Omega Dog (17 page)

With warmest thanks,

Dmitri Stavros Papakostas

There was a cell phone number at the top of the page. No address or email. The letter was dated February 16
^th
this year. A little over three months ago.

‘May I?’ said Beth. Venn handed her the papers accompanying the letter.

She leafed through them.

‘These are all from obscure journals,’ she murmured. ‘Haven’t even heard of a couple of them. And that’s just the ones in English.’

‘What are they about?’ said Venn.

‘The Russian one I can’t say. But I know Spanish, and I can read a little Italian. Those papers and the English-language ones all have a common theme. I’m assuming the Russian one does, too.’

She lapsed into silence, absorbed in her reading. Venn fought a growing impatience. He didn’t think the locker facility was being watched. But the events of the past day and night had put him on permanent edge, the hairs at the back of his neck repeatedly tingling.

‘What is this theme?’ he said, as calmly as he could.

‘C-77,’ Beth muttered, not looking up from the pages.

Venn waited.

Some of his frustration must have started to radiate off him because Beth looked up. There was wonder in her eyes.

‘Compound 77,’ she said. ‘It’s a short name for the precursor of one of the main active agents in Zylurin, the drug we’re trialing.’

‘Precursor?’

Beth bit her lip, lost in thought once more. But this time she seemed not to forget Venn was there.

‘Zylurin is a synthesis of several other compounds,’ she explained. ‘One of them is C-77. It was originally developed as a potential antidepressant around ten years ago, and subject to a small phase two trial. That’s a trial involving human volunteers, mainly to assess for side effects. The initial trial was stopped because the incidence of side effects in the participants was too high. Almost universal, in fact. Mainly nausea and vomiting.

‘So the drug didn’t go anywhere. Except a few years later, it was found that if C-77 was combined with certain other agents, the side effects were minimized. The new drug, the result of combining these different agents, is Zylurin.’

Venn was struggling to follow. ‘So what are those papers all about?’ he said, indicating the sheaf in Beth’s hand.

‘I’ll need to read them more carefully.’ She tapped the stack with a fingernail. ‘But so far, it looks as if each of these studies are demonstrating a link between the original C-77 and a more serious, long-term side effect.’

‘And what’s that?’

‘Cancer,’ Beth said.

Venn took a step toward her. The color, which had been starting to come back into her cheeks after the trauma of events back at the brownstone, was now draining away from her face again.

‘What’s wrong?’ he asked.

Her eyes searched his.

‘I took part in those original trials,’ she said. ‘But not as a researcher. As a volunteer. I took C-77.’

––––––––

A
s a field agent with MI6 in the 1990s, Marcus Royle had specialized in assassination and sabotage.

Most of his activities were ‘unofficial’, and wholly unsanctioned either by the senior officers of the organization or the political line of command to which it was answerable. But they were a fact of life in the world of international intelligence, and Royle had no reason to believe things had changed.

His operations had often involved long periods of sitting or lying still, keeping a potential target – whether a person, a vehicle or a building – under surveillance. Some of these periods stretched out to 36 hours or more. Rather than attempt to stay awake all this time, a superhuman feat beyond the reach of most people, including Royle himself, he had learned the facility of being able to catch short naps in any location and any position, but of being able to snap instantly and fully awake at will.

After he’d put enough distance between himself and the ambulance that he felt safe to slow down, Royle stopped running randomly and began to search actively for what he required.

And what he required was a store, open at four in the morning, which sold cell phones. His last phone had been destroyed in the exchange of gunfire with the police earlier.

This was New York, the city that never hit the sack. He found a store on Canal Street, and ten minutes later walked out with a pay-per-use smartphone.

Down the street he found another 24-hour store where he purchased a set of pencils and a block of paper.

Royle wandered in the direction of the Hudson, where the natural light was better. Leaning on the balustrade overlooking the water, he began to sketch.

He was blessed with a near-perfect visual memory for faces. Nonetheless, it took him four attempts before he was satisfied that the face looking back at him from the page matched precisely that of the man who’d fired on him in the car, and who’d spirited Colby away. 

