The Rhesus Chart (13 page)

“I’m not in,” she snaps. “I’m running late for a meeting.”

I do a double take. “Are you Dr. Wills?”

“Yes, and I’m running late.” She begins to walk away. “If it’s about the facilities audit it’ll have to wait—”

I haul out my warrant card. “I’m not from admin.”

Wills turns back towards me. “Hey, I’m supposed to be meeting you in room 2006. What are you doing
here
?”

“Nobody told me about a meeting room. Where’s room 2006?”

“Oh for—” She stops. “Hmm.” She has a way of tilting her head and narrowing her eyes as she assimilates new information that reminds me of Mo. The straw-blonde hair and slightly watery eyes behind thick lenses are very different, though. “Well, as you’re here, would you rather use my office?”

I shrug. “If it’s private.” I put the warrant card away. “As I said, nobody mentioned a meeting room.”

“Mack, our departmental receptionist, said he’d sorted it out.”

“Well, it never got passed on to my end.” Yet another detail that fell through the cracks. “Your office isn’t shared, is it?”

“Yes, but Barry’s teaching today.” She eyes me cautiously. “Why?”

“What I want to talk about isn’t for public consumption, I’m afraid.” I shrug self-effacingly, trying to take the sting out of my brusque approach. “I need to pick your brain on the subject of a delicate matter.”

Dr. Wills’s office is surprisingly spacious. It’s what we jokingly refer to as an Ark Special in the Laundry: it’s actually sized for two people, with two desks, two workstations, two of everything. I take the visitor’s seat across from her—one that is clearly accustomed to
regular
visitors, for it is free of clutter and situated in a clear patch of floor. She shuts the door behind us: I appreciate the gesture. “What can I do for the Laundry today?” she asks.

I take a deep breath. “You’ve worked with us before, I gather. On K syndrome.”

“Krantzberg-Gödel Spongiform Encephalopathy. Yes?” She waits for me to nod.

“That’s it. Um. Tell me, for epidemiological purposes, speaking hypothetically”—I’m making a hash of this; I force myself to get a grip—“suppose there was a significant outbreak of K syndrome in the UK, am I right in thinking that the first thing we’d know about it would be a spike in cases of CJD being diagnosed by post-mortem examination?”

“If there was a—” Her expression could not be more eloquent if I’d asked her how we’d know if there was a minor outbreak of the Black Death: a mixture of pungent disbelief, the barnyard stench of second-guessery, and a high note of
oh shit
all colliding simultaneously in the back of her mind. It’s enough to freeze anyone’s tongue, so I give her a few seconds before I grin and nod, trying to look like an idiot student in need of tuition. “Please tell me you’re joking? No? Oh
fuck
.” She slumps back in her chair. “Hang on.” She straightens up again as second, and then third, thoughts line up in a disorderly queue. “This isn’t a joke, is it?”

“I sincerely hope not. I don’t want to waste your time or mine. Look, I know you’d be aware of actual referrals for treatment, patients with active disease and a diagnosis, right?”

“Yes, that’s exactly right! So there can’t be an epidemic without us knowing about it, because—” She stops dead.

“Because it’s a progressive disease, and you’d be seeing them as referrals from wherever they were diagnosed?”

“Yes.” She frowns, perplexed. “Your scenario doesn’t make sense, I’m afraid.”

“Okay. Let me try again. If coroners around the country began recording spongiform lesions in the brains of patients who had died suddenly in the past month, how long would it take you to hear about it?”

“The past
month
?” She shakes her head. “Then it can’t be K syndrome, Mr. Howard. We get regular updates from the NHS epidemiological tracking database, part of the Secondary Usage Service. K syndrome is rather distinctive. Your typical patient exhibits the symptoms of nvCJD; it’s a strikingly early onset dementia with non-standard signs and presentation, and it’s progressive. More to the point, the patients are also distinctive: mathematicians, philosophers, occultists. Also, they test negative for PrP variants. What you’re talking about is something else—diagnosed only after death, which means the patients went downhill much too rapidly for K syndrome or any prion disease we know about. Do you have any more information about them?”

I finally get to open my briefcase. “This is the output of a query I ran on data extracted from the SUS data warehouse.” I shove the screen shot I took of the geographical scatter plot across her desk. “Twelve cases were diagnosed at post-mortem, all in the past four weeks. The factor they’ve got in common—at least, what I’ve established so far—is that they all worked for an office cleaning agency in Tower Hamlets. I don’t have the individual patient records, but I suspect the shit is going to hit the fan really soon, and I’d like to have some answers to send up the line.” I shove the printout of the spreadsheet summary at her: ages, postcodes, other basic anonymized information.

