AMLoR—Reboot

[Mad Dan Eccles]

Michel waited patiently for the barman to finish serving the group in front of him. He ordered his pint, and Toni's wine.

"Your other friend coming back, do you think?"

Michel shrugged. "I do not know. I thought she would be pleased."

"Ah. Women. You never can tell. There you go."

Michel handed over a handful of coins. "That should be right."

The barman smiled. "Thank you very much, Mike. Right as usual. And don't worry about the wine. I'll make sure I save you some." He winked at Michel, "She'll be back."

Toni was writing in a ring-bound notebook when Michel returned. She looked up with a smile as he approached.

"Thank you, Michel."

He nodded. "You are welcome." For a moment, he just stood there, then suddenly dropped into his chair. Toni frowned.

"Are you all right? I thought you looked a little odd, just there."

"It is all right. You remind me of someone, that is all."

She smiled again.

"Someone you remember fondly, I hope?"

Michel shook his head. Verdomme. "It seems a long time ago, now." He kept her gaze until she dropped it, ruffled the edges of her notebook; coughed.

"Okay. So we were talking about Chikungunya. About it how it isn't dangerous?"

Michel nodded, slowly.

"But if it were dangerous, it could infect someone? In the lab I mean. And that would be bad?"

"It would be very bad. But as I have said, we have the P3, we have the procedures."

"But an accident—"

"It is impossible."

"Okay." Toni hesitated. "And it's not fatal, anyway?"

"Not normally, no." He took a sip from his pint. "People with weakened immune systems, perhaps the young, perhaps the pregnant—then there might be a problem."

"And Charlotte wasn't pregnant?"

"Not as far as we know. The coroner said nothing about that, and you journalists would be on that like a pack of wolfhounds."

Toni looked down at the table between them. "Yes, maybe you're right." Then a thought seemed to appear to her, and she looked up again. "Coroner? There was an inquest?"

"Naturally. It was unusual."

"What was the verdict?"

Michel leaned back in his chair. "I would have thought you would have looked it up. Natural causes. Fully consistent with being infected by a virus. But not," he said, suddenly leaning forward on the table, "not one picked up from a lab."

"All right. Let's talk hypotheticals," Toni said, brightly. "If you cut viruses apart, as you say, can you put them back together again? Do you do that."

Michel took another sip, leaned back in his chair again. He had no idea where this was going. He wished he could understand what she wanted. He wished Sabine was here to help him. He wished she didn't remind him so much of Karen.

"Michel?"

"Yes, I hear. And yes, we can put viruses back together, as you put it. Indeed, it is something we have to do if we want to test our theories in the wild. It is something we have to do if we want gene therapy to work. It is not so difficult."

"And you, I don't mean you personally, but in general—you could make mistakes putting them back together? They could get back together wrong, and be dangerous?"

Michel sighed, rubbed his eyes. It had been a long day. The confrontation with Slater had been difficult, and ever since then he had been puzzling how to make everything all right again, how to repay the trust he had asked Slater to place in him. The answer had come just before Slater had left; just before Sabine asked to join him. And now she wasn't here, and he had to answer these questions by himself. Scientifically, the questions were not hard: he simply had no idea if there was anything behind them; if the journalist had an agenda that he could not follow.

"I mean," Toni continued, "perhaps something could have got in there, or somebody did something wrong, got tired and careless, and the virus could have escaped?"

"In theory, yes. No. Possibly." Michel suddenly felt the need to defend science, defend its practitioners, defend his friends, against this insult. "It is, I would say, very unlikely. What is more likely is that somebody could deliberately do something."

"Like what?" Toni was alert, her pen still on the paper.

"Maybe you could put the DNA for a toxic protein into the virus. You would have to reverse transcribe it and make sure it got packaged, but you could do it like that."

Toni shook her head. "I don't know what those words mean. But is it easy?"

"Easy? It is trivial, if that is what you mean."

"I mean could you do it? Could Charlotte do it?"

He lifted his chin and held her gaze, saying nothing. She looked away first.

"So Charlotte could have done this?"

"Even if she had, the P3—"

"Yes, I know, but you, all the scientists, you work so hard and you get tired—"

"That is why we have the procedures."

"But you could still make mistakes, yes? Did Charlotte work weekends? By herself?"

"We all do that."

"And if you do, are you not tempted to take shortcuts? The gloves, the masks—"

"As far as I know," Michel said, too loudly, "Charlotte did not have a reason to reconstitute the virus. With or without some hypothetical toxin!"

