Ice Age
Page 46
Geraldine said: ‘It’s convenient, there already being a nursery although I’d want to do it differently.’
Stoddart drove unspeaking for several minutes. ‘Are we talking hopeful or are you trying to tell me something?’
‘I’m telling you something.’
Stoddart pulled over to the hard shoulder and twisted in his seat to look at her. ‘We got another first. No one ever asked you to marry them before and no one ever told me before that I was going to be a father.’
‘What are you going to tell me?’
‘I can’t imagine anything better to complete our perfect picture.’
He turned at the next exit and agreed the asking price of the Rockville house. The sellers said they hoped they’d be very happy and Stoddart told them they already were. The following week Geraldine put her London flat on the market and asked for her resignation as chief scientific officer to be immediately effective, which it was. Peter Reynell hosted a farewell lunch at which he repeated the safe seat offer. She didn’t tell him of the pregnancy or of the intended wedding.
She liked the interior designer to whom she was introduced in Rockville and agreed a yellow and grey colour scheme for the nursery. The commute was easy to Baltimore and because it was the city in which she would be spending most of her working time, she registered with a gynaecologist there instead of the woman she’d consulted in Washington after the abortion. The Baltimore specialist, also a woman, said she didn’t want to X-ray or scan so early but from the initial physical examination and the Washington case notes there weren’t going to be any problems. Geraldine said she felt lucky not to be suffering morning sickness: any pregnancy discomfort at all.
Geraldine accepted that as with all the approaches she’d been offered the Baltimore Chair – and a salary four times higher than what she’d earned in England – because of her public exposure and philosophically endured the publicity of her arrival. She agreed her concentration would obviously be the continuing research for the age-triggering gene and insisted in every interview that its eventual location would not be an individual discovery but the result of a combined scientific effort. On her first working day the chancellor promised to provide any scientific facility, including additional staff, she considered lacking.
Geraldine and Stoddart amused themselves compiling a list of wedding guests they could have invited (‘for so many cameras Partington would probably stage the reception in the Rose Garden’) and settled for an unannounced registry office ceremony, with Walter Pelham and Amanda O’Connell as witnesses.
Stoddart went with Geraldine for the first X-ray and scan, announcing on the way that he wanted to be present at the birth. Geraldine said it would probably be possible that day to get an indication of the sex but wasn’t sure if she wanted to know. Stoddart said he wasn’t sure he did, either. When they got there the gynaecologist thought it was probably too early to tell so it wasn’t a decision they had to reach for another month. They had coffee between waiting for the X-ray to be developed and the scan, which was the way the gynaecologist liked to examine. She wasn’t carrying the plates when she came into the office and said they were ready for the scan and that Stoddart should come too. There were two nurses already in the consulting room.
Geraldine said: ‘Were the X-rays OK?’
‘Let’s look at these pictures,’ said the gynaecologist, starting to move the scan over Geraldine’s abdomen but abruptly stopping.
It was one of the nurses who gasped, before the doctor, and then Geraldine cried out: ‘No!’
The clear image was of a perfectly and completely formed, although minute, human being – a boy – already with a substantial growth of hair. The heart was beating.
Jagged-voiced, disbelieving, the physician said: ‘It’s not a three-month foetus. It’s the growth of a two-year-old …’
But Geraldine didn’t hear anything more because she’d lapsed into fainted unconsciousness.
Geraldine was kept heavily sedated that first day and during the one that followed, when with Stoddard beside her she was taken by ambulance back to the isolation unit at Fort Detrick. On the fourth day the scientists began carrying out preliminary but by now well practised tests, all of which were repeated on Stoddart in an adjoining chamber in an unsuccessful attempt to discover if he were a carrier. Everyone with whom Geraldine had been associated or with whom she had worked were put into quarantine, for matching investigation. Reynall insisted photographs of him taken through the separating glass of the English isolation unit be issued to the media.
Over the days Geraldine’s sedation was gradually reduced. Stoddart demanded to be at her bedside when she properly awoke, which she did with an instant recollection of what she had seen on the gynaecologist’s scan and for a long time sobbed in his arms. Even when she stopped crying, dry sobs shook through her. Stoddart respected Geraldine’s intelligence too much to meaninglessly offer consoling words he couldn’t think of anyway, so he just continued to hold her.
When Geraldine finally spoke her voice was jagged, uneven. ‘Are we at Fort Detrick?’
‘Yes.’
‘Have you been tested?’
‘Yes. Nothing registered.’
‘Everyone else?’
‘Everyone.’
‘Is the sound on, to record everything?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s in the human egg,’ said Geraldine. ‘It’s hosting in the ovum ova.’
‘How … I don’t …’ tried Stoddart.
‘I made a scientific mistake … a terrible mistake,’ said Geraldine. ‘I even warned about it during the investigation and then forgot to take it into account myself. DNA corrects itself, if it starts to mutate. But RNA – ribonucleic acid – doesn’t. If it starts to mutate while it’s replicating in a host cell it creates an entirely new strain of its parent. It’s even done that to destroy the natural immunity that the cave children developed. It’s exploding through the cells. Sometimes – confusing me – it’s been blocked by latent, residual immunity. But sometimes – too often – it hasn’t been stopped. And it’s mutated too fast for us to find it … put up a chemically blocking fire wall …’
Stoddart made a helpless, lost gesture.
