The Next Big One

by Derek Des Anges

  “That’s a bit polysyllabic for a red-top,” Ben muttered, automatically.

  Sherazi threw him an ugly stare that silenced him and also nearly stopped his heart from beating. “We can reveal that XXXXX/XXXXXX, originally working on a ‘training virus’ based on the combination of HIV, Ebola, and rabies, which they claim is an accident, released KBV into a clinical trial group told they would be helping test an intravenous anti-fatigue drug. In what a source calls the ‘breath-taking’ case of a series of misled patients, lost files, management switchovers, and fat-cat complicity, this world-famous, FTSE-listed pharmaceutical company unleashed an incurable virus that is set to kill thousands on every continent.”

  “Lyssa,” Ben corrected, his brain stunned into immobility.

  “A source who asked not to be named has said, ‘Cross-contamination in one West African man resulted in a bizarre hybrid previously thought to be impossible.’ Another, who has also asked that their identity be kept a secret for fear of reprisals, has speculated, ‘Repeated attempts were probably made to replicate the process, including the introduction of several other wildly different viruses’,” Sherazi said.

  “Doesn’t sound like the Ma—” Ben began, surprised by the combination of the paper’s crest with an absence of finger-wagging.

  “I don’t think they care about register, they’re too fucking excited to have a story of this magnitude.”

  “But that’s—” Ben began.

  “Shh. Work with the original sample resulted in the production of a ‘three-way hybrid’ which was, it can be revealed, illegally tested on homeless families in South America in one of the worst ethical failures since Nazi doctor Josef Mengele.” Sherazi made a face. “Why would you…never mind. Questions must be asked about the safety of vulnerable children who are subjected to this kind of treatment even when supposedly under the protection of NGOs like XXX.”

  “They didn’t—” Ben protested. His tutor cut him off with a raised eyebrow.

  “There’s some stuff here about training viruses again — I don’t think that’s the technical name for them either — ah hah, reference to Simon Crawford, quote from his suicide note…” she turned the page. “Blah blah blah, now trying to cover their tracks. Suspicion that this is an elaborate attempt to create a vaccine hostage situation has been raised by the existence of notes referring to the existence of both post-exposure “prophylaxes” (a type of vaccine to prevent infection), and “antigens” (treatment for people who are already infected) next to a serial number linked to the virus, but a clear failure to fully understand the nature of the virus about to be released.”

  “I found—” Ben began, sitting forward.

  “You know all this,” said Sherazi, throwing the newspaper aside.

  “Yes,” said Ben.

  “Because that’s your story.”

  “Yes.”

  Sherazi pointed back at the offending paper. “That’s not your fucking name on it.”

  “I—”

  She shook her head. “What the fuck happened that Amanda DeWalt just published the biggest story possible and it’s your work it’s based on? Did you think she’d share the credit?” Sherazi looked as if she was suggesting that the earth had just opened up and distributed Skittles in an explosive rainbow of well-being. It was about as far-fetched. She stared at him with the kind of blackened intensity that could have scorched metal. “Did you get cold feet? What the fuck happened?”

  Ben, who would have quite liked to have sunk into his chair and become part of the carpet for the rest of his life said, “I. She. She called me up in the middle of the night and just…kept…”

  “It’s a favoured tactic of hers,” Sherazi said dryly. “What exactly did you—”

  “She kept going on about Leah—”

  “Who the hell is Leah?”

  Ben said, wretchedly, “My sister is in a secure ward and somehow DeWalt found out and she just wouldn’t stop going on about how everything I’d done was just bullshit grudge-wank designed to…designed to make me feel better about it or something and I, I just…”

  “Your sister is in a secure ward,” Sherazi repeated, leaning forward. “Your sister. Has KBV. Which presumably, you already knew about at the beginning of the year?”

  “Yes,” said Ben.

  “Why the hell didn’t you tell me?” Sherazi threw her hands up. “I’d have moved you onto something else! Ben! For God’s sake.”

