Everything to Lose (15 page)

"I
think it's a simple process."

"It's
a simple process for shallow males that's why porn is big business."

"Tell
me why women dress up in sexy clothes and fabulous hair styles."

"Women
make themselves attractive to please themselves Shawlens. Not to snare a man."

"Yes
but isn't that pleasure part of their arousal?"

"You're
not making sense Shawlens. But it's a scientist thing so don't worry."

"Men
and women become aroused when they inflame arousal in another person. Men show you've aroused them by calling, whistling and ogling. Does that not give you a good feeling, an arousal?"

"Rubbish.
I hate wolf whistles. I slap men who ogle. I dress to make me feel good not to make men feel good."

"If
I asked you out on a date. You'd get dressed up, perfumed up, hair done and feel aroused. If your appearance and perfume aroused me. I'd pay attention, talk sexy, touch warmly, to reinforce your arousal until …"

"Forget
it Shawlens I'd rather read a book," she said in a tone that meant end of.

"Isn't
that how it works for you with your male escorts?"

"Shut
it."

Zoe
shook her head from side to side as she got up and walked to her room.
Emma
she thought
what
on
Earth
did
you
see
in
him
.

24

Langley
,
Virginia
,
USA

Director Bill Maverack stepped smartly out of the elevator onto his floor at the George Bush Centre for Intelligence and headed toward his office. With a black laptop briefcase pannier slung over his shoulder, thick newspaper in one hand and cinnamon latte to go in the other hand, he marched forward.

The silence struck him and he
almost stopped when he noticed the floor of the NCS was not the usual hive of busy bees and excited chatter. He thought that some incident must be unfolding and everyone was getting the story in the large briefing room probably from CNN.

He
stopped to look-in on his secretary and pick up messages. She wasn't there to shield him from the steady stream of people needing a quick word with the Director. He noted her desk wasn't cluttered with documents, mail and all the usual paperwork.

Anxiety
surged when he saw the door to his office slightly ajar. Panic grabbed his mind when he saw someone in his room, sitting at his desk. He pushed the door and saw Katherine M Kaplentsky, Director CIA, sitting in his chair.

It
was a bright sunny morning. She was looking out though the large glass window behind his desk, past the parking areas, past the Turkey Run Park and Potomac River, to the rolling emerald evergreen forests beyond.

"Katherine."

"Bill, come in. Close the door," Katherine said as she swung round in his chair to face him.

"God
you gave me quite a start. Where are all my people?" he said and opened his arm toward the door behind him.

"Bill,
Bill, Bill. What were you damn well thinking?" she said slowly, her expression disappointed as she gestured him to sit down in the chair in front of his desk.

"Katherine,
I'm not giving up on this. POINT-K is a longstanding military operation running in Britain and I'm not in the loop. I must know what it's about. I need to make sure it does not cross-over critical ops I have in play there," he said as he placed his latte on his desk and dropped his briefcase and newspaper at his feet.

"I've
told you. You don't need to know."

"It's
not negotiable Katherine, sorry and all that. I'm taking a solid stand here and I know the other Directors will back me. If you don't get on board with this Katherine ... I think your position is going to crumble. Who knows what will happen," he said and she heard a threat in his voice.

"Really,
Bill. I thought you understood what makes a smart director in this business. Don't you remember the bit about not forcing your head into the lion's mouth?"

Bill
got up from his chair and stood at the end of his desk to look down at her. He slapped his hand on his desk with frustration.

"For
goodness sake Katherine. General Schumantle is using CIA assets for personal clandestine operations and sidestepping my office. It's probably illegal. It's unacceptable Katherine. It's downright dangerous. When this blows open, it could end your career but I refuse to allow it to end my career."

"You've
stepped over the line Bill. Worse than that. You put four good staff members at risk," Katherine said and her tone deepened markedly.

"Katherine.
Please. Just give Hopper a bit more time. The target Shawlens is apparently on some kind of operation ..."

"ENOUGH.
I don't want to hear any more. Hopkine is in the infirmary recovering from an overdose of propofol."

"What?
Who-the-hell took him out?"