Her eyes flicker across the papers. “This is—I—”

“It’s crazy, isn’t it?” I suggest.

“No! But it’s something new. Hmm. How did you find this?”

I hesitate for a couple of seconds. “I don’t think I can tell you,” I finally say. “Not without prior authorization.”

“Well, if it’s not Krantzberg-Gödel syndrome that makes it even
worse
.” She shakes her head in unconscious distress. “Mr. Howard, I’m going to have to go and do some digging in order to de-anonymize these patients and confirm that what you’ve found actually exists. Data warehouses tend to accumulate rubbish in the corners . . . I can’t just go pulling these records without justification: there are issues of medical confidentiality here, and respect for the relatives, and so on. On the other hand, I can’t write this off either. Um.” She stares at me until I make eye contact. “I may need some arms discreetly twisted, and unlike you, I don’t have one of those special badges.”

I make a careful judgment call and decide to exceed my lawful authority. Just this once, in order to facilitate the speedy investigation of a major threat—that’s what I’ll tell the Auditors if they haul me onto the carpet. Doing it by the book, I should go and round up a committee or a herd of managers to agree with me first—diffusion of responsibility, it’s called—but I honestly don’t think there’s time for that right now. Thirty thousand deaths a year corresponds to seven hundred a week. (Just sitting on it for the extra day it’d take to convince a committee could result in . . . let’s not go there.) “Whose authorization do you need?” I ask.

“Professor Everett can sign off on the paperwork to pull the patient records, but I’ll need to persuade him in turn that the Department of Health are happy about this.” She bites her lip. “K syndrome is a special case, of course, but this, this is . . .”

“This is
suspected
K syndrome, or a K syndrome-related condition of, um, what’s the right medical term?”

“Unknown etiology. Yes, that should do it. I need authorization to access medical records of deceased patients suffering from a spongiform encephalopathy of unknown etiology that is possibly associated with K syndrome. In writing. Preferably signed in blood. Can you get me that?” She does the tilt-shift thing again, like she’s trying to view me as a miniature diorama.

“Yes. I’ll email you a memo as soon as I get back to my office. Is there anything else?”

“Yes.” She stands. “Better pray to whatever nameless horrors you believe in that you’re wrong, Mr. Howard. If twelve people died of a new sudden-onset form of K syndrome in London in the last month, then you’d better hope it was just a group of cultists who got lucky. Because if it wasn’t, we’re in worse trouble than you can possibly imagine.”

THE THING ABOUT OSCAR MENENDEZ, IN MHARI’S OPINION, IS
that he is intelligent, charming, personable, manipulative, and
utterly
ruthless. He is not a normal workplace sociopath: he is that much more dangerous phenomenon, a not-quite-neurotypical person who has worked among the regular sociopaths for so long that he can see things from their point of view and manipulate them; a dolphin among sharks. Sociopaths aren’t good at impulse control or deferred gratification. Oscar works out what they want, dangles it in front of them like a shiny bauble in front of a kitten, and ensures that the shortest route from predator to prize takes them right where he wants them to go. Which is why the Bank gave him, if not carte blanche, then at least a clean sheet and a low seven-digit budget with which to establish the Scrum. It has been a pleasure to work with him, and to help steer the Scrum around the worst obstacles in its path. And now she’s going to accompany him to a meeting with their overseers where he is going to try and talk them into giving the Scrum a slightly larger pot to play with.

He’s assigned her the job of covering the exits, lest any of the cattle try to flee.

It has been an
interesting
month since Alex’s accidental flash of insight and their subsequent week-long scramble to research and define the potentials and pitfalls of their new condition. Mhari has been working eighty-hour weeks, and she’s not alone—not that there’s anyone waiting back home for her since Alan fucked off last year. (Or, if you want to be truthful, since she fired him for being an insufficiently supportive partner.) Oscar is similarly, if not single, then moderately unencumbered: his wife Pippa seems content to play the role of arm-candy on demand, keep their two children out of his hair, and look after the house in return for her annual Mercedes SLC and the Royal Opera House season ticket.

As the managerial side of the Scrum, they’ve barely been out of each other’s presence for the past few weeks as they organized the office move, pushed their people through the planning and early execution stages of what they have come to call the Big Pivot, arranged the tiresome but entirely necessary in-house dental visits for the team, and attended to all the other necessary minutiae of the operation.

And now it’s time for Oscar’s big pitch.

