Ice Age

by Brian Freemantle

  Lyalin nodded towards the television upon which they’d just watched the White House announcement. ‘If he’s right, about how this thing is getting into the environment, Stoddart isn’t proving to be inadequate.’

  ‘If,’ said Raisa heavily.

  ‘I’ll leave it up to you whether you add to your message,’ dismissed Lyalin. ‘I won’t bother to comment unless I’m asked. I’m more interested in the positive than the negative.’

  Peter Reynell had also watched the environmental declaration from his embassy, his concentration not directly upon the White House event but upon the CNN transmission of Simon Buxton’s closely timed and matching British commitment from which he’d been further deflected by Geraldine Rothman’s totally unexpected and hopeful news. Until she received the detailed Cambridge findings overnight – and more importantly had the woman explain them to him in terms he could better understand – it was obviously premature to try to take any early advantage, but it was enough upon which to base another telephone call to Ralph Prendergast at the Foreign Office and to the now always-receptive Lord Ranleigh. Reynell stopped short of using a word like breakthrough – limiting himself to suggesting a possible but by no means certain development – more intent upon filtering from both conversations that Buxton’s anxiously proposed overnight flight to Washington to appear with the American president had been rejected by the White House. Striving to remain impartial, Reynell still judged Buxton’s performance lacklustre, too obviously a tagged-on effort made even more obvious by neither the Russian nor French leader trying to compete with a personal appearance.

  Which was Henrietta’s – and therefore clearly her father’s – opinion when they spoke. She said: ‘Buxton looked panicked, I thought.’

  ‘I’d liked to have seen a longer excerpt than CNN,’ said Reynell.

  ‘I taped it, for when you get back. Any idea when that might be?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘So who you going to screw tonight?’

  ‘I’m actually having dinner with a man,’ said Reynell, which was true.

  ‘You into fucking men now?’

  ‘Only figuratively.’ Believing he’d sufficiently seduced Amanda – in every definition of the word – that night’s dinner was with Gerard Buchemin.

  The rooftop bar of the Washington hotel had become their place and Geraldine was already at a table when Stoddart arrived. He thought he detected two signs of recognition as he moved past the line waiting to be seated and was glad they were tonight to the side and not in the front, where they’d managed to sit on previous evenings.

  As he sat she said: ‘I saw the television. You were terrific.’

  ‘A lot of people don’t think so.’ There was definite recognition from the waitress taking their order. ‘I was supposed to stay mute.’

  ‘You certainly weren’t that.’

  ‘I’m in media demand. So I’m not going to Fairfax after all: it’ll be surrounded. But we can have dinner before we go back.

  ‘I’m not going back,’ Geraldine announced. ‘We’ve found something, genetically.’

  Stoddart looked hurriedly around the noisy verandah and was at once embarrassed by the theatricality. ‘What?’

  ‘I need to wait until the full research material gets here tomorrow, but it seems to involve telomeres. They’re the sealing-off caps at the end of each DNA molecule; essential, to keep chromosomes intact. In all our victims their telomeres were either abnormally short or didn’t exist at all.’

  ‘I don’t understand the significance,’ protested Stoddart.

  ‘You will.’

  They went again to Georgetown, Stoddart relieved to escape the growing attention at the hotel, and this time found a smaller French restaurant just off Wisconsin’s join with M Street. Stoddart was more comfortable with a table near the large, plant-filled fireplace. Geraldine changed from Chardonnay to gin martinis – although restricting herself to two, remembering her arrival flight – and tried in general terms to explain the importance of DNA telomeres until Stoddart said maybe he should wait until the following day. They drank imported Pomerol with the quail and Stoddart admitted to planning that afternoon’s intervention.

  ‘It’s borrowed time but as long as I can stretch it out maybe there can be some legislation that can come halfway near to being complied with.’

  ‘Just halfway near?’

  ‘That will be a damned sight better than anything that’s being achieved at the moment.’

  Geraldine raised her wine glass. ‘Here’s to a brave, committed man.’

