The Silent Sleep of the Dying (Eisenmenger-Flemming Forensic Mysteries) (33 page)

"Now, cells are at their most vulnerable to mistakes when they're dividing. The consequence of that is that this little subpopulation becomes more likely to acquire yet more genetic abnormalities. If mistakes contribute to the growth advantage, they will persist. This creates a positive feedback cycle of error that results in a cancer."

He had stopped eating and she waved her fork at him to remind him. He stuffed in some more, then continued, "The sixteen genes in that virus are sixteen of the most fundamental, and therefore the most dangerous, oncogenes."

"So they created a cancer-causing virus? Put the sixteen genes into a cell and sit back and wait for a cancer."

"They did more than that. I don't understand half of it — I suspect we never will — but they overcame several major problems with the process. For a start off, if you put sixteen oncogenes into a cell — even if you put them directly into the genetic material of the cell, as a retrovirus can do — their expression will be low and erratic. Somehow they made the process fantastically more efficient. I guess, but I don't know, that a lot of the unknown sequences are redesigned promoters and enhancers — they're things that seem to accelerate gene expression.

"Then they had the problem of what to do about antioncogenes."

"What are they?"

"Cancer is not just a process of things going wrong. There are also mechanisms that act in the cell to put things right. Thus there are genes that code for proteins that repair other, damaged genes. There are also genes that act as 'cellular policemen.' If a cell goes badly wrong, they force the cell to commit suicide.

"But think about it. If for some reason those genes don't do their job, that will tend to lead to cancer as well. Those genes are the anti-oncogenes because their absence or lack of function also tends to lead to cancer.

"Ideally, if you're designing a cancer-causing virus, you want some way to get rid of the anti-oncogenes."

"You think they managed it?"

"They had a tutor from nature. Human Papilloma Viruses — HPVs — cause lots of trouble for humans, from warts to cancer. The ones that cause cancer do so by mopping up anti-oncogenes with their own protein 'sponge'. I suspect that Proteus virus has a similar mechanism."

She thought the food palatable but the more he spoke, the less flavour she noticed. Even the wine was losing its bouquet. "Why?" she asked. "Why do it?"

"I don't know. I can guess but unless we can find someone else from the laboratory, it will remain guesswork."

She knew his guesswork. "Tell me, anyway."

He put his knife and fork down. "Models Development' is an odd title but a model, in the medical sense, is a system that mimics a disease process. Thus you might take a mouse egg, knock out both copies of, say, the retinoblastoma gene, let the mouse develop and you have an organism that you know will get a malignant tumour of the eye. That's your model; you can use it to examine the disease, examine possible therapies, and so on.

"I wonder if the aim of the work was the development of a cancer model. Perhaps transfecting cell lines to make new variants. Apparently Millicent Sweet was working on targeted mutagenesis; I wonder if it was her job to fine-tune the thing. Make it do exactly what it was supposed to do."

"You'll have to explain targeted mutagenesis."

"A not-unclever technique whereby you alter the coding sequence of the DNA in exactly the way you want. Using computer modelling you can predict what changes you need to make to produce the effect you desire. Theoretically, you can design your own genes, thus design your own proteins. I suspect that's why a lot of the sequences aren't recognizable from the database; poor Millie put the finishing polish on the means of her own execution."

"So it got out, during the fire, and what? What exactly do you think happened?"

He had resumed eating, still unheeding of anything other than the thoughts in his head. "It was a virus. As I said, viruses get into cells. Actually it's very difficult to get DNA into cells by other means. So they used a virus, just adding to and subtly altering its genetic information. Sixteen genes that were guaranteed to turn a cell to cancer. When it escaped — presumably because a vial broke, or a containment hood was breached — it would have been as an aerosol, ready to be breathed in."

"And Millie Sweet breathed it in."

"Millie Sweet, and maybe Robin Turner. When he died, he was just developing cancer too, don't forget."

"But they breathed it in two years ago. I don't understand why they didn't get cancer earlier."

"I wondered that. The answer, I think, lies in a short DNA sequence that Belinda found. A trigger. A switch, if you like, that turns on the oncogenes. Until the switch is flicked, the virus is inert, just sitting there, in every cell of the body."

"And the switch? What activates it?"

"A temperature of forty Celsius."

"What's the point of that?"

"It's a common trick. It enables you to control exactly the start of the experiment. In this case, though, it was a trigger being squeezed. Millie got the flu, and a week later she was dead, turned, if you like, into the perfect biological model of cancer. Ironic, really."

"So this whole business has been to cover up the accident?"

He nodded, then finished eating and seemed surprised that there was no more food. Certainly the tone of his voice when he said, "That was really rather good," suggested a man who had not been paying attention.

*

Luke's "late shift" was over and he was gone, back to his family. Beverley hated these times, moments when the advantages of the single life were exhausted, when there was only her, and the shame and dread. In the darkness of the post-coital night, there were too many memories, too few hopes; a time when wishes were worthless while regrets abounded. Insomnia caught her heart with its cold hands and didn't even need to squeeze, for the chill was enough, the languor of the blackness.

They were getting worse, these bouts of depression. Worse since the fiasco of Nikki Exner, when her ascendancy had been abruptly terminated. Not surprising, she reckoned, for without achievement she was nothing. Her whole existence was predicated on processing life — hers, her colleagues, her enemies — and converting it into the substrate of her success. No success, no life. A simple equation, like e=mc2, but just as powerful, just as profound, just as inescapable.