For
the first time in his quest to expose POINT-K Bill Maverack felt threatened. His actions may have rebounded wrongly. His left hand rushed to grasp his forehead as if to make sure it wouldn't explode.

"If
Hopkine had overturned Dovecoat then they both would have come home in bodybags. Thank God Dovecoat was smart enough to stick to POINT-K protocols."

"Why
are we doing this to ourselves Katherine? I just can't …"

"God
above. You still don't get it, do you? POINT-K, supersedes, overrules, cut's over, pulls rank over all domestic and international operations BAR NONE."

"I
have the same clearance as you have. Why can't you tell me what POINT-K is and who is involved."

"
Look at it this way. There are secrets we know about and there are secrets we don't know about. It is our business to find out about those. There are a few secrets that we don't know about and it's better for us that we don't even know that we don't know about them."

"
You mean this is above my security clearance?"

"Bill
we operate in a society that is incapable of keeping secrets. Politicians think leaking secrets is a game to play. Service personnel and agents can be turned, blackmailed or develop a conscience. We knew this situation more than sixty years ago and despite our best security efforts and intensive vetting we have WikiLeaks, Snowden and God knows what next."

"Do
you, at least, know what POINT-K is?" he asked as he crept back and sat on the edge of his seat.

"Truthfully
Bill and this is the REAL truth. I don't know. What I do know is there are some secrets beyond a security clearance. A handful of secrets that absolutely must remain concealed and the only way to guarantee that one hundred per cent is to keep them contained in one office, confined to one secure person," she said while leaning forward on his desk.

"
General Schumantle."

"Yes.
If the need ever arises for action then the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs will let the secret out of its box and we will all do whatever is required of us. Until then it doesn't exist outside of his office."

"Dovecoat
exists."

"Dovecoat
exists for POINT-K but not for us."

"I
was never going to find out what it is."

"I
warned you to leave well alone. Now you and four NCS staff know more about POINT-K than anyone should."

Bill
Maverack sighed, rested his elbows on his knees and buried his heads in his hands. His cherished career was crumbling like a tall building during an earthquake.

"What
do I have to do to get my people back to first base?" he pleaded.

"Your
staff will be redacted. It has only been a week or two for them, so they'll have a splitting headache for a few days. They'll be back at work within two weeks, none the wiser."

"I
appreciate that Katherine. Thanks."

"POINT-K
has been bugging you for some time so you need deeper redaction and an office move. Your staff are being told right now that you've had a nervous breakdown. Not unusual in this job. You will be off work for at least eight weeks. When you return it will be into the Office of Public Affairs. You'll get the employee communications desk. That's the best I can do. I hope that turns out alright for you."

"Let's
get on with it. For God's sake get this stuff out of my head," he said and threw his hands up in the air.

Katherine
buzzed through to the outside office. Two men came in and took Bill Maverack to the CIA's private hospital for memory redaction. A process of memory wiping developed in the early 1960's using a combination of neurotransmitter chemicals and electrical treatment to disrupt recent synaptic memories.

The
procedure wipes recent memories of up to four months and leaves the patient with no more than a temporary blinding headache. Maverack would be redacted more deeply to wipe his memory on POINT-K.

Like
everyone else the neurons in Maverack's brain create memories by joining together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle to form a memory pattern that is stored. When Maverack retrieves a memory his neurons re-create the pattern and his memory is perceived.

The
redaction processor would use sound and vision to make him recall all memory relating to POINT-K then chemicals and electrical treatment would disrupt his retrieval process. After treatment his neuron associations would still be there but unable to recreate the correct patterns. The POINT-K memories would be redacted.

In
fact redaction has been used many times over the decades on civilians and military personnel who worked for short periods on development, construction or operation of POINT-K projects. It ensured that these projects remained secret after the personnel had completed their work.

25

Research
lab
K416

It was late in the afternoon as Gavin Shawlens put the finishing touches to the PowerPoint presentation he had prepared for his seminar. He looked outside and saw it was dull blustery but dry. He guessed most people would prefer to be on their way home rather than attending his seminar.

