making, Meg stopped digging. ‘Sorry, I suppose that makes it worse.’

  Cameron allowed herself to cry once more, while Meg rubbed her back in long, slow circles of comfort.

  Then, on an impulse, Meg put her hand to the scientist’s head and pulled away the rubber band. Her shoulder-length sandy hair fell around her face, still kinked where the band had gripped it. Meg ran her fingers through the hair like a hairdresser before a restyle, then put her hand to Cameron’s chin and lifted it, gazing into the brave but grief-battered face.

  ‘You don’t really give yourself a chance, do you?’

  ‘What d’you mean?’ asked Cameron, old defensive patterns at the ready.

  ‘Look, tell me if I’m going too far, but you’re not exactly experienced, are you? Have you ever had, like, a proper boyfriend?’

  ‘Have I ever had a proper boyfriend? I’m not a virgin if that’s what you mean. There were a couple of guys at grad school, and we had intercourse and everything. But, Jesus! They were juveniles, Meg, more interested in Budweiser and bowling than anything else. I wanted to work. I knew I had it in me to do great work in medicine, and I couldn’t see the point in fooling around, really. If I ever met a man who was actually grown to adulthood, it might be different, but till then, I don’t really give a damn. At least, I didn’t until … until …’

  ‘Until Bryn conned you into thinking he might be a grown-up.’

  ‘And it’s not as though sex is all it’s cracked up to be. Not for me it wasn’t.’

  ‘It can be quite nice with the right bloke, and you know, Bryn’s not such a baby. He’s into commitment. I know he was cut up about his marriage. I think his fling with Kati is just a holiday until he’s ready to start looking for the one true one again.’