As he helped her clear away, Parnell said: ‘I’m sorry if I frightened you.’
‘It’s OK,’ said Beverley, in a voice indicating that it wasn’t.
‘We’ve only been out together twice,’ said Parnell, trying to lift the mood. ‘Maybe we should avoid each other from now on.’
Beverley held him for several moments with one of her direct looks. ‘Maybe,’ she said, in the same voice as before.
‘I’m at dinner, with guests,’ complained Edward C. Grant.
‘This can’t wait,’ insisted Dwight Newton. He could hear people in the background.
‘What?’
Newton told him. Unsettled by the length of the silence from the other end, Newton said: ‘You still there?’
‘I’m going into the study. Wait.’ The line went dead and then picked up again, without any background noise. Grant said:‘You told me it was safe, Dwight. You said you and Benn had run all the checks and that it was safe.’
‘I double-checked Russell’s tests,’ tried Newton.
‘But you didn’t, did you?’
‘He didn’t do this test.’
‘Why didn’t you? You take two weeks and tell me everything’s kosher, Parnell takes two days and discovers it’s fucking fatal!’
‘It’s a genetic discipline.’
‘This… whatever it’s called… is known not to affect mice, upon which Benn did test, but it does affect humans, right? That’s what you said.’
‘I know what I said.’ Newton wished he hadn’t sounded so uncertain.
‘So, it would have been obvious to do the comparison.’
‘It wasn’t done,’ capitulated Newton.
‘You know I should fire you? And Benn?’
‘Yes.’ But you wouldn’t, Newton thought.
‘But that I can’t, because of the attention it would attract.’
‘You want us to resign?’ That wasn’t possible either.
‘Still too much risk of publicity. You’re hanging on by a thread, both of you. Hanging on by default. You hear what I’m saying?’
‘Yes.’
‘Benn with you?’
‘No.’
‘You tell him what I’m telling you.’
‘You pressed me on this… wanted the decision you got,’ said Newton, clumsily.
The line went silent again for what seemed longer than before. Finally Grant said: ‘If that was a threat, the thread by which you’re hanging just started to fray, Dwight.’
‘It wasn’t any sort of threat,’ retreated the vice president, weakly. ‘Have France gone into production… started to distribute?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘It’s got to be stopped… all of it.’
‘Of course it’s got to be stopped!’ said Grant, irritably. ‘You call them, right now. Wake Saby up.’
‘I thought you’d want to do that,’ said Newton. He was soaked in perspiration, bowed forward over his desk with his free hand supporting his forehead.
‘It’s your responsibility, Dwight. Everything’s your responsibility. You’ve got the authority. Exercise it.’
‘You going to tell the board?’
‘Of course I’m going to have to tell the board. And you’re going to be here when I do, explaining it.’
Newton felt physically sick, swallowing against the bile at the back of his throat. ‘What about Parnell?’
‘What about Parnell?’ echoed the other man from New York.
‘Hopefully he’s prevented a potential catastrophe. Shouldn’t he be thanked… congratulated?’
There was yet another hesitation, although shorter this time. ‘Did you thank him?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’ll do, for the moment.’
Until you’ve worked out your escape from every danger and pitfall, you bastard, thought Newton. ‘OK.’
‘Talk to me about Parnell,’ demanded Grant. ‘Is he a whistleblower?’
Newton at once saw the chance to unsettle the other man. ‘He’s certainly got a lot of principles. All he kept on about today was stopping everything.’
‘You ask him why he made the check that he did?’
‘Of course. He worked the weekend, in his own time. Said he did it because the stuff was just there, in his laboratory. That there was no positive reason.’
‘You believe that?’ asked Grant, his voice betraying that he clearly didn’t.
‘I’m telling you what he said,’ insisted Newton, uncaring about the petulance. He felt drained, too exhausted to keep his thoughts in order.
‘What else did he say?’ persisted the president.
Newton weighed the questioning. ‘He wanted to run his tests of everything from France when he learned that there was some stuff he hadn’t been shown.’
‘Let him,’ instructed Grant. ‘I don’t want him thinking anything’s being kept away from him.’
‘I was obviously going to anyway,’ said Newton.
‘They were in it together, weren’t they?’ abruptly demanded Grant. ‘Parnell and that damned girl, probing together. And now he’s discovered this! If he tells the FBI, the FBI will tell the Food and Drug Administration, who’ll tell whoever’s responsible for licensing in France. And we’re dangling from a high branch.’
Newton felt a surge of satisfaction at the fear that was coming clearly down the line. Unusually emboldened in his own desperation – sure there was nothing left for him to lose – Newton said: ‘We’d better hope he doesn’t suffer an accident to make the FBI – and the media – even more curious than they already are, hadn’t we?’
The line went dead from the other end.
Twenty-Three
David Benton described Parnell’s call as coincidence, because they’d intended contacting him to arrange another meeting.
‘You got something?’ demanded Parnell, at once.
‘Just touching bases,’ side-stepped the FBI man. ‘Guess you’ll need to liaise with your attorney. Get back to us asap.’
Barry Jackson’s secretary didn’t know when he would be out of court. Parnell asked for the lawyer to call back, juggling in his mind all the things he had to do, smiling to himself as Benton’s phrase intruded into his mind – trying to remember all the bases he had to cover. It was a bitty, fragmented schedule. He supposed he should add to it the promised phone call to his mother. That morning there had been two replies from England to his apology letters – one, from someone he’d worked with on the genome project in Cambridge, asked why he didn’t come back. There was a position available. All he had to do was officially apply and it was his. Sublime academia awaited. Parnell thought it truly sounded sublime, as well as knowing he wouldn’t make the application.
First on Parnell’s list of things to do was to reassure his unit after what Beverley had told him. He waited for everyone to arrive, Beverley being the last, before going out into the communal laboratory, conscious of their waiting expectantly.
‘I told you yesterday that what happened then won’t happen again,’ reiterated Parnell. ‘Now I’m telling you one more time, because I know there’s some concern. You all know now that it was necessary. And why it was necessary. But I’ve made it clear to the vice president how and why it had to be done. He’s grateful. Now we get