Zoe
Tampin shuffled her reagent bottles around the white laminate laboratory bench when she saw Tyler Wattsin walk into the room. He headed straight for Gavin's desk. Zoe stepped over and blocked his path for a second and as he rounded her she scanned his body language and decided he wasn't a threat so she let him go. He didn't see her left hand glide up toward the back of his neck, ready to grab his hair.

He
didn't see her right hand because it was behind her back. It had an automatic pipette with a sharp yellow tip on the end that she could have stabbed into his carotid artery if he was a threat. She went back to her bench and re-positioned rows of test tubes in and out of two test-tube racks. She didn't know what kind of assassin Barscadden might send to try and kill Gavin Shawlens but she was sure it wasn't Tyler Wattsin.

Tyler
sat down at Gavin's desk and said he wanted to discuss a project. Gavin had told Tyler before that without laboratory experience he couldn't do any practical work. Tyler suggested Christine would do the laboratory work for him. Gavin laughed in his face and told him he would win the Lottery jackpot before that would happen.

Tyler
told Gavin that he had spoken to Oliver Mansole. He said Oliver was staying with his aunt and that if Gavin offered a project then he would take Gavin to Oliver's aunt. Gavin agreed but offered Tyler a theoretical 'dry' project about steroid production and abuse. They talked about Tyler's new project until Gavin gathered his notes for his seminar. Gavin and Tyler stood up from his desk together and walked toward Christine. Gavin walked behind Tyler and waved his hand rapidly under his nose to waft Tyler's body odour away from his nose.

"Christine
this is Tyler Wattsin. Tyler will be doing a project on steroid production."

"Steroids,"
Zoe cut in to mean
I
can't
do
that
.

"Not
a wet project. I meant a library based project," Gavin said to reassure her.

"I
understand. Okay Tyler good to have you on board," she said with relief.

Gavin
ushered Tyler forward as they walked towards the door. Tyler had agreed to show Gavin the way to the Sir James Chadwick lecture theatre.

"Christine
I'm off to do the research seminar. I'll see you later," Gavin called from the opposite end of the lab.

"Dr
Shawlens how long will you be exactly? I think these proteins are almost cooked."

"Good,
just keep them incubating in the water bath until I get back. I would like you to make up some more of the phosphate buffer solutions we talked about earlier," he said for Tyler's benefit.

Gavin
and Zoe had discussed what she could do to look the part of a lab technician. He had set-up a bench to look busy with lots of stock bottles of chemicals, lots of large glass beakers, various glass storage bottles he had labelled as phosphate buffers and glass measuring cylinders.

A
couple of beakers half-full with water were stirring away on magnetic stirrers. Zoe liked to turn the magnetic stirrers up full to make a deep vortex form in the liquid and he kept turning them down to normal speed.

To
look convincing when other researchers or technicians were nosing around the lab; Zoe measured out volumes of liquid in glass cylinders, stirred the liquids in beakers and then poured the liquids into glass storage bottles.

Zoe
asked Gavin for coloured chemicals so she could make green, blue, yellow, and orange solutions for her beakers and reagent bottles. She was disappointed when he told her ninety-six percent of lab reagents were colourless. He did give her some copper sulphate to make one blue coloured reagent bottle. She thought he was being petty. After initial hesitance she looked very confident and rather good at it. No one knew that all the bottles contained tap water with unmeasured amounts of table salt and sugar for effect.

Earlier
Zoe told Gavin that two bottles of her phosphate buffer solution had disappeared. He told her that a student had probably sneaked into the lab and pinched them to save making their own. It happens when someone runs out of reagent in the middle of an experiment. They'll get some unexpected results using salty tap water he said. Serves them right for stealing my bottles she said.

Gavin
Shawlens and Tyler Wattsin walked along the corridors toward the main lecture theatre.

"Olly's
aunt's like, really worried. Is he in trouble with the Uni?"

"No
I need to talk to him about research, that's all."

"She'll
be like, really chuffed meeting you. Someone high up in the Uni."

"Where
does she live?"