“Good evening, Sam, Steph, Ari, and thank you for making time in your crowded schedule, Sir David.” Oscar rolls into his warm-up while Mhari waits at one side of the table, within easy grabbing distance of the laptop and the projector, playing the glamorous assistant to Oscar’s stage magician. “This isn’t a routine report, you’ll be pleased to hear. Five weeks ago one of our theoreticians made a conceptual breakthrough and I decided to put regular work on hold for a week while we explored its potential to revolutionize our operations. I don’t use that word lightly, and I wouldn’t have pulled my entire team off their normal workload if the value proposition represented by the new paradigm wasn’t extreme, with a payback curve that will reach break-even within a single quarter. However, to continue in this new direction I need to confirm that all stakeholders are fully invested. Basically, gentlemen and lady, I need your consent to pivot the Scrum . . .”

Mhari strokes the remote lighting controller that she holds out of sight behind her back. She’s been dimming the meeting room lights slowly since the four senior execs arrived, taking her cue from Oscar. She’s got no idea how he managed to winkle Sir David out of his oak-paneled penthouse nest, but he’s a prize—the Bank’s director of quantitative trading. The others are all lower-level executives, from the head of the London Stock Exchange IT group to the Lord (or rather, Lady) High Executioner of the regulatory compliance team: but they’re all critically important, because any one of them can spike Oscar’s attempt to change his team’s operation remit if they withhold their consent. Furthermore they’re already beginning to look uneasy at what Oscar is telling them.

“. . . We will be able to anticipate major trading strategy shifts among the quant-determined strategies of our rival institutions. This is medium-term stuff—a one to ten day lead—but with this fantastic new algorithmic approach we should be able to consistently anticipate the commodities markets. Ironically, the worst drawback is that it’s so
good
it’ll look eerily like front-running to an outsider—and we don’t want to lay ourselves open to accusations of malfeasance. So we intend to bulletproof ourselves from a regulatory perspective before we go any further, which is why I invited you all here today—”

What Oscar and Mhari have in mind is not front-running. Front-running is the practice of executing your own trades on the basis of information about pending trades your clients have told you to perform on their behalf—a form of insider trading. But it’s not insider trading if you gaze into the eyes of your opposite number from a rival brokerage or investment bank over an after-work cocktail, calmly
order
them to adopt a specific spread the next day, and then tell them to forget the conversation ever took place. It’s almost certainly illegal, but vampiric mind control is much harder to prove than front-running. For their part, Oscar and Mhari are happy to leave the question of which laws (if any) have been broken to the eventual SFO investigation, because by the time it happens they intend to be over the horizon and far away.

Oscar’s voice is intense but somehow mellow and pleasing to the ear: he’s a hypnotic speaker, and Mhari is pleased to see that his small audience is nodding along with him in perfect harmony.

“I need access to a trading fund with an initial one hundred points of liquidity.” (A point is a million pounds sterling.) “I’ll need to liaise with you, Steph, about setting up appropriate accounting and oversight controls on the new fund, with full record-keeping so that it’s clear that we’re perfectly clean—that we’re genuinely anticipating market movements. Ari, to minimize latency I need to move my group further into the bunker”—the basement levels below the Bank, windowless subterranean vaults full of servers and roaring air conditioning—“and, Sir David, I thought it would be best to keep you in the loop on this because the profits this pivot will generate will show up on the company-wide balance sheet by Q1 next year at the latest, and you’ll want to be fully informed ahead of the next AGM.” Oscar smiles, almost (but not quite) baring his new and very expensive dental work. Mhari runs her tongue around the inside of her upper jaw in unconscious sympathy: it’s still sore and they’re very tender, but at least her teeth won’t raise any awkward questions if she’s seen in public.

“Thank you, Oscar,” says Sir David. “But you haven’t told us exactly what this new breakthrough
is
yet. Would you like to elaborate?”

Sir David is a distinguished-looking gentleman in his mid-sixties, gray-haired and sober-looking—every inch a traditional British bank manager. That’s one of the reasons the board keeps him on, to be wheeled out at press conferences when the unwashed proles need reassuring that everything is fine. Right now he looks, if not alarmed, then at least mildly perplexed. Mhari shivers and fixes her gaze on his collar, avoiding eye contact; also avoiding staring at the blood vessels in his neck, through which surges and hisses the stuff of . . . of . . .

“A fundamental new insight in probability theory,” Oscar says smoothly. “Our existing strategies rely on Bayesian reasoning—which allows us to compute the probability of some event occurring in a given period on the basis of how frequently it has taken place in the past. That’s all very well, but where no prior probabilities can be calculated, we can’t predict future outcomes—or at least that’s the way it’s been in the past. Finding a way of reasoning under conditions of prior uncertainty has been the holy grail in one particular branch of mathematics for decades, like solving Fermat’s last theorem. I’m pleased to say—” He smiles and shrugs. “Well,
that
would be telling.”

