by M. R. Hall
Theory made the leap to practical reality in the early 2000s, when it become possible to decode vast sections of the human genome quickly and cheaply. Slavksy’s idea was to put an ethical spin on his earlier research. He would isolate the genetic code for ethnicity not to develop smart weapons, but to create smart vaccines and medicines that would be effective only on certain populations. He saw it as a huge joke on rich Western governments, who had used their financial muscle to drive down the price they paid for drugs, beyond the point at which the manufacturers could afford to discount them for poorer countries, thus depriving the neediest of badly needed medicines. But if you could develop an Aids vaccine or a cancer treatment that would operate only on West Africans or Indonesians, they could have it for a dollar, while Americans and Europeans would have to pay ten for a version engineered to treat their populations. If he could perfect the technique, every major drugs company in the world would want to license the technology.
Their efforts were stunningly successful. The DNA of individuals from hundreds of different ethnic groups was compared for minute variations. Within six months it became apparent that in among the three billion base pairs of DNA that make up the human genome there was a region containing fewer than a hundred pairs, in which the code varied significantly among different local populations.
The work then progressed to the much slower task of identifying and precisely analysing the proteins expressed by these genes, for only when they were understood could a mechanism be reverse-engineered that would allow a drug to activate only in the presence of that tiny sequence.
‘Imagine a very complicated set of molecular keys and locks,’ Harrison said. ‘Our technology was designed to create locks that could be opened only by the key created by each specific ethnic gene.’
By 2008 work had already begun on a meningitis vaccine that would operate only on populations sharing a gene sequence common to 80 per cent of sub-Saharan Africans. The end was in sight, but Slavsky had worked himself to exhaustion. Word of their work had leaked out. Slavsky suddenly found himself bombarded with offers to buy the business. He resisted, but following his sudden death, his daughter became the majority shareholder and sold to the highest bidder, Mohammed Al-Rahman, a Saudi businessman who had invested his family’s oil wealth in biotech.
During the period of Al-Rahman’s ownership, everything had changed. Many senior personnel had been replaced, and Harrison had found himself demoted to menial tasks and excluded from the regular strategy meetings. Within the past eighteen months, a whole new lab within a lab had been established, and dark rumours had circulated about the nature of its research.
One of those absorbed into the new secretive team was Katya Toluev, a gifted young woman whom Slavsky had personally recruited from St Petersburg University. Harrison had worked closely with her until she had joined the inner circle, but their friendship picked up again when they found themselves working alongside one another at the Diamond Light Source. It was obvious to Harrison that Katya was deeply troubled and unhappy. Near the end of their stretch at Diamond she finally took him into her confidence and told him that she and her team were working on a contract to create BWs. Al-Rahman had refused to tell them who the buyer was or even to assure them it was legal. She suspected the customer was a Middle Eastern or North African government: they were developing a strain of meningitis designed to activate in the presence of the sub-Saharan gene, which they had named SS1, and another which they had isolated amongst Ashkenazi Jews, named, unimaginatively, AJ1.
Katya’s concerns weren’t only ethical: she knew the work was illegal. She confessed to Harrison that she had been contacted by an Oxford academic, Sonia Blake, who was surprisingly well informed. She had known that Slavsky had been developing ethnically targeted medicines, and she also claimed to have information that some of the staff imported from the Middle East were known to have been working on BW programmes in Saudi Arabia and North Africa. It was a crude attempt at blackmail: Blake offered Katya the choice of turning whistleblower or taking her chances once Blake made her evidence public. Katya hadn’t needed much persuasion. Nor had Harrison.
He agreed to help her obtain evidence: a live sample of the recombinant meningitis that could be independently analysed. Several weeks passed during which Katya hadn’t mentioned the subject again, but late one evening she had called him in great distress, saying that she had heard from Blake that there had been a mass death from meningitis in South Sudan that bore all the hallmarks of their pathogen. A British witness had reported that an entire village had been wiped out, leaving only one survivor, who had been brought to the UK. Sonia Blake was preparing to make formal allegations based on a dossier of evidence, and had given Katya a last chance to cooperate.