"She's
a bit funny like, you being a top boss from Uni. I'll need to do like, introductions so she feels comfortable," Tyler sounded hesitant.

"Okay
let me know where and when," Gavin said as he opened the door to the lecture theatre.

Professor
Kevin Buzzwall looked up at the audience in the tiered Sir James Chadwick lecture theatre and introduced Dr Gavin Shawlens to the audience consisting of the Department of Sports Biology's research community of academics, postdocs, research assistants, postgraduate and undergraduate research students.

There
were almost fifty people in the lecture room. Dr Gavin Shawlens spent forty-five minutes giving an overview of his own research and the work of his research group at the University of Kinmalcolm then fifteen minutes answering questions.

At
the cheese and wine after the seminar Gavin circulated around the various academics with Professor Buzzwall to meet all of the research team leaders. When he met Suzie Griffan he stopped circulating and settled into a discussion with her.

The
CASTER group had concerns about the research publications of Professor Buzzwall, Professor Kwan and Dr Griffan. As people drifted away from the cheese and wine, Gavin decided that Suzie Griffan looked the least intimidating of the three and therefore a good place to start probing their research.

Suzie
thanked Gavin for his seminar. He had read enough of her papers to keep her engaged in work conversations. As they stood chatting with two research students in the cheese and wine room she told Gavin that she was struggling to understand the biochemistry in some of her recent results. He agreed to look at them with her.

"Now!"
she sounded surprised.

"Why
not I've got nothing planned."

"Cool,"
she said as she led him to her laboratory.

She
asked and he confirmed he'd signed the University's confidentiality agreement. Suzie's lab was very large and fitted out with sports equipment. The room was bright with natural light from overhead glass windows. The room was cool almost cold. Her office was at the opposite south end of the room.

As
Gavin walked into the room he saw a row of eight cycle ergometers and three bicycle rollers against the east wall. Against the west wall there were a row of ten large programmable treadmills capable of raised incline.

In
the centre of the room they walked over inter-locked mats about eight metres square. At the back of the room were stacks of two-metre balance benches and racks of dumbbell weights, squat and dip racks, kettlebell kits, barbell kits and weights.

As
they approached her office Gavin saw two laboratory benches equipped with a range of physiological testing and measuring equipment, four professional rowing machines and four large grey steel storage cupboards.

"Brilliant
range of kit you've got here Suzie."

"Yes
we've had good research funding over the years," Suzie said as she took her seat at her desk.

Gavin's
phone rang and he apologised to Suzie. He saw it was from Zoe so he turned back to answer it.

"I
need to take this. I've told my people at Kinmalcolm that they must get my approval before they order equipment. Don't want to go back and find an electron microscope sitting on my bench," he lied.

He
walked out of her office toward the end of the lab to be sure Suzie couldn't hear. Suzie picked up a note that had been taped to her computer screen.

"Can
you speak?" Zoe asked.

"Yes."

"Where are you?"

"The
electrophysiology lab talking with Suzie Griffan."

"Heads
up! Rolley has uncovered evidence that there is large scale dealing in sports drugs. Jemard Edmond was a user and Oliver Mansole is a dealer. We'll talk about this back at the flat."

"Do
you want me to ask Suzie about Oliver or Jemard?"

"What
context?"

"Don't
know."

"Well
you're going to look pretty stupid if not suspicious when she asks why you want to know. Get the context before you open your mouth. Speak to you later."

As
Gavin Shawlens walked into Suzie Griffan's office he said loudly into his phone.

"I
want three quotes. Get another quote. Bye."

"Sorry
about that," he said as he waved his phone in the air.

Gavin
Shawlens lifted a chair and sat beside her rather than opposite her across her desk. She finished reading a hand-written note left on her monitor. She lifted a folder titled 'Research Results' and put it back in her desk drawer. Her demeanour had changed markedly and he saw an angry look on her face.

"You've
got a bloody bare-faced cheek," she said accusingly.

"Excuse
me," Gavin looked confused.

"One
of my students just told me you've been trying to contact Oliver Mansole. What the hell do you think you're doing questioning my students? What the hell do you want with my technician?"