The Next Big One

by Derek Des Anges

  “Er,” said Ben, who’d tried to look it up, and when he’d asked Natalya had then had to have Dr Bill drafted in to explain. He would have consulted Daniel, but something made him hold back from sending that particular email.

  “Viral hybrids aren’t like plant hybrids, you know that much? There’s no sexual reproduction, so there’s no ‘viable’ or ‘not viable’, in the same way.”

  “I got that much.”

  “Reassortment — sort of virus sex, a gene swap — happens sometimes when two viruses have accidentally infected the same cell. Usually with very similar viruses.”

  “Like bird flu and…flu flu?”

  “Exactly. My colleague — this was kind of a long time ago, more than ten years — was supposed to be reverse-engineering a, a kind of artificial training virus — do you know what those are?”

  “You have a virus and you use it to test cures on?” asked Ben, who had at least managed to grasp this much.

  “Basically…yeah, I guess that’s what you’d put on PBS. You toy with the structure until you have something with the right characteristics — resistant to such-and-such, a bacteriophage, really good at getting into CD4 cells, infernon-blocking, whatever you’re studying — and then you keep bombarding it until something works. Crude, but not ineffective.”

  “So your colleague?”

  “She was supposed to be taking apart someone else’s training virus to find out how they’d made it. Reverse engineering it on commission, essentially. Like, it shouldn’t really have been able to be. Two very, very different viruses. It was supposedly based on a concurrent infection that came out of a West African patient, and no one could figure out how it was — how it had happened, but they’d managed to replicate it, so they’d passed it on to another lab to look at.”

  Ben wasn’t quite sure where this was going, but in the elation of finally getting someone to talk to him he didn’t feel he had any business being picky.

  “In the end her team couldn’t do jack with it and they passed it on to someone else. She thinks it wasn’t derived from the concurrent infection, it actually just was the concurrent infection, but it’s hard to know. My point is, I guess, you poke at viruses and you try to replicate that weird, hail-Mary combination, and maybe you succeed with, I don’t know, lyssa or something, and you don’t get to publish — my colleague didn’t, she was working in a company lab and they got twitchy about it — and years later you find yourself wondering: what did happen to that project? Did that work I did with, say, HTLV-1, end up in the hands of someone shitty? Did I accidentally contribute to a dirty bomb in Pakistan?”

  “D’you happen to know,” Ben said, very casually, “which company it was that didn’t let your colleague publish?”

  “No. She wasn’t really supposed to talk about the work, either, she signed an NDA — completely unethical, against everything that makes science work — but people get drunk, sometimes, and forget about NDAs.” The voice was pointed now, insistent.

  “But you don’t think any of your work might have been misused like that?”

  “I think it’s possible for someone to take work I’ve published and build on it, but people are supposed to be able to do that. Whether they use it for fair means or foul is on their heads. But you can see, can’t you? How easy it is to feel responsible for where your efforts end up?”

  The summons from Dr Bill came in time to save him from any further tangling with phone conversations of dubious ethicality, or from rereading chapters of McNae’s on exactly what the law said about recording conversations without telling people explicitly that’s what you were doing, or necessarily identifying yourself every single time. Ben didn’t feel as relieved as he’d thought he was going to: there was something in the man’s tone of voice.

  Ben knocked hesitantly on Dr Bill’s door. The laptop felt almost heavy with recordings — fragmentary conversations, worried virologists, angry university admin, angry lab receptionists, tired grad students, a hundred ways to say ‘I can’t/won’t talk to you’.

  “You join us at an interesting time,” said Dr Bill, reversing down his own corridor at speed. Ben closed the door behind him.

  Natalya, to Ben’s surprise, was also there. She was wearing a red jumper and a furious scowl, hunched up in an armchair with a laptop on her knees and an untouched cup of what smelled like very good coffee by her side.

  “Is that interesting in the sense of ‘awful’?” Ben suggested.

  “Extremely,” said Dr Bill, beaming behind his beard, “but I prefer to think of that as indicative of having poked a serious and reactive nerve.”