"But other people did? You said you it's something you want to do to test your theories?"

Michel stared at his hands on the table. The important thing was to stay calm. He counted his breaths, counted the pounding in his ears; willed it to slow down. Slowly, he became aware that Toni was still speaking. Still looking down, spoke over her:

"We need to know how the viruses would infect in the wild. I have said that." He rubbed the side of his nose. Words were important, here. "We are not there yet. It is something we have to do, should do, carefully. Carefully."

"So...could a reconstituted virus have got infected, contaminated itself? Picked up some toxic DNA from somewhere else?"

"You do not know what you are saying."

"But it could?"

He shook his head. "The chances of something like that happening by chance... It would have to be engineered. We are clever people. It would really not be difficult to engineer, to splice in a toxin into a virus, package it up and let the virus infect someone. The clever thing would be to stop it spreading. Otherwise you would have have a lethal epidemic. You would have have to stop the virus leaving the host, to spread. But by chance? No. Never."

"Would it be difficult to do deliberately? Technically I mean?"

"An undergraduate could do it if you gave him a recipe. You have to be careful, and clean, and you have to think about it quite a bit, but I could teach you to do it. If you were not a complete klutz. Perhaps I will try next week. The really clever thing would be to make an inducible promoter, a switch that makes it so that it could or could not infect people. Maybe you could even turn it on and off. Like a light switch."

Toni had stopped taking notes. "Like a weapon?"

"Like a weapon."

"But who would do such a thing?"

Michel drank long and deep from his glass, almost finishing it. "There are many groups who might want something like that. We are thinking about using viruses in gene therapy, to make people better—so maybe you could use viruses the other way. Maybe the military would want to use viruses to kill people."

"And do you think that Charlotte—" Toni stopped, and stared at the door.

Michel turned, and saw Sabine standing there. He stood up, but Toni had already reached her, put her arm around her. Together, without a word, they sat together across from Michel. He noted the smudged eyeliner, the redness of her cheeks, her rapid and shallow breathing.

"Sabine, sweetheart," Toni said, "is he...?"

Sabine nodded, sniffed. "It's over. I'm going to get my things in the morning."

"Do you need somewhere to stay?"

Sabine didn't answer, but looked up at Michel. "I'm sorry, Michel. I should have been here for you."

"It is okay." He slid the still-untouched glass of Châteuneuf towards Sabine. "I will be at the lab, if either of you need me."

He turned to the door, stopped, and came back. Without asking, he took Toni's pen from her unresisting fingers, and scribbled on her pad. "In case you want to talk more. I will be out of the lab tomorrow, but please call me."

And then he left.

[Mad Dan Eccles]

Cambridge News, Saturday 12th April 2008

Was Cambridge scientist's death murder?

The tragic death last month of brilliant young researcher Charlotte Stowell raises serious questions about safety in Cambridge's new multimillion pound research institute.

Ms Stowell, 28, worked on the infectivity of flu viruses in Professor Thomas Slater's laboratory at The Wolfhaven Institute, locally known as the 'Nobel Factory'. She died after contracting Chikungunya fever, a disease normally carried by mosquitoes.

The virus that killed Ms Stowell normal does not affect healthy people, but it can be dangerous in pregnancy. Dr Michel de Kooij, a virologist in Professor Slater's lab, said he didn't know if Ms Stowell was pregnant. He said, "We were as surprised as anyone that Charlotte caught it."

Dr de Kooij said that despite extensive safety procedures, "poor working conditions" and long hours make it is easy to forget how dangerous working with viruses can be. But Ms Stowell left the Wolfhaven four months previously to work for the leading scientific magazine Nature.

Paul McIntyre, a technician at the Wolfhaven said that Ms Stowell, "a really lovely woman" used to receive packages from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. "It always feels a little scary," Mr McIntyre, 57, said, "because you don't know what's in there."

Scientists at the Wolfhaven Institute routinely take viruses like Chikungunya apart to see how they work, and put them back together to test their theories in the wild. It is possible that a toxic gene from another lab accidentally got joined to the Chikungunya sequence, but Dr de Kooij thought this was unlikely. "It could never happen by chance," he said. "It is more likely it was done deliberately."

Dr de Kooij did not know who might have wanted Ms Stowell dead. He said that he plans to use viruses in gene therapy, but added that terrorist groups and government agencies could use exactly the same technology to make a deadly weapon, and added: "It would not be difficult."