Using his phone, Royle took a photo of the drawing he’d done. Then he balled up the pages and tossed them down into the river, as well as the pencils.

Finding an alley that was ventilated by a cool pre-dawn breeze from the river, he went down it and dialed an international number. The same one he’d called earlier.

Sir Peter Greening answered once more, sounding a little testy this time.

Royle was advised that what he was asking was ‘rather a tall order’, and that he would probably have to wait at least several hours before receiving an answer.

That gave him a chance to catch up on sleep. Refresh himself in body and mind.

Royle curled on his side in the alleyway, among trashcans spilling over with fishheads and beer bottles and potato peelings, placed the buds from his phone into his ears – the music he chose to drift off to was Bartok’s
Concerto for Orchestra
– and closed his eyes.

The ringing phone woke him. Bright sunlight flooded down the alley, and the traffic was thickening on the street at the end.

Royle peered at the time. 6:30 AM. Two and a half hours’ sleep.

It would do.

‘Marcus.’

Sir Peter’s jovial tone was back. Royle wondered if the man had had a little pick-me-up since they’d last spoken. A drop of the hard stuff.

‘First of all,’ said Sir Peter, ‘that phone you asked me to have traced earlier is no longer detectable.’

Royle had expected as much. The Colby woman would have destroyed it.

‘The other thing?’ he asked.

‘Ah yes. Been a bit round the houses there, I have. Ruffled a few feathers. Had to call in some favors of my own.’

Get to the bloody point, you old fool
, thought Royle.

‘That picture you sent me really was appalling quality. Not the artwork, but the photo itself. Couldn’t you have found something better?’

Royle said nothing, counting slowly backwards from a hundred.

Sir Peter said, ‘Nevertheless, my contacts in the US Department of Defense have been most helpful, if grudgingly so. They’ve narrowed the field down to just over three hundred possibilities. You should receive the file any moment now.’

‘Thanks,’ said Venn. ‘I’ll have one more request later.’

A few seconds later an email arrived on his phone with a large file attachment. He opened it, and began rapidly to scroll through the mug shots.

Some of the matches to the drawing he’d done were better than others. Royle assumed the man was military, or ex-military. He estimated his age as around thirty-five, but he’d asked Sir Peter to allow a margin of ten years either way. Similarly, he’d specified a height range of five feet ten to six feet four, and a weight of between 180 and 230 pounds.

Royle had viewed and discounted almost 100 faces when one of them snagged his attention. He thumbed back a face or two.

There. That was the man. He was certain of it.

He dialed.

‘Sir Peter,’ he said. ‘I’ve found the man I want.’

‘Have you? Splendid.’

‘Now I have one more favor to ask.’

At the other end, the man groaned.

It took longer this time. Royle used the delay to eat breakfast, then found a department store that opened early. There, he bought a new set of clothes – though he kept his favorite shoes on – and a few simple items in a drugstore.

In the restroom of the department store, he dyed his hair so that it looked grayer. Did a few things with some foundation and other makeup to make his face look thinner. Put on a new pair of eyeglasses with plain plastic lenses, which completely altered the shape of his face.

Simple measures, but they would suffice.

At 10:30 his phone finally rang. He was sitting on a bench in Gramercy Park, feeding the pigeons.

Sir Peter had pulled strings at the Pentagon and with the NSA again. This was the last time. He’d called in all his favors, and hoped Marcus appreciated it.

By the time Royle hung up, he had a name. Joseph Venn. He had the man’s history: former Marine and Chicago police detective lieutenant, now private eye.

Most important of all, he had Venn’s cell phone number, and a real-time link to his location.

Once again he watched the small, pulsing beacon on the screen of his phone.

Our third encounter
, he told Venn silently.
And it will be the final one, my friend.

––––––––

O
nce again, Venn and Beth found themselves in a greasy spoon. This time they didn’t order anything to eat. Just caffeine, and lots of it.

They were somewhere near the Port Authority Terminal. Venn had bought them each a hoodie from a street vendor, and they sat with the hoods pulled up, hunched over the table like a couple of junkies discussing where their next score was likely to come from.

