Dead End

by Brian Freemantle

  Parnell didn’t intend waiting until Monday, of course. And he had other work in mind, as well.

  Parnell arrived at McLean just after seven on the Saturday morning, his reading until midnight bringing him two thirds of the way through the Scripps material. He put what remained of the American documentation beside that from San Diego on his desk, everything temporarily suspended, sure what he intended would only take up the morning, possibly even less. He accepted that there would have to be an explanation for the rest of the unit when they saw the obvious evidence of an experiment, but was unconcerned about it. He was, after all, working in his spare time, and by Monday he would have completed all the necessary reading, so he’d be further ahead than anyone else. On all their benches and desks there were sections of both dossiers obediently left for the following week. Parnell concentrated his experiment upon the medicines to which the additional expectorants and the rifofludine partial-preservative had been added, recording the dosages of each to his carefully separated test mice, from each of which he first took a blood sample to provide a comparative DNA string to measure the effect, if any, of the new formulae against the old. He was almost at the end of his preparation when the other idea came to him and he physically stopped what he was doing, considering it. With the exception of the three new constituents, every drug had gone through the required three-phase licensing process, and those three ingredients could not, in themselves, be humanly harmful. He wasn’t, anyway, considering human testing as such, just a shortcut to extend the experiments beyond mice.

  He prepared each petrie dish with a measured sample of every brand product containing liulousine, beneuflous and rifofludine. It was difficult extruding the vein in his left arm and he inserted the hypodermic awkwardly, hurting himself, but he managed to withdraw sufficient blood identically to match the drug measures already in the culture dishes.

  He was concentrating so totally upon storing them that he didn’t hear Beverley Jackson come into the laboratory. The first he knew of her presence was when she said: ‘What the hell are you doing?’ And so startled was he that he came close to dropping the culture dish in his hand.

  He turned to face her at the door, aware that the shirt sleeve of his left arm was still rolled up and that the hypodermic, with some blood remaining in the chamber, was lying very obviously on the bench alongside Russell Benn’s samples.

  ‘I’m just working my way through something,’ Parnell said, inadequately.

  Beverley came further into the room, absorbing everything as she did so. ‘For Christ’s sake, Dick, you’re experimenting on yourself! What is it? What have you injected? Tell me you haven’t done anything stupid! Holy Christ!’

  ‘Stop it,’ he said, hoping his calmness would calm her. ‘I haven’t injected myself with anything. I just needed human blood and I was the only donor.’

  ‘What for?’ she persisted, looking more intently at the neatly stacked bottles and phials. Before Parnell could answer she said: ‘They came from the chemical division a couple of days back, right?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m just carrying out a few tests, that’s all.’

  ‘Why? Why on these specific samples when we’ve got hundreds of others we haven’t even looked at yet? And when we’re supposed to be working exclusively on the flu research, which, incidentally, is what I’ve come in here today to go on doing.’

  It could only be his suspicion that there was some connection with Rebecca’s killing, but he couldn’t compromise Beverley in any way. ‘I want you to trust me. Trust me and not talk to anyone about what I’m doing. Which is what I am going to ask everyone else on Monday, when they see the mice and the cultures.’

  ‘It’s personal?’

  There was only one inference if he answered that. ‘Trust me.’

  Beverley regarded him steadily for several moments. ‘Am I going to regret coming in here today?’

  ‘You could go.’

  ‘I’m logged in, at the security gatehouse. As you are.’

  Shit, thought Parnell. ‘You don’t know anything. You’re not part of anything. There’s probably nothing to know or be part of.’

  There was another silence. ‘Were you and Rebecca doing something you shouldn’t have been?’

  Beverley was too clever, too prescient, Parnell conceded. ‘Neither Rebecca nor I were betraying Dubette in any way. Nor were – or have – either of us done anything illegal or against the company.’

  ‘I’ve got to trust you on that?’

  ‘I’m asking you to trust me on that,’ qualified Parnell.

  ‘Do I get to know sometime?’

  ‘I can’t answer that. Like I said, maybe there’s nothing to know.’

  ‘It would have been a good day to stay at home, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘It would have avoided a lot of complications.’

  Beverley Jackson didn’t reply and Parnell accepted, surprised, that he’d had the last word.

  They read – Parnell retreating into his private office – for the rest of the morning. He was surprised, although not as much as he had been earlier, by her sudden arrival at his office door. ‘What are you doing about lunch?’

  ‘I hadn’t thought about it. Probably won’t bother.’

  ‘You know what you look like …?’

  ‘Don’t!’ stopped Parnell, realizing he hadn’t even bothered to shave that morning. ‘And yes, I know. Everyone keeps telling me.’

  ‘Shit,’ completed the woman, refusing the interruption.

  ‘That’s it. That’s what everyone keeps telling me.’

  ‘Did you make breakfast?’

  ‘I didn’t have time.’

  ‘What was dinner last night?’

  ‘That really was shit. A prepared lasagne: I didn’t get all the plastic covering off, before the microwave. It didn’t add to the flavour. But then I don’t think anything could have done.’

