It was in one of these buildings that Karolina found herself, she was no longer bound hand and foot but and she had been allowed to lie down. She had no idea where she had been brought as a blindfold had been fastened over her eyes until she was inside the room. Also in the room was what looked rather like a dentist’s chair. The tape over her mouth had now been removed and she was trying to remain quiet. It had been made quite clear to here that failure to comply would result in extremely painful treatment and she would never work again as a lap dancer, or anything else. She was there to take part in a clinical trial and would be free to go with the usual generous payment for such participation.
Unfortunately, she wasn’t allowed anything to eat until after the experiment which was due to start in a couple of hours time, once the doctor arrived. She had been told to try to relax. Karolina began to wonder whether she was in the middle of a nightmare. Her life in the UK had already proved to have fallen well short of her expectations and now she was caught up in a situation so bizarre she could never have imagined it. Her throat was dry and she was shivering more with fear than with cold. Once it was over she would flee Persford and the club and use her meagre savings to start elsewhere. Perhaps one of her friends who had moved from Poland along with her would take her in for a while. They were still in contact and she would phone her as soon as she was released. She didn’t care about losing the deposit on her rented room, she was going to leave that evening and put as much distance between herself and Persford as possible.
**
Godfrey Clancy had phoned his surgery feigning a bout of sickness and diarrhoea and had told his receptionist Margaret that there was no way he could attend surgery today. All routine appointments would be rebooked and any urgent ones would be absorbed by his colleagues. Even though he wasn’t suffering from the norovirus he hadn’t slept a wink during the night. He’d had to make a late night visit to a friend who worked in the chemotherapy department at Persford General Hospital to collect some equipment and to use their sterile facilities to make up a solution of the UP-627-TK. He had passed over the protocol for the solubility of the prototype drug and his colleague had weighed out the appropriate dose and added it to a some saline solution to check the solubility. It had mostly dissolved but they had added a five percent glucose solution which aided solubility and then this was added to a bag of sterile saline solution. He then gave Godfrey the necessary cannulas, ports and needles in order to administer the infusion. The infusion would deliver the material at a specific rate and he advised Godfrey on the appropriate settings for the volume to be administered. The whole procedure should take around three hours. Godfrey promised to return the equipment by the end of the week and told his colleague he would be in touch about collecting the second batch of drug. He then handed over an envelope containing a thousand pounds in twenty pound notes and began the ten mile journey back to Brensford Manor. The infusion was due to start at about 8 a.m. and he seriously hoped that some strong coffee would be provided for him. He’d now been awake for over twenty-four hours and he was feeling extremely tired. At his age he should not be involved in such stressful events. He braked suddenly to avoid a fox which shot across the road. When this was over he would seriously consider retirement and a move away from the area. He had never envisioned that he would be involved in such an episode as this. This was definitely his last favour for Cole.
**
Once again, Dan was the first of his team to arrive at the university. He had remembered his suit and he hung it on some bookshelves in the office area. This morning he felt particularly depressed and anxious. He’d spent another disturbed night, waking every hour or so, disturbed by vivid dreams and panic attacks involving Jessica. Several times he’d woken soaked with sweat and he’d had to get up to change his T-shirt and pyjama bottoms. At 5 a.m. he’d given up on sleep and had arisen to get showered and dressed. He’d changed the bedding and put the sweat soaked sheets in to wash in the hope that Jessica would be with him again once more that night. With the TV for company he’d somehow managed to drink a cup of instant coffee and eat a piece of toast although each mouthful had taken an age to chew and swallow. How on earth was he going to manage to eat his way through a three course dinner tonight? Perhaps copious amounts of alcohol would help the food slip down his gullet. He would have to leave his car at the university and get a taxi home as he would be in no state to drive.
By 8 a.m. other colleagues were starting to arrive so he had to put some sort of brave face on things. The last thing he wanted was for people to start to become suspicious of his behaviour.
‘Morning,’ said Nick.
‘Oh, morning,’ replied Dan. He felt embarrassed by the events of the previous day and was unsure whether to mention them or just to hope that Nick bore no resentment towards him and would be keen to put it all in the past.
‘Bit chilly out there this morning,’ said Nick as he was logging on to the university network.
‘Sure is, won’t be long before I’m having to scrape my car in the morning,’ replied Dan.
‘Yes, I wish we had a garage to avoid that,’ said Nick, ‘but I guess we are lucky we have a driveway.
Dan felt it was best to keep to neutral subjects and was relieved that Nick seemed keen to start today afresh. He was determined to keep his emotions in check. Nick was still very much an unknown entity and he didn’t want to make an enemy of him.
‘Right,’ said Nick. ‘I’ll go and see how my reaction had fared overnight.’
‘Good luck,’ said Dan, cheerfully.
Nick took some samples from his reaction. He’d been encouraged by the data he’d obtained the day before. With a bit of luck, this could be the breakthrough the project needed.
**
Karolina had fallen asleep on the bed as she had been awake most of the night. She heard the door opening and stirred, rubbing her eyes and stretching her arms and legs. For a few moments she was confused as to where she was but soon the full horror of her ordeal came flooding back to her. She was immediately awake and once her eyes focused she saw a man in his late sixties looming over her. He was wearing a mask, a green clinical gown and surgical gloves.