  “I’ve got,” Ben said, not sure what to say, “some conversations with people. That might be of use.”

  Dr Bill waved an expansive hand at the table. “Stick it down there, this place is frequently a forest of laptops, one more won’t make any difference. Where’s your other half?”

  Natalya looked up briefly from her own work and said, “They’re not.”

  “Oh? Sorry.” Dr Bill took the laptop out of Ben’s hands and opened it on the table. “But before that, you need to hear this. I didn’t really want to tell you over the phone because the Cold War Relic over there has been making noises about intercepted calls.”

  “It is not outside the realms of possibility,” Natalya objected.

  “No, I suppose not. But I doubt this is enough to trouble GCHQ.” Dr Bill stroked his beard meditatively for a minute and then started to laugh. “Sorry, this is an exciting time. Awful, as you say, but bewilderingly exciting. I don’t think I’ve ever upset anyone this powerful before. There’s something quite exhilarating about it.”

  Ben was pleased to see that Natalya gave him exactly the same look of disgusted disbelief that he was sure was on his face.

  “What’s happened?” Ben asked, stepping back from his laptop once he had the folder of recordings open. He’d already made a careful effort to remove the files containing sleeping sounds, arguments with Kingsley, and embarrassing conversations with Gareth, Molly, Ina, and Daniel that he wished he hadn’t had to hear all over again. There were also one or two he had paused over deleting.

  “I’ve had,” said Dr Bill with a huge, aggressive smile, “my access to certain areas of UCH revoked.”

  “Oh,” said Ben.

  “Namely,” said Dr Bill, “I can’t get into any of the labs. I thought it was an administrative cock-up, as you do, but when I checked with admin — who were as confused as I was — they said they’d had a direct request from significantly further up the line to remove access to any area of the hospital not involved in my current work, which, as you know, means the entire hospital barring the library we share with the Wellcome Institute, because epidemiology isn’t exactly famed for lab work and I’ve got my own surgery here.”

  Ben said nothing to this. He wasn’t sure what there was to say besides ‘shit’, and the hairs on his neck and arms were already doing their best to stand up under winter clothes.

  “So,” Natalya prompted, still looking at the laptop. “He calls—”

  “I called further up the line and asked what they were playing at, and they said there had been an external request, and I asked who, and they said it was none of my business, and I said I wanted to know who external to the hospital had any right making requests like that and having them listened to, and they said ‘we’ve noticed you’ve been letting people into areas they shouldn’t be in’—”

  “Had you?” Ben asked.

  Natalya raised her hand and didn’t look up.

  “Natalya needed access to some equipment and modelling software her laptop can’t run with that kind of memory — and I happened to have a pass,” said Dr Bill. “I don’t see that it’s a problem. We’re a public teaching hospital. The place is crawling with students.”

  “What did they say?”

  “Well, I didn’t tell them that, obviously. I said who made the request and they said ‘your behaviour is beginning to be a concern’.” Dr Bill
sat back with satisfaction. “Or, in less strained and diplomatic language, ‘fuck off, William, you’re being a nuisance and we’re trying to stay out of trouble’.”

  “Now tell him why I have to use UCH labs,” Natalya said, still busy with her laptop.

  “I think that’s your story.”

  “You’re enjoying yourself,” Natalya accused him, looking up. “You tell him.”

  “Natalya has been reduced to using my surgery, and my now-useless lab pass,” said Dr Bill, with scandalised eyebrows, “because there is a policeman sitting outside her flat.”

  “WHAT?” Ben stared at them both.

  Natalya shrugged. “Rhiannon came to see me, I was here, a policeman talks to her — Bill, you are not telling this story properly.”

