The Next Big One

by Derek Des Anges

  She shook her head. “I heard from one of his friends — ex-friend now — he got into a full-on fistfight with him for saying ‘you might want to slow the fuck down a bit and also stay away from Vincent’s girlfriend’.”

  Ben winced. “You know this—”

  “Isn’t looking good.” Tasneen raised her eyebrows and clenched her lips together. “Yeah. Who fucking knew you could hope this much that someone was just on coke.”

  “Maybe he is?” Ben offered.

  She closed her eyes. “Don’t.” After a minute she opened them again. “So. How is your intrepid investigation going? Did you speak to The Dreaded DeWalt? Did she tell you she’s a stooge of the government or—?”

  “She phoned me up at stupid o’clock last night to tell me she’s basically going to murder me and then sue my corpse,” said Ben. Tasneen stared at him.

  “No way.”

  “And I’m a fuckwit and didn’t record it so I can’t take it to the police.”

  “Okay,” Tasneen admitted. “That I can believe. If I was running a game now I would mark you down as Most Likely To Be Hit By Falling Rocks.”

  “Ugh,” said Ben, seeing the appeal of quitting the English language for the foreseeable future. “Everything is terrible.”

  “Do you still have the number she called you from?”

  “What?”

  Tasneen took Ben’s phone out of his bag.

  “Hey — no — don’t — do not do that.”

  She scrolled through his received calls. “This is it?”

  “Tasneen, don’t do anything—”

  “You know Sherazi was talking about persistence,” Tasneen said, hitting the call button.

  “Tasneen give my fucking phone back, Jesus Christ—” Ben reached for it horror.

  She returned it to him with a wordless smile as the phone call connected.

  “Hello?” said the rasping, cigarette-hoarse voice suspiciously. “Who is this? I don’t recognise your number.”

  “I’m returning a call,” said Ben, swallowing uneasily. “About Badai-Tugai.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I just need to ask you about how you came by the information,” Ben said, reaching out to touch the concrete wall beside him with one hand, as if the presence of something solid and cold would make up for the possibility that Amanda DeWalt was going to shove a lawyer into his lungs or whatever horrendous threat she could think up next.

  “I see,” said DeWalt, cautiously.

  Ben realised that she thought the conversation was being recorded this time, and moved the phone to the hand with the Kapture on his wrist.

  “Did you find the source by yourself or did someone refer them to you?” Ben asked.

  “I know who this is,” said DeWalt, with an exultant noise that made her sound like a large, angry cat. “I know who you are. You’re the idiot with the yo-yoing byline at the liberals without subeditors. Ben something.”

  “Martin,” Ben confirmed. “Are you willing to talk to me?”

  “You,” said DeWalt, with amusement. “You have the stench of a stillborn career on you.”

  “Probably,” said Ben, “so it doesn’t matter if you tell me, does it?”

  “It doesn’t matter if I tell you anyway,” DeWalt said, cheerfully. “Anything you print we can have down in seconds.”

  ‘We’, Ben noted, with a sudden cold flush.

  “So—” he began, but she cut him off.

  “I got the source from my editor, who got it from a company who like to make sure our titles are kept comfortable, and who sometimes like to pay for people’s lunches,” she said, with magnificent indifference. “And you can print that if it makes you happy, but that is how this industry runs. There isn’t a scandal. We have the source, we have the story. You get nothing.”

  “Do you know which company it is?”

  “No.” DeWalt seemed completely unperturbed by this. “My editor might, but he’s not going to tell you.”

  “You didn’t even bother to check your—”

  “Oh god,” DeWalt started to laugh. “You’re a fucking child. Who cares?”

  “You’re meant to be a journalist.”

  “Hey,” said DeWalt, with real amusement, “At least my stories stay online.”

  She hung up.

  Thoroughly sick and tired of voicemails, telephones in general, and by the time he got home, of all human contact, Ben didn’t relish the idea of talking to his step-mother for however long it took to explain that his sister had been moved.

