Dead End (30 page)

‘There must be more … different … independent experiments,' blustered Benn, all truculence gone.

‘Production, distribution, has got to be stopped right away,' insisted Parnell. ‘I extended my tests, separately upon liulousine, beneuflous and rifofludine. By themselves they don't cause any HPRT increase. There has to be some chemical effect when they're combined in the cocktail, or maybe with the colouring agents, although I doubt the colorants contributed.' Parnell hesitated, unsure if he'd left anything unsaid. Quickly he added: ‘I've obviously kept all the tests, all the cultures, for you both to examine.'

‘Why did you do this?' asked the virtually silent Newton, still quiet-voiced. ‘You – your unit – had been given a specific assignment.'

Parnell felt the rising anger but suppressed it, having hoped the absurd demand wouldn't be made but, deep within himself, believing himself adjusted now to Dubette thinking and Dubette rationalizing, he was not truly surprised that Newton had asked it. Tightly, careless of their inferring contempt or disgust in his tone, Parnell said: ‘Which we have been working upon, uninterrupted, except for two or three hours today. And that interruption was upon my very definite instructions, to confirm my initial personal findings. I worked here on Saturday. Russell had made the samples available to me after our conversation, Dwight, about France. I did the tests on impulse, because the samples were there, right in front of me. You really want to talk about why I did it – my having just told you there was no positive reason – when I've just also told you what Dubette are manufacturing in France? And what the result of that manufacture will be?' He didn't feel like the explaining schoolboy any longer. Instead he very much felt himself the castigating schoolmaster addressing careless, culpably inattentive students. They even looked like caught-out, culpable, inattentive students, no longer unchangeable senior pharmaceutical executives. It didn't give Parnell any satisfaction.

Newton said: ‘It's late in France. Gone midnight.'

‘Wake people up,' insisted Parnell.

‘I think …' began Newton, but stopped.

‘What?' demanded Parnell.

‘I should talk to New York,' finished the skeletally thin research vice president.

‘You do whatever needs to be done. If the French production isn't stopped it will destroy Dubette as an international pharmaceutical conglomerate.'

‘Yes,' accepted Newton, dully.

Just as dully, practically to himself, Benn said: ‘We cleared everything as safe.'

Caught by a sudden uncertainty, Parnell said: ‘Did I have everything? Or was there more?'

‘More,' admitted Benn, unhesitatingly. ‘Some children's decongestants. Some linctuses.'

‘It's all got to be stopped. Withdrawn,' demanded Parnell, frustrated by their apparent failure to understand the urgency.

‘Yes,' said Newton again.

The other two men were virtually shell-shocked, Parnell decided. Careless now of patronizing or challenging or even demanding, he said: ‘It will be done, won't it? You will speak to New York or Paris or whoever you need to warn? Tonight?'

Newton made a physical effort to recover, straightening in his chair, although yet again all he managed to say was, ‘Yes.'

‘Do you want me to be part of any link-up, technically to explain what's happened – and the effect of it?' asked Parnell.

‘No,' refused Newton, recovering further. ‘It's scarcely technical.'

‘I think my unit should examine all that we haven't so far tested of what France was going to distribute,' persisted Parnell, a tiny, irritating sand grit of doubt settling in his mind. He looked once more directly at Russell Benn. ‘And that you should start again, from the beginning.'

‘You've made your point well enough,' bristled the man, emerging from his lethargy. ‘You want me to tell you we fucked up? OK, we fucked up! Satisfied?'

‘I will be when I'm sure nothing's being distributed throughout Africa. Or that anything that has is being withdrawn and destroyed,' said Parnell. ‘I'm not scoring points, looking for admissions of mistakes. I'm trying to stop a potential disaster.'

‘I accept that. And thank you,' said Newton.

‘What about the cultures?' asked Parnell. ‘Do you want to examine them now?'

‘I'm prepared to take your word for the moment,' said the vice president. ‘The calls I've got to make are more important.'

