Babel (27 page)

‘Oh, too bad. I thought it’d be right up your street. Can’t you just tell them to take a jump? I mean, if you’re getting out anyway?’

‘I really appreciate it, Tina. I’m sorry, it’s a legal thing. I can’t get out of it.’

Was that really true? She sat for a while after she rang off, her head in her hands, wondering if she was thinking straight.

The case conference was held in a meeting room in the main New Scotland Yard building on Victoria Street. Most of the people there were from Superintendent Russell’s team, with the addition of half a dozen of Brock’s. Russell began with the announcement that a decision had been made at senior level that the Springer/Khadra inquiry would be split between two groups, under his general direction. One, led by Brock, would focus on the murder of Springer, and the other, comprising Russell’s core team, would continue with the case against the skinheads involved in Abu’s murder. Everyone seemed pleased with this decision, especially Russell’s team, whose investigations had revealed an orchestrated campaign of actions by a number of linked right-wing groups culminating in the Khadra murder, and there was optimism that these investigations would trap a number of leading neo-Nazis in conspiracy if not murder charges.

After hearing a detailed summary of these ramifications, illustrated by complicated diagrams prepared by Special and Criminal Intelligence Branches tracing a web of extremist associations in the Greater London area and further afield, Brock presented a summary of the Springer case that seemed very modest in comparison. The outstanding question really, he said, was whether Khadra had acted alone in killing Springer, or whether some wider conspiracy was involved. Had he been compelled or induced or supported in any way? Where had the gun come from, or the money? And was it possible to clarify his motive, or the choice of victim? There was little discussion at the end of this, and Kathy had the impression that, like the media which was now focusing exclusively on the skinhead angle, most of the police were no longer much interested in why Max Springer had died.

When the meeting broke up Brock came over to Kathy and asked if she was free for lunch. She took this to be another little morale-boosting gesture, and said he didn’t need to worry, if he had more important things to do.

‘No, no,’ he waved that aside. ‘This is work, Kathy.’

They walked a couple of blocks down Victoria Street and turned off, coming to an Italian restaurant favoured, Kathy knew, by lawyers from the Crown Prosecution Service. Inside the climate was suddenly hot and crowded and noisy, and they were shown to a table at the back of the room, squeezing between diners most of whom seemed to know Brock, to where a man sat alone, nursing a glass of white wine. They shook hands, and Brock introduced Reggie Grice, a man of dignified bearing, well barbered silver hair and a beautifully cut charcoal grey suit.

‘Reggie’s one of our scientists,’ Brock explained. ‘He used to be a sort of “Q” for MI6, didn’t you, Reggie, brewing untraceable poisons and so on.’

Reggie screwed up his nose with distaste. ‘
Please
, Brock. You know I hate to dwell in the past.’ He cast an imperious gaze across the restaurant. ‘Why have I never been here before? It seems rather jolly. They can’t be coppers, surely?’

‘They’re lawyers, Reggie.’

‘Oh, well, that answers both questions.’ He turned to Kathy. ‘When you’ve been divorced as often as I have, you tend to avoid the haunts of lawyers.’

‘I heard there was a new Mrs Grice in the offing, Reggie. Is that true?’

‘Pure rumour and speculation. And what about you? You look as if someone’s been giving you a hell of a battering.’ He peered at the traces of bruises on Brock’s face, then looked with interest at Kathy.

Brock picked up the menu and said, ‘I can recommend the veal.’

Reggie inclined his head to Kathy. ‘Brock is
so
secretive, Kathy. I wonder if you and I could get together and swap information on the old goat.’

‘I should warn you,’ Brock murmured, ‘that she’s currently on suspension for beating up a member of the public with her Asp.’

Reggie looked entranced. ‘You hit someone with a snake? How perfectly splendid. Doesn’t that make her a sort of Cleopatra to your Mark Anthony, I wonder, Brock?’

It gradually transpired that Reggie Grice was no longer a practising scientist, but rather, in the manner of poacher turned gamekeeper, chaired various Home Office committees concerned with the regulation of scientific and medical research.

‘And you want to know more about Richard Haygill and CAB-Tech?’ he said, consulting the menu. ‘I’ve been following the case with great interest, of course. It was one of his boys who bumped off the mad philosopher Springer, wasn’t it?’