  However, he thought, as he trudged up the stairs, speckled with rain and what seemed to be snow that couldn’t be arsed with being snow, his Dad would probably want to know.

  Or more to the point, he’d bring it up next time if Ben didn’t tell him now.

  He picked up the landline handset, got through to voicemail, and made a cautious victory punch to the air.

  “Hi, Melinda, it’s me. Ben. Listen, I just got a letter through from the hospital, I thought you and Dad should know as well, they’re moving her to, to ‘secure ward’.”

  That, Ben thought, was sufficient information. He hung up.

  His phone vibrated with an email notification.

  “Fuck it,” said Ben, turning on his heel. He picked up his coat again, pulled out some earphones, and went back down the stairs.

  He’d made it as far as the northern edge of Clissold Park — far enough that he was tired and felt like an idiot — when his phone began to buzz and beep, and he was obliged to answer it if only to avoid looking like he was too stupid to notice his own phone ringing.

  Ben pulled out an ear phone and looked at the screen.

  He put the phone into record mode.

  “Hello, Ms DeWalt,” said Ben, inching up to lean against the trunk of a bare-branched tree. “How is your evening?”

  “So far,” rasped DeWalt, “very enlightening. I was wondering if perhaps you’d like to help keep that going.”

  “Depends very much on what you want to know,” said Ben, picking at the bark. The tension was such that there was a good chance it would be his fingernails that gave up before the tree did.

  “Well, let’s try this,” said DeWalt. “I told you where my source came from. I’d like to know where yours came from.”

  “Which one?”

  DeWalt appeared to undergo a struggle at the other end of the line, and said, “Perhaps I should apologise.”

  “In general or to me?” Ben asked, finally detaching a small flake of bark. His fingers were very cold.

  “Probably both,” said DeWalt, “but you’re on the end of the line. I admit, I find your work a little threatening.”

  “Any particular reason?”

  “It’s very good,” she said, and there was something like a deep purr in her voice.

  Ben strongly doubted it was anything of the sort, but he said nothing. A woman pushing a pram full of watermelons passed him without turning her head.

  “Now,” said DeWalt. “I believe you’ve been writing a lot about an alternative source for the KBV virus.”

  That’s a redundancy, thought Ben, who’d been warned off this mistake several times. KBV was the abbreviation for koneboget virus, but he supposed that working at the Mail, DeWalt was more used to calling it the Koneboget Vampire Virus. He could almost hear the glottal stop where the more sensationalist noun had been excised at the last minute.

  “I’d be very interested to know,” said DeWalt, “what sources you have for this information.”

  “HPA Colindale,” said Ben, promptly. “Nothing especially hard to come by.”

  “Mm,” said DeWalt. “No particular contacts?”

  “You’ll have read about all of them,” Ben said, firmly. “No one’s hidden. The couple in Uzbekistan are missing, and Dr Yagoda has been very public and very forthcoming.”

  “She has indeed,” said DeWalt. “And no one else has been talking to you about alternative sources?”

  “No,” sa
id Ben, thinking about Noelle’s alarmed, accidental implications. “They’ve been very pointedly not talking about them.”

  “Nothing at all?” DeWalt persisted, as Ben renewed his attack on the tree, and the tips of his ears began to hurt.

  “Aside from an angrily letter from a very prestigious firm of corporate lawyers,” said Ben, with certain bitterness, “No, nothing else.”

  “So you don’t have much evidence,” DeWalt concluded.

  “Well that’s rarely stopped you.”

  She laughed at him. “Ben. I never publish anything without evidence that will stand up when propped up by good lawyers. If you can’t get good lawyers, you need an awful lot more evidence. You can have that advice for free.”

  Ben gritted his teeth. “Was there something you wanted?”

  “Yes,” said DeWalt, “but I have it now. Good evening, Ben.”

  “Fuck off,” Ben told the ended call screen.