Only Beverley Jackson was in the pharmacogenomics unit when Parnell returned. She said: ‘By yourself?'

‘Dwight has calls to make.'

‘We thought they'd want to see for themselves – that it would be more discreet if as few as possible were around.'

‘It is eight o'clock,' Parnell pointed out. He calculated that it would be two a.m. in Paris.

‘From the way you talked on Saturday, you're an authority on the bars of Georgetown. You fancy buying a girl a drink on her way home?'

‘Sure,' accepted Parnell, surprised as well as pleased.

‘I'll follow you.'

It meant he didn't have to worry about lights in his rear-view mirror, Parnell supposed, as he led the way back into the city. One thought prompted another. Apart from the first two or three days after having his lawyer's warning confirmed by the FBI, Parnell had increasingly found it difficult completely to believe he was in any physical danger, the more so as the days passed, although he still did what he considered to be taking care. But the FBI
had
been serious. So, too, had Beverley's ex-husband. From which it was logical that anyone was exposed by association with him. He took his normal route home, crossing at the Key Bridge, but didn't find any convenient parking in Georgetown itself, so he continued on to his reserved slot at Washington Square. There was a second space for Beverley practically outside the apartment.

He held her door open for her and said: ‘I hope you don't mind the walk.'

‘It hardly counts as a walk.'

She took his arm almost automatically as they went back into Georgetown. He chose the bar he'd found on his first few days in the city. The student he'd got to know wasn't there any longer. Beverley asked for beer and he had the same.

She said at once: ‘I didn't wait on at work accidentally. I'm the elected spokesperson.'

To say what?'

‘To ask what,' she corrected. ‘Why'd you test that particular batch of stuff, rather than anything else?'

The question brought Parnell's mind back to his thoughts about inherent danger on the way in from McLean. ‘I was thinking, on the way here. Rebecca was murdered. The Bureau and Barry both think I could be targeted, too.'

‘Why?'

Parnell humped his shoulders. ‘No one's worked out yet why Rebecca was killed. Or why anyone would want to kill me. But if I'm at risk, then so must be anyone who's with me.'

‘Me, you mean!' She sounded surprised.

‘You're with me.'

She sniggered an uncertain laugh and actually looked around the crowded bar. ‘It's not easy to take that on board.'

Parnell said: ‘That's what I did, the first time I was warned – actually looked around me as if expecting to see someone coming at me.'

‘Has anyone? Come at you, I mean?'

‘No.'

‘Maybe there was something …?' Beverley stopped, looking awkwardly into her drink.

‘I think that's a big part of the investigation, trying to find out if there was anything in Rebecca's past,' guessed Parnell. He definitely had to use the excuse of getting his own car back to talk to Howard Dingley or David Benton.

‘I'm sorry … I wasn't …' Beverley stumbled.

‘It's OK.'

‘It seems unreal … talking about murder and the possibility of someone trying to murder you. Talking of
terrorism
! All unreal. I don't think I ever believed it … properly took it in … when Barry used to talk about cases … killings.'

‘I thought it was right I should tell you.'

‘Thank you.' She sniggered again. ‘This seems unreal as well, doesn't it – you warning me I might get hit by a bullet meant for you?'

‘They go in for car accidents,' corrected Parnell.

‘You didn't answer my question, about testing those French formulae improvements. It was something to do with Rebecca, wasn't it?'

‘She was curious about it, that's all.'

‘With good reason.'

Parnell shook his head. ‘Not because she thought there was anything wrong with them. They went outwith the normal delivery system.'

‘Hardly sufficient to become curious.'

‘It doesn't seem to be, not now,' accepted Parnell. ‘It did to her.'

‘What did you mean about everything coming down to money?'

That had been a stupid, unthinking remark, acknowledged Parnell. ‘I don't want you – any of you – to get mixed up in this, any more than you already have been. I'm sorry now that I asked you all in the first place. It had to be done in a hurry, for the confirmation I needed to get it stopped.'

‘To get what stopped?'

