Alchemist (71 page)

Monty hammered in fury on the windowpane. ‘Hey! Hey!' she yelled.

Stark naked, she ran and grabbed her mackintosh. As she did so, the phone started ringing but she ignored it. Forty seconds later she was outside and launching herself in a blind rage down the steps to the pavement.

The MG had come to life and was reversing backwards, bumping the car behind; there was a tinkle of broken glass, fuelling her rage even more. The engine revved, the tyres screeched and she watched helplessly as her car roared out of the parking bay, snaked wildly, and began to disappear down the road.

She raced after it, barefoot. Catch it at the end. Might catch it at the end if it had to wait to turn on to the Fulham Road, she thought.

Suddenly the car slowed abruptly and seemed to glow from within, as if the bodywork had become translucent. The roof billowed out, then rose eerily in the air, separating from the car and winging its way several feet skywards like a gigantic bat. The cockpit filled with a ball of flames. Both doors flew open.

Monty felt as if she had just run into an invisible wall that had jarred every bone in her body and which halted her dead in her tracks. Her ears popped. All the oxygen seemed, momentarily, to have been sucked from the street. Then a powerful shock wave rippled through her and she felt a searing blast of heat on her face.

There was a deep, booming explosion and fragments hurtled from the MG in all directions. It tilted on to one side, slithered crazily across the road, smashed into a parked car and overturned. She could see the chassis, the exhaust and the smooth boxes of the silencers all bent outwards as if gouged by a massive tin opener. Rivers of flame flowed out all around. Then there was a deep, dull
KERRRUMPHH
and a column of fire rose thirty feet into the atmosphere.

Monty dived down between two parked cars. She heard a cracking sound and an object blurred past her, bounced once
and fell with a clatter into the road. On her knees, gripping on to the nearest rear bumper and feeling as if she was about to throw up at any second, Monty peered out towards the fireball.

Through the flames she could see a motionless, blackened shape lying half in and half out of the open driver's door. It was an outstretched human.

Lights were coming on in the houses all around her. She could hear the sound of windows and doors opening. The terrible whooshing roar of the flames. The thick, pungent stench of burning paint, and a sweeter, more sickening smell of roasting meat.

She gagged, whimpering in shock, gripping the sharp edge of the bumper, clinging to it as if it were a life raft. She gagged again as the stench of cooking flesh became stronger; then she threw up.

Footsteps hurried past her. Voices. Someone was screaming. She stayed where she was. It seemed an age before she heard any sirens. The image of the charred figure reanimated itself and ripped through Monty's mind like a bolt cutter. Something drove past her, blue lights flashing, then another vehicle, then another. Fire engines; tenders; an ambulance.

Demented banshee wails of their sirens. A police car, followed by a second; more sirens.

Then a firm, calm voice through a loud hailer. ‘Stand back. Please, everyone stand well back.'

Monty remained in her own small universe, crouched down beside the pool of her own vomit, concealed between the two parked cars, shivering with fear.

Should go and speak to someone, she thought. Should tell them it's my car. But she did not want to admit that the grotesque mangled object burning like a funeral pyre belonged to her.

She was incapable of speaking. Incapable of explaining that whatever had been placed in the car had been intended for her.

The keys puttered steadily, click-click-click, pause, click-click-click, pause, punctuated by frequent backspacing and curses. Dick Bannerman pecked away with one finger of each hand, watching the rows of black letters appear on his grey screen
AGT TCA TGG GAA ATC TTA GTA AAG CAA
…

Groups – codons – of three of the four bases, Adenine, Thymine, Guanine, Cytosine, that were the building blocks of all life. He read them off a long column of horizontal dashes that looked like a strip of barcoding, on a sheet of developed film beside him.

There'd been only one hiccup so far, earlier in the week: his original tests had shown that the Maternox contained DNA, but when he'd tried to incubate it, it had not worked. In subsequent tests he discovered it was not DNA, but RNA. RNA viruses were used sometimes as delivery systems in genetic engineering. It seemed that within the Maternox capsule was contained some form of attempt at genetic engineering. But what?

Through a reverse transcriptase, he had copied the RNA into DNA, from which he had then done a series of vertical gel tests, which were captured on the sheets of film each containing two hundred bases, the first of which he was now entering on his screen. He'd had to think of a suitable name for this test; something by which he could identify it, but which would mean nothing to anyone else.

CAPSULE I. SEQ
, he typed.

Then he called up the Internet address of the London Genome Data Bank, the British centre of the Human Genome Organization, entered it and waited for a connection. After some moments, the familiar
Welcome to the Human Genome Resource Centre
greeting appeared on the screen, with a list of instructions and options.

The Human Genome Organization (Hugo) was only the world's most ambitious ever scientific joint-venture. All scientists had free access to its series of international programmes,
within which all new genes identified were instantly pooled into a common database. The aim of the project was to have all 100,000 genes of the human body identified and sequenced by the year 2005.

Dick Bannerman called up his Proscan program and instructed his elderly computer to do a database search to try to find a match between the two hundred bases he had just entered and any known existing gene. He pressed carriage return to start the process, then sat thoughtfully back in his chair. These Genome searches could sometimes take several hours.

Nine o'clock. It could be a long night ahead but he didn't mind, he was enjoying being back in his old laboratory, felt comfortable here, far happier than in the damned Bendix Building, in spite of all its equipment and staff.

What a mess, he thought; what a damned bloody mess Monty had got them into. She was a good kid and she had meant well, but he wished to hell he had followed his own instincts and never allowed himself to be swayed by her. Sure they had always struggled with funding before, but they had got by, they had been their own people here. They'd not had to answer to creeps like Crowe, had not had to fill out forms in triplicate every time they needed a new box of pipettes or wanted to go to the toilet.