  He didn’t feel entirely comfortable. It wasn’t so much the cold in the park or the lowering night sky which was still pissing out particles of not-quite-snow with a ferocity that something so delicate shouldn’t have been capable of, but something that settled in the pit of his stomach and made him want to keep moving.

  After another couple of hours he ended up outside the Picturehouse, and bought a ticket because trying to decide what else to do was too taxing. The name of the film escaped him entirely, but it had too many coincidences and a befuddled hero and Ben felt uncomfortably as if he could relate all too well to the situation. Over the top of the dialogue he heard DeWalt sneering, you need an awful lot more evidence.

  Halfway through the film, Ben decided that the protagonist was a moron, and that he needed to start calling a lot more people.

  He emailed Natalya in fit of restlessness at an hour she couldn’t possibly be awake: within ten minutes he had an answer.

  To: Ben Martin

  From: Yagoda, Natalya

  Re: sources

  Look up anyone connected with research on neurotrophic longevity, gain-of-function, hybridisation, latency periods, brain-blood barrier transgression, and work by Lydia Kells, Simon Crawford, or any one of the attached list. Some may cooperate if you mention you’re calling on my behalf. Some may not.

  Ben noticed that she didn’t ask why he wanted them, or why he wanted them now.

  The thoughts no time like the present and oh God sat in Ben’s head as he picked up his phone the next morning, half-dressed and fortified by half a slice of toast. Minnie, triumphant in her subtlety, had run off with the other half hanging from her mouth like a dead mouse.

  He checked the time three or four more times, and the number on the laboratory phone book section another two.

  The phone rang, and rang, and rang.

  A congested voice answered.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, my name’s Ben Martin, I see you’re listed as one of the co-authors on a paper with Dr Simon Crawford, I was wondering if you’d done any other work with him?”

  “None of your business.”

  “Any work on latency periods at all?”

  “How did you get this number?”

  “With great difficult— oh.”

  Some of the phone conversations raised significantly more questions than they answered, along with the hairs on the back of Ben’s neck:

  “Hi — I’m sorry, who is this?”

  “My name’s Ben Martin? I called earlier and left a message.”

  “Look, I can’t talk to you about my work at the moment, it’s really not in my best interests.”

  “Oh?”

  “No — I really — you must stop calling. Please.”

  Ben began to work his way down Natalya’s list with more confidence. After several hang-ups, ‘no’s, and evasions, it stopped feeling so much like a frustrating series of dead ends, and more like a game.

  “Hello, this is Ben Martin. I was wondering if I could talk to you about some work you did with Lydia Kells on neurotrophic virus longevity, could you call me back when you have a moment? I’m on 07XXX XXX XXX.”

  “Who is this?”

  “Hi, my name’s Ben Martin—”

  “Are you a journalist?”

  “Sometimes…”

  “I’m not allowed to talk to journalists.”

  “Says who?”

  “I’m not allowed to tell you that, either. Just please…don’t call this number again.”

  After a while Ben began to experiment with answerphone messages, mostly out of boredom: he got a better rate of return if he didn’t mention journalism, which was to be expected. He got a better rate of return if he didn’t mention why he was calling, although the return was usually bad-tempered and hung up on him as soon as he did mention. If he said “calling on behalf of Dr Yagoda he usually got a polite return but they only wanted to know, in a detached way, why she wasn’t calling herself.

  “Who’m I speaking to?”

  “Hi, this is Ben Martin.”

  “Can I ask how you got this number?”

  “Persistence, mostly. Do you have a moment?”

  ‘Persistence’, Ben reflected, sounded a lot better than the truth, which was that the person he was calling had a very common name, and Natalya hadn’t been able to provide much information, and he’d doggedly gone through several pages of 192.com and its American equivalents and resented every penny he’d paid for the stack of useless phone numbers it had generated.

  Days of calling people had given him a new-found and very grudging respect for cold-callers, although not so much that he hadn’t hung up on the woman from Injury Claims 4 Everyone who caught him in the middle of a sandwich.