She sat up in bed, feeling sore where Luke had played a little roughly with her. Still, he was a good boy; responded well to a warning squeeze of the balls. She put on the light by the bed, staring at herself in the mirror on the wall opposite.
What
are
you
going
to
do
with
your
life
now
?

It wasn't a question she wanted to answer, certainly not at three in the morning, but whoever was doing the asking wasn't interested in the time of day. Time was running away from her. When she had been assigned to Lambert's team, she had understood that it was a penance; a punishment for past misdemeanours, maybe a chance to start again.

The problem was that Lambert had made it clear that he had a different view of the matter. He hadn't wanted her, had decided that she was irredeemably bad, and wasn't about to expend any effort trying to improve her. Probably any effort he did choose to expend in her direction would be purely to stick the proverbial into her crotch.

Beverley was not naive. She had come across people like Lambert on several occasions in her career, but usually there had been more equality of weapons. She had possessed not only ability but also the reputation for ability. Once those had gone, she was severely wounded.

And of course, there had always been the possibility of being "amenable" …

Now not only was she without repute, she was without the opportunities to shine, and nobody was asking for any "amenability."

Crap
! She rejected the word at once.
Say
what
you
mean
,
girl
. Willingness to have sex.

There was a time when she would not have felt the need to use such a euphemism, when she would not have felt a seep of sadness at the more accurate expression. Afraid that she was going to cry, she grabbed a tissue and blew her nose as if the act would destroy the tears. She got up, put on a gown and went to find some whisky. When she had found it — and with it lost her self-pity — she sat in the living room and thought through what to do.

Lambert was looking to kill her off and her only chance was to go to the extreme; find out what was going on with

Pel-Ebstein. Three, maybe four, deaths in a month were too many for chance, even if this news had come from a vacuum. And such deaths! Beverley had seen many exits from the world, seen the cruelty, the inventiveness, the peculiarity and the ever-present stupidity of the myriad ways that people died, and there was something about these that seemed to her to be far from ordinary The details that Luke had recovered concerning the others who had worked in that ill-fated laboratory were scanty but they intrigued; no doubt about that — they intrigued.

No bodies, for a start. One case in which the poor girl had been blown to pieces by a gas explosion, another in which a young man had just vanished from a Parisian cafe, leaving his girlfriend wondering where he was. In this last case the French gendarmerie, too, had concluded that he was dead, the witness statements suggesting some form of kidnap attempt.

And then there were the dates. Separated by a few days, as if someone had been moving from one to the other. And Carlos Arias-Stella had vanished, his girlfriend believing him to have left her, but Beverley wondered about more sinister possibilities.

What, then, about Stein? Disappeared some two years ago — nothing heard or seen from him since. Was that significant? Was he dead? Was he very much alive and connected with all this?

The recent incidents had happened in different countries and taken individually there was no reason to suspect some form of conspiracy; only if you knew to look for a pattern did you see it. Her experience and training told her that the next steps were to investigate these deaths from the point of view of a potential organized assassination list, at the same time initiating a search for Carlos and Stein. Without Lambert, though, she didn't have the resources to do the former; with Lambert she wouldn't be allowed to do the latter. Lambert would do one of two things — either he would take what she knew and use it, excising her completely from the investigation and any subsequent praise, or he would simply take what she gave him, forget it and use her misdemeanours to make sure that she was permanently excluded from promotion.

And if she neglected to mention anything to him?

Continue.

That was easy. One word, three syllables, eight letters. Like a Home Office directive it said what to do, but not how, precisely, to do it. Strategy without tactics was like asking a deaf man to review the Proms.

It was a huge gamble.

Her name was already being mentioned. Lambert would soon learn something of what was going on, either unofficially or officially, and when he did her time would run out. If she proceeded without him then at the end she would have to have something beyond dispute, something that would justify her insubordination, her decision to cut out her superior.

She could, of course, proceed to locate Arias-Stella, hoping that he was both alive and able to provide all the answers, but could she risk it? She still didn't have the faintest idea what was happening around her, except that people were dying. Some of them were dying in odd (but apparently natural) ways, some of them were dying in obviously unnatural ways. She did not know how it was all connected, but connected it was.

She looked at herself in the mirror, relieved to see a look of determination back on her face, surprised as she witnessed a smile evolve, almost as if she were watching a stranger, as if she were a voyeur.

The idea seemed to come to her after she saw herself smile, a moment of dislocating strangeness, an eerily significant and pivotal event.

In such a moment as this, she now realized, she needed allies.

*

"Have you heard from Raymond Sweet?"

They were still up, still awake, although the pulse of the night was at its slowest and weakest. They half lay, half sat on the sofa together, his head on her shoulder, her eyes closed in sleepiness, his eyes still open, still bright. He couldn't stop thinking, stop wondering. He was missing something, he knew.

"No. I'll ring him in the morning," she replied dozily.

He sipped some more wine. "Why," he asked suddenly. "Why are they so scared?"

"Who?"

"PEP."

She still had eyes that were locked away behind closed lids. "Because they don't want anyone to find out. Maybe the others involved in the accident may also be contaminated, in which case their liability is potentially enormous."

He considered this. "No," he decided. "It doesn't work. Surely they have no liability if it really was an accident."

"Not necessarily."

"So … " He lapsed into contemplation.