The Next Big One

by Derek Des Anges

  “Right,” said Daniel. “Can I come and work on your team instead, please.”

  “As this now involves the risk of prosecution for perjury,” Natalya said, closing her eyes. “I would not advise that.”

  In the time it took for Sergeant Reardon to complete whatever task had taken him away from their first conversation, Dr Bill grew tired of sitting around in tense silence and insisted on making tea, which only he and Ben drank.

  “For a moment there,” Ben said, between sips, “I was starting to think that the whole, the abduction was something XXXXX/XXXXXX had set up to try and frighten you off or keep you quiet.” He made an embarrassed face. “I, er, which sounds very paranoid when I come to say it out loud.”

  “That,” said Natalya, “is still a plausible explanation.”

  “Plausible is pushing it,” Daniel corrected, leaning on the back of Ben’s chair. “Come on, surely ‘a bunch of nutjobs with a stupid conspiracy and probable homeopathy brainwashing decide to rip off a movie and kidnap a scientist’ is infinitely more likely than ‘massive pharmaceutical research company with resources and connections up the wazoo decide to employ collection of idiot thugs to etc’.”

  “They have primarily focussed on legal threats before,” Dr Bill agreed. “But, assuming that they are the same people who tried to bribe Natalya…if they have a great deal to hide then concocting a far-fetched abduction scenario would be a wonderfully easy way to discredit her and also her revelations regarding KBV, don’t you think?”

  The discussion was curtailed as the phone rang again.

  “Sergeant Reardon again,” said Sergeant Reardon, a little out of breath. “We’ve had a couple of little chats, one with your colleagues, who agree that you’ve been very lucky and aren’t KBV positive, which is nice, and one immediately afterwards with our conscience-stricken kidnapper, who says we have to be wrong about that.”

  Ben found he was holding his breath again.

  “He’s claiming,” went on Sergeant Reardon, “that they got the infected blood from ‘a good source’ and that it’s impossible for you not to have been infected. Now, we’ve asked what this source is but he won’t talk, so we’re pulling a bit of health leg. on them and having them tested. Obviously we’re not going to get the results back on that for some time, but my guess is that either none of them are infected or all of ‘em are. And if they all are, well, they’ve got an annoying bloody defence of either KBV paranoia or infection knowledge stress for the court, but they’re going in quarantine then anyway.” He took a breath.

  Ben finished his tea as quietly as he could, and looked around for somewhere to put the cup. Daniel snatched it out of his hand.

  “However,” Sergeant Reardon went on in a quieter voice. “He is also claiming ‘we knew she was being paid by Big Pharma before that story full of lies about her rejecting a bribe’, and babbling about having a mole in Big Pharma; it looks so far like their vans and equipment was not paid for by any of the group and he’s mentioned a ‘benefactor’ in the same breath as the ‘mole’.” He sounded unimpressed.

  Ben caught Daniel’s eye and Daniel looked bewildered. Do they normally—? Daniel mouthed, as if Ben were somehow an expert on what the police did and didn’t do.

  Sergeant Reardon went on. “Ordinarily, Doctor Yagoda, I would dismiss this as hysterical bullshit and be required to check it out anyway. In this instance, no sooner have I mentioned this to my superiors than they get back to me with a message from further up the line informing me — and please do not pass this on to your Guardianista friend because I would like to have a job tomorrow — that I am strongly encouraged to treat this as nonsense.”

  “I see,” said Natalya. “I imagine this leads you to consider the opposite.”

  “Yes,” said Sergeant Reardon, firmly. “Like you, Doctor Yagoda, I don’t appreciate when I find people are trying to make my job harder for some reason, and I like it even less when they’re people who are meant to be on my side.”

  “If any further threats are made,” Natalya said, carefully, “should I contact you specifically?”

  “It is possible,” said Sergeant Reardon, “that would be for the best.”

  “Thank you, Sergeant Reardon,” said Natalya, “I appreciate you keeping me informed of developments in this affair. I had believed these men might never be found.”

