Dead End

by Brian Freemantle

  It was initially impossible to distinguish one question from another, and again Jackson had to wave for quiet, changing the gesture when the noise lessened, to indicate a woman near the front.

  ‘What’s your explanation for Ms Lang having a terrorist-associated flight number in her possession?’ asked the woman.

  Jackson nodded his agreement to an answer and Parnell said: ‘I don’t have one. Rebecca was not a political person, nor associated or connected in any way with terrorism or terrorist organizations. I understand that to be the findings of the FBI after exhaustive enquiries.’

  ‘What about you?’ called someone deeper into the hall.

  Jackson shook his head but Parnell said: ‘I am completely apolitical. I have never had any links with any radical organization, let alone one that could be described as terrorist. That’s also been established by the FBI.’

  ‘Did Metro DC police know of the terrorist flight number when they arrested you?’ called someone else.

  The room was quiet now and this time Jackson took the question, before Parnell could speak. The lawyer said: ‘What the Metro DC officers did or did not know at the time of my client’s arrest will obviously form a substantial part of the claim my client is making against the department. Just as obviously, I am not able to disclose any part of that at this stage, although I can say that it will be a most rigorously pursued aspect of the eventual hearing.’

  As his lawyer talked, Parnell saw that three men and a woman separating the Dubette group from the FBI officers were making notes on yellow legal pads, and wondered if they were police-department attorneys. Jackson intervened on several more occasions, refusing to let Parnell answer whether he had been subjected to any physical or verbal abuse, whether he had resisted arrest or if his position at Dubette had been affected by his detention. Parnell listened intently, aware that, with every response, Jackson was conveying the impression that there were a lot of accusations to be levelled against Peter Bellamy and Helen Montgomery.

  Hammering the threat home in a reply to a further question, Jackson said: ‘It has not been confirmed to me that the two officers who are named in this action have been suspended, as you suggest. But I would have been surprised had they not been. The evidence I already possess and intend producing during the case will bring Metro DC police into considerable disrepute. There are others not directly named on the writs whose conduct will also be shown to be highly questionable, if not verging on criminal collusion.’

  That reply produced a flurry of demands for explanation, all of which Jackson refused, choosing an intervening question from a woman journalist about Parnell and Rebecca’s relationship in order to hand over to Parnell. Parnell did so haltingly, badly unprepared. It was inexplicable that he’d allowed Rebecca to drive home alone to Bethesda. It was a mistake he’d regret for the rest of his life. No definite date had been decided upon for the wedding. There was evidence – Parnell’s reply brought a twitch from Jackson, the lawyer tensed to intervene, although he didn’t – against Rebecca being a chosen-by-chance victim of a random attack. He was appalled at Rebecca’s killer or killers escaping, because of Metro DC’s incompetence – Jackson leaned forward again, ready – but that was something to be explored at the impending civil court hearing. He had every confidence in the FBI bringing a successful criminal prosecution.

  Jackson rejected every request for one-to-one television interviews – including those from the three major American networks, as well as six from England, France, and Germany – and from eight American and foreign radio stations. Jackson had taken a suite, as well as reserving the conference room. There was wine and alcohol as well as coffee waiting for them when they got there.

  ‘Now you can have a glass of wine,’ Jackson announced.

  ‘Who’s this for?’ asked Parnell.

  ‘You did well. Damned well,’ praised the lawyer, familiarly avoiding the question.

  ‘I’m not sure what we achieved.’

  ‘I think we achieved everything, and more, we set out to,’ contradicted Jackson. ‘We had to make some cracks into the wall facing the FBI. Which we did and then some. There’s guys out there thinking hard about personal survival or escape. Or both.’

  Which Edwin Pullinger virtually repeated minutes later when he arrived – with Dingley and Benton – answering Parnell’s earlier unanswered question about the reason for the suite.

  ‘Thank you,’ added the FBI attorney. ‘We made some worried people a lot more worried.’

