First Horseman, The

by Chambers, Clem

  Yet without her there was still a giant emptiness in his heart, an injury to his brain that could not repair itself. He hungered for her.

  There was a flash and he glanced at the speedometer: he was doing seventy in a thirty m.p.h. zone. He groaned. Pretty soon Stafford was going to have to replace the shot-up Maybach limo with one that didn’t look like it had been the subject of a car-bomb attack, because at this rate Jim would end up as a passenger with a driving ban hanging around his neck. Then Stafford, or a newly hired chauffeur, would have to drive him around.

  18

  Kate had been about to send Jim a flirtatious SMS but thought better of it. Instead she Googled him. ‘Billionaire Jim Evans, Britain’s Most Eligible Bachelor Under Thirty,’ said the headline. She clicked on the images and there he was, in a blurred long-distance shot. She couldn’t make out his face but she could tell it was him. ‘Oh dear,’ she said aloud, putting the phone down. Texting no longer seemed such a good idea. She saw him in her mind’s eye. Was he cute or was it just the money? No, he was extremely cute, even with a flaming red eye – which somehow enhanced his appeal with a touch of dash. How had he really got it? ‘Training’? Training for what, exactly? She picked up the phone and reread the message she’d been about to send him: ‘Nice to meet you. I enjoyed lunch.’

  Silly. She deleted it, turned the phone upside-down and put it on the table.

  She read two other articles about Jim. He was starting to seem a bit sinister. ‘No one knows exactly where his fortune comes from,’ said an article. That was a good reason not to contact him … but the slightly dangerous angle was enticing. She closed the browser. If he liked her, he would call. They all did. Then she would decide whether or not to respond. She turned the phone over and looked at the screen. No, he wouldn’t. Who was she kidding?

  It gave him a satisfying thrill to draw up outside his Jacobean mansion in the Veyron. The ancient house oozed mystery, its ornate façade stern yet welcoming. This house and his place in London’s Docklands were his anchors. How many dramas had gone on during those buildings’ long histories? How many adventures and tragedies had washed past as the tide of history had ebbed and flowed? Was his story any more outlandish than the lost histories of the rich men who had owned this mansion over the four centuries before he had bought it?

  He got out, hearing the crows calling from the trees beyond the rose gardens as the wind blew light clouds across a blue sky. He surveyed the scene. This was all his. He had to start enjoying his luck a bit more, he thought. He had to start wanting the things he had but, compared to the abstraction of the markets, physical things left him cold.

  Stafford was standing in the doorway. Jim wished he wouldn’t do that.

  ‘Welcome back, Jim.’

  ‘Hi, Stafford,’ he said, bounding up the steps.

  ‘Would you like tea, sir?’

  ‘No, thanks,’ said Jim, heading for the cloakroom and a toilet break. He pushed open the door, glimpsing himself in the large mirror over the basin. He stopped in his tracks. ‘Bloody hell!’ He leant close to the mirror. His eye was completely healed. Gone was the bloody red circle that had replaced the swollen black bruise and the skin didn’t even show the jaundiced tint of earlier. It was as if he had never had a black eye. He touched the skin, which was smooth – smoother than it was on the undamaged side. He bent closer. There wasn’t a mark where there had been a swollen mess just hours before.

  ‘Amazing,’ he muttered. He must call the professor and find out more. But first things first.

  19

  Cardini looked disappointed. ‘So, Bob, do you think the mosquito bit the subject or not?’

  ‘It’s hard to tell. Maybe it did, maybe not.’ Renton grimaced, bobbing up and down on the balls of his feet. ‘It landed, but that doesn’t mean it fed.’

  ‘In your opinion?’

  ‘It’s hard to have one.’

  ‘If you did, what would it be?’

  Renton screwed up his face, his black beard jutting out.

  The phone rang.

  Cardini stared at it disapprovingly.

  ‘Shall I get it?’ suggested Renton.

  Cardini thought for a moment. ‘No.’ He picked up the receiver. ‘Cardini,’ he said sharply, as if he was engaged in something vital.

  ‘It’s Jim Evans,’ said a young voice.