  “Yeah,” said Sergeant Reardon, without any of her formality, “and if that pillock hadn’t got nervous, you’d have been right, too.”

  He hung up.

  “Something genuinely fucked up is going on,” Daniel said, apparently impressed. “Like, really and completely batshit insane. Someone is lying about something somewhere along the way and—” he waved a hand somewhere over Ben’s head, “who?”

  Dr Bill said, rather more jovially, “Are you a stooge of Big Pharma, Natalya?”

  She gave him a withering look.

  “Ben?”

  “If I am, I’m not very good at it,” Ben noted. “Also I’d expect to be getting paid and that’s definitely not happening.”

  “Daniel?”

  “No, more’s the pity,” said Daniel. “Like Ben said, the money would be nice.”

  “And despite the strident claims of sugar pill salesmen, various components of Big Pharma have been enjoying hurling lawyers at me for years,” said Dr Bill with mock-regret. “So I think we can assume that either the man with the van and the balaclava is out to lunch, or—”

  “Or he’s the unwitting stooge after all?” suggested Daniel.

  “Moles, double agents,” Dr Bill said, with some satisfaction. “I let a Soviet into my house and suddenly we’re stuck in the Cold War again. Tea? Coffee?”

  In the light of all this Ben had almost forgotten about Dr Bill’s attempts to make contact with the human guinea pigs. He succeeded in hobbling and shuffling to college the next day, where Victoria greeted him with disbelief. He also bought breath spray.

  “Have you been breaking into government facilities?” Victoria asked, hand on hip, as he staggered into his seat.

  “Nope,” said Ben, pulling out a copy of McNae’s to garnish his desk with.

  “Pursuing the Beckhams down the street with a telephoto?”

  “Nope,” Ben said, accepting a coffee from Tasneen with caution, under the understanding that Victoria was probably going to take it off him in a minute.

  “Received a beating from the bully-boys for poking your nose into illegal doings?” Victoria asked, making her way back to the front of the class with a jangle of bracelets.

  “Nope,” said Ben, sipping latte. “I fell up the stairs to my flat because the light had gone.”

  “Wonderful,” said Victoria, clapping her hands together. “So today’s op ed is about private landlords and health and safety liability. Everyone to the left of Ben, you are in favour of tightening this legislation that makes private landlords responsible for their tenants injuries and ill health, everyone to the right of Ben, you are against it. Three hundred words. Go! Go!”

  “What am I doing?” Ben asked.

  “That is a very good question,” Victoria asked, severely. “What are you doing, Benjamin Martin? Where is last week’s assignment?”

  “Ah,” said Ben. “I was going to do it, and then I had to eavesdrop on the police.”

  Three people stopped writing and looked up at him suspiciously.

  “Unless you have finished and finished like you can put it in the Telegraph,” said Victoria sharply, “I don’t want to see your faces.”

  Three heads bent back over keyboards.

  “So,” Victoria said, coming to sit on the edge of Ben’s desk. “You are using this time to do last week’s assignment, and also to perhaps, maybe, if you can be bothered, to do some of the great big pile of summaries you are distressing Kyle by not writing.”

  She stood again, setting off a fresh avalanche of bangles.

  “Oh, he wails around the staff room like a disconsolate ghost,” she said, lifting both
hands in the universally-recognised sign language for ‘ghost’ and the more personally-applicable ‘creating percussion’, “when will Ben Martin ever write his summaries? When will I know peace? When will Jack put his head back down and finish writing his op ed?”

  Ben settled himself at a power point, next to a pile of books on Dadaism which hadn’t been put away, and tried to wade through a few more summaries.

  He was interrupted halfway through the first with an email notification, and immediately decided that it was far too important to ignore, whatever it turned out to be.

  To: Ben M; Yagoda, Natalya; Khoo, Daniel

  From: Dr Bill Greenhill

  Subj: FWD: FWD:

  To: Dr Bill Greenhill

  From: Yancy the Rat

  Subj: FWD:

  Is this what you’re looking for?