  ‘Or a stupid one.’ He raised his glass in return. ‘Here’s to the person who found the answer to our problem.’

  ‘I’m not even going to drink to that,’ refused Geraldine.

  Stoddart examined his near empty glass. ‘I’ve drunk too much to consider driving all the way back to Frederick. You have any difficulty in getting a room?’

  Geraldine shook her head, solemnly.

  ‘I can call from here, see if they’ve got another.’

  ‘It needn’t matter, if they haven’t.’ She felt as if her face was burning and hoped it wasn’t.

  Stoddart was confused, not sure what his sensation was. ‘You sure?’

  ‘No,’ she answered, honestly.

  ‘You can change your mind.’ What about his mind? He wasn’t sure either.

  ‘Let’s not go into deep subconscious analysis.’

  Geraldine’s reservation was at the downtown Marriott on 14th Street, just a block behind where they’d earlier been, at the Washington Hotel. They crossed the huge foyer and rode the elevator unspeaking and untouching and halted just inside her door, looking uncertainly at each other.

  Trying to lighten things, Stoddart said: ‘Raisa wouldn’t like this.’

  ‘She might, given the opportunity.’

  They kissed awkwardly, fumbling with buttons until Geraldine pulled away and said: ‘We’d be better doing it ourselves.’

  She was very full busted, her breasts freckled, and flat stomached and naturally red haired. Her thighs were freckled, too, at their very tops. The kiss was better when they tried again and he explored her with his mouth, urging himself to respond. He remained flaccid and tried to disguise the failure with his mouth again before becoming aware of her rigid unresponsiveness.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  ‘So am I.’

  ‘Patricia?’

  It hadn’t been such a secret after all, he accepted. ‘I guess so. It wasn’t anything long term but I saw her die.’ He wasn’t sure what he was trying to say.

  ‘There was someone, Michael, just before I came here. It was a mess. Ugly.’

  Stoddart extended his arm and she came into its crook, snuggling against his chest and shoulder. ‘I’m not,’ she said, her voice muffled.

  ‘Not what?’

  ‘Sorry. Better to give ourselves time.’

  ‘Not too much, though.

  ‘Not too much,’ she agreed.

  It was two hours later, on the far side of the city, when the telephone jarred into Gregori Lyalin’s embassy compound room, waking him from the sleep he didn’t regain for the rest of that night.

  Twenty-Three

  They made love sometime in the early morning, each for the first few seconds surprised to find someone next to them, and afterwards Geraldine said: ‘There, that wasn’t so difficult after all, was it?’ and Stoddart laughed because she was making their discovery of each other fun.

  They slept afterwards with her body cupped against his, always vaguely conscience of each other – each wanting to be conscious of each other – in the half dream between sleep and wakefulness. And when they finally did awake, they made love again and she said they had to be careful it didn’t become habit forming and he asked why and she said she needed time to think of an answer.

  It continued for both of them to be an adventure without any unexpected abyss. He was able to gift her a second toothbrush from his travel bag and she promised
that the shaving head of her cosmetic razor hadn’t been used, even though he said it wouldn’t have mattered if it had.

  They flicked between morning television channels, all three majors of which remained dominated by the environmental declaration and all three of which concentrated – with separate panel discussion, supplemented by footage of ecologically-claimed disasters – more upon the importance of Jack Stoddart’s personal involvement and even more positively upon the man’s integrity pledge than they did, regretfully (even forgetfully), upon the president’s supposed ecological awakening, although that, even more regretfully, was the actual word used to describe Henry Partington’s statement in an accompanying New York Times editorial they discovered later, at breakfast. The concentration was equally upon Stoddart in the Washington Post and USA Today.