  ‘Jim,’ boomed Cardini, as if he was welcoming a long-lost friend, ‘good of you to call.’

  ‘That stuff you put on my face is amazing.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I mean really amazing.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘My black eye’s completely better.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s impossible, right?’

  ‘Apparently not.’

  ‘Can you tell me more about it?’

  ‘I could,’ said Cardini, smiling to himself.

  ‘Can it do more than just heal bruises?’

  ‘Yes, very much more.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Jim, I’m not particularly happy to discuss my research over the phone.’

  ‘Right,’ said Jim. ‘I was wondering maybe if I could fund this line of research. I mean, it’s not like the other stuff you’re doing.’

  ‘You mean the animals?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No,’ said Cardini. ‘I am my own guinea pig.’

  ‘Right,’ said Jim, sounding surprised.

  ‘I hope that’s sufficiently humane for you.’

  ‘You can’t say fairer than that,’ said Jim, who was pulling Cardini up on Wikipedia. ‘Can I—’ He coughed violently. He had caught sight of Cardini’s birthdate. The man was nearly eighty, not fifty. ‘Can I—’ More coughing.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  Jim took a deep breath. ‘Can I come up and talk it over with you, then?’

  ‘Tomorrow morning,’ said Cardini. ‘I have to go to America, so my time is very short.’

  ‘No problem. Nine o’clock?’

  ‘Yes indeed.’

  ‘See you then.’

  ‘Good day.’ Cardini hung up and looked at Renton. ‘We must speed up our work,’ he said. ‘Bring the girl in and test her for the infection. If she isn’t infected, infect her. Examine the development, then terminate the test. Do it once I have left for America and make sure there is no trace by my return.’

  ‘Yes, Professor.’

  ‘Do your utmost, Bob. The first horseman’s entrance must soon be upon us.’

  20

  Kate stared at the message she had typed on her phone. She was filled with paralysing indecision: her mind was unable to command her hand to press the button. ‘Enjoyed lunch,’ seemed almost sendable but she had typed several versions and they’d all looked awful. What was wrong with her?

  Her phone buzzed. She flipped to the message and almost dropped the phone. It was from Jim. ‘I’m back up in Cambridge tomorrow. Fancy another burger?’

  ‘Pizza?’

  ‘Sure. I’ll call when out of meeting.’

  ‘gr8.’ She regretted that one the moment she pressed send.

  Jim looked at the message: ‘gr8’. She liked him. He smiled.

  He opened his trading screen. The dollar was going up and the euro was going down. He jumped on the dollar and joined the ride.

  ‘Happy days,’ he said, as Stafford came in with a mug of tea.

  ‘Very good, sir.’

  21

  Jim shook Cardini’s hand and sat down in front of the professor’s desk. It was worn at the front where so many people had sat before, leaning themselves or their papers on its edge. The varnish had worn off to show the light-coloured wood below.

  Cardini pushed a document towards him. ‘You will need to sign this, Jim,’ he said.

  Jim picked it up. ‘Confidentiality Agreement,’ said the cover page. The date was written on it in flowing script. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Let me give it a read.’ He turned back to the first page. It was typical legal bullshit, he
thought, but if he talked in his sleep about what the professor was doing he’d be sued. He flicked through the pages to make sure there was nothing wildly odd in any of the paragraphs, then turned to the signature page. ‘Got something to write with?’

  ‘Of course.’ Cardini produced a black fountain pen with a large red crystal set in the top. He unscrewed it and pushed the cap on to the rear of the barrel, then offered it to Jim, who took it.

  ‘Don’t think I’ve ever used one of these before,’ said Jim. ‘Writing with a biro is crazy enough.’ He scratched his signature, which looked horribly childish. He liked the way the shiny wet ink dried into the paper. ‘There you go,’ he said, handing it back.

  Cardini took the document. ‘I will send you a copy.’

  ‘So, what the hell is that stuff you put on my eye?’

  Cardini was smiling. ‘Telomere eukaryotic retranscriptase.’

  Jim nodded. ‘You said that before and I tried looking it up but I couldn’t find anything.’

