Resurrection (6 page)

‘What?’ exclaimed Malloy. ‘But I was just about to request the fragments carrying the DNA upstream from the region we’ve been working on. We suspect the control region we were looking for had been cut through during the fragmentation.’

Hutton shrugged and said, ‘I’m sorry, it’s a joint WHO/UN recommendation that the government has endorsed with immediate effect.’

‘Shit, but why?’

‘No explanation but they also want us to audit and declare all the fragments we’re holding. Sounds like someone has been doing something they shouldn’t.’

‘Joining up the fragments, you mean? God, you’d have to be a pork pie short of a picnic to do that to any great extent. Mind you …’

‘Yes?’

‘In some ways I can sympathise with the people who’d like the complete virus to work on. The trouble we’ve been experiencing is largely down to working with fragments rather than the complete genome. They thought in the beginning it would be just as good but it’s not. Lots of important genes have been cut through when they cut the DNA into fragments. So anyone interested in finding out how the whole thing operates might be tempted to try a bit of reassembly. It may be stupid and against the rules but it’s understandable.’

‘It may not be being done for reasons of scientific curiosity,’ said Hutton.

Malloy looked at him questioningly then it dawned on him what Hutton meant. ‘God, you can’t be serious. Someone trying to reconstruct live smallpox virus? They’d have to be out of their tree.’

Hutton shrugged his agreement. ‘Be that as it may, can you let me have a list of the fragments you’re currently holding?’

‘
Of course.’

‘
I’ve also had a letter from Ali Hammadi’s parents.’

Malloy’s face clouded over. ‘Oh yes,’ he said quietly.

‘
They’d like to endow a PhD studentship in his honour. Some kind of lasting memorial. Your thoughts?’

‘
I still find it hard to believe Ali’s dead. He was a good student, easy going, easy to get on with. Everyone liked him. His work was going exceptionally well and then suddenly in the space of a few short weeks his whole demeanour changed. He turned into a morose recluse who wouldn’t speak to anyone and then he took his own life. I just don’t understand it.’

‘
We’ll have to assume it was some kind of mental aberration. Clinical depression can strike at anyone at any time and for no discernible reason to the outsider.’

‘
And bright people are more susceptible, yes I know all the get-outs. I’ve been using them for the past few weeks but I still feel guilty. I should have realised how serious his condition was. I just kept thinking it was something he would snap out of if we gave him time. Girl trouble or something like that.’

‘
Not your fault. Graduate students are adults. We can’t baby-sit them. Now, about the studentship?’

‘
Okay by me. I think it’s a nice idea.’

‘
Good. I’ll tell them we’re delighted and have admin start the paperwork. The Ali Hammadi Research Fellowship in Molecular Science. Has a nice ring to it.’

Malloy returned to his lab and told the others what had been said, starting with the government ban on smallpox fragments.

‘But that’s crazy,’ protested Le Grice. ‘If we can’t try out the upstream region we can’t find out what’s wrong with our system. It’s going to put a complete stop to our research.’

‘Well, shit happens and it’s been that kind of a month really,’ sighed Malloy, sounding both tired and world-weary.’

‘But why?’ persisted Le Grice. ‘Why are they doing this?’

Malloy shrugged his shoulders. ‘Hutton hasn’t been told but you know how careful the powers that be are about smallpox. There must have been some kind of scare somewhere.’

‘Probably some kid got a bad dose of chickenpox in Outer Mongolia and the WHO got diarrhoea. Don’t these people realise what they’re doing when they suddenly come out with crazy bans like this?’ retorted Le Grice angrily.

‘Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and suppose that they do in this case and that they might have good reasons for introducing the ban,’ said Malloy.

‘Look, if we can’t get the fragments we need from the official sources any more why don’t I phone around. Maybe the Beatson in Glasgow has them or the guys in Manchester.’

Malloy shook his head. ‘The ban is on all fragment movement, not just from official sources.’

‘Sure but if they don’t know …’

Malloy’s look was enough to make Le Grice change his mind about what he was going to say.

‘I know it’s tough on all of us but we’re going to play by the rules on this one. Apart from anything else there are certain factions within this institute that would not be adverse to seeing us get into really deep shit and deliberately flouting a WHO/UN ruling is as deep as it comes.

‘Any idea how long the ban is going to last?’ asked Sandra Macandrew.

‘None.’

‘This could screw up our PhD work,’ said Sandra looking at Peter.

‘You don’t have to achieve success to get your degrees. You just have to show that you’ve carried out your research programme in a controlled and methodical scientific manner. Demonstrate that you thought things through and acted accordingly. The work you did on the first vaccine will probably be enough.’

‘But it’s not the same, is it?’

‘No. A successful vaccine would be have been nicer,’ conceded Malloy.

Le Grice gave a snort at the understatement.

‘So what do we do in the meantime?’

‘We get the smallpox DNA sequence out from the database again and study it. See if we can figure out what’s going on in the region we’re interested in without actually working with it.’

‘Not for the first time,’ said Le Grice.

‘I know we’ve done it before,’ said Malloy, coldness creeping into his voice as his patience wore thin. ‘But we’re going to do it again. All right’

‘Sure.’

‘In the meantime, George, we have to submit an audit of what smallpox fragments we hold at the moment. Maybe you could run a check on that?

‘Will do.’

‘There’s one other thing. Ali’s parents want to set up some kind of memorial thing for him. They’re thinking of endowing a studentship.’

‘That’s nice,’ said Sandra. The others smiled and nodded, unsure of what to say.

‘It’s nice to know they don’t blame us,’ said Malloy quietly.

