The Pattern Maker

by Nicholas Lim

  He returned to the table. There was no sound from the upper bunk.

  “Gudrun, I am worried about Adele. Her speech is worse,” Richardson whispered. His wife moved so he faced her back. He wanted to reach out and touch her. They had not touched for a long time.

  They were breaking down. He certainly was, and his child too. Only his wife was surviving, become hard, almost inhuman. She protected Adele in careful ways, keeping to a routine, running lessons, a school timetable, supporting her successive accommodations, even this regression.

  Richardson remembered earlier times, innocent times, just after they had married, what they had said to each other, before they had had Adele, that as long as they stayed together they could face anything. They hadn’t known then what he could do.

  Richardson blinked rapidly. The thought of what was happening gripped him again.

  Not all was lost. Someone must be investigating the outbreak on the south coast. He prayed for a scientist, not some overworked nurse or field doctor. Please God it was someone smart with experience, who understood outbreak management; someone who knew the importance of finding first cases and could find one of them alive.

  Approaching voices echoed in the outside corridor. He saw his wife glance around the room. He knew she still hoped to escape. The idea frightened him.

  A key screamed in the door lock, iron on iron. Blankets moved in the top bunk.

  “Don’t go Daddy.”

  “I’ve got to work Adele. I’ll see you tonight.”

  He looked down at his wife. She remained at the table, eyes fixed on the wall, her back straight.

  Chapter 18

  The small rectangle of plastic looked like a credit card. Except that the chip etched on the substrate was an opaque matt black and large as a thumbprint. Zahra turned her head to catch the audible click of a clean seat as she settled the card into a mounting.

  She wriggled down into her chair like a racing driver into a cockpit. “Ok, let’s check who you are.” She pecked at the keyboard with two fingers to configure the processing sequence. “Twenty-three thousand strains should catch you.” At her elbow, the mounting locked shut, isolating the chip while current was supplied.

  On arriving, Zahra had found a box of peppermint tea next to her keyboard. Garrett had sent her an e-mail that began, “It doesn't work. But a cup of tea can help in other ways.” Christine must have driven to a local shop to get the gift that morning. It was true: ginger tea, peppermint tea, vitamins, antacids, she had tried them all and none of them worked; she still felt sick. Zahra had smiled.

  Garrett had returned to the lab the previous evening to write a search sequence to apply additional checks. Her e-mail suggested Zahra try it when checking the two new samples. Zahra had just tested her code; it had worked without error and she had to admit Garrett had improved on the approach. Some parts she didn’t fully understand. She was surprised Garrett hadn’t stayed to help interpret the output.

  Processing… Checking chip integrity… Applying current… Please wait… Applying current…Analysing electrode responses…

  Zahra watched the onscreen hourglass fill with binary sand as Sherlock read chemical syllables from the cut strips of malarial DNA.

  Translating… Translating...

  The processing was quick. The analyzer’s chemical sequencing mimicked reproduction in its unzipping of the twin nucleic ribbons and the massively-parallel chip core allowed a fluent reading in minutes of the fifteen sequences of a thousand base pairs from Garrett's biopsy.

  Translation complete. Analysing… exceptions reported...

  Zahra viewed anomaly reports from Garrett’s search as they came. Nothing much. Some unexpected data but all in junk DNA. Zahra clicked through to see a dump of nucleotide sequences.

  AGT CAG AGT CAG AGT CAG AGT CAG AGT CAG AGT CAG AGT CAG AGT CAG AGT CAG AAA CCC AAA CCC AAA CCC CAG AGT CAG AGT CAG AGT CAG AGT CAG AGT CAG AGT CAG AGT CAG AGT CAG AGT CAG AGT CAG AGT CAG AGT CAG AGT CAG AGT CAG AGT AGT CAG AGT CAG

  Zahra frowned at the anomalous sequence highlit by Garrett’s code and the repetitious starting pattern. Unusual. She had not seen it before. She pulled at her lower lip. She stopped when it began to hurt. Who to ask? She couldn't pester George about every tiny thing. Rheinnalt was working on the far side of the lab. He might be able to help. He was good with computers. But as well as weird the man was annoying. The way he had cozied up to Christine. So obvious.