Whatever the real story behind Ms Stowell's death, it is clear that many searching questions remain to be answered at this jewel in Britain's research crown.

[Mad Dan Eccles]

The woman slammed the paper down.

“Who the fuck is this journalist? Why don’t we know about her?”

The man shrugged. “It’s unimportant.”

“No Peter, it’s not unimportant. It’s of the utmost fucking importance. Somebody, somewhere, somehow, has tipped them off. Who knows? Peter, who the fuck knows?”

The man reached into a pocket and pulled out a packet of cigarettes, offering one to the woman.

“No? Well then.” He tapped one out of the packet, flicked his Zippo. “Does it matter?”

She snatched the lighter from his hand.

“Yes it fucking matters. If Slater has squealed it could get us shut down. And we can’t afford that. If he’s squealed...”

“Yah. Whitehall won’t be happy.”

She grimaced. “I think we need to get heavy on Slater. I’ve just about had enough. We’re so fucking close, I can smell it. I know he’s been stringing us along, but I haven’t wanted to get heavy in case it spooks him too much. But now, now... we’re nearly there, Peter. I think we should pay him a visit. In person.”

He reached across the table and plucked the Zippo from her unresisting hand. He flicked it, drew on his cigarette, blew a smoke ring at the ceiling.

“I have a better idea, Susan. Let’s give captain plod something to do.”

[Mad Dan Eccles]

Unsubtle.

That was the single thought that occupied his mind. The blue lights reflecting off the windows in the quiet Cherry Hinton street, the two uniformed officers hammering on the door, the shrillness of Mary’s voice, audible even out here in the allotments.

Unsubtle.

When, two hours after they’d arrived, the police went back to their car and drove off, Michel wasn’t totally surprised that Tom wasn’t with them. Even the Cambridge police must have realized there wasn’t a shred of evidence. No, what was surprising was that they had got involved at all at this stage. There was but one hypothesis that fit his observations, but he’d have to wait a little while more to find out if he was right.

He’d waited all afternoon, a little more wouldn’t hurt.

And there it was. The white Ford with the Sheffield licence plates turning into the cul-de-sac, reaching the end, and reversing into the Slaters’ driveway. And the platinum blonde—and someone else he didn’t recognize—crunching up to the front door and ringing the bell.

When the door opened, he pinched out the joint and walked slowly up to the house.

[Mad Dan Eccles]

It was always trying, visiting Mary’s mother. Most Saturdays Slater would rise early and sit in the box room he liked to call his study with a pile of academic papers, perhaps a lab notebook or two or a student’s thesis, and catch up with everything he hadn’t been able to do during the week. He’d emerge briefly around 11 for fresh coffee, then take a late lunch. Towards late afternoon, if Mary wasn’t visiting friends they’d go for a walk out towards Fulbourn or over the Gogs, afterwards often heading into town for dinner. They never booked ahead, but rather looked around until they found somewhere not too busy, hang the cost.

Was the spontaneity of their Saturday evenings was an attempt to recover some lost romanticism? Or maybe one or other of them was trying to apologize for something—or even simply reminding themselves that perhaps not having children was not without its benefits. All his friends had grown up, had children, and although they seemed to work as hard as he did he could occasionally feel their envy, disguised though it was as pity.

Whatever the reason, he looked forward to Saturdays—except when once a month when they’d make the tedious drive to Leicester, to the drab Fifties vision that was the Eyres Monsell estate, to the semi smelling of stale cigarettes, Camp coffee and cat piss.

In another life, perhaps, he could have got on with Mary’s mother. She had been, by all accounts, quite a looker in her youth. But while some women age gracefully, maintaining an air of elegance, even desirability, well into their greying years, she had fared no better than her council estate environment. Neither was she immune to the more medical slings and arrows of age: the signs of creeping dementia and incipient angina were clear.

She’d also taken an immediate and deep-seated dislike to her only son-in-law. When they arrived at her door, Mary had to tell her Tom’s name repeatedly. When at last she did appear to remember him, she would ask why he’d dropped out of med school, or what kind of career was journalism for the husband of her daughter. He had almost convinced himself that the old bat wasn’t at all senile, but rather was deliberately needling him.

As usual, they had driven home in silence. Slater let Mary through the door first, then threw his keys with slightly more force than intended onto the table. Mary frowned without saying anything, and Slater hated himself just a little bit more.

The decanter was rattling on the edge of the whisky tumbler when the doorbell rang.