  To: Yancy the Rat

  From: Halifax, Louisa Clare

  Subj: FWD

  Not sure if this is going to be relevant to your friend b/c it’s not actually about the guinea pigs but it’s the only thing I can think of. Sticks in my mind because I feel kind of responsible.

  So maybe a couple of years after I quit pigging and started doing vso before proper aid stuff, I was working with some landfill/dump scavenger families doing evening soup/teaching sessions for the kids in between helping them with what you’d call upcycling now. One family especially, they had a little girl called – well let’s call her “Marina”, don’t want to use names.

  Marina’s half-brother John got a chance to make some money doing something other than scavenging, we encouraged them to look for stuff like that because of how badly it screwed up their health in the long run. Some reps from somewhere corporate came down and offered what to the families was a fortune in exchange for warm bodies.

  I’d mentioned to them that before I came to teach I was a guinea pig, and so they thought it was safe, and I guess they’d seen me coming in working for the charity with kit and so on and just connected pigging with getting a better gig, or maybe they just wanted to believe it worked like that. Don’t blame them, really.

  We’d had the infectious diseases ed. team in recently too, explaining how to limit contagious stuff like colds and crap, and basic hygiene, or as much as you can do when your job is rooting through other people’s rubbish, I think that’s what contained it.

  Anyway John came back from pigging with what counts as shedloads of cash if you’re used to being paid in fractions of a cent, and a couple of the kids didn’t come back and the reps didn’t come back either and John said he’d been told they’d died but the reps never returned their bodies.

  John said he would talk to the reps for the other families (now he was sure they couldn’t take his money off him because he’d given it to his auntie), but instead he came down with…we didn’t know what it was because it seemed like ebola and ebola just…doesn’t happen in that part of the world. It’s the wrong continent, that stuff comes out of the jungles, all that.

  The charity wanted to take him to a hospice but his family didn’t want him to die where they couldn’t be there; we were hoping we could save him but he bled out after a week, screaming for meat and trying to bite his sister.

  Good thing we had the infectious diseases team down so soon before because they were careful with his body and as far as I know they didn’t have anyone else bled out like that.

  Sticks in my mind partly because of the guilt, them thinking a trial would be okay because I’d been in some, and partly I think because of the biting, John’s mother got him to bite on a stick most of the time but there was bloody foam and he ended snarling like a mad dog, and I remember seeing that sad footage, the KBV stuff everyone’s seen now, and at the time it reminded me of poor John. I feel pretty bad about that. I wish you hadn’t asked to be honest.

  Hope this helps. Going to be working downriver for the next six weeks so if your friend needs clarification he’s going to have to wait a while,

  LCH.

  PS: just realised you asked about what the trials were for in any case. Obvs I don’t know what was involved in John’s trial b/c they’d have made him take a confidentiality even if they told him at all in the first place (I/C not as big a deal in countries where people are disposable, as you’d suspect, prob why they’re doing the trials down here in the first place) but he was so pleased with the money we got the name of his benefactors a few times, XXXXX/XXXXXX funding and XXXXXX running it.

  Ben immediately copied this to the folder marked “hideous conspiracy” inside the KBV folder, and put his head briefly in his hands. Write a summary of the law as it pertains to information obtained under duress or by deception. Yeah, sure, just as soon as he’d stopped getting updates on the possibility that someone had deliberately infected people with a deadly virus. Any minute now.

  Despite the interruptions Ben struggled through four summaries and emailed them to Kyle before limping home in the dark. He was amused to see that, obvious hobbling or not, no one was in the mood to offer him their seat on the tube: leaning hard on the central pole, he made eye contact with a heavily pregnant woman wearing a “Baby on Board” badge on her coat, and both of them sighed.

  He got in to an empty flat later than seemed realistically possible to come back out from, and sent Molly an email from his phone, flaking out from the evening on the grounds of being both literally and figuratively lame.