‘I suppose, to get to the heart of it, Reggie, we’ve been wondering what possible threat Springer could be to someone like Haygill and his operation. From what I’ve been able to gather, Haygill seems to have a great deal of credibility. I’m not sure that the same can be said for Springer.’

‘Oh, we’re all vulnerable, Brock. I came across Springer once, at a conference on ethics and science, ages ago, and although they dubbed him Mad Max behind his back, he struck me as very shrewd. Of course he could have gone gaga since then. He was one of those people who instinctively take a contrary point of view, just to see what will come of it. We need people like that, of course. My God, we could do with a few in my neck of the woods! And you’d think that scientists would particularly welcome them, since scientists are supposed to constantly question everything. But in practice it doesn’t necessarily work like that. We got quite ratty with Springer at the conference, as I recall. He unsettled us, made us feel vulnerable.’

Reggie turned his attention to the wine-list. ‘I should warn you, Brock,’ he said, ‘that I have absolutely no appointments this afternoon, and presumably Kathy doesn’t either if she’s on suspension. Which means that we can get stuck into the reds, while you nurse your mineral water.’

‘Be my guest, Reggie.’

‘Thank you, we shall. Have your researchers dug up an article in
Nature
of last May about UCLE and CAB-Tech?’ He reached for a slim document case on the floor beside him and selected a photocopied sheet which he handed to Brock. The page was headed ‘NEWS’ and contained several short articles on current events. The one circled in yellow marker was titled, ‘UNIVERSITY DENIES RIFT WITH BIOTECH RESEARCH CENTRE’.

Brock read the article while Reggie consulted with Kathy on her tastes in wine.

UCLE President Roderick Young has issued a press statement denying rumours that the university’s Centre of Advanced Biotechnology might move to another institution, possibly overseas. The university has recently been embroiled in a race discrimination case involving staff of the Centre, which receives much of its funding from Middle East sources. Describing CAB-Tech as the flagship of UCLE’s research effort, Young said that earlier problems had been exaggerated, and that both parties were committed to the partnership.

Kathy suggested a wine on the list, but Reggie turned it down on the grounds that it was far too modest for Cleopatra’s taste. He stabbed a finger at the article. ‘A bit like me issuing a press statement denying rumours that my wife was leaving me, eh?’

‘So there have been domestic problems at CAB-Tech,’ Brock nodded. ‘We heard about some of them.’

‘Bound to happen. You put a high-flying operation with bags of money like CAB-Tech inside a cash-strapped university and it’s bound to attract hostility and jealousy. Haygill’s position in particular would be sensitive. Who is he really answerable to, and who is his real paymaster? The university or his overseas backers? There have been several cases recently of universities suing academics with strong external consultancy funding for a share of their outside earnings. You could imagine the mischief someone like Springer could create in that sort of atmosphere, if he wanted to.’

He indicated to Brock his selection from the wine list. Brock suppressed a wince and called over the waiter.

‘So Haygill could be vulnerable to Springer on the home front,’ Reggie went on, snapping a bread stick. ‘But more interestingly, he could be equally vulnerable on the foreign and scientific fronts too.’

‘How come?’

‘There’s no doubt Haygill’s science is top-drawer stuff in a highly visible and competitive area, but it’s a tricky field, gene therapy. Bucketfuls of cash have been poured into it, but so far results have been sparse, and in at least one case—the Jesse Gelsinger case in the States last year—fatal. The American authorities have examined several hundred gene-therapy protocols involving thousands of patients, but so far we’ve been very cautious about approving experimental programmes involving humans in this country.’

‘Your committees would have to clear what Haygill does, would they?’

‘What he does in the UK, yes, which is mainly laboratory work on genes and gene vectors. He’s said to have gathered an extraordinary amount of material for his analysis, genetic material from over a million women from around the Middle East.’

‘What?’ Kathy looked up, startled. ‘In that building of his, a million women?’

‘A few cells from each, yes . . .’ Reggie’s attention wandered to the menu. ‘The veal, you reckon, Brock? What about the pollo?’

‘I’ve always found it quite edible, Reggie.’

‘Yes . . . but you don’t really care much about food, do you? Not really . . .’ He mused over the alternatives, then ordered the chicken liver crostini, Brock some grilled pigeon. Kathy didn’t feel hungry, and ordered a small risotto and green salad.