Venn thought that Beth looked in a bad way. It wasn’t just the red-rimmed eyes and sallow skin from lack of sleep. The fight seemed to be draining out of her.

He couldn’t afford to let her give in to despair. Not now.

‘So let’s get this straight,’ he said. ‘Because soon we need to get moving.’

She nodded, rubbing her eyes with her fingertips.

‘Okay.’ She cleared her throat, as if about to present a patient’s clinical findings to her superior. ‘There were twelve of us in the C-77 trial. This was ten years ago. I was nineteen, a premed student. Most of us were students, but not all.’

‘Professor Lomax was conducting the study?’

‘Yes. That’s how I first got to know him. I signed up for the trial after seeing an advertisement in the local student paper. Afterward, I kept in touch with the Prof all through med school. We started doing research together a couple of years ago, while I was an intern.’

‘And the twelve of you, the twelve volunteers... you all took this C-77?’

‘Yes. There was no placebo arm yet. It really was a preliminary study. If we’d had no side effects, there’d have been a bigger study with a control group, taking a placebo. A dummy pill. But it never got to that stage. We all came down with serious vomiting after just a couple of doses. The study was aborted after four weeks.’

‘And you met the other volunteers?’ Venn prompted. Beth had already given him a jumbled version of the story but he wanted to get it clear. To get her thought patterns back on the straight and narrow, as much as anything.

‘Yes. I can’t remember all of them. But there was a kid around my age. Alvin, Aaron, something like that. A student friend of mine named Luisa Perez. A guy a few years older than us, Larry. Lawrence B. Siddon.

‘Yesterday I read in the
New York Times
that Larry Siddon had been killed after apparently falling onto a subway line in Queens. I knew he sounded familiar but I couldn’t quite place him. A short while earlier I’d learned that Luisa, my friend, had died suddenly. She was on the oncology ward. She had cancer, but it wasn’t a life-threatening kind. There was no reason an otherwise healthy woman in her twenties should die suddenly like that.

‘Two deaths, of young or youngish people, in a short space of time. Both of them connected through this clinical trial they took part in a decade ago. And now somebody’s trying to kill me. And I took part in the trial as well. That’s got to be the link.’

Venn thought about it. ‘These papers, these journal articles. They all suggest a connection between this C-77 agent and cancer?’

‘Yes. The ones I can read, anyhow.’ Her voice faltered a little. Venn understood why.

‘Then it’s a coverup,’ he said. ‘Somebody’s trying to hide evidence of the cancer link. By killing all the subjects who took the drug a decade ago, and who either have cancer now or might develop it.’

Beth ran a hand through her hair. ‘There’s just no way of warning the others, if they’re still alive,’ she said, her tone shot through with despair. ‘I can’t remember their names. Many of them probably aren’t even in New York any more.’

Venn said, as gently as he could: ‘What do these medical papers say? How strong’s the link with cancer? And what kind of cancer is it?’

‘That’s the problem,’ said Beth. ‘All of the ones I’ve skimmed through point to an association between the agent and carcinogenic – that’s cancer-causing – effects, which is greater than would be expected by chance alone. It doesn’t prove anything. To do that, you’d need much bigger numbers and a properly designed study. These are all small data sets, from different countries where C-77 has been trialed. As far as I know, nobody’s made the connection between all of these studies yet. The scientific world lost interest in C-77 when it didn’t get out of the starting blocks, and it’s only come back into vogue now with the development of Zylurin.

‘As to what type of cancer... it looks like mainly hematological varieties. Leukemias, lymphomas. That’s what my friend Luisa had. Leukemia. A potentially manageable one. But some of the research subjects in these reports have developed nastier, more aggressive kinds.’

She fell silent, avoiding Venn’s gaze.

Quietly, he said: ‘Like you pointed out, the connection’s not proven. There’s no certainty that you’ve... that you’re going to get...’

She looked up. He could see the struggle in her face, the battle not to break down in tears. ‘It’s crazy, though, isn’t it? Worrying that I might get cancer when there’s a very real chance I’ll be killed by a bullet in the next few hours.’