The plan was to smuggle a sample of meningitis out from the lab that could later be independently analysed. The whole operation was organized like a spy ring, with Sonia Blake sitting at the centre, the only person who knew the identities of all those involved. Katya was to bring the sample out of the lab and Harrison agreed to act as courier. The initial stage all went according to plan: he collected a flask Katya had left in a concealed spot in the Savernake Forest and took it home, where he stored it in his refrigerator. After a gap of several more days, he received an email from Sonia Blake instructing him to hand the flask to Adam Jordan, who would meet him at a filling station in Great Shefford. He was also told that the survivor of the attack in South Sudan would be present, and that he was to take a DNA swab. It would be an easy task for him to run her sample through the lab to see if she carried SS1: hundreds of such analyses were being conducted every day.
Harrison’s rendezvous with Jordan and Ayen Deng had been over in a matter of minutes. He had handed Jordan the flask, run a cotton bud around the inside of Ayen’s mouth and gone on his way. Twelve hours later he had a result: she was negative for SS1. She could have drunk a gallon of infected water and not suffered so much as a headache. Her failure to inherit the gene, while her sisters had, was less a lucky accident than an indication that her own biological father had probably come from outside the area.
Jenny glanced out at Ayen, now sitting arm in arm with Gabra, and was grateful to see that she had failed to register the meaning of what Harrison had just said. She saw no need to explain it.
Jenny said, ‘Do you have any idea who the men were that Miss Deng saw abducting Adam Jordan?’
‘Al-Rahman had security staff, Saudi guys he’d brought in to keep an eye on the employees. It was rumoured they were ex-secret police – they certainly behaved like it. We would all get called in for random checks. They would ask you whether you had been approached by anyone asking questions about your work, or whether you had said anything you shouldn’t have online. They knew their business all right.’
‘How do you think they caught up with Adam Jordan?’
‘They didn’t come after me that day, so my best guess is they picked up on an indiscreet phone call. From what I’ve heard today it wouldn’t surprise me if Rahman’s people knew Jordan had witnessed the massacre at Ginya and had been keeping tabs on him. You can plant a device the size of a penny piece in someone’s car, listen in on their conversations and track their location to within a few feet. It’s easy when you know how.’
Jenny had only one more question: ‘Why Ginya, Mr Harrison?’
He looked up from the floor and met Jenny’s gaze for the first time during his evidence. ‘It was a testing ground. No one’s going to buy without due diligence. Rahman chose the most obscure corner of Africa he could find to prove his technology worked.’ He gave a slow, thoughtful nod. ‘It worked all right. Just like Professor Slavsky knew it would. I’m just glad he knew nothing about it.’
The evidence was almost at an end. The lone journalist re-entered the hall and returned to his seat, and Jenny read a short statement that had been forwarded to her by Dr Verma.
In their search for a link between Sophie Freeman and Elena Lujan, the HPA had found meningitis bact
eria in a throat swab taken from a thirty-five-year-old paramedic at the Vale Hospital named Gavin Evans. Evans had been one of a team of three who had removed Adam Jordan’s body from the motorway, and at the time he had been suffering from a bad head cold. His partner was a theatre sister, who in the days after Jordan’s death had been working alongside Ed Freeman. Evans, it seemed, had picked up bacteria on his hands and inadvertently transferred them to his mouth. He had become the means whereby bacteria spread from person to person, but finding no receptive host other than Sophie, they had quickly died off. Evans had denied ever having visited the Recife sauna, but shown his photograph, several of the staff had claimed to recognize him as an occasional customer. Evans had since been placed in isolation while undergoing treatment to ensure any live bacteria were eradicated.