‘Anyway,’ Reggie went on, reaching for another breadstick, ‘we have to approve what he does here, but we don’t monitor whatever experiments or applications of his basic research he or one of CAB-Tech’s commercial affiliates may do overseas, right? And that’s where things become sensitive.’

‘What sort of things might he be doing?’ Kathy asked, still thinking of the million women’s cells inside that ziggurat, and wondering if she really wanted to know.

‘Well, let me give you an example. A few years ago the Ashkenazi Jews in the United States became concerned about the incidence of cystic fibrosis, a genetic disease, among their people. So they decided to screen their schoolchildren’s blood. Each child was given an anonymous code number, and when they reached marriageable age and a match was considered with another young Jew, the two code numbers were examined, and if both were found to be carriers for the disease the Committee for the Prevention of Jewish Genetic Diseases advised against the marriage.

‘It was an extremely successful campaign, and as a result cystic fibrosis has been pretty well eliminated from the American Jewish population, but it was also controversial. The
New York Times
attacked it as being eugenic, and there was considerable debate. Since the Nazis, the word ‘eugenic’ is the big bogey word, of course—the deliberate attempt to breed certain characteristics into, or out of, the human population. But before them it was a quite respectable idea. We’d been improving cattle and wheat that way for thousands of years, so why not people? In the first few decades of the twentieth century lots of respectable people, from Theodore Roosevelt to Winston Churchill, thought eugenics was the way to go, and lots of countries passed eugenics laws for the compulsory sterilisation of inadequate citizens who might be weakening the gene pool, Sweden and many US states, for example, apart from Germany.

‘In the end, you see, science is a political and a philosophical matter. It was the
compulsory
nature of the eugenics laws that we now consider repugnant, the state enforcing an idea against the free will of the individual. And for that reason the campaign of the American Ashkenazi Jews was felt to be acceptable, because it merely screened and advised the individuals concerned about the possible consequences of their actions. But in other circumstances there might be social or cultural reasons why people might not follow that advice. And what if some form of gene therapy became available which would allow a government to actively interfere in the passing on of the defective gene?

‘So, that brings us back to Haygill. Let’s say you have some incurable genetic disorder like, say, Duchenne muscular dystrophy, which is more prevalent in certain regions of the world because of patterns of intermarriage which, for social and cultural reasons, you don’t want to interfere with. And let’s say someone like Haygill comes along with some kind of therapy for a specific gene, let’s call it BRCA4, which will eliminate the disease without restricting people’s intermarriage choices, provided it’s applied systematically according to some government-controlled protocol. Is that eugenics? And if it works for that disease, why stop there? Why not clean up all the genetic typos in the book of life?’

Reggie paused as lunch arrived.

Brock, who had been making notes, looked up. ‘And is there such a project?’

Reggie shrugged. ‘We don’t know. We know that Haygill has done work on BRCA4 in his labs over here, and we’ve heard rumours of a trial for an ambitious BRCA4 protocol, but it’s never been submitted to us.’

‘When we first met Haygill he gave us a dumb copper’s guide to genetics, and he used the same metaphor, about the book of life.’

‘Oh, yes. He must use it all the time. His clients and paymasters will like that, the idea of an authoritative, true book of life, kept free of error. But that’s where Springer could make trouble, you see, where science becomes philosophy. Is it blasphemous to tamper with the human genome, with God’s book of the human being? Springer would probably argue that it is. And Haygill’s clients would be susceptible to that. They’ve been brought up to believe in a Book which records Divine revelation in the actual words spoken over a twenty year period by the Prophet, and preserved over the following fourteen hundred years by continual repetition without error. They would be sensitive to the suggestion that Haygill’s project might be heretical and blasphemous.’

Reggie stopped talking for a while to eat. His lecture seemed to have given him an appetite, and he tucked in vigorously. Kathy, on the other hand, had become less and less hungry as he’d gone on. She knew that the kind of work that Haygill was doing might prevent much suffering, but since she’d formed the image of the glass ziggurat and its vast collection of female cells the idea of it had seemed increasingly insidious, as if the whole production had made the human patients it was meant to serve completely passive and even irrelevant.