  ‘You lectured us last night, about the danger of being brain-dead?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You’re a mess. And getting messier. For a lot of reasons I know and for a lot more that I don’t. What I do know is that a messed-up – fucked-up – head of department is even more of a danger than being brain-dead.’

  ‘I’ll do better – eat better, get better – tonight.’

  ‘I know you will,’ said the woman. ‘I’m personally going to see that you do. But also that you shave first. Christ, you really are a fucked-up mess!’

  Twenty-One

  Parnell managed to finish all there was to read by two a.m. on the Monday without finding a direction from either the English or American flu discoveries, to pursue his unit’s particular search. There was always the possibility, he told himself, that someone else in the pharmacogenomics section had spotted something he’d missed – it was at least a slender straw at which to clutch. He was at McLean by seven, determined to be the first there, although still without an explanation for the experiment Beverley had caught him conducting on the Saturday, trying to convince himself that, as head of the department, he didn’t necessarily have to provide one. He’d expected Beverley to press him further during dinner but she hadn’t, not in fact referring to it once, which he didn’t fully understand. Most of the time the talk had been light, although they’d obviously discussed the influenza project, but not in any depth, Parnell warning that neither of them at that stage had completed their reading, creating the need to avoid one misguiding the other with half-formed or ill-formed impressions. And although there’d been no indication of it, Parnell tried to overcome any difficulty Beverley might have by openly referring to Rebecca. That had been the moment he’d expected Beverley to challenge him about that morning’s experiment. They hadn’t talked at all about her ex-husband. He’d enjoyed the evening – positively, physically, relaxing. Beverley chose the restaurant, in a part of midtown he hadn’t been to before, and met him there. It was traditional home-town American cooking, which dictated portions sufficient to relieve an African famine, even th
ough he tried to order minimally. He decided the only thing missing from the rib-eye steak were hooves and tail. As he had anticipated, Beverley initially led the conversation, but gave way to him as the evening progressed, and by its end he’d realized, surprised, that he was dominating the exchanges and Beverley appeared content to let him, not once trying for the last word. He refused her demand that they split the bill, which she accepted without continuing argument, and they’d parted quite comfortably outside the restaurant, without any awkwardness about nightcaps at another bar or either’s apartment. In the cab on his way back to Washington Circle, Parnell found himself wondering what possibly could have gone wrong between Beverley and her husband. That reflection prompted the half thought that he’d found the first evening with Beverley easier than he had with Rebecca, but that was where he’d halted it, as a half thought not to be completed. It left him feeling guilty, which was worsened throughout the following day by his failure to pick up something from the San Diego or London research. Richard Parnell wasn’t a man upon whom the rarity of professional disappointment rested easily.

  None of the mice he’d injected with the French-suggested drug modifications showed any obvious ill effects after the forty-eighty-hour period, and he was halfway through extracting blood comparisons when Beverley Jackson arrived.

  She said at once: ‘We going to learn all today?’

  ‘You finished the flu-identification papers?’ avoided Parnell.

  ‘Almost.’

  ‘I didn’t get a lead.’

  ‘I haven’t either, not yet.’

  ‘Let’s hope you do before you finish. Or one of the others might come up with something.’

  ‘You didn’t answer my question,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ Parnell agreed, turning back to his sampling.

  He was conscious of other arrivals behind him but didn’t respond to them until he had the tests from all the experimental mice on to slides. He turned back into the main laboratory unsurprised to find himself the focus of everyone’s attention. He said: ‘This has nothing to do with what we’re looking for. It’s something I set up over the weekend. Anyone come up with anything, anything at all, from what you’ve read so far?’

  There were various head-shakes. Deke Pulbrow said: ‘Not a godamned thing.’

  Sean Sato said: ‘It’s great research but there’s nothing here that’s going to help us.’

  . ‘I haven’t found anything either,’ conceded Parnell, again. ‘Let’s talk about it when we’re all through.’ He’d tell them as much of the truth as he felt able, Parnell finally determined. Not about his suspicion that Rebecca’s death was somehow connected with the French material, but that he had become curious at the apparent secrecy in which it had been chemically tested, and had decided to put it through the most basic of genetic programmes without interfering in any way at all with what they were concentrating upon.

  Parnell worked with total concentration, able as he always had been to isolate himself from all or any surrounding distraction, bow-backed over his microscope to contrast his before-and-after slides, anxious for a variation he didn’t find. Reluctant to accept yet another disappointment – at the same time objectively warning himself that there should not be any change after Russell Benn and Dwight Newton’s medical clearances – he repeated every examination under stronger magnification. And once more found nothing.