Attached to Dr Verma’s statement were the results of DNA analyses Jenny had requested with Harrison’s guidance. They confirmed that both Sophie Freeman and Elena Lujan carried the short sequence of genetic code Combined Life Systems had identified as AJ1. This tiny footnote in their genetic history meant that among the hundreds and thousands exposed to the bacteria incubated and spread by Evans, only Sophie and Elena had been vulnerable to fullblown infection.
Dr Verma had tactfully made no reference to the fact that, as Sophie had been infected via her father, who like his wife had failed to contract the disease, the likelihood was that neither parent carried AJ1. There was no question that Fiona Freeman was Sophie’s mother, which left Ed unlikely to be her biological father.
Jenny watched Ed Freeman turn to his wife as the realization dawned, but she refused to meet his eyes, and in a moment understood by no one in the room except the three of them, Fiona Freeman stifled a guilty sob in her sleeve and hurried, head-down, from the hall.
Jenny waited until her footsteps had died away before beginning to sum up the evidence to the jury. She would invite them to return a verdict of unlawful killing and was confident they would oblige. But as Karen Jordan took hold of her mother’s hand and stared into a future without the father of her child, Jenny knew that even if his killers were found and brought to justice, their knowledge could not be undone.
Many more Ayens would emerge alone from a wall of flies before some method, as yet unknown, might neutralize the threat.
It was just the way it was, as inexorable as the cycle of life and death: human beings only truly learned from their most catastrophic mistakes.
TWENTY-EIGHT
THE BIRDS GREW QUIET IN AUGUST. There was no riotous chorus at sunrise, no exultant clamour to greet the day. They had switched their attention from reproduction to survival, and were silently gathering strength to defy the winnowing of winter. The wheel ground on. Life would endure, but individual life would not.
Saturday mornings always seemed to bring such thoughts to the fore, and today Jenny felt them keenly. They had been with her since before she woke, needling and goading her. A brief exchange from her final conversation with Dr Allen – almost forgotten in the frantic rush of the previous weeks – played over and over in her mind: ‘Remember that life is precious, Mrs Cooper. It exists by chance but thrives by will. Always keep hold of your purpose.’
Even the full blast of the shower couldn’t silence his persistent voice. What did he mean, purpose? Wasn’t it enough that she had delivered her verdict of unlawful killing? That Karen Jordan’s son would grow up knowing that his father hadn’t abandoned him? That she had beaten Webley and all the others to the truth? How much more could he expect of her? Did he really think she could make herself happy as well? Happiness lay with other people’s decisions, not with hers. All she could do was prepare the ground and hope – and my God, she had tried.
After several weeks of silence, she had finally persuaded Michael to talk. They had turned their lives inside out, examined them from every angle. There was so much that they could have had together, but one great stumbling block hadn’t gone away: Michael really did want to be a father. Jenny had searched deep inside herself, questioned herself a thousand times over, but each time arrived at the same answer: she had brought one life into the world, and that would be the extent of her contribution to the continuance of the human race. Had she lost Ross, who knows what elemental forces would have stirred in her, but she hadn’t. Michael was welcome to share her life – she hoped more than anything that he would – but she alone would have to be enough. It was over to him. He was the one who had to find a purpose beyond fatherhood if they were to have a future.
She carried the coffee pot to the table in her long-neglected garden along with her mobile. There were darting swallows, fat dragonflies the colour of peacock feathers hovering by the stream, and somewhere nearby a deep, persistent hum that said bees were swarming, but Jenny’s eyes kept flicking to the screen in her hand, hoping for a message from Michael saying that he had decided to be with her. But none came. She refilled her cup and turned her face up to the sun, closed her eyes and tried to unwind. It began to work – the tension that had gripped her shoulders slowly eased, her breathing settled to a slow, steady rhythm – but one short buzz from the phone and her heart leaped as violently as if it had been a gunshot. It was an email. She hit the screen with impatient fingers, only to find that it was from Ruth Webley: I thought you might find the attached interesting. I turned it up in the notes of Slavsky’s Berlin debriefing in ’89. No luck with Slavsky’s book, however. All copies gone from the secondhand market. Not our doing, I assure you. Suspect Al-Rahman and friends.