‘It’s about time you stopped blaming yourself,’ said Sandra. ‘All of us are to blame and none of us are to blame. We’ll probably never know why he did it because he didn’t tell us what was wrong and it wasn’t for the want of asking. We all liked him. We all cared about him. He just wouldn’t open up to us.’

‘Not even after a couple of pints,’ said Peter.

‘Ali drank beer?’ asked Malloy.

‘George introduced him to McEwans 80 shilling ale.’

‘He was a willing student,’ said Ferguson. ‘He enjoyed it. Ali was a bright bloke. He figured out that Allah probably wouldn’t hold it against him.’

‘How often did you two go drinking?’ asked Malloy.

‘Don’t read too much into it,’ laughed Ferguson. ‘Ali wasn’t an alcoholic and he didn’t get depressed. That isn’t why he topped himself. We had an occasional couple of pints at the union on a Friday night, that’s all.’

‘But he never loosened up enough to tell you what was wrong?’

‘Fraid not.’

FOUR

The Sci-Med Inspectorate

The Home Office

London.

‘Jean has prepared a file for you,’ said the director, John Macmillan to Adam Dewar as he showed him to the door. I think the WHO are erring on the side of caution in banning the movement of these fragments but it certainly seems the side to err on as far as this bug’s concerned. I’ve taken the liberty of arranging a meeting for you with a leading virus consultant at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine this afternoon, a man called Hector Wright. He’ll give you a crash course on the disease; he’s expecting you at three.’

‘Right you are sir,’ said Dewar.

‘I think this one is probably just a paperwork exercise but good luck anyway.’

Dewar had lunch at a pub by the river on the way back to the flat. It was sunny so he sat outside in the autumn sunshine with a pint of Guinness, watching the river traffic go by and thinking it might be the last time he’d do that this year. He was pleasantly surprised at how quiet the pub was. It encouraged him to open his briefcase and take out the folder he’s been given. He flicked through the contents while he waited for his prawn salad.

Basically it was a list of the universities and research institutes currently holding DNA fragments of the smallpox virus. There were twelve, two in Scotland, the rest in England. Eight had already complied with the audit request, four were still to file. The two in Scotland were among the four. Of the eight that had made returns, seven had submitted lists that agreed with the central source file. One, the Institute of Biosciences in Manchester appeared to have two more fragments than they were officially credited with. That seemed like a good starting point, thought Dewar as he put away the file and took a sip of his beer.

Hector Wright turned out to be a short fat man in his late fifties. He had a shock of white hair, a pugnacious expression and eyes that looked and learned all the time. He would never manage to look elegant or distinguished, whatever he wore, but no one would ever sell him a vacuum cleaner he didn’t want.

‘So you want me to tell you all about smallpox,’ said Wright as he slumped back down in his chair behind his desk after shaking hands. Dewar caught the body language of a man about to launch an interrogation. ‘Why?’

‘I understand you’re a leading expert on the subject,’ said Dewar, deliberately misunderstanding the question.

Wright nodded thoughtfully. He knew that Dewar had side-stepped the question. He also reckoned that he wasn’t going to get anywhere by pursuing it. ‘I don’t know if anyone can ever claim to be an expert on that little bastard,’ he said with feeling. ‘When I worked with it all these years ago it always seemed to have some new trick up its sleeve. You’d think you understood it then - I know it’s stupid to say this about a virus for God’s sake - it’s about the most basic life form you can get and some people would argue that it isn’t even that - but it was almost as if it had a mind of its own, that it was malevolent, if you get my meaning, that it wanted to kill you.’

Dewar saw that the man meant what he was saying; he wasn’t just coming out with it for effect.

‘I don’t mind telling you I got pretty mad when these people put a stop to the WHO proposal to wipe it out altogether back in ‘95. All that rubbish about destroying something that God had created and what an interesting little beast it really was. Jesus! the only function a smallpox virus ever had on this earth was to kill human beings. There’s no intermediate vector, no animal hosts, no life cycle of its own; it only affects us and we’re talking about a fifty percent kill rate with
Variola
major
.

‘As much as that?’

And that doesn’t mean to say the other fifty percent get better like nothing ever happened. More often than not it leaves the survivors brain damaged, sometimes mad, often blind, always disfigured. If you come out of it with only a face that looks like you stood in front of a grenade when it went off you can count yourself a very lucky person indeed.’

‘It’s that bad?’

‘The worst.’

‘You’ve actually experienced it in the field then?’

‘1975, Somalia. I was with the WHO team who encircled the last outbreak. Like Apaches round a wagon train we were, closing in for the kill, vaccinating everything that moved so the disease couldn’t spread out from its epicentre.’

‘It must have given you a tremendous sense of achievement when you finally realised that you’d actually done it, wiped out a disease that’s plagued man throughout recorded history and probably before that.’

‘Damn right. Me and a few others, mainly Americans, got pie-eyed for a week but you know, it hardly made the papers back here.’

‘Really?’

‘People in this country had already forgotten what smallpox could do. By that time it was something that happened in far off lands. If we’d wiped out something that affected Cheltenham it might have been a different story but Africa? Bottom of page five if we were lucky. Until of course, the accident happened.’

‘Accident?’

‘Birmingham. Everyone thought it was okay to work on the virus under lab conditions. After all, you know exactly where the virus is at all times in the lab. Glass containers are much more predictable than human beings; they don’t cough, spit, throw up over you or bugger off to Majorca when they feel like it. We didn’t have the fancy containment facilities they have today and all the rules and regulations to go with it but we were still pretty careful in our own way. Each lab did its best; some were better than others of course. It was up to individual consultants to impose their own rules but Birmingham was a lesson to us all.