  ‘And there’s no reason to stop,’ Jackson said to Parnell. ‘Now tell them the other intriguing things you’ve come across.’

  Parnell channel-hopped, watching prime-time coverage of the conference, surprised at the memory blank he had over quite a number of the questions. His general recollection was of uncertainty – nervousness even – but it wasn’t evident on the screen and he was grateful. He decided against eating again that day, but considered walking along to Giorgio’s – or maybe another Georgetown bar – for a drink, but decided against that, too. He was depressed that nothing had been produced by his division. He paraded all the balancing arguments in his mind – that it had only been months, not years, and that research took years, not months – but it didn’t lift the disappointment. He’d become accustomed to success, too expectant perhaps, after his involvement in the genome project. But that had taken years, he reminded himself – engaged dozens, hundreds even, of scientists on an international level, his involvement coming luckily at the end, when so much mapping had already been achieved, and not at the beginning, with every twist of the double helix to unravel. But everything was overshadowed, totally overwhelmed in fact, by Rebecca’s murder, the unexplained terrorist-flight alert and now this civil claim that he abruptly realized had been virtually thrust upon him, and which he wouldn’t have considered but for the hope of it moving on the FBI investigation. What if it didn’t? What if the murder enquiry remained stalled, months running into years like research ran from months into years? Would it anchor him to Dubette? There was an insidious Big Brother ambience about everything at McLean, with its spider’s-web imagery and inches-thick personal files, and intrusive psychology and silent, empty faces at watchful windows.

  The entry bell jarred into the apartment, startling him, and sounded again before he reached the receiver.

  ‘It’s me,’ announced Beverley Jackson, from the entrance lobby.

  ‘You didn’t phone?’

  ‘No. Spur of the moment detour, on my way home.’

  ‘Something come up?’

  ‘I’d like to,’ she said, twisting his question. ‘Or are we going to have a conversation like this?’

  Parnell pressed the downstairs release and opened his own front door for the arrival of the elevator. When Beverley emerged, she was carrying her briefcase, from which Parnell knew that she really had been on her way home.

  He said: ‘I didn’t expect you.’

  ‘No,’ she said, tossing her coat and case on to a chair, slumping into another.

  ‘There’s wine.’

  ‘Maybe a small one.’

  ‘Something come up?’ he repeated, as he poured for both of them.

  Beverley said: ‘Your health,’ and raised her glass.

  Parnell raised his in return. There wasn’t the difficulty he’d expected from their next being alone together. He didn’t believe he should feel as glad as he was that they were together alone again.

  ‘I told personnel I wouldn’t undergo the psychological assessment,’ declared Beverley. ‘Wayne Denny wants to talk to me about it. Deke Pulbrow doesn’t want to take an assessment, either.’

  Parnell shrugged. ‘You know how I feel about it.’

  ‘You’ll support Deke, too?’

  ‘It’s hardly likely I’d back you and not Deke, is it?’

  ‘I think Deke’s worried a refusal might go against him, at Dubette.’

  ‘I thought Barry told you there was a legal right to refuse?’

  ‘I
t was a knee-jerk. He needs to check to be sure,’ said the lawyer’s former wife. ‘I’m going to ask him to make sure.’

  Would the extent and intrusiveness he’d discovered in the personnel files help their objections? wondered Parnell. He wouldn’t say anything now, but he’d remind Jackson if it became a problem for either of them. ‘You sure it’s just Deke who’s worried?’

  ‘I told you my only concern.’

  ‘And I told you I wasn’t worried about it.’

  A separation of silence came down between them. Hurrying to fill it, Beverley said: ‘You’re becoming quite the star television performer.’

  ‘Not from choice,’ said Parnell.

  ‘What are you going to do with ten million dollars?’

  ‘Pay your ex-husband’s bill,’ said Parnell, glad of the well-rehearsed joke. ‘We had lunch at your favourite midtown restaurant today. I told him we’d eaten there.’