Mhari flexes her fingers longingly. Then she startles, infinitesimally aware that one of the other audience members is in the process of noticing her staring, so she smiles, tight-lipped (very glad that English girls are taught not to bare their teeth like Americans: it’s a sign of aggression), and glances around the room, registering that Sir David is gazing at Oscar as if hypnotized, his mouth slack. Oscar is laying the charisma on hard—perhaps too hard.

She intervenes. “We’ve verified the formal proof,” she says smoothly; “that’s what took us a no-holds-barred two-week hiatus in our normal workflow. I’d like to remind you that the Scrum has some of the best pure mathematics PhDs to come out of the Russell Group in the past decade. The lads are a little eccentric but basically sound—naturally they’re a little miffed about not being able to publish and claim their Fields Medal right away, but they put the interests of the organization ahead of their own personal fame, which is why we’re eager to give them the opportunity to earn a bonus that will put the Nobel Prize money to shame.” The latter is strictly irrelevant—there’s no Nobel Prize for mathematics—but she’s not sure her audience have heard of the Fields Medal, and she wants to implant the idea:
seven-digit bonuses all round
.

Oscar nods, his expression pinched and intense, and relaxes his grip on Sir David’s gray matter infinitesimally. Sir David twitches, then shuffles himself upright in his chair. “Capital idea!” he announces. “Yes. If you’d be so good as to forward me a copy of the presentation, along with a memo detailing your requirements, I’ll push it forward. Stephanie, please give Mr. Menendez everything he wants, as a matter of urgency. You, too, Mr. McAndrew: if the Scrum requires hosting in the middle of the LSE interconnect, give it to them. Whatever it takes.” He stands, implicitly bringing the meeting to an end. If smiles were luminous, his beaming approval could power a small solar farm.

The executives stagger out into the corridor, blinking and uncoordinated like excessively well-tailored zombies. “So.” Oscar finally cracks a grin. “How did I do?”

Mhari takes his arm conspiratorially: “You did
brilliantly
.” She swallows. “I thought you were laying it on a bit thick towards the end, which is why I jumped in, but it seems to have worked.”

“Yes. I can barely believe it. It’s not every day I ask for a hundred points on a plate. Much less get it, no questions asked. But I could
feel
them.” He rubs his throat. “I’m really thirsty.”

“Me, too.” She lets go of his arm, intrigued by his carefully controlled non-reaction. “It’s a quarter to six. How about we go for a drink after we shut up shop?”

“I’d like that.” He grins again, this time catching her eye. “I’d like that a lot.”

 • • • 

“DUDE, YOU JUST RENFIELDED OUR REPORTING CHAIN ALL THE
way up to board level? Epic win! Achievement unlocked!”

“Piss off home, Evan,” Mhari says wearily. She’s been working since six in the morning and it’s nearly seven at night. They’ve just moved into the Scrum’s new office on the third subsurface floor of the Bank, and the rough edges still show: the ceiling isn’t finished and a couple of missing floor tiles are surrounded by cones and yellow hazard tape to show where the trolls are still working on the wiring runs by day. There are fresh scars on the walls, and a cloying stench of fresh emulsion paint. But it’s theirs, and it’s
safe
. There are no windows, the doors lock on the inside, and there are other extras that make it a suitable bolt-hole for a nest of vampires. The specially installed fire escape opens directly into the garage, and there’s a shiny black Mercedes van with mirrored windows parked next to the crash door.

Oscar bought it, and Evan promptly dubbed it the Mystery Machine: it’s fueled and boasts features such as a minibar fully stocked with 20ml type “O” Scooby snacks and a couple of (discreetly hidden) sets of false number plates. The keys are in the ignition and the satnav is loaded with routes to a bolt-hole in the country. If a Van Helsing wannabe comes at them through the bank lobby, the Scrum can get clear in under thirty seconds.

“I’ll go home after”—Evan is juggling a set of luminous green furry dice—“sunset, thanks.”

“Ten minutes,” Oscar warns. The office is already semi-empty. Alex has long since sloped away into the deep underground by tube train, Janice is molesting a server somewhere off-site, and the remaining pigs are oinking away happily in the old office upstairs, anticipating another shitfaced evening at a club where discreet activities involving syringes in toilet cubicles will raise no more eyebrows than usual.
*

“I can tell when I’m not wanted,” Evan snarks. He lets the dice fall as they will, then collects his briefcase and heads for the door. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, ’kay?”

“Don’t let the doorknob hit you on the way out,” Oscar mouths silently as he leaves. Mhari glances at him. Oscar shares a guilty expression of complicity with her. “You didn’t hear me think that, did you?”

“Think what?” Their eyes meet: a secret smile is exchanged. “I’m famished. How about you?”