  “Rhiannon went to ask Natalya if she needed anything, because she’s a sweetheart,” said Dr Bill, waving his hand impatiently at Natalya and huffing into his beard. “And encountered a member of the constabulary — not Sergeant Reardon, we checked — and he said, had Rhiannon seen Ms Yagoda. Rhiannon of course said Dr Yagoda is on sick leave — for trauma counselling, I mean, she was firm on that — I came to see her but she doesn’t seem to be in, and the police officer informed her that if she encounters Dr or Ms Yagoda then she is to steer well clear and report her to the police because they’ve had a tip-off that she’s ‘acting strangely’ and they want to advise her to have the triple-test as soon as possible in order to clear up any possibility that she’s been infected, and it turns out that there’s a plainclothes officer sitting in the car park at HPA drinking a lot of coffee and looking deeply bored.”

  “So,” Natalya concluded, without concern, “I am a fugitive.”

  “Who tipped them off?” Ben asked. “No, wait, they’re not about to tell anyone…”

  “Rhiannon asked Anil and David about it,” Natalya said, “before calling me. “David says the first any of them heard about it was one of upstairs sending around a flagged email. ‘Police have informed us Natalya Yagoda has been acting strangely and under no circumstances is to anyone allow her access to this site’.”

  “And,” Dr Bill said, taking over, “I called up Sergeant Reardon and asked him if he’d seen Natalya, and he said that he’d been asked specifically not to treat her absence as a missing persons case and that officers were cautioned to treat her as potentially contagious if they encountered her and did I know anything about this. So of course I said no, and he said well HPA didn’t either so I have no bloody idea where that tip came from and don’t tell anyone I said anything but this is beginning to piss me off.”

  Ben said, “Do you mind if I sit down?”, and not wholly because of the horrific quality of Dr Bill’s impression of Sergeant Readon.

  “Of course not. Let’s have a listen to these calls. My god, you’ve been busy—”

  “They’re mostly hang-ups,” said Ben, sitting down abruptly on the other armchair.

  “To be expected,” Natalya said, finally looking up. “Remember: Noelle is nervous, everyone is becoming nervous.”

  “Yes,” said Dr Bill, finding the first recording, “but why?”

  Half-way down the road from Dr Bill’s enviable Islington house and low bookshelves, Ben had a brainwave. Initially it resembled only a very bad idea, and he stopped in the middle of the pavement to look at the thick grey skies as if they were to blame for it.

  “This is just because he’s go the whole Harry Potter series on the shelf next to where I was sitting,” Ben said, under his breath, already looking for his phone.

  The phrase the dark arts refused to exit his head.

  “She probably doesn’t know anything about it,” he muttered into the collar of his t-shirt, finding the name nestled among a few phone numbers which had “?” after the alleged contact. Too many attempts to update too many contacts after too many phone-related accidents had left the inside of his contacts looking like what Ben imagined computer brains looked like if they could scar.

  There was, he reflected, as the phone began to ring, an easy way to get her to agree to help.

  “Hi,” he said, to her voicemail. “Sam Adrian? It’s Ben Martin here, you gave me Amanda DeWalt’s phone number? I was just wondering if you’d like to help me completely screw her over without any of it coming back on you.”

  “Hi,” said Ben, stamping his feet at the bus stop to keep the cold from crawling up his legs. His fingers had gone blue, and he was beginning to suspect that his determination not to find gloves would break before the weather did. “Thanks for getting back to me so quickly.”

  “Okay,” said the thin, transatlantic voice of the dark arts practitioner. “You’ve got Stacy Li, fired for absences; Dean Grover, fired for theft and misuse of company property; Mike Walker, fired for breach of confidence and misuse of company property; Loretta Fine, fired for sexual misconduct in the workplace; Opal Freeman, fired for inappropriate attitude towards management—”

  “Mike Walker sounds promising,” said Ben, wrangling a scrap of paper and a Sharpie against the side of the bus stop. “Any idea where he is now?”

  “I have a forwarding address and phone number from when he was fired,” the thin voice said, with disdain, “which was eleven years ago.”

  “Shit,” said Ben.

  “We’re going to take two hundred bucks off your credit card, and when that comes through you can have the details emailed to you.”