  ‘Who paid?’

  ‘He did.’

  ‘It’ll go on your bill. I told you he knew – not about the restaurant but that we’d been out a couple of times.’

  It was best they confront it, Parnell supposed. ‘He said you’d only ever lied to each other once.’

  ‘That’s off-limits,’ she refused, instantly.

  ‘OK,’ accepted Parnell, just as quickly. ‘We talked about it, you and I being seen together. He said it wouldn’t play well if it became public – talked about losing the sympathy vote.’

  Beverley let more silence build up, but with a purpose. Looking very directly at him, she said: ‘Are we going to risk being seen together?’

  ‘I feel a total shit,’ Parnell confessed, needing to purge himself, raising his hand to just beneath his chin. ‘I’ve got guilt up to here.’

  ‘You and me both,’ she said. ‘What are we going to do about it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Parnell, another admission he didn’t like making.

  ‘I don’t want to jeopardize anything. Cause any embarrassment. Or disrespect to Rebecca.’

  ‘You and me both,’ echoed Parnell. ‘Although I don’t actually give a damn about any ten-million-dollar court case.’

  ‘You tell me you don’t care about ten million bucks, I’ll try to believe you, but it won’t be easy.’

  She was trying hard, Parnell acknowledged. He said: ‘We’re avoiding the question.’

  ‘Let’s take everything very slowly,’ suggested Beverley. ‘We’re talking like people with a secret, and there’s nothing to be secretive about! At the moment it’s no more than we like being with each other and seem to understand each other’s jokes, although we could possibly do with more of those.’

  ‘If there was more to laugh about,’ said Parnell.

  ‘You like big band, Glen Miller music?’

  ‘I could find out.’

  ‘There’s a concert at the Kennedy Centre at the weekend.’

  ‘I’ll get tickets.’

  ‘I already got them.’

  ‘You always this forthright?’ So much for excuses about spur-of-the-moment detours. And his undertaking – and understanding – with Barry Jackson.

  ‘Not always. I figured you already had a lot to do.’

  ‘You want more wine?’

  Beverley shook her head, rising from the chair. ‘I’m driving. And I’m going now. Like I said, everything nice and slow.’

  The duty private investigator from the agency – hired cash in advance, under a false name and using an equally anonymous cut-out procedure – let two cars come comfortably between him and Beverley Jackson for the short ride to Dupont Circle. The light had been bad but the man was sure he’d managed at least two identifiable photographs of her leaving Parnell’s apartment building.

  When Parnell got to McLean the following day, there was a waiting memorandum that the half-yearly seminar had, without any given reason, been postponed until after the forthcoming annual stockholders’ meeting. It was to be the first of several memos he received that day.

  Twenty-Eight

  Overnight the pendulum swung and Parnell’s day began with the mountains seeming higher and the oceans wider. Richard Parnell’s unsettling disappointment in himself was compounded by what he’d so easily agreed with Beverley the previous evening, which scarcely made sense because he wasn’t in any way disappointed or depressed by the thought of being with her the coming weekend. He wanted very much to be with her, and that wish outweighed all the rest of the conflicting doubts, like guilt and concern at their being seen together or at his being accused of hypocrisy, or whatever the accusation might be, if the outing – or any that hopefully followed – became public. In fact, the biggest contradiction of all, for someone with so many conflicting emotional confusions, was that, for the first time for a very long time, he felt remarkably happy by the time he arrived at McLean. And that had everything to do with the idea that had come to him after Beverley left, a thought that had so excited him he’d even considered calling her, needing someone with whom to talk about it. He hadn’t, though, because it would have appeared too much like an excuse, and by then he hadn’t rationalized his uncertainties as he believed he had, finally, on his way to North Virginia the following day.

  Ted Lapidus was the first to arrive after Parnell, and told him at once that the previous day’s meeting with Russell Benn hadn’t shown any chemical research progress, adding that his impression had been that Benn’s unit were expecting a lead from pharmacogenomics.