  Analysis complete. Perform additional exceptions analysis?

  Zahra hesitated. All sorts of oddities were seen in junk DNA: hence the name. Junk encoded for no active proteins and served no known practical function; the genomes of mature species were full of junk. Unimportant, evolutionary dead-ends.

  Zahra breathed in sharply. She put a hand on her stomach. What was that? Wind? No. It had felt alien, like a thump inside her. A kick. She closed her eyes. She thought about a tiny foot. She squeezed her eyes more tightly closed as they filled with tears. What was she crying for? She waited until she fell calmer. When she opened her eyes she saw Rheinnalt staring at her. She glared furiously at the exceptions report on the screen. What was she doing?

  Yes. Junk DNA. It wasn't important. Zahra closed the exceptions report and returned to the main results window.

  Species: Falciparum. Match: Sumatra-7

  There it was again.

  “George, we’ve got a repeat match on the Brighton strain.”

  Skinner looked up from a tray of tubes, hands full.

  “You’re meant to be working on Cuito?”

  “I just ran the match for Christine, that’s all. I don’t think she’ll be pleased. She insists something else must be going on.”

  Skinner put down his tray and sighed. He nodded reluctantly.

  “I was reading up on the phylogeny of Plasmodium last night,” Zahra shoved her keyboard away like an empty plate, “And malaria seems uniquely prone to cross-mutations and jumping species. One study suggested human malaria’s virulence was due to its recent transfer from migratory European songbirds.”

  “Susan Tollen.”

  “Yes,” Zahra looked annoyed.

  “She was not the first to make that claim.”

  “She pointed out that because many mosquito species feed on multiple hosts – mammals, birds, reptiles, humans – alien transfer events occur all the time.” Zahra’s voice rose. “I was thinking, a bird-malaria type-scenario would solve the transmission puzzle! There are dozens of candidate mosquito strains in southern England, not just anopheles.”

  “As they say, variation is the one biological constant.” Skinner’s voice struggled with patience.

  “But if it were true,” Zahra persisted, her face suggesting a girl who had done her homework and not got what she wanted. “A new cross-species malaria would be the epidemiologist’s nightmare. AIDS, smallpox, polio, Ebola: they were all caused that way. And it doesn’t take much. A few alterations to a haemaglutanin protein–”

  “Shani–”

  “–when Yersinia Pestis mutated to become orally infectious it created the bubonic plague.”

  “Shani, I’ve told you before, we can’t shout ‘Pandemic!’ every time we see strange pathologies.”

  “I know. But I understand a bit more what is haunting Christine about this case. She is obsessed by it isn’t she?”

  Skinner did not reply.

  ***

  The roads west of Porton were twisting and this early in the morning mostly clear of traffic. Garrett pushed her car fast through the corners, glad to be leaving. She had a backlog of work she wanted to clear at the Royal. A campervan held her up for two miles. The toot of an oncoming lorry forced her to check, brake hard and drop back. The single carriageway offered few chances to overtake. After two more tries, she stopped forcing the pace.

  She reached the town of Boscombe. Porton was only a few miles behind her but already she felt calmer. Off to one side of the road she glimpsed a squat church steeple rising through trees, a stone dart ai
med upward. She slowed, stopped, got out of the car. Her feet walked her through a wooden gate and led her across mowed grass littered with toppling stones. A small parish church stood under yew trees, a neat house of rubble masonry with dressed stone lintels and window frames. Why do I come back?

  After David’s death she had gone to church and wept. She had called out to God, then raged against him. In the silence of her prayers she had asked questions, and waited.

  The grassy courtyard was quiet. Garrett walked towards the church.