‘The production and distribution.'

‘Distribution where?'

‘Stop it, Beverley.'

‘We – the unit –
are
involved.'

‘No more.'

‘Did Dwight Newton and Russell Benn sign it all off as being safe?'

Parnell refused to reply. She was back in her last-word mode, he decided.

‘You know what I find strange?' she continued, undeterred. ‘If I was head of an entire division, a vice president, or the research director, and a guy told me that something I'd cleared as safe could – would – kill people for whom it was prescribed, the first thing I'd do would be to demand it be proven to me under proper laboratory conditions.'

‘It was more important to put a stop on it – on the production and marketing.'

‘I'd have still wanted proof before I did anything.'

‘I offered them the opportunity. They didn't take it. My priority was getting it halted.'

‘The other guys were uneasy about what happened today.'

‘I gave them – and you – my word it won't ever be that way again. And it won't.'

She sipped her beer in silence for several moments. ‘It's a pretty impressive success for the department, isn't it?'

‘I suppose it is.' It was the first time he'd thought of it being that.

‘What did Newton say?'

‘They were both numbed. But he did thank me.'

‘They weren't professional – cut corners,' declared the woman. ‘They should be called to account for that.'

‘Not everything was made available to us. I've asked that it should be.'

‘You going to go over their heads, complain to New York?'

‘I hadn't thought of doing that,' admitted Parnell. ‘That's what Newton said he had to do, talk to New York.'

‘Let's hope he does it.'

‘He can't avoid it!' exclaimed Parnell.

‘You'd be surprised what someone will do to keep five hundred thousand a year and stock options.'

‘He can't avoid it,' insisted Parnell, although another sand speck of doubt settled in his mind.

‘It's late,' Beverley suddenly announced.

‘We should eat,' accepted Parnell. Giorgio's restaurant was less than a hundred yards up Wisconsin Avenue. It was unthinkable that he should go there with another woman, totally innocent and uninvolved though they were.

‘I've got something ready at home,' said Beverley.

Parnell later decided that it was probably the thought of Giorgio's trattoria and the celebration he'd planned with Rebecca there that prompted his response. ‘You mind if I drive home with you? In your car, I mean?'

Beverley looked steadily at him, understanding immediately. ‘You are taking it seriously, aren't you?'

‘If I'd been with Rebecca that night, she would probably still be alive.'

‘Or you'd both be dead.'

‘I prefer it my way.'

Beverley took his arm again on their way back to Washington Square but Parnell could feel a stiffness. Beverley's apartment was off Dupont and they drove there in silence. As she parked she said: ‘I didn't like that.'

‘I'm sorry. I'm being overreactive.' He made no attempt to get out of the car.

‘There's enough for two,' said Beverley. ‘I was going to butterfly it anyway.'

It was, coincidentally, rib-eye steak, large enough easily to be shared between the two of them. There was salad and a Napa Valley red but not a lot of conversation.

As he helped her clear away, Parnell said: ‘I'm sorry if I frightened you.'

‘It's OK,' said Beverley, in a voice indicating that it wasn't.

‘We've only been out together twice,' said Parnell, trying to lift the mood. ‘Maybe we should avoid each other from now on.'

Beverley held him for several moments with one of her direct looks. ‘Maybe,' she said, in the same voice as before.

‘I'm at dinner, with guests,' complained Edward C. Grant.

‘This can't wait,' insisted Dwight Newton. He could hear people in the background.

‘What?'

Newton told him. Unsettled by the length of the silence from the other end, Newton said: ‘You still there?'

‘I'm going into the study. Wait.' The line went dead and then picked up again, without any background noise. Grant said:‘You told me it was safe, Dwight. You said you and Benn had run all the checks and that it was safe.'

‘I double-checked Russell's tests,' tried Newton.

‘But you didn't, did you?'

‘He didn't do this test.'

‘Why didn't you? You take two weeks and tell me everything's kosher, Parnell takes two days and discovers it's fucking fatal!'