  “If you’re trying to save my soul it’s already been saved, I’ve already got insurance, I don’t need new windows, and if you’re trying to leave me two million conveniently in need of distribution by a Nigerian businessman I’m alright, thanks.”

  “I promise I’m not a salesman, or a con artist. I just want to ask a couple of questions about your work.”

  “More or less everything’s been published — if you can get my number you can get onto PubMed, I’m sure.”

  “I know, I had a look,” said Ben, who’d read it until he had a headache and was barely any the wiser. “You’ve not done any work with Dr Crawford?”

  “No. Are you calling about his death? You think there was some sort of foul play?”

  “No,” said Ben, who still wasn’t entirely sure about that. “I think he felt very, very guilty about some use his work was put to and took his own life, and I’m trying to find out what use that was.”

  “Can’t help. Don’t know anything about Simon Crawford.” The voice sounded a little like it was having difficulty breathing. Not crying, but clearly wound up.

  “Have you ever worked for or with Noelle Anathan?”

  “I…no…we’re not in the same area. One of my colleagues consulted her a few times — Marburg capsids maybe? But I’ve never spoken to her.”

  “Lydia Kells?”

  “Are you just throwing out virologist names now? You do know none of these people work on the same things, right? Who are you?”

  “What I’m looking into might touch on a lot of areas,” Ben said, holding his breath for the inevitable click of a dead line.

  “Uh-huh. And what is that, exactly?”

  “I don’t actually know yet.”

  “Helpful. What did you say your name was?”

  “Ben Martin.”

  “Doesn’t ring any bells. Are you going to ask me if I’ve ever worked with Natalya Yagoda?”

  “I’m pretty sure she’d have told me if you had, I did tell her who I was trying to contact.”

  There was a pause on the end of the line.

  “You know Natalya?”

  “At this point,” said Ben, “I think I consider her a friend. I have,” he added without a trace of insincerity, “enormous respect for her.”

  There was a longer silence.

>   “Yeah. You should.”

  “So you haven’t consulted Lydia Kells at all?”

  “No, but…”

  There was another long pause.

  “But?”

  “Have you called a lot of people about this?”

  “Yes,” Ben said, trying not to sound as worn out by it as he was. “I’ve called a lot of wary and in some cases outright frightened-seeming virologists in the last few days.”

  “Not surprised.” There was a long silence. “You know why that is?”

  “I’m guessing,” Ben said, “there’s a lot of worried virologists wondering if their research has been misused as well.”

  A sound like a cocked gun, made with the mouth. “Dr Crawford’s suicide note is common knowledge in this field. You ever hear of Henry Bedford?”

  “No?”

  “He worked on the smallpox virus a few decades ago. Some of it escaped from his lab and got into the hospital…ventilation or just in through the window, I forget which. Caused an outbreak after smallpox had supposedly been eradicated. He killed himself, too.”

  Ben said nothing. He thought about Natalya.

  “Listen, I don’t know what your field is — obviously you’re not in microbio — but I guess you can imagine what it feels like to suspect something you’ve done, in good faith, with the intention of helping humanity, has gone on to directly cause that amount of suffering? How it weighs on you?”

  Ben clutched the phone a little harder and tried not to think too much about the Uzbek and the Uzbek’s wife, but they’d already crept into his mind.

  “Is there any of your work that could—”

  “Probably, but I was thinking of a colleague. Same area of work, but he—uh. You know, there’s a lot of things that get done, for research, which don’t sit well with the public, but the end result is sometimes a huge leap forward in knowledge despite the unorthodoxy.”

  “Gain-of-function? Like Dr Kawaoko?”

  A rubbery sound of dismissal. “No, that was dumb. I can see his logic, but that’s the kind of thing you want a secure-as-hell, isolated — you’d want to be in Siberia for that, RIVP Moscow and CDC aren’t even sufficient. But, in a way, related. Do you know anything about hybridisation?”