  While waiting she had worked and in that distraction found a sort of peace. There, among the ill and the dead, she had turned her scientific detachment onto herself. Through that objective lens she had seen a simple idea as if for the first time. Community, consolation, nostalgia, promises of reward or punishment: they were not reasons to believe something was true. Belief in the Christian God was an accident of birth; it was not supported by evidence. It was unscientific. She had stopped going to Mass.

  She approached the arched entrance. At her feet clumps of yellow flowering herbs pushed out of the grass. She recognised Hypericum perforatum – Chase-devil or St John's wort. Its cancer-inhibiting properties had recently brought the plant into the news feeds. Half-forgotten lines surfaced in her mind. Pick simples for a cancer. She glanced up at the Chi Rho inscribed on the arch keystone. A purpose more obscure.

  Staring up at the weathered carving, she remembered childhood Sundays. The sacraments weren’t like her theories. They were shared old steps, more like a social dance, with meanings worn smooth with use. She pushed at the door.

  The air inside was cool. She crossed the transept. Even as she genuflected she wondered if it showed more than respect. Physical memory is not wholly to be trusted she decided as she rose from a half-crouch. It might allow you to play a memorized piece of music – or drive from Brighton to Porton Down with hardly a conscious thought – but before you are wholly aware it can kneel you before a God you no longer believe exists. She sat in one of the pews at the back and listened to the thickening silence. It was peaceful in the church. Nothing moved.

  After some minutes she looked round. She had half-expected a conversation. David’s ghost had been with her that morning, together with the anger that always came with him. Memory of another presence had been there too, of Jason, mistrustful, holding himself at a distance, out of reach. It had filled her fists with frustration.

  A small altar stood at the end of the central aisle covered with a simple white cloth, a table awaiting setting. She suddenly realised why she had loved the gospels so much. They were a master pattern, a way of understanding told in a story of human proportion. She bowed her head over her empty hands clasped like a child’s around a found treasure.

  Sunlight fell on Garrett's upturned face, stained through the leaded figures of the four evangelists. So fix our eyes on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. What if that were true?

  Was her lapse other than she had supposed, simpler than her rational arguments? Had she allowed anger and resentment to foster sin? Had scientific detachment and her pride in knowledge cut her off from a living faith, from a personality behind the facts of the world?

  She remembered her argument with Rheinnalt Bryce the day before. It itched like an insect bite. Her models of infection and protein expression gave predictions and identified compounds that saved lives. As Bryce had suggested, this queer grip her medical maths had beyond the tip of her pen required explanation. How did her mind-made levers move objects in the world?

  The crucifix high on the wall of the apse filled her vision. She had the sudden image of herself suspended between two worlds, as if a diver seeing both corals and sky. She moved her head as if to shake something free.

  Even if she considered an unproven origin for the patterns she studied, the journey would hardly be started. To return to a place kneeling in front of a cross? That would need a confrontation with a Creator who appeared to be incompetent, indifferent or worse.

  The image of a man as God hung in front of her. Perhaps she could just take what was useful, and not trouble with the hows and whys? The thought rang hollow. Some instinct warned her that what she was facing would demand of her a greater understanding.

  She stood and crossed over to the gospel aisle. Halfway up, a cluster of patched flags drooped from poles in the windless air. Retired regimental colours. Garrett recognised the long shadow of Porton, five miles down the road. She remembered her anger seeing in Skinner’s lab the intrusion of military purpose into her scientific world. Here too.

  At the end of the nave a large painting of dark oils hung from the back wall. In front of it, intricate swirls of inlaid coloured tiles patterned the floor. Garrett drew closer.

  She recognized a type of maze, a prayer labyrinth. As a young girl on a French exchange holiday she had discovered the one in Chartres Cathedral and been entranced. Separated from her group, she had not noticed their absence until she had solved the puzzle and entered the six-petalled stone rose at the centre.

  This one was smaller but complex. As she studied the twists and turns, her preoccupations – the memory of her sudden anger with Bryce, the endless waiting for a phone call that never came, the current medical case – fell away. For a moment, she was happy.