  Stoddart remained secure in the anonymity of a room reserved in Geraldine Rothman’s name when she left for the British embassy. His first call was to Walter Pelham (‘Where the hell have you been, posing for a commemorative statue?’) to fix a meeting for that afternoon (‘Geraldine’s got something; I don’t know how good it is’) and separately – but individually – to the no longer isolated Darryl Matthews and Harold Norris, to outline briefly the environmental offer and arrange a meeting with them, even later. Stoddart turned the television off at the second repetition of CNN’s White House coverage of the previous day to introduce that morning’s news-of-the-moment footage of his many earlier televised criticisms of industries’ ecological disregard and sat alone, momentarily uninvolved and disconnected, wondering what had happened between himself and Geraldine Rothman.

  Nothing, he decided. They’d had a lot – too much – to drink and their individual adrenaline had been high and eventually they’d spent a mutually satisfactory night together, which had certainly been good for him and which, from the very little she’d said about someone named Michael, had been good for her, too. It was ridiculous, artificial, for him to imagine that what had happened between them in any way affected what there’d been with Patricia. He found it even more difficult now than he had less than twenty-four hours earlier invoking Patricia’s memory to excuse his embarrassment. He was humiliated by using her to cover his inadequacy. If there’d been a way – if he’d believed in God and prayer, maybe – he thought at that moment he would have prayed for her forgiveness and at once felt even more embarrassed and humiliated because he didn’t believe, which made the reflection even less respectful to the dead woman.

  Geraldine returned just before eleven, flushed and smiling. She said at once: ‘I’ve outlined it to Reynell but I don’t think he fully understood, so I want to read through it all again on the way back and do a better comparison on the tissue Raisa made available from the Russian victims. In a nutshell, I think we’ve found the effect but not the cause.’

  Stoddart frowned, disappointed. ‘We know the effect. Everyone gets old and dies.’

  ‘How they get old,’ said Geraldine. ‘What have you told Fort Detrick?’

  ‘To be ready for a two o’clock meeting. We talking breakthrough here?’

  ‘How about something close to a giant step forward?’

  ‘That’ll do.’

  Geraldine pushed her passenger seat back as far as it would go to make room on the floor in front of her for papers and diagrams and what looked like surreal positive prints taken from what he guessed to be some specialized microscope images. She kept the Russian file separate on the back seat. Her concentration was absolute and Stoddart didn’t attempt any conversation, instead formulating in his own mind what – or how – he would discuss with Matthews and Norris about the previous day.

  Occasionally, beside him, Geraldine mumbled to herself. Once, consulting something she took from the rear seat, she said: ‘Shit!’ although again not addressing him. They had almost reached Frederick, the landmarks becoming familiar, before she said, softly at first but then repeated, finally, to him: ‘I’m right! And it accounts for the necrosis, too.’

  He jerked his head towards the rear seat and said: ‘What’s wrong with the Russian stuff?’

  ‘There’s not enough to take it any further.’

  Because Geraldine suggested display screens and a blackboard might help, they arranged to meet in the improvised conference room, but before they did Geraldine huddled specifically with the two virologists on Pelham’s staff, comparing the British and American analyses of the Russian material. She told Raisa Orlov before doing so, accurately anticipating the woman’s insistence upon taking part, which effectively rehearsed Raisa for what was to follow.

  By the time they finally assembled, only fifteen minutes behind schedule, Geraldine had her surreal prints displayed and had ensured complete duplicates were available of what had arrived that morning from England.

  ‘There’s unarguable proof that our disease is attacking its victims’ genes,’ declared Geraldine. ‘And the effect of it doing so confirms the theory of organs dying – technically necrosis – that we found in our victims and is evident, too, in the Russian tissue samples.’ She indicated what looked to Stoddart nothing more than dark markings against a lighter background on three of her illustrations, continuing on to her blackboard. ‘Those are chromosomes, more precisely 5, 8 and 14 of the 23 that make up the molecular structure of cells in the human body; in this case those of Harry Armstrong and George Bedall, who died in the Antarctic, and Henri Lebrun, the French glaciologist at Noatak, in Alaska, who died here … They’re samples, chosen at random. The packs you have in front of you contain tissue readings identical to those I’ve pinned up here …’