The attachment was a scanned image of a heavily edited page of typescript. All of the text had been blacked out except for a short passage:
Asked how he came into possession of the file from Genix, a biotechnology company in Scottsdale, Arizona, Slavsky replied that he had indirectly procured it. He knew Genix’s leading research scientist to be Roy Emmett Hudson, a man who had worked on the US Army’s biological weapons programme at Cornmill Creek in the late 1960s, and had suggested the KGB target him. Hudson was duly approached by an undercover agent claiming to be acting for a rival company, but rejected even the most generous financial offers. Hudson’s wife proved more persuadable, however. An agent posing as a radical journalist befriended and seduced her, and persuaded her to copy and hand over several batches of her husband’s technical documents with the suggestion that his work might have sinister military applications. The techniques they revealed had accelerated Slavsky’s work in recombinant DNA by at least five years. It had been the committee’s decision to eliminate Hudson when his wife expressed nervousness that he was growing suspicious of her. Slavsky claimed he felt no remorse for the death of a man who had been involved in BW research at the start of his career. In his words, ‘We were scientific combatants and bore the same risks as the military.’
Jenny looked up from the document and thought of Sonia Blake’s unhappy childhood. Slavsky had held the one piece of information that might have enabled her to make sense of her life, but hadn’t the courage to confess it to her. Jenny forwarded the email to Alex Forster and then to Henry Blake in the hope that they might gain a little peace, even if it had been too late for the tormented woman they had both tried, unsuccessfully, to love.
Morning slipped into afternoon. Michael wasn’t going to call. She wasn’t enough. To hell with him. Time to move on and forget him, time to forget about men altogether. That was why she was unhappy, the lousy men she had chosen, none of them able to see beyond themselves, none of them prepared to make the kind of sacrifice every woman took for granted. She felt tears of self-pity threatening and pushed them away. No. No crying. What was she thinking? She had far more important things to deal with than her hurt feelings.
Jenny had grown to recognize each one of the ICU nurses over the past few weeks. It was Maria, the Filipina with bright, child’s eyes, she had to catch hold of. The others were sticklers for visiting time, but Maria was always guaranteed to let her through. Jenny hovered in a doorway along the corridor until she appeared from
the nurses’ station, waited for her nod signalling the all-clear, then slipped across to the ward and into the curtained-off bay.
She was lying exactly as she had been three days before on Jenny’s last visit, eyes partially open, as if staring at the ceiling. Jenny slowly passed a hand in front of her face.
‘Alison. It’s Jenny.’
There was no response.
She was breathing without a ventilator, which the consultant had assured her was a positive sign, but he couldn’t say when the return to consciousness would come, or even if it would. Her hair, grey at the roots, was starting to grow back where it had been shaved from the crown of her head to the top of her forehead, slowly covering the U-shaped seam of stitches that enclosed much of the front portion of her skull. It had taken three separate, painstaking operations to reconstruct the shattered bone. She hadn’t been wearing a seatbelt. If she had, she would have emerged from the wreck with nothing but a few broken ribs. Alison, who fastidiously wore a belt even in the back seat of taxi, had flown at the Range Rover unprotected and hit it head-on. In the intervening days, Jenny had often wondered whether she had done so on purpose. In a cruel twist, her oncologist had revealed that her most recent biopsies were clear. What he had feared was an aggressive secondary tumour was nothing but benign, fibrous tissue, a harbinger of approaching old age, but not of death.
What could you do for someone in a coma apart from sit and wait for a sign of life? Jenny stared at her in tongue-tied silence, feeling more than helpless.
‘It’s good to talk to her. Sometimes it can work miracles.’ Maria appeared with a fresh bag of saline drip and hooked it up to the stand. ‘It doesn’t matter what you say. It’s just hearing the voice.’ She picked up one of Alison’s hands. ‘Her nails could do with filing.’