  With growing, unwelcome resignation, Parnell eventually turned to his own before-and-after blood specimens, starting at the lower magnification, and for the briefest of seconds not fully absorbing what he was seeing. Parnell was too consummate a professional to accept a single illustration. Patiently, although with increasing satisfaction, he checked every single treated and untreated slide, one against the other, and obtained the same result in every case. It was only when he pushed his stool away from his bench, stretching against the aching tension in his back and shoulders, that Parnell became properly aware of how tightly and how long he had been hunched over his microscope. It was a fleeting discomfort, virtually at once compensated by a surge of excitement. Which, in turn, was tempered by further inherent professionalism. He had positive findings from a lot of separate, uncontaminated tests. Which in his own opinion was unequivocal. But which, by the standards of research – and certainly the challenge he would have to face – was insufficient. There had to be separate, independent experiments, with no prior, alerting indication of what the expected result might be. And he needed to duplicate everything himself – on himself – against the remote possibility that this initial analysis had inadvertently been contaminated to produce a faulty result.

  Only Ted Lapidus was still reading when Parnell emerged into the main laboratory, surprised to find it was already noon. The rest of the unit looked up at him in solemn expectation. He said: ‘Any bright, shining pathways?’

  There was a further series of head-shaking. Mark Easton said: ‘In the words of the prophet, back to the drawing board.’

  ‘I want everything temporarily suspended, at least for the rest of today,’ announced Parnell. ‘I’m asking all of you to conduct blind blood-sampling, using your own blood, involving something Dubette is making available on a limited market.’

  ‘What are we looking for?’ asked Lapidus, coming up from his final paper.

  ‘Blind tests, like I said,’ refused Parnell. ‘No prior indication. I don’t want us challenged on this.’

  ‘We’re bypassing phase-one animal assessment?’ queried Battey.

  ‘Yes,’ acknowledged Parnell.

  ‘Why the mystery?’ demanded Beverley.

  ‘There isn’t one. I want independent, corroborative findings, that’s all.’ Or was it all, he asked himself.

  Parnell refined – and extended – the confirming experiments, testing upon the altered Dubette medicines before individually duplicating the experiments by separately adding liulou-sine, beneuflous and rifofludine. Having already established the research once, Parnell completed the repetition ahead of everyone else. He withdrew briefly to his side office, to avoid the appearance of hovering over them, but used the vantage point to watch them at work. Once again he was impressed at how quickly – and expertly – they had unquestioningly adjusted to his limited briefing.

  Beverley was the first to finish of the rest of the group. As Parnell came out into the main laboratory, she said: ‘I expected to sweat blood, not give it!’

  ‘This is a one-off situation,’ said Parnell.

  ‘I hope it is,’ said Lapidus. ‘I’ve never gone along with this scientist-test-yourself mumbo-jumbo.’

  ‘Neither have I,’ assured Parnell. ‘As I said, it’s a one-off.’

  ‘When do we know what it’s all about?’

  He didn’t know, Parnell acknowledged. The mutation on his own initial self-experiment had shown after forty-eight hours, but it could have occurred far quicker than that. He should have monitored it during the Saturday, and most certainly have checked on the Sunday. Not having a time sequence risked his first findings being dismissed as flawed research. ‘Let’s give it an hour.’

  ‘What were you doing when we arrived?’ pressed Sato.

  ‘I’ve duplicated everything, for a comparison.’

  ‘You expect us to do that too?’ demanded Battey.

  ‘No,’ assured Parnell. ‘If your findings match mine – and my second tests corroborate – that’ll be enough.’ Should he set up a meeting with Dwight Newton in advance? There was every reason to move as quickly as possible if his findings were confirmed and the French subsidiary were already in production. But his findings weren’t yet confirmed. And until they were he couldn’t risk setting off alarm bells and challenging a company vice president and the director of chemical research.

  There was another familiar hiatus throughout the unit. Sean Sato and Deke Pulbrow returned to their earlier contrasting of chicken and human DNA strings. Parnell told Kathy Richardson how he wanted the San Diego and London research filed, and dictated letters to
both institutions congratulating them upon their exploratory work but regretting it hadn’t led them anywhere.

  Parnell adhered strictly to his hourly check. There was no mutation on any of his carefully prepared petrie dishes. One by one, unasked, the rest of the unit ran their own checks on their own experiments. There was no response from anyone.

  Impatiently Lapidus said: ‘I really don’t see why we can’t be told what we’re looking for!’

  Neither did he now, conceded Parnell. It was overly cautious, imposing blind comparisons as he had: he deservedly risked the ridicule of the rest of the unit – whose respect he believed he’d had until now – if his cultures were inconclusive. ‘You’ll see it soon enough.’

  ‘How long do you want us to stay here?’ questioned Sean Sato. ‘I’m not complaining but I actually have something fixed for tonight I need to rearrange if this is going to go on.’

  He needed at least one independent observer, accepted Parnell. ‘Let’s give it another hour. We’ll decide what to do in another hour.’ He sounded weak, ineffectual, he realized. He hadn’t thought it through, prepared properly.

  Beverley said: ‘I’m not doing anything – in no hurry to get away.’

  ‘Neither am I,’ said Peter Battey. He led the afternoon coffee break. Parnell declined. So did Beverley.

  When the two of them were alone Beverley said: ‘This is looking a little strange.’

  ‘It’s looking fucking ridiculous!’ corrected Parnell.

  ‘That’s what I meant.’

  ‘I didn’t want to influence anyone, as I didn’t want us to influence each other on Saturday when we were halfway through reading the flu research.’