  She stepped forward and threaded her way through the tiled spirals without hesitation or retreat, like a chess master moving against a club player. The turns narrowed. At the last, her eyes lifted towards the painting on the back wall positioned to face the puzzle’s centre.

  An inscription at the top read “The light of glory everlasting”. In the middle, Christ hovered between broken gates below a golden sky. In his hands he drew up a man and a woman by their wrists. Below was a dark cave, its black interior tessellated with figures of the damned. The lowest crouched in corners manacled to rocks.

  The faces of the chained were turned away. There was a second quote from St Aquinas below Christ’s feet. “Shame for their unbelief.” Garrett drew a cold, dusty breath. The message of the Harrowing was unequivocal. Rejection of God was the sin that could not be forgiven. She would find no comfort here.

  Chapter 19

  It was a cold night. The broken glass and bars of the cell window let in a breeze. Richardson could feel it on his face. The sky was clear, a three-quarter moon visible above the trees. The light would be useful. He listened as he worked. The sea, a background fizz of white noise, was some help too.

  “Shit!”

  Pain scraped his knuckles. Richardson looked down at the broken halves of a fork. Blood trickled between his fingers. He hit a brick with his fist then rested his forehead on the rough wall.

  “Be quiet.”

  The tone of his wife's instruction suggested it should not need repeating. She sat at the table behind him watching with cold eyes.

  “Sorry.”

  “How much longer?”

  “Maybe tonight.”

  Richardson crossed to the bunk bed. From above came an occasional snuffle and snore. Adele was sleeping. He pulled the lower mattress away from the wall, reached into an open seam, swapped the broken fork for a spoon, and returned to the window.

  It was his wife who had spotted the chance. She had noticed when a different person returned to collect their meals, and saved a fork, hiding it in the mattress. That night, four weeks ago, she had put him to work at the window.

  He hacked between bricks. The bars were fixed on the outside. He removed and replaced more mortar each night. Already, he had loosened the courses across two bars beneath the window frame. Freeing a third bar would be enough.

  The worst part was not his scarred hands, it was the scraping silence. His wife directed him with few words, more with her eyes. And over the weeks he had worked on the window she had worked on their jailer.

  Richardson had been forced to listen to her methods. She had recently managed to convince the young man – Sky she called him now – to let her leave the cell w
ith him. Twice. Coming back, she had said nothing. Had she gone to his room? Had she undressed, closed her eyes, with him? So far, she had only managed to leave in daylight, with others watching.

  Each night these past weeks she had played another game, another sort of seduction, with Adele. ‘Mousy mousy’ she called it and there were only two rules: you must keep up with Mummy; and you mustn't make any noise, however surprised, or hurt. She had the child chase her round and round the room and rewarded her with chocolate – a gift from the young man no doubt. Sky.

  Richardson hacked free another few grains of cement. He was close now. He would finish his work before her. Maybe by morning.

  It was quiet in the woods. When Kirtananda came out of the trees the sea was suddenly, surprisingly loud, but in here nothing stirred but water.

  He leaned on his spade and surveyed his work. He gave a low grunt, satisfied. The valley stream ran down the slope along its usual course till it met his makeshift dam of mud and stones. A small pool had formed above the obstruction and the overflow trickled down through the surrounding trees, creating a wide area of sodden earth. Three deep trenches marked the bare stream bed below the dam. The two largest holes – seven feet long – he had dug side-by-side; the third, half that length, ran across their ends; they formed a crude hieroglyph, the shadow of a trilith, on the earth.

  All the guys were out, only Sky left here with him. He would use the boy. Of course he could clean up on his own. He needed blooding. This was a good opportunity. Belief was one thing – the lad had plenty of that – real loyalty was something else. You had to feel it, earn it. Prove it. Not just think about it.

  This job would do the trick. He had the right bait and the right hook. And if the boy ducked – if his acid-cooked brains shut down, or he bottled it – never mind, he would do it himself. Killing wasn't something he enjoyed. That wasn't his kink. But it didn't bother him either. He had learned that in Iraq.