Crowe was someone for whom he had very little time. It was true that unlike most chief executives in the pharmaceutical industry he did actually have a scientific background – and an impressive one at that – but Bannerman found him conceited and opinionated. Above all, his real objection was that he considered him typical of the breed of businessmen scientists whose only interest in research was the commercial profit.

As he left the lab to walk across the campus for a bite to eat at the refectory, he was wondering how watertight their contract with Bendix Schere was, and whether his solicitor could find some way of getting them out of it before the old lab had gone for good.

Feeling a little brighter after his snack, Dr Bannerman arrived back in his lab and noticed immediately that the figures on his
computer were static, indicating it had stopped searching. He sat down and stared at the screen.

There was a line dividing it down the middle. On the left were the columns of the bases he had entered, headed:
TARGET FOR MATCH
. On the right was a fresh set, headed:
CLOSEST MATCH
. Beneath, it said:

He shook his head in disbelief.
Polio
. Was that what the Maternox was doing? Delivering the gene that caused polio to pregnant women? No. There had to be some other explanation. He picked up his voice-activated recorder and dictated this latest finding into it. Then he added some interim conclusions.

‘Poliovirus possibly indicates intent to use an oral delivery system. Most viruses can't be used to deliver genetic material orally, because they can't survive in the human gut. Poliovirus can. It is simple to produce a defective poliovirus that cannot replicate.'

He read the words on the screen again. 86 per cent match was close, but not identical. He decided it was essential to put the whole of its sequence into the database.

He disconnected from the Genome Data Bank and began the long and monotonous task of entering a further six thousand bases, one finger, one letter, at a time …

It was close to midnight before he had the final percentage match back from the Data Bank but this meant he had the whole sequence mapped.

His data revealed that the first 2000 bases and the last 2000 showed an 86 per cent match to polio. But he was struck by the match of the central 2000 bases. He stared at the screen again.

PERCENTAGE MATCH: 98% OVER 2000 BASES

He had been right in his suspicion. The poliovirus was a
vector, a delivery system; it occupied each end of the string. The fact that it was an 86 per cent match rather than 100 per cent was, he presumed, explained by the fact that the virus had been doctored to prevent it replicating – and therefore infecting the recipient with polio.

It was finally beginning to make sense, although he desperately wished he was mistaken.

He thought of the files that had gone missing from the Stacks – one in particular – and read the unblinking letters that were now spelling out its name on the screen in front of him.

‘You bastards,' he said under his breath, struggling to contain his sickening horror in a blast of anger. ‘My God, you bastards.'

A reflection glanced off the screen and a shadow slipped across his desk. He spun his chair round, startled, to see Dr Vincent Crowe standing in the lab. Right behind him.

The Chief Executive was immaculate as always, in a camel coat with a velvet collar. He held his hands behind his back as he spoke.

‘Good evening, Dr Bannerman. I just happened to be passing – thought I'd drop by and have a chat. Haven't seen much of you in the past week or so.' He gestured towards the doorway, where another figure now appeared. ‘I'm not sure if you've met Major Gunn, our Director of Security?'

Hubert Wentworth was tired. It was 2 a.m. but he rarely went to bed early. The television flickered silently in front of him and all three bars of the electric heater glowed. He needed to stretch his legs, take a hot bath and then he would hope to drop off for an hour or two. It had been a useful night's work, yes, time well spent.

Time.

Putting his affairs in order.

A time to be born, and a time to die
. The words echoed around his mind like a half-remembered tune.
Ecclesiastes
, yes.
A time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted
. Death was close now and he was not afraid. He had never been afraid of dying; there was nothing that could come close to some of the horrors of life. The release, the escape. Not for him,
Do not go gentle into that good night
.

Go, finally, to Françoise, who had been waiting for him for thirty-three years.

He had seen the doctor again last week and the report from the oncologist was not good. An operation was needed; radical surgery. But he was not sure he wanted to go through with it; a few years ago, yes, there might have been a point then. So much unfinished business then. But now it was different; a week, maybe two, that was all he needed. Surgery. Pain. Physiotherapy. Prolonging the agony. No, he did not want that.

He stared fondly at his collection of toy cars; painted lead models a few inches long of the saloons, convertibles, sports cars and commercial vehicles of his childhood. They evoked in him memories of a time when life had stretched out ahead and seemed so full of promise. How very different it had all turned out, he thought, his eyes fixing on one of his favourite photographs of Françoise. She was smiling, so warmly, so happily. Sun-tanned, red scarf tied round her head, sleek black hair underneath, the smile, the one that was for him and him alone.

You'll get over it
, they said.
Two years. Time is a great healer
.

They were wrong. Thirty-three years and he had thought of no one else, day and night. He had cared for Sarah, yes of course, their daughter, she had meant the world to him, had been his life. But all the time, in her every movement, every sound, he had seen and heard Françoise. He had often wondered if she'd ever realized quite how much she wrenched his heart.

Dead, too, now. His eyes went to the photograph on the mantelpiece. Sarah and Alan on their wedding day. Both gone. They were lucky, they were out of here. In death they had escaped. Not like him; he had been condemned to a living hell,
driven by one obsession that had taken thirty-three years to come to fruition.

They had taken his wife and his daughter and they had never said sorry. They had built the Bendix Building as a monument to their success when it should, instead, have been a headstone for Françoise, except she would never have liked anything so vulgar.

He reached forward and stroked the photograph of his wife.
I promised you I would never rest until I brought them to justice
.

Moist eyes fixed on Françoise, he leaned back in his armchair, then looked proudly at the row of documents, each neatly stacked and labelled, that sat on the floor at his feet. His watch said 2.10. He yawned and raised a hand to his mouth, ever mindful of his manners.