Twenty-One
Parnell managed to finish all there was to read by two a.m. on the Monday without finding a direction from either the English or American flu discoveries, to pursue his unit’s particular search. There was always the possibility, he told himself, that someone else in the pharmacogenomics section had spotted something he’d missed – it was at least a slender straw at which to clutch. He was at McLean by seven, determined to be the first there, although still without an explanation for the experiment Beverley had caught him conducting on the Saturday, trying to convince himself that, as head of the department, he didn’t necessarily have to provide one. He’d expected Beverley to press him further during dinner but she hadn’t, not in fact referring to it once, which he didn’t fully understand. Most of the time the talk had been light, although they’d obviously discussed the influenza project, but not in any depth, Parnell warning that neither of them at that stage had completed their reading, creating the need to avoid one misguiding the other with half-formed or ill-formed impressions. And although there’d been no indication of it, Parnell tried to overcome any difficulty Beverley might have by openly referring to Rebecca. That had been the moment he’d expected Beverley to challenge him about that morning’s experiment. They hadn’t talked at all about her ex-husband. He’d enjoyed the evening – positively, physically, relaxing. Beverley chose the restaurant, in a part of midtown he hadn’t been to before, and met him there. It was traditional home-town American cooking, which dictated portions sufficient to relieve an African famine, even though he tried to order minimally. He decided the only thing missing from the rib-eye steak were hooves and tail. As he had anticipated, Beverley initially led the conversation, but gave way to him as the evening progressed, and by its end he’d realized, surprised, that he was dominating the exchanges and Beverley appeared content to let him, not once trying for the last word. He refused her demand that they split the bill, which she accepted without continuing argument, and they’d parted quite comfortably outside the restaurant, without any awkwardness about nightcaps at another bar or either’s apartment. In the cab on his way back to Washington Circle, Parnell found himself wondering what possibly could have gone wrong between Beverley and her husband. That reflection prompted the half thought that he’d found the first evening with Beverley easier than he had with Rebecca, but that was where he’d halted it, as a half thought not to be completed. It left him feeling guilty, which was worsened throughout the following day by his failure to pick up something from the San Diego or London research. Richard Parnell wasn’t a man upon whom the rarity of professional disappointment rested easily.
None of the mice he’d injected with the French-suggested drug modifications showed any obvious ill effects after the forty-eighty-hour period, and he was halfway through extracting blood comparisons when Beverley Jackson arrived.
She said at once: ‘We going to learn all today?’
‘You finished the flu-identification papers?’ avoided Parnell.
‘Almost.’
‘I didn’t get a lead.’
‘I haven’t either, not yet.’
‘Let’s hope you do before you finish. Or one of the others might come up with something.’
‘You didn’t answer my question,’ she said.
‘No,’ Parnell agreed, turning back to his sampling.
He was conscious of other arrivals behind him but didn’t respond to them until he had the tests from all the experimental mice on to slides. He turned back into the main laboratory unsurprised to find himself the focus of everyone’s attention. He said: ‘This has nothing to do with what we’re looking for. It’s something I set up over the weekend. Anyone come up with anything, anything at all, from what you’ve read so far?’
There were various head-shakes. Deke Pulbrow said: ‘Not a godamned thing.’
Sean Sato said: ‘It’s great research but there’s nothing here that’s going to help us.’ . ‘I haven’t found anything either,’ conceded Parnell, again. ‘Let’s talk about it when we’re all through.’ He’d tell them as much of the truth as he felt able, Parnell finally determined. Not about his suspicion that Rebecca’s death was somehow connected with the French material, but that he had become curious at the apparent secrecy in which it had been chemically tested, and had decided to put it through the most basic of genetic programmes without interfering in any way at all with what they were concentrating upon.
Parnell worked with total concentration, able as he always had been to isolate himself from all or any surrounding distraction, bow-backed over his microscope to contrast his before-and-after slides, anxious for a variation he didn’t find. Reluctant to accept yet another disappointment – at the same time objectively warning himself that there should not be any change after Russell Benn and Dwight Newton’s medical clearances – he repeated every examination under stronger magnification. And once more found nothing.
With growing, unwelcome resignation, Parnell eventually turned to his own before-and-after blood specimens, starting at the lower magnification, and for the briefest of seconds not fully absorbing what he was seeing. Parnell was too consummate a professional to accept a single illustration. Patiently, although with increasing satisfaction, he checked every single treated and untreated slide, one against the other, and obtained the same result in every case. It was only when he pushed his stool away from his bench, stretching against the aching tension in his back and shoulders, that Parnell became properly aware of how tightly and how long he had been hunched over his microscope. It was a fleeting discomfort, virtually at once compensated by a surge of excitement. Which, in turn, was tempered by further inherent professionalism. He had positive findings from a lot of separate, uncontaminated tests. Which in his own opinion was unequivocal. But which, by the standards of research – and certainly the challenge he would have to face – was insufficient. There had to be separate, independent experiments, with no prior, alerting indication of what the expected result might be. And he needed to duplicate everything himself – on himself – against the remote possibility that this initial analysis had inadvertently been contaminated to produce a faulty result.
Only Ted Lapidus was still reading when Parnell emerged into the main laboratory, surprised to find it was already noon. The rest of the unit looked up at him in solemn expectation. He said: ‘Any bright, shining pathways?’
There was a further series of head-shaking. Mark Easton said: ‘In the words of the prophet, back to the drawing board.’
‘I want everything temporarily suspended, at least for the rest of today,’ announced Parnell. ‘I’m asking all of you to conduct blind blood-sampling, using your own blood, involving something Dubette is making available on a limited market.’
‘What are we looking for?’ asked Lapidus, coming up from his final paper.
‘Blind tests, like I said,’ refused Parnell. ‘No prior indication. I don’t want us challenged on this.’
‘We’re bypassing phase-one animal assessment?’ queried Battey.
‘Yes,’ acknowledged Parnell.
‘Why the mystery?’ demanded Beverley.
‘There isn’t one. I want independent, corroborative findings, that’s all.’ Or was it all, he asked himself.
Parnell refined – and extended – the confirming experiments, testing upon the altered Dubette medicines before individually duplicating the experiments by separately adding liulou-sine, beneuflous and rifofludine. Having already established the research once, Parnell completed the repetition ahead of everyone else. He withdrew briefly to his side office, to avoid the appearance of hovering over them, but used the vantage point to watch them at work. Once again he was impressed at how quickly – and expertly – they had unquestioningly adjusted to his limited briefing.
Beverley was the first to finish of the rest of the group. As Parnell came out into the main laboratory, she said: ‘I expected to sweat blood, not give it!’
‘This is a one-off situation,’ said Parnell.
‘I hope it is,’ said Lapidus. ‘I’ve never gone along with this scientist-test-yourself mumbo-jumbo.’
‘Neither have I,’ assured Parnell. ‘As I said, it’s a one-off.’
‘When do we know what it’s all about?’
He didn’t know, Parnell acknowledged. The mutation on his own initial self-experiment had shown after forty-eight hours, but it could have occurred far quicker than that. He should have monitored it during the Saturday,