  “You said we had to learn how to—”

  “I’m not nuts,” Sherazi barked. “Do you really think I’d force a first year student to spend all year—” she gesticulated at nothing, “—jabbing themselves in an open wound if I knew? That’s not a level of sadism that any editor thinks is acceptable — maybe the Mail — but good fucking God.”

  “I…possibly shouted at her about research,” Ben admitted, slowly.

  “And from there she clearly has enough detail to do what you’ve already done, and rather more resources,” said Sherazi, sinking onto the desk. “Well. You know what? I think you have more than enough reason to give her a taste of her own medicine.”

  “What?”

  Sherazi waved her hand at Ben. “Call her. Call her right now. Here.”

  “But—”

  “You have her number. Call her.”

  Ben shrivelled back into the chair. Sherazi continued to stare at him. Ben shrivelled slightly further, but took out his phone all the same.

  He dialled, put it on speakerphone, set up record, and laid the iPhone on the desk next to Sherazi.

  “This is your story,” Sherazi said. “You’re talking to her.”

  The phone rang on.

  “If she picks up,” Ben muttered.

  The phone rang on.

  “Thank you,” said DeWalt, without preamble. “Your congratulations are very much appreciated.”

  “Yeah,” said Ben, bitterly , glancing at Sherazi for confirmation. “You couldn’t have done it without me.”

  “I could,” said DeWalt, with a small sneer in her voice. “The information was out there. But look at it this way: I have more clout than you do. I know where to get this heard more widely than your sad little rag with its collection of weepy intelligentsia. And I have a lot, lot more practice in being sued and winning than you do.”

  “It’s still my story,” said Ben, gritting his teeth.

  “Which you were planning to sit on until kingdom come, no doubt. Or you’d have slung it up and had it pulled down again five minutes later or, pfft.” DeWalt snorted.

  “Don’t you think,” Ben said, his jaw clenched, “it’s moderately hypocritical to take a bullshit source and a hefty bung from XXXXX/XXXXXX and then write up this?”

  “Or,” said DeWalt, with a laugh, “I was lulling them into a false sense of security.”

  “You were doing no such fucking thing,” Ben said. Sherazi made a downward motion with her hand: calm down.

  “I have the story of the century,” said DeWalt, and coughed. “I have a near-guaranteed book deal and I just got paid more than you will ever see in your shitty little life — I really don’t care.”

  She hung up.

  Ben stared at the blank phone screen, and concentrated on breathing normally.

  “She’s barely a journalist,” Sherazi said, passing Ben his phone back. “She’s a bin-rummager. She goes through trash looking for scandal. And like any other scavenger, she knows when she’s found an easy ride.”

  “Well I feel better,” Ben muttered sarcastically. He shoved his phone back into his bag.

  “No one has any respect for her,” Sherazi went on, “and I doubt anyone believes she did the hard work for this herself.”

  “I’m not sure,” said Ben, looking at his hands, “that I have much respect for myself right now.”

  Sherazi shrugged, and stood up to open the door. “I think I’ll have to take into account ‘locked horns with the crowned queen of bullshit’ when I come to mark your final piece.”

 
She pulled open the door.

  “But you still have to hand it in.”

  Ben nodded, and reshouldered his bag with an empty feeling growing somewhere below his lungs.

  “By the way,” Sherazi added. “Why the glasses?”

  “Short-sighted,” said Ben, exhausted.

  “Obviously. Why now?”

  Ben shrugged. “Stopped caring whether I look stupid.”

  It had been a mistake to check his emails, Ben realised, half-way down the stairs. Not because the college wireless was best described as ‘euphemistically functional’, a term Victoria liked to use a lot, but because he still felt like a damp rag after the exchange with DeWalt. And because everyone that he knew read the papers looking for KBV knew what his research looked like, and because expecting sympathy or tact from Daniel was like expecting delicacy from a rhino.

  To: Ben M

  From: Khoo, Daniel

  Subj: re: d walt dirtney

  So when are you going to kick the bitch in the fork? Want me to help? Want me to provide a soundtrack while you drag her?