‘We could have contracted it, you and I, in so many different ways,’ monotoned Geraldine. ‘… Still be carriers without it being possible to detect, in the normal ways we tried … It could be sexually transmitted after all, like AIDS. And if it is, it will have been passed on a million – a trillion – times, everywhere there’s been an outbreak … and that transmission is just one of the mutations …’
‘But you … us … our baby …’ tried Stoddart, in reality-losing desperation.
‘I’m sharing his blood, he’s sharing mine,’ said Geraldine, voice flat in resignation. ‘One of us will kill the other.’
‘That can’t happen!’
‘I know. Like I know I’ve only got six months to find the way for one of us at least to stay alive.’
‘It has to be you!’
Geraldine tried to find the words but couldn’t. Instead she said: ‘We’ve got to start all over again. Now!’
A Biography of Brian Freemantle
Brian Freemantle (b. 1936) is one of Britain’s most prolific and accomplished authors of spy fiction. His novels have sold more than ten million copies worldwide, and have been optioned for numerous film and television adaptations.
Born in Southampton, on the southern coast of England, Freemantle began his career as a journalist. In 1975, as the foreign editor at the Daily Mail, he made headlines during the American evacuation of Saigon: As the North Vietnamese closed in on the city, Freemantle became worried about the future of the city’s orphans. He lobbied his superiors at the paper to take action, and they agreed to fund an evacuation for the children. In three days, Freemantle organized a thirty-six-hour helicopter airlift for ninety-nine children, who were transported to Britain. In a flash of dramatic inspiration, he changed nearly one hundred live
s—and sold a bundle of newspapers.
Although he began writing espionage fiction in the late 1960s, he first won fame in 1977, with Charlie M. That book introduced the world to Charlie Muffin—a disheveled spy with a skill set more bureaucratic than Bond-like. The novel, which drew favorable comparisons to the work of John Le Carré, was a hit, and Freemantle began writing sequels. The sixth in the series, The Blind Run, was nominated for an Edgar Award for Best Novel. To date, Freemantle has penned fourteen titles in the Charlie Muffin series, the most recent of which is Red Star Rising (2010), which brought back the popular spy after a nine-year absence.
In addition to the stories of Charlie Muffin, Freemantle has written more than two dozen standalone novels, many of them under pseudonyms including Jonathan Evans and Andrea Hart. Freemantle’s other series include two books about Sebastian Holmes, an illegitimate son of Sherlock Holmes, and the four Cowley and Danilov books, which were written in the years after the end of the Cold War and follow an odd pair of detectives—an FBI operative and the head of Russia’s organized crime bureau.
Freemantle lives and works in London, England.
A school photograph of Brian Freemantle at age twelve.
Brian Freemantle, at age fourteen, with his mother, Violet, at the country estate of a family acquaintance, Major Mears.
Freemantle’s parents, Harold and Violet Freemantle, at the country estate of Major Mears.
Brian Freemantle and his wife, Maureen, on their wedding day. They were married on December 8, 1956, in Southampton, where both were born and spent their childhoods. Although they attended the same schools, they did not meet until after they had both left Southampton.
Brian Freemantle (right) with photographer Bob Lowry in 1959. Freemantle and Lowry opened a branch office of the Bristol Evening World together in Trowbridge, in Wiltshire, England.
A bearded Freemantle with his wife, Maureen, circa 1971. He grew the beard for an undercover newspaper assignment in what was then known as Czechoslovakia.
Freemantle (left) with Lady and Sir David English, the editors of the Daily Mail, on Freemantle’s fiftieth birthday. Freemantle was foreign editor of the Daily Mail, and with the backing of Sir David and the newspaper, he organized the airlift rescue of nearly one hundred Vietnamese orphans from Saigon in 1975.
Freemantle working on a novel before beginning his daily newspaper assignments. His wife, Maureen, looks over his shoulder.
Brian Freemantle says good-bye to Fleet Street and the Daily Mail to take up a fulltime career as a writer in 1975. The editor’s office was turned into a replica of a railway carriage to represent the fact that Freemantle had written eight books while commuting—when he wasn’t abroad as a foreign correspondent.
Many of the staff secretaries are dressed as Vietnamese hostesses to commemorate the many tours Freemantle carried out in Vietnam.
The Freemantle family on the grounds of the Winchester Cathedral in 1988. Back row: wife Maureen; eldest daughter, Victoria; and mother-in-law, Alice Tipney, a widow who lived with the Freemantle family for a total of forty-eight years until her death. Second row: middle daughter, Emma; granddaughter, Harriet; Freemantle; and third daughter, Charlotte.
Freemantle in 1999, in the Outer Close outside Winchester Cathedral. For thirty years, he lived with his family in the basement library of a fourteenth-century house with a tunnel connecting it to the cathedral. Priests used this tunnel to escape persecution during the English Reformation.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 2002 by Brian Freemantle
cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa
This edition published in 2011 by Open Road Integrated Media
180 Varick Street
New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Acknowledgement
Author’s Note
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
A Biography of Brian Freemantle
Copyright Page