field, gene therapy. Bucketfuls of cash have been poured into it, but so far results have been sparse, and in at least one case-the Jesse Gelsinger case in the States last year-fatal. The American authorities have examined several hundred gene-therapy protocols involving thousands of patients, but so far we’ve been very cautious about approving experimental programmes involving humans in this country.’
‘Your committees would have to clear what Haygill does, would they?’
‘What he does in the UK, yes, which is mainly laboratory work on genes and gene vectors. He’s said to have gathered an extraordinary amount of material for his analysis, genetic material from over a million women from around the Middle East.’
‘What?’ Kathy looked up, startled. ‘In that building of his, a million women?’
‘A few cells from each, yes…’ Reggie’s attention wandered to the menu. ‘The veal, you reckon, Brock? What about the pollo?’
‘I’ve always found it quite edible, Reggie.’
‘Yes… but you don’t really care much about food, do you? Not really…’ He mused over the alternatives, then ordered the chicken liver crostini, Brock some grilled pigeon. Kathy didn’t feel hungry, and ordered a small risotto and green salad.
‘Anyway,’ Reggie went on, reaching for another breadstick, ‘we have to approve what he does here, but we don’t monitor whatever experiments or applications of his basic research he or one of CAB-Tech’s commercial affiliates may do overseas, right? And that’s where things become sensitive.’
‘What sort of things might he be doing?’ Kathy asked, still thinking of the million women’s cells inside that ziggurat, and wondering if she really wanted to know.
‘Well, let me give you an example. A few years ago the Ashkenazi Jews in the United States became concerned about the incidence of cystic fibrosis, a genetic disease, among their people. So they decided to screen their schoolchildren’s blood. Each child was given an anonymous code number, and when they reached marriageable age and a match was considered with another young Jew, the two code numbers were examined, and if both were found to be carriers for the disease the Committee for the Prevention of Jewish Genetic Diseases advised against the marriage.
‘It was an extremely successful campaign, and as a result cystic fibrosis has been pretty well eliminated from the American Jewish population, but it was also controversial. The New York Times attacked it as being eugenic, and there was considerable debate. Since the Nazis, the word ‘eugenic’ is the big bogey word, of course-the deliberate attempt to breed certain characteristics into, or out of, the human population. But before them it was a quite respectable idea. We’d been improving cattle and wheat that way for thousands of years, so why not people? In the first few decades of the twentieth century lots of respectable people, from Theodore Roosevelt to Winston Churchill, thought eugenics was the way to go, and lots of countries passed eugenics laws for the compulsory sterilisation of inadequate citizens who might be weakening the gene pool, Sweden and many US states, for example, apart from Germany.
‘In the end, you see, science is a political and a philosophical matter. It was the compulsory nature of the eugenics laws that we now consider repugnant, the state enforcing an idea against the free will of the individual. And for that reason the campaign of the American Ashkenazi Jews was felt to be acceptable, because it merely screened and advised the individuals concerned about the possible consequences of their actions. But in other circumstances there might be social or cultural reasons why people might not follow that advice. And what if some form of gene therapy became available which would allow a government to actively interfere in the passing on of the defective gene?
‘So, that brings us back to Haygill. Let’s say you have some incurable genetic disorder like, say, Duchenne muscular dystrophy, which is more prevalent in certain regions of the world because of patterns of intermarriage which, for social and cultural reasons, you don’t want to interfere with. And let’s say someone like Haygill comes along with some kind of therapy for a specific gene, let’s call it BRCA4, which will eliminate the disease without restricting people’s intermarriage choices, provided it’s applied systematically according to some government- controlled protocol. Is that eugenics? And if it works for that disease, why stop there? Why not clean up all the genetic typos in the book of life?’
Reggie paused as lunch arrived.
Brock, who had been making notes, looked up. ‘And is there such a project?’
Reggie shrugged. ‘We don’t know. We know that Haygill has done work on BRCA4 in his labs over here, and we’ve heard rumours of a trial for an ambitious BRCA4 protocol, but it’s never been submitted to us.’
‘When we first met Haygill he gave us a dumb copper’s guide to genetics, and he used the same metaphor, about the book of life.’
‘Oh, yes. He must use it all the time. His clients and paymasters will like that, the idea of an authoritative, true book of life, kept free of error. But that’s where Springer could make trouble, you see, where science becomes philosophy. Is it blasphemous to tamper with the human genome, with God’s book of the human being? Springer would probably argue that it is. And Haygill’s clients would be susceptible to that. They’ve been brought up to believe in a Book which records Divine revelation in the actual words spoken over a twenty year period by the Prophet, and preserved over the following fourteen hundred years by continual repetition without error. They would be sensitive to the suggestion that Haygill’s project might be heretical and blasphemous.’
Reggie stopped talking for a while to eat. His lecture seemed to have given him an appetite, and he tucked in vigorously. Kathy, on the other hand, had become less and less hungry as he’d gone on. She knew that the kind of work that Haygill was doing might prevent much suffering, but since she’d formed the image of the glass ziggurat and its vast collection of female cells the idea of it had seemed increasingly insidious, as if the whole production had made the human patients it was meant to serve completely passive and even irrelevant.
Brock didn’t seem very hungry either, and appeared preoccupied. His phone began to ring, and he murmured an apology and put it to his ear. He muttered something and slipped it away, checking his watch.
‘Don’t tell me you’re going to run away,’ Reggie said, mouth full.
‘No, no. I was just checking the time. I was badly out with my estimate, Kathy. Only five hours. I said twenty-four.’
She looked at him in surprise. ‘What’s that?’
‘Mr Manzoor has decided to withdraw his complaint against you. CIB have closed the case.’
‘Just like that?’ She felt numb for a moment, then relief flooded through her. ‘I can’t believe it.’
‘That means you’re not on suspension any more, so you’d better lay off that wine.’ He smiled and poured some from the bottle into his own glass and raised it. ‘Congratulations.’
Reggie joined in. ‘How did you wangle that, Brock?’
‘Upon reflection the complainant realised that Kathy would have revealed some inconvenient facts about him, if the matter had been pursued.’
‘But I didn’t know any,’ Kathy objected.
‘You would have done, Kathy. You would have done.’
She shook her head, grateful but not understanding, and it occurred to her that it might not be too late to ring Tina and tell her she could go on the trip after all. It wouldn’t be difficult to arrange it. All she needed to do was excuse herself and make a couple of calls. But then she thought about Brock’s intervention with Manzoor, and imagined him quietly pulling strings in the background, preparing the way for her return to duty. She thought about it, working through the options, and still she didn’t move.
She became aware that the two men were talking about something else. Reggie had asked about Abu and his place in Haygill’s team.
‘Odd,’ he said eventually. ‘Seems all very clumsy and incriminating.’
‘How do you mean?’ Brock was taking another sip of the wine, reluctantly acknowledging Reggie’s excellent taste.
‘Well, he must have been a real loose cannon, this Abu. I mean, what he’s done must be a tremendous embarrassment to Haygill, the very person he was trying to protect.’
‘Presumably he didn’t expect to get caught. Perhaps he knew that Springer was planning something to get at Haygill, along the lines you’ve suggested, and felt he had to act. Apparently he regards Haygill as a kind of father figure.’
‘I see…’ Reggie didn’t seem convinced. ‘All the same, you’d think he would have talked it over with someone else on the team. You know, with a group like that, tightly knit, strong sense of themselves as outsiders, I would