  Ben hopped into the kitchen, fed Minnie, and made an attempt at feeding himself.

  He looked at the remaining four slices of bread.

  He looked at the yellow plastic tub of cock soup powder, which had a note taped to it reading “LITERALLY ALL YOU NEED TO DO IS ADD BOILING WATER BEN”.

  He opened the fridge and stared at a selection of pots of yogurt.

  “Fuck it,” said Ben, and he took a Double Decker out of the egg compartment of the fridge.

  On the TV, an interview with someone who looked like he was made out of spheres of ham and who apparently represented UKIP somewhere bleak on the east coast came to an end. Ben turned up the volume and stretched out his bandaged ankle in front of him. It throbbed reproachfully.

  “Doug Lewis, MP for Lewisham, instrumental campaigner for the retention of maternity services in Lewisham Clinic, author of the motion to extend support payments to the dependents of those quarantined with KBV, is quitting politics to write iPhone games full time.”

  Ben looked up. There was a stock clip of footage for the MP — the background was red, so Ben guessed he was probably Labour — walking down some steps outside somewhere official and neo-classical on screen. He looked affably nerdy, well-fed, at the beginnings of bald, with a round face and round glasses and a confused smile at the end of the clip.

  He certainly looked as if he could quit to write iPhone games.

  “Doug Lewis’s previous credits include,” said the TV, bringing them up in bullet point form, “a strong voting record in favour of women’s rights. Being asked to leave PMQs for wearing trainers. The first known MP to livetweet a debate on hospital hygiene contracts. Wrote Oligarch Quest, a satirical adventure game for the iPhone, and Pig Warrior, a coordination game for the under-tens, also for the iPhone and iPad, lately released for Android devices.”

  Ben recalled being briefly amused by Oligarch Quest when it had been released, but he couldn’t recall if he’d ever completed it.

  “Doug Lewis has been one of the louder back benchers on the subject of a potential epidemic, and has repeatedly pushed for increased funding for broader testing.”

  Ben muted the TV again and, after thinking about it for some time, lay down on the futon with his trainer still on his swollen foot.

  The thing was, ‘Doug Lewis’ sounded like a familiar name outside of the context of parliament.

  Ben rolled over until he couldn’t see the TV any more.

  In fact, he was pretty sure there was someone who knew someone with a name very similar to that.

  It was a common name, though.

/>   Ben closed his eyes.

  In fact, he’d been talking about Oligarch Quest and someone had said one of their friends was friends with the guy who’d written it, and then they’d said Doug Lewis.

  Ben pulled his pillow over his face.

  Doug Lewis was a friend of Stella’s, he remembered. They’d been in the same club to do with something to do with games, and they’d kept in touch, and Stella would still have his number, and talking to an MP who had some connection with KBV would look good on his project, and she’d quoted him once, that gaming aphorism, when you start meeting resistance it’s because you’re going in the right direction…

  And he didn’t have Stella’s number.

  Ben pulled the pillow off his face again.

  Minnie climbed onto his stomach and then arranged herself so that she could most effectively pummel his bladder with her paws.

  He’d been talking about Oligarch Quest with Leah. At that picnic. Something to do with Stella.

  One of Stella’s friends had written the game Ben had mentioned in passing. That was it.

  Stella was Leah’s best friend. School friend. Friend from when they were all ridiculously young. He remembered her from Stella and Leah and the fun game of ‘Lock Ben in the cupboard under the sink’, and greatest hits like ‘it was definitely Ben who broke that’; he’d been immensely grateful when his sister and her best friend hit puberty and lost interest in seeing how many nooks and crannies he could be forced into against his will, especially as Stella had proceeded to continue growing the hell up into a pleasant, responsible adult while his sister vanished off the face of the earth for several years.

  Ben chewed the side of his thumb.

  The problem with this, he thought, wasn’t the ‘talking to Stella’ part. He liked Stella. Stella didn’t wholly dislike him. She’d probably give him Doug Lewis’s phone number without any fuss.