‘Good morning, my dear,’ said the man. She looked past him to see another heavily built man guarding the door. On the table at the side, she noticed some medical equipment which hadn’t been there when she first arrived. This was for real, she hadn’t dreamt what she’d been told last night. She was part of some sort of clinical experiment.
‘Now, I just need to find a nice vein,’ said the doctor, holding her arm and tapping the veins on her arm.
‘What are you doing?’ she protested, ‘get off me!’
The assistant came over looking menacing. It was clear she had no choice but to comply.
‘You need to relax, it’s quite straightforward,’ said the doctor. ‘Now, I’ll just sterilise your hand before I insert this cannula.’ He applied a tourniquet to her upper arm. ‘Flex your fingers a few times and make a fist. That’s good. Now, you will just feel a sharp scratch. That’s it, easy. Excellent, all done now,’ and he inserted the cannula to the full extent and released the tourniquet. Godfrey pressed down the adhesive tape around the port on the cannula then once it was secure he flushed the port through with a syringe of saline. Karolina had been pulling a face and gasping whilst the procedure took place and now she lay back on the bed relieved that the cannula was now inserted. She felt slightly light-headed as she’d not had anything to drink now for over eight hours.
The doctor patted her arm comfortingly. He too was relieved as it had been many years since he’d performed such a procedure. ‘Now just relax for a few minutes and then I want you to come and sit in this chair please.’
Godfrey busied himself with the medication at the side of the room. She could see a portable table at the side of the dentist’s chair as she thought of it. There was some equipment she didn’t recognise along with what looked like a blood pressure monitor and a temperature
probe. The doctor removed a polythene bag from a zip-up container like a cool bag and connected it up to the equipment on the table.
‘Please come over here, we are ready for you,’ said the doctor.
Karolina sat upright and swung her legs off the bed. As she stood she felt like she was going to faint and her knees buckled. She sat down again and put her head down towards her knees.
‘I feel dizzy,’ she said, ‘I don’t feel well.’
‘Cut the dramatics,’ said the menacing assistant. ‘Get over here now and do as you are told,’ and he grabbed her by the arm, dragging her across the room and pushed her roughly back on to the chair. She collapsed heavily and closed her eyes.
Godfrey did look a little worried as she had gone very pale. He removed one of his surgical gloves and felt at her forehead. She felt clammy which was what often happened after someone recovered from a faint and started to come around. He adjusted the chair so that it was reclining more to allow the blood to pump to her head more easily. He waited a couple of minutes and whilst the colour returned to her cheeks.
‘Better now?’
‘A little,’ she replied.
‘Now this will just take a couple of hours,’ said Godfrey, then it will all be over with and you will be free to go.
‘What? A couple of hours?’ she screamed.
‘Try to relax, go to sleep if you want, it will make the time pass more quickly.
He pressed the button on the infusion pump and the machine started. He allowed the pump to run for a minute or so, collecting the liquid in a kidney-shaped dish. Once all the air bubbles had been removed and the line was purged he stopped the pump and connected it up to the cannula port in Karolina’s arm. He switched the pump on and stood back. He checked that the liquid was flowing properly and there were no bubbles developing in the airline. He went over to a chair and felt an overwhelming feeling of relief. He’d not done anything like this for ages and he realised he’d been holding his breath for a while at the end of the procedure. He took off his gloves and wiped his brow which felt hot and greasy. He gulped down some water and followed that by a few swigs of whisky from his hip flask. He took out his mobile and phoned Cole.
‘Godfrey my boy, how’s the experiment going?’
‘OK, well I think so, everything is running smoothly.’
‘Excellent, well, it’s good you’ve had a practice run, we should be all set for Friday then?’
‘Yes, my colleague will make up another solution and I’ll collect it on Thursday night. We’ll start first thing on Friday morning.’
‘Good, let me know when you finish today and drop by my office. We can have a drink together.’
‘Of course, thank you, speak to you later.’
Godfrey was exhausted. He wanted to go home to his bed but he knew he would have to be sociable with Cole. He would feign tiredness and hopefully cut the chat short. He looked at his watch and saw that the infusion had now been in operation for twenty minutes. He went over to Karolina who looked to have dozed off. It was time to check her blood pressure. He placed the cuff on her arm and pressed the start button. This was an automatic machine and the cuff started to inflate. Karolina stirred as the pressure on her arm awoke her.
‘What’s happening?’ she murmured, her speech sounding rather slurred.
‘Just checking your blood pressure, no need to worry.’
The cuff on the machine deflated and counted back down for sixty seconds, then displayed the reading. The blood pressure, read ninety-five over fifty-five which was very low but not excessively so as the patient was lying down and she was a young and healthy looking woman. Her pulse rate, however, was over a hundred, one hundred and ten to be precise. That was rather strange he had to admit but she had been agitated. He placed the temperature probe in her ear and it beeped and showed the reading. Her temperature was thirty-nine degrees. He looked at the display again. He pressed the button to reset it and took another measurement. It read almost the same, thirty-nine point two degrees. It was too high, she was running a temperature.