  ‘You won’t find anything. I tend to call it TRT for short.’

  ‘I saw some stuff about telomeres, but it didn’t help me understand what made my face heal so quickly.’

  ‘As you may have picked up,’ Cardini began, ‘telomeres are areas of the chromosome that terminate them. Telomeres are a part of our DNA that protects our genetic fingerprint from corruption.’ He nodded, his expression suggesting he was reconsidering the subject and finding it very much to his satisfaction.

  ‘When your DNA replicates it comes unzipped, if you will.’ He made a motion with his hand as though something was being torn apart. ‘It then re-forms, pulling the other half of the genetic puzzle back together from the surrounding chemicals afloat in the cell. The telomeres enable this zipping and unzipping to take place without destroying the viable DNA at both ends. Without the telomere the DNA division process would cause catastrophic corruption in the chromosome. Without telomeres, as we understand them, the outcome of a cell dividing would be unsustainable.’

  Jim was listening intently.

  ‘Without telomeres, cancerous mutations would soon destroy an organism. Your cells simply would not survive the many divisions required for your body to grow and survive. Without telomeres, life would remain primitive. Telomeres are crucial for complex organisms. Sadly, this protecting DNA terminating code wears away with each cycle, shortening with every round of regeneration. The telomeres are an inert buffer, which is eroded by each tick of our genetic clock.’ Cardini arched an eyebrow and looked grave.

  ‘This,’ he boomed, ‘limits the cell to a finite number of divisions before it must die. Once the telomere is consumed … the cell is destroyed. The telomere is like the spring of a watch that is slowly unwound, except there is no key to wind it up again. The untold billions of telomeres in your body are the inbuilt timer of your life. When their cycles have run their course, just like the cell, you come to an inglorious end. As the telomeres shorten, so do we age. Telomeres in aggregate dictate your allotted span. They programme your mortality.’ He examined Jim’s face, which was mainly blank. ‘Do you see?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jim. ‘Well, I sort of get your drift.’

  ‘Good,’ rumbled Cardini. ‘Telomere eukaryotic retranscriptase lengthens telomeres. Retranscript means “to write again”. You see? It is an enzyme that extends the telomeres in the chromosomes and in effect makes the cells young again.’

  ‘So how did that make the bruise on my face go so quickly?’

  ‘TRT, as I prefer to call it, creates a chronomatic reaction.’

  ‘And what’s that?’

  ‘It speeds up the biological processes in damaged tissues. Healing or growth can take place up to a hundred times faster. You are young and the dose was low so certain effects of TRT will not be so dramatic in your case.’

  ‘It seemed pretty dramatic to me.’

  ‘It is not possible, for example, to take forty years off your cells,’ he chuckled, ‘but in older people, well, TRT winds back the clock. It temporarily reverses the ageing process by amplifying the organism’s natural ability to repair and rejuvenate old cells.’

  ‘This is like a revolutionary medicine, right?’ said Jim, now perched on the very edge of his seat.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So why isn’t it all over the newspapers? Why haven’t you got a Nobel Prize? Why isn’t the whole world parked outside your door?’

  Cardini stiffened. ‘Because no one knows about my discoveries.’

  ‘But why not?’

  Cardini looked at him so fiercely that he almost shrank back in his seat. ‘There are problems.’

  ‘What problems?’

  Cardini sighed, a low grumble that resonated in his chest. ‘There are seven billion people in this world, Jim, but before the discovery of penicillin there were just two billion. I believe that without that one compound there would still be just two billion people on this planet.’ He paused. ‘It is said that the average Indian peasant spends a quarter of their income on antibiotics and this expenditure on that medicine is responsible not just for their health but for their and their children’s very existence. Yet this miracle compound is terribly underestimated. People imagine that such drugs are simple things, like chocolates, and that, once discovered, they can be produced cheaply at will.’