  Raisa shifted, looking neither at the material in front of her nor at Geraldine, who on her blackboard drew a sausage shape. ‘There’s a chromosome, packed with thousands of genes.’ Very positively she chalked in both ends. ‘And they’re telomeres. They don’t contain genes, as such, but are a special sort of DNA which—’ Geraldine waved her hands, as if seizing an analogy from the air. ‘Let’s think of them as sealing wax. That’s their function, to act as a sealant or cap at the end of each chromosome for a very specific and necessary purpose …’

  Geraldine’s voice grated and she moved away from the blackboard to pour herself water. ‘The human body is made up of millions of thousands of cells, a lot of which are constantly renewing themselves. Those in the skin and gut, for instance, do so every three days. They do that by dividing, but prior to that division each DNA makes a complete replica of itself, giving the new cell the genes it needs. Which is where – and why – telomeres are vital. During the division process, they cap each end of the chromosome to prevent the DNA from being eroded or frayed—’ Abruptly Geraldine wiped away her chalked-in ends. ‘No telomeres, no seal. All the beads – the DNA – can just fall out the tube, erode, go to hell, whatever. Which is what the indications are, in all our victims. In every case with every victim the chromosome telomeres are three, in some cases five times shorter than they should be. There are twenty instances overall, among all the victims, of there being no telomeres remaining at all …’

  She gulped water and during the pause Pelham said: ‘I accept the genetic findings, but why is it that only the genes that bring about rapid ageing are being affected … falling out, to continue your analogy? That doesn’t have any scientific logic.’

  ‘I agree it doesn’t,’ said Geraldine. ‘And I don’t know the answer. We don’t fully know, genetically, which or what genes cause ageing: only that there are obviously several. Those affecting skin, others causing hair loss or discolouration, still more resulting in bone depletion, sight loss, hearing impairment … There is, though, sufficient indication from cells developed in culture that telomere shortening is an intrinsic part of the ageing process. If cells can’t regenerate themselves they die. And we already know that the organs of our victims here progressively died …’ She hesitated. ‘… At an astonishingly accelerated rate … a rate I’m not aware of in any other disease, causing organs to die as we now know the organs of the victi
ms died, one after the other. It’s as if …’ She spoke to Raisa. ‘And here we need your input … it’s as if we’re not dealing with one infection – one virus or one bacterium – but several attacking different targets like an army …’

  Dupuy said: ‘You’ve discovered this post mortem, like it’s only possible to diagnose a lot of diseases – brain sectioning for Creutzfeldt Jakob, for instance – after death. How are we going to find a preventative or a cure if there aren’t recognizable pre-death symptoms to treat …’

  ‘We’re not even in sight of that question yet, let alone an answer to it,’ said Geraldine. ‘Let’s try to understand where we are with what we do know.’

  ‘But you’ve been right so far,’ smiled Dupuy, in intended congratulation.

  Quickly, without looking at Raisa, Geraldine said: ‘A lot of science is luck and coincidence.’ She tapped one of the prints, without bothering to look at it. ‘That’s happened. I can’t tell you why it’s happened, how to stop it happening again or even – as I’ve already admitted – why it’s having the specific effect that it has—’ She went to Raisa again. ‘Which was why I was hopeful about the tissue register in your one victim …?’

  ‘Oleg Vasilevich,’ identified the Russian, reluctant to concede the unquestionable British progress. ‘It is a register and brings us back to viruses.’

  ‘A register of what, though?’ demanded Geraldine. ‘It’s too faint – indistinct – to recognize as an antibody or an enzyme …’

  Not on my more positive sample, thought Raisa. That was clearly an antibody and very shortly Grenkov, using immunofluorescent staining and electron microscopy, would establish the antigen to which it had been trying to attach itself and give them the alien protein. And when he did that, she’d have her viral proof and the simpering Frenchman would have to acknowledge who deserved the real credit. To Pelham she said: ‘Don’t your virologists consider it enzymal evidence?’

  ‘They can’t be certain,’ said the uncomfortable director.