  To: Khoo, Daniel

  From: Ben M:

  Subj: re: re: d walt dirtney

  I’m not going to do anything.

  To: Ben M

  From: Khoo, Daniel

  Subj: re: re: re: d walt dirtney

  NO. YOU FUCKING DRAG THAT BITCH. Do not lie down.

  Ben spent possibly the longest continuous period of typing in his life sitting in an anonymous Starbucks inside Paddington station, while commuters came and went unseen around him.

  To: Sherazi, M A

  From: Ben M

  Subj: article

  Please find attached one draft article detailing Amanda DeWalt’s acceptance of a bung from XXXXX/XXXXXX and subsequent about-face.

  To: Ben M

  From: Sherazi, M A

  Subj: re: article

  Bin it. She can spin that as a Damascene conversion. ‘Journalist has crisis of conscience, starts investigating, discovers conspiracy of cock-up’. Just makes her look better and you bitter.

  Ben spent the next hour and a half writing at a speed he hadn’t known he was capable of, while the Starbucks staff glared at him. He spent the hour and a half after that removing what felt like every typo it was possible to make.

  To: Sherazi, M A

  From: Ben M

  Subj: article 2

  Please find attached article detailing DeWalt calling me up at 3am to harass contacts out of me, along with Kapture recording of that conversation.

  To: Ben M

  From: Sherazi, M A

  Subj: re: article 2

  YES. This one, you print.

  In the teens of March — not quite the Ides — Ben knocked on Dr Bill’s door and tried to find something resembling a ledge to stand under. It had yet to stop raining, but the rain was at least not quite as close to freezing as it had been.

  Small comfort when it was making a hobby out of getting down the back of his neck, Ben thought.

  “Right,” said Dr Bill, opening the door. “What have we got?”

  “Endless, endless reports,” said Ben, who’d been dazzled and then slightly impoverished, until he’d realised he only really needed to buy print copies of the stuff with online paywalls.

  Dr Bill backed down the corridor and veered into the living room. “There’s coffee.”

  “Thanks, but,” Ben cast around for a way to point out that he actually didn’t like coffee and would have preferred to smother it with as many other tastes as possible, gave, up, and said, “thanks.”

  “There’s also tea.” Dr Bill had his laptop open on the table, and patted the wooden surface encouragingly. “Where’s your other —wait, he’s still not — never mind.”

  Ben said, with composure, “Daniel’s on radio silence. Either he’s got Borna problems again—”

  “Likely,” said Dr Bill, “it’s a tricky little bastard.”

  “—Or,” Ben sighed, emptying newspapers out of his bag and carefully removing his Macbook from the melee, “I offended him by being a cavalier twat about, uh, tests.”

  “Mm?” Dr Bill had already begun going through the papers.

  “It’s a long and boring story,” said Ben, picking out one of the other papers, “basically I said no a lot to, to a, to spitting in a jar, and…uh. Where’s Natalya?”

  Dr Bill grinned behind his beard. “Asleep.”

  Ben looked at his phone. It was midday.

  “Hungover,” Dr Bill translated, with a snorted. “We may possibly have been a little drunk last night.”

  Ben decided not to pursue a line of questioning on that one.

  “Here we go,” said Dr Bill, leafing through. “Oh, you marked it, very sensible. I keep forgetting to do that. Got so used to just clipping things into Zotero that when I get stuck behind a print book it’s impossible to keep track. They’re inconvenient, anyway. More scanning, that’s what the world needs. Ahem.” He shook out the paper, and put on an even more booming voice than his usual. “I was asked to hold back on publishing these results on the understanding that X/X — I see they’ve started abbreviating it now the buggers are in the public eye so much — would be more inclined to provide future funding to my projects if I let them work this in private. Funding’s a good way to keep people in line. If there was more of it bloody well allocated in the first place we wouldn’t have these problems to anything like this extent—”

  “Was told I could find better career advancement in a different area and that my results weren’t worth publishing—” Ben said, and moved further down the same article, “received a very generous pay increase and was given a position on a much more successful team.”