  Cardini stared at Jim, his eyes unblinking. ‘But when it was discovered, penicillin, for example, could only be produced in tiny amounts.’ He leant forwards. ‘The drug’s first subject was a policeman dying from a terrible infection behind his eye.’ Cardini interlaced his fingers. ‘The penicillin had been extracted from mould grown in racks of bedpans and when it was given to the dying man he began to recover. Yet even though the team at Oxford extracted as much as they could, even redistilling it from the patient’s own urine to eke it out, they did not have enough to save his life.”

  Cardini sat back. ‘Soon he lapsed once more into a coma and died. It was fourteen years from the discovery of penicillin before there was enough to treat even ten people. It was yet another ten years before use was truly widespread. Even with such miraculous properties it took a generation for the compound to reach mankind en masse.’

  ‘Sorry, Chris, I don’t understand the problem.’

  ‘I can only make the tiniest amounts.’ He stared at Jim as if it was his fault. ‘It must seem perverse, particularly to your generation, but little has changed in chemistry in the last two or three decades. In computing, progress has been exponential, but in chemistry and medicine, it has been linear. A computer chip in the nineteen seventies may have had just a thousand transistors but now it has two billion. Meanwhile chemistry cannot make a molecule of ten thousand atoms, let alone a million.’

  Cardini’s eyes bulged, apparently with fury.

  ‘When compared to the progress in electronics, chemists are working in the dark ages. We cannot even imagine creating proteins of any real complexity, let alone anything as complex as a simple cell. The best we can do is to modify existing life and have it do the biochemistry for us. The basic chemicals we call drugs are the simplest of compounds, perhaps a dozen or two elements glued together. Anything complex must be extracted from life itself, be it plant or animal. There is no real capacity to make anything but the simplest pharmaceuticals from scratch. We are little better than the primitives that stewed plants and drank the decoction thereof.’

  ‘How do you make it?’

  ‘We take human blood and distil it.’

  ‘How much blood does it take to make the treatment you gave me?’

  ‘About thirty tons.’

  ‘Thirty tons of human blood?’ said Jim, nearly falling off the edge of his chair. ‘How the hell do you get it all?’

  ‘We take what we can from blood banks across the country as its age passes its mandated storage limit. We have access to about a thousand tons a year. Happily we do the medical profession a service in disposing of it for them but the supply is nowhere near enough for my work. Extraction from
human blood is not the answer. To advance we must synthesise the drug, and we have not yet done that. Or, rather, I have not yet implemented it on anything but a minute scale.’

  ‘A thousand tons of human blood,’ said Jim. ‘How do you process it all? That’s twenty tons a week.’

  ‘There is a facility outside the city dedicated to it.’

  ‘Can I see it?’

  ‘Jim,’ said Cardini, sternly, ‘I must bring you back to my earlier point. We need to synthesise the compound. Extracting it from life is simply not a feasible long-term solution.’

  ‘What about blood from abattoirs? Cows and chickens, that kind of thing.’

  ‘Five million dollars would be the price for such a medicine. Five million for a single dose.’

  Jim put a finger to his cheek. ‘It cost five million dollars to fix my eye?’

  ‘That was not a full dose,’ said Cardini, ‘but that is not the point. There is not enough biomass to produce the compound at scale in this manner. It is a drug beyond the reach of all but kings.’

  ‘I shouldn’t think kings get many black eyes,’ muttered Jim, who was now deep in thought.

  ‘Were you listening, Jim?’ said Cardini, somewhat plaintively.

  ‘Yes,’ said Jim, eyes glazed. ‘You need to find a way to synthesise it.’ He shook himself. ‘Have I missed something?’ He looked into Cardini’s face and saw the Wikipedia picture: a dark-haired middle-aged man with scary black eyes. ‘You’re eighty-one, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you look fiftyish.’

  ‘So I’m told.’

  ‘And that’s because you take your drug?’

  Cardini lifted his head a little and peered down his nose at Jim. ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you’re emptying our blood banks to make enough for yourself.’

  ‘In effect,’ Cardini held up the finger of his right hand, ‘but not quite.’

  ‘Not quite?’

  ‘Jim,’ said Cardini, ‘the cost of this project is truly great and I have a patron who funds it. I help him in return. I have small amounts of serum surplus to requirements. It accrues, but is scant. I need further funding to take the next step.’