Suddenly Godfrey’s heart started to race, he felt light-headed. This did not look good. What should he do? Should he stop the experiment? He took out his phone and rang Cole.
Chapter 32
Nick had isolated the product from his reaction and was waiting for some more data. He’d run a sample against the one from Thierry’s batch and he was sure he had isolated the correct material. In about half an hour he should have the additional data and then he needed to compare it with the printouts from the previous batches. He was in a positive mood. The conditions he’d suggested had borne fruit and this looked like the direction they should be following. It was by no means optimised but it should be a step up from the procedure they had to date. They would need to fine-tune the reaction conditions to improve on it even more and to scale up so there was lots to do. Nick hoped that either Seth or Hannah would be able to assist with some of the reactions.
Dan had only spent about an hour in the lab this morning. Once again he seemed anxious and kept leaving to check his mobile. At least there hadn’t been another outburst from him. He was obviously tense about his formal dinner this evening, who wouldn’t be, thought Nick. As he’d walked past Dan’s desk he noticed he’d printed off a few papers by Professor Zeng, so he was familiarising himself with his research.
Nick collected his data and sat down at his desk. He looked at it closely and to him, it seemed to fit the structure of the compound he was trying to make. However, as he was new to the project, he wanted to check it against previous batches to make sure he wasn’t seeing what he wanted to see. It could be a problem that you fitted the data to what you wanted it to look like rather than viewing it objectively.
‘Dan, do you have the data on UP-627-TK, for me to look at?’
‘Oh, yes, it’s here in this file,’ said Dan, walking over to a filing cabinet and rifling through the divided sections. ‘Wait a minute, no, it’s not here. Pat’s taken it, he’s writing it up for the patents. I think he’s taken it all off to a meeting room so he won’t be disturbed.’
‘I’ll see if I can find him,’ said Nick, starting to wander off down the corridor.
‘Hang on a minute,’ shouted Dan. ‘I’ve got Thierry’s data folder here. It will have the data for UP-627.’
‘Oh, great, I’ll have a look.’
‘Here, let me find it,’ said Dan and he started to flick through the plastic wallets containing the data.
He found what he was looking for and handed it to Nick. It was from the batch he’d sent off to the biologists the previous week. Everything looked nice and pure.
‘Thanks, I’ll compare it with mine,’ said Nick, taking it over to his desk.
As Dan was closing the folder, some of the data fell out on the floor.
‘Shit,’ he said, fumbling to pick it all up.
He shuffled the papers and put them back in the sequence of the pages. One of the last experiments Thierry had completed was the batch he’d given to the dealer the night before. He looked at it closely. A wave of panic washed over him. There were some extra peaks in the data which hadn’t been in the data he’d given to Nick. He opened up the printouts and continued to look at the data. Although the material had looked like a nice white crystalline solid it was clearly contaminated with something else. Exactly what, he couldn’t immediately tell. Wasn’t that just typical of Thierry not to let the team know that his batch was substandard? Now he realised that this batch was a second one from the same reaction and Thierry had neglected to make that clear. No doubt he felt he was coming to the end of his tenure at Persford and he just didn’t care. When Dan had been threatened by the dealer he had been so focused on providing the material he’d never thought to check its purity. He’d assumed that as Thierry had left the sample labelled up and for project use it met the required purity. However, would he have risked Jessica’s life by not supplying the material whatever state it was in? He put his head in his hands.
His mind was in turmoil. He had lost the ability to think clearly. Questions raced through his mind. Would this be discovered? Oh, God, hadn’t they said they could analyse it? What would the consequences be for himself and more importantly, Jessica?
**
The infusion experiment had now been running for an hour. A sheen of sweat had formed on Karolina’s brow and wisps of her hair were looking damp. Her vest top had dark patches where it clung to her stomach. He took her temperature again, it read forty degrees.
‘Water, water, please,’ she moaned, ‘I’m too hot,’ and she started to try to get up from the chair.
The assistant came over and restrained her with his large hands.
Godfrey attached the blood-pressure cuff and took another reading. Waiting for the cuff to inflate and then deflate before giving the reading seemed to take an age. Finally, the figures flashed up on the display. Karolina’s blood pressure had now decreased markedly. It was seventy-five over fifty. The heartbeat reading was flashing a warning as it was reading and extremely high value of one hundred and forty-two. Godfrey started to panic. He realised something had gone tragically wrong. How had he ever got caught up in this ridiculous experiment?
He switched off the infusion equipment and disconnected the cannula from the port.
‘Bring that drip stand over!’ he shouted, ‘and that bag of saline!’
He quickly hooked up the bag of saline and attached the solution to the port. His hands were shaking and he was also sweating. Although Godfrey had strayed from the Hippocratic oath on many occasions when treating his elderly patients, this time it seemed different. The young woman in front of him had all her life ahead of her. She may not have had any illnesses at all. The sad fact was he’d not seen her medical history and she could well have had an underlying condition which had made her more susceptible to this new drug. In reality, she was being used as a human guinea pig and the calculations he’d made from the information he’d been given could well have been flawed.
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