  “We’re—” the paper flapped for a moment, “martyrs to our bloody career paths. Here’s another one: thought it was very important as nothing like this had been done before but was informed that pursuing ‘side-projects’ was not acceptable use of funds and that I should refocus on main stated aims, which had been changed since the beginning of the work.”

  “Oh,” said Ben, returning to his Macbook for a minute, “I forgot, there were a couple who weren’t in virology or microbio either…here—”

  He pushed the screen toward Dr Bill, who took the whole laptop with a carelessness that made Ben fear for the safety of what had once been an expensive machine. “Whistleblower from X/X Stevenage: I Quit As A Matter Of Conscience.”

  “I’ve practically memorised that one,” said Ben, his face getting hotter. “That’s the one who got asked to just ‘keep that note off the internet’—”

  “Crawford’s suicide note?” Dr Bill said, reading on. “Oh yes, there it is.”

  “Also,” said Ben, but Dr Bill cut him off with a grim expression.

  “‘There was also some discussion about buying a van for someone — I don’t remember who but I got the impression it was supposed to be used for intimidation purposes: ‘just make sure no one listens to her’.” He gave Ben the laptop back and sunk into his beard for a moment. “What a pack of amoral fucking—” he looked up. His expression was constrained, drawn around a hollow point where his lips pressed together too hard. It wasn’t a look Ben had seen on him before. “Excuse me. Of course they’re amoral shits. I don’t know why I was so surprised.”

  “And,” said Ben, hastily, moving between tabs, “this morning.”

  He passed the laptop back again.

  “Well, shit,” said Dr Bill, reading the headline. “Source reveals X/X attempted injunction against publication of Stevenage revelations.” He grumbled into his beard for a moment longer, and added, “Wait, this one’s a diff—no, sorry, there’s another whistle-blower?”

  “There’s a whole orchestra,” Ben said in a low voice, not sure if Dr Bill was listening at all.

  “When I suggested patient follow-up after the Tashkent trial — ah, they’re from XXXXXX, the trials people who were so bloody polite when I was researching number three — I was told we had already done one a
fter a year and found a zero-percent side effects rate. I was not able to find any documents on this but there were references to a follow-up.” Dr Bill snorted. “If nothing else at all comes of this I suspect a lot of companies will be reviewing their archiving methods.”

  Ben nodded mutely, and reached for his laptop, but Dr Bill had already moved off through the tabs.

  “Ah, here we go.” Dr Bill frowned at it for a while longer. “Memo leaked regarding archive cleansing, all minutes relating to period between 2000 and 2007 fiscal year and ‘you-know-what’ to be destroyed, unfinished patent applications on ‘live material’ to be destroyed, data on structure of ‘live material’ to be encrypted and removed to a secure site.”

  “Yeah,” said Ben, leaning back on the table and sitting on his hands. “She’s invoking a bunch of whistleblowing laws and protections and used the phrase ‘humanitarian emergency’ a lot.”

  “Did you get to speak to her?”

  Ben shook his head. “Everyone is talking to her.”

  “Including, I imagine,” said Dr Bill, “X/X’s lawyers.”

  “The best one’s at the end,” Ben said, giving up on getting his laptop back.

  “Scientists of several nations some together to say ‘we’ve been used, misled, deceived, and abused by X/X’?” Dr Bill asked.

  “No, the Guardian one.”

  “Ah, got it. The Graun. Here we are.” Dr Bill peered at the screen for a minute. “Ex-staff confirm likely existence of stockpiles.”

  “And,” Ben said, from memory, “a quote from Noelle Anathan: I was consulted on the behaviour of a virus very like KBV a long time before the public reports of any cases came in. They have been working on counteracting it for longer than any public agency and I would be extremely surprised if something created by X/X is not also something which can already be cured by X/X.”

  “See,” Dr Bill said, giving Ben his laptop back. “I knew she wasn’t wretched. An arse, frequently, and a bit full of her own magnificence — which isn’t entirely unwarranted when you look at her career — but she’s not a bad person.”