  “Sure,” said Ben, wondering what on earth Daniel would think about this. He decided Daniel probably didn’t care either way; if he had, he might have called at some point. Emailed. Texted. Not, Ben thought, that it was any of his business whether Daniel wanted to talk to him or not.

  “Happy hunting,” said the voice.

  “I’m looking for Mike Walker?”

  “Who?”

  “Mike Walker. Used to live at this address?”

  “You’ll need to speak to the landlord, buddy, I’ve only been here six months.”

  “Hi, I was wondering if you had any contact details for Mike Walker?”

  “Jesus, not heard that name for time.”

  “Do you know how I can get hold of him?”

  “You a cop?”

  “Nope, journalist.”

  “Hell do you want with Mike Walker?”

  “I think he might be able to help me unravel a colossal pharmaceutical conspiracy,” said Ben, who was getting increasingly tired of explaining himself.

  “Hey yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, don’t have his number but I know where you can find his ex-girlfriend.”

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, I’m looking for Mike Walker?”

  “Oh. Yeah. Well, I don’t live with him any more.”

  “I kind of know that, I’m just trying to find out how I can get in touch with him.”

  “You calling from Britain?”

  “Uh-huh. London.”

  “Okay, I don’t have his number, he changed phones like five months ago and didn’t give me the new one, we don’t talk, but I know his roommate—”

  “Hi there!”

  “Hello?”

  “Uh… who the fuck are you?”

  “I’m looking for Mike Walker.”

  “Oh right. He’s working right now, do you want to leave your number?”

  “Sure, sure. It’s, uh, it’s an international number so if he wants to just ring and then hang up I can call him back and—”

  “That’s still gonna cost him.”

  “Oh right, right, your billing works differently. Um.”

  “I’ll get him to call you from work. What’s your name?”

  For reasons that escaped the rational part of his mind, Ben found himself standing in the Korean ceramics gallery in the British Museum, fielding a phone call from Mike Walker, and feeling bad about it. No one else was in the gallery, but the museum attendant at the far end looked like she was trying to get five minutes sleep without anyone disturbing her, and his voice carried down the
thin room more than he’d have liked.

  “Hey, that Ben Martin?”

  “It is me.”

  “What can I do for you? Louis said you called my house.”

  “Actually I’ve been trying to get hold of you for a while,” said Ben, which was something of an understatement. “I kind of wanted to talk to you about a job you used to have.”

  “Wait up. Who’re you working for?” Mike Walker’s voice drained out some of its friendly veneer.

  “Myself,” said Ben, “I’m a freelance journalist. I’d like to talk to you about XXXXX/XXXXXX, if you’re willing.”

  “Them?” Mike Walker had clearly been expecting something else. “Uh, sure. But I haven’t worked for them since…shit, it’s been more than ten years.”

  “I know,” said Ben. “You’re in roughly the right timeframe. And, well, I talked to someone who is very good at getting hold of this kind of information, and, well, I found out why you were fired, and—”

  “Hey listen,” Mike Walker said, without any friendliness at all, “this is none of your—”

  “No, no,” Ben said, as the gallery attendant shifted on her stool, “hear me out. I don’t — the reason I want to talk to you is because of that. Not because of your — whatever, you took a bit of paper, everyone does something like that from time to time, not important. I just want to know what it said.”

  “You want,” Mike Walker said, only slightly mollified, “to know what it said on some minutes from an internal meeting like eleven, ten years ago?”

  “Yes.”

  “You think I even remember that?”

  Ben said, staring at a glazed jar, “It’s a long shot, I know, but—”

  “Lucky for you,” said Mike Walker, “I Xeroxed about ten copies and kept them.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Hey, I thought if they were being so secretive about it, probably worth something. Worth my job, at the time, which was a pisser, but now I don’t have to work cleaning shitty offices and boom, it turns out to be worth something after all.”

  “It does indeed,” said Ben, who was starting to get a headache from staring fixedly at the same spot. He turned on his heel. “Do you think you could email me a copy?”