  ‘Which, from the way it’s going so far, they’ll be lucky to get,’ remarked the dolefully moustached Greek scientist.

  ‘Let’s talk, when everyone else arrives,’ suggested Parnell. ‘I’ve had a thought.’

  Beverley was once more the last, although it was still only just past eight. She smiled and said, ‘Hi!’ when the Greek geneticist led his group into Parnell’s instantly overcrowded office.

  Parnell said: ‘I’ve been thinking about approaches. So far we’ve been trying to follow how the flu virus attaches itself and enters a host cell, like the spiky little bastard of 1918, right?’

  ‘That’s the A, B, C, D system,’ confirmed Lapidus.

  ‘Why don’t we try D, C, B, A?’ proposed Parnell. ‘Offer up a host target molecule, coloured so we’ll be able to trace which, if any, get hit.’

  ‘You get the idea from the colorants the French introduced?’ seized Pulbrow, at once.

  ‘As a matter of fact, I did,’ admitted Parnell. ‘This time the mutation, if it occurs, will be beneficial, not the other way around. I can’t understand why the method didn’t occur to me earlier.’

  ‘Or any of us,’ accepted Lapidus, doubtfully. ‘It’s worth trying.’

  ‘If going backwards gets us forwards, then let’s try it,’ said Beverley. ‘It’s the only idea in town.’

  ‘It’ll be a slow process of elimination,’ warned Deke Pulbrow.

  ‘It was always going to be that,’ Parnell pointed out. ‘But it doesn’t necessarily have to be that slow. Influenza is basically respiratory – that narrows our genetic field.’

  ‘By a few thousand,’ said Beverley.

  ‘We’ll need more samples. And a lot more mice,’ said Lapidus.

  ‘Get as many samples as you need from Tokyo,’ said Parnell.

  ‘We’ve got enough to start already,’ said Beverley, enthusiastically. ‘Kathy’s the mouse mother.’

  ‘Then start,’ urged Parnell.

  Pulbrow hesitated, as they began filing out, and Parnell said: ‘Beverley told me. Why not close the door?’

  Pulbrow did so, but stayed by it. ‘I don’t want to cause trouble.’

  ‘As far as I’m concerned, it’s entirely down to you whether you undergo the assessment or not. I’m certainly not going to put any pressure on you. I don’t see how I could. Or why I should.’

  ‘You think I should have it?’

  The man wanted someone to make the decision for him, guessed Parnell. He said: ‘I think you should decide yourself what you wa
nt to do. And then do it.’

  ‘I’ve talked around. This seems to be a pretty structured, authoritative organization.’

  ‘The organization might be. This unit certainly isn’t,’ said Parnell. ‘No one’s holding a gun to your head, Deke.’

  ‘You took it?’

  ‘I thought it was a waste of time. Still do, for that matter. I couldn’t then be bothered to refuse.’

  ‘Then?’ questioned the other man.

  ‘I think I might tell her to forget it next time, if indeed there is a next time.’

  ‘Her?’

  ‘The psychologist is a woman. Kind of an earth mother.’

  ‘I’ll think some more about it,’ said Pulbrow, uncertainly.

  ‘You do that,’ encouraged Parnell, looking up at Kathy Richardson’s entry.

  ‘You’re high on Dwight’s demand list,’ said the secretary. ‘Written confirmation after the telephone call.’

  Why the duplication? wondered Parnell.

  The truckers’ stop, about ten miles into New Jersey beyond the Hudson tunnel, had been designated by Edward C. Grant, who had been waiting when Harry Johnson arrived, the untasted coffee like a totem before him, the menu pushed to one side. Johnson chose the Big Breakfast, with an extra side order of hash browns and a double orange juice, his necessary and already marked serviette tucked tightly into his collar in a forlorn attempt to protect his shirt.

  Johnson said: ‘You should have ordered this. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day – sets you up.’