Scorpion's Advance (25 page)

They turned the door that led to the laundry and went inside.

'Green or white?' asked
Mirit.

'The ones I saw were wearing green.'

Mirit had just finished tucking her hair into her surgical cap when they heard raised voices a long way off. Anderson took his hand off the door handle. 'It's too late,' he said. 'They're coming.'

They looked around desperately for anything they could use as a weapon in a last-ditch stand, but found the search hopeless. Anderson was considering hiding in laundry baskets when he saw the chute protruding from the wall above one of them. He examined the angle of its slope and said, 'We can do it.'

Mirit looked up inside the chute and agreed that there was room enough. 'But where does it go?'

They could now hear voices in the corridor outside, accompanied by the intermittent slam of doors. A distant yell told them that the man they had knocked out had been found. It dispelled any further consideration of where the chute led to.

'In you get,' whispered Anderson.

Mirit
clambered inside the mouth of the chute and started moving up the forty-five degree incline. Anderson waited until she was ten feet inside before crossing the room to the light switch. He paused to memorize his return route then switched it off.

For Anderson, climbing into the chute in darkness with only one hand was no joke. At his first attempt he slid back down into the laundry basket. He was unhurt, but the voices outside said that he might have run out of time. He had just managed to get up into the chute when he heard the laundry door being opened.
Mirit heard it too. They froze like statues in a party game.

The room light was switched on. Anderson could see the lit square of floor at the end of the chute below. He could hear three separate voices raised in argument, urgent, angry voices.

Anderson felt his green surgical cap slide down the back of his head. It had been knocked askew in his struggle to get into the chute and he hadn't been able to adjust it. It was going to fall off and there was nothing that he could do about it! He couldn't take his hand away from the wall of the chute or he'd fall. Desperately he hunched his shoulders and tilted his head in a succession of angles to provide a platform for it, but his final effort just made things worse. The cloth cap tumbled off the back of his head and rolled off his shoulder. It fluttered gently and silently to the floor below.

Anderson couldn't take his eyes off it. It was his death warrant. The argument still raged below but Anderson saw a foot move into the square of light, then a shoulder and an arm as a man bent down to retrieve the cap. Oh, Christ, here it comes! thought Anderson. But the man below was still intent on pursuing his argument. He had picked up the cap and accepted it as nothing out of the ordinary. Almost absentmindedly he pushed a wicker basket under the mouth of the chute and, still shouting the odds, he and his companions switched off the light and left the room. Anderson offered up a silent prayer and, looking up into the darkness, said, 'OK, on we go.'

The darkness offered no distraction from the almost unbearable heat in the chute as Mirit and Anderson inched upwards, their thigh muscles feeling the strain of constantly having to maintain friction between their feet and the smooth metal walls. Their breathing was now heavy and laboured as their lungs demanded more and more oxygen from the static, unyielding air.

Anderson could now see
Mirit up ahead; it was getting lighter; they were getting near the top. Mirit stopped moving and looked at Anderson coming up behind her. Neither spoke but they knew that they had to rest before the final climb to the top. Anderson let his head rest on his chest, gazing idly back down into the darkness while he waited for his pulse rate to drop and his breathing to quieten. Sweat dripped from his forehead and fell audibly on to the metal wall of the chute like the ticking of an erratic clock. When all was quiet again he looked up and nodded to Mirit.

Anderson had thought that it would get much lighter as they neared the exit of the chute, but it didn't. For some reason that he didn't yet understand, the lighting remained subdued, even when they got to the mouth itself. It was as if the room they were about to emerge into was lit by candlelight. He saw
Mirit pull herself slowly and carefully out of the opening and stand up on the floor. She turned to help him with his one-handed effort.

Anderson had almost succeeded in getting out of the chute when the sound of voices startled him and he lost his balance. He had to throw out his injured hand to save himself from tumbling back down and felt the pain burst like an exploding shell as the metal corner of the chute exit gouged into the raw, bleeding flesh of his hand. Sweat poured down his face in a river as he locked his jaw in a desperate attempt to remain silent.
Mirit slid her hand beneath his left armpit and allowed him to take some of the strain off his hand. She whispered encouragement to him. 'Concentrate on your feet!' she urged as she took control of the top half of his body.

Anderson regained ground with pained slowness but gradually moved upwards till his centre of gravity tilted in his favour. He rolled out of the chute and lay on the floor clutching his injured hand.

Mirit removed her cap and gently mopped his forehead with it while cradling his head in her arms. The pain ebbed slowly like the tide going out, leaving Anderson exhausted but well enough to take stock of his surroundings. The strange light in the room was actually coming from next door. There was a glass fanlight some three metres up the wall which was allowing light to come in along with the intermittent sound of voices.

Anderson could see another room which adjoined theirs and which was being dimly lit from the same source. He recognized it as a surgical recovery
room where patients would be taken after their operation while they came out of anaesthesia. The room that they had emerged in was part of a surgical theatre complex and the light, Anderson guessed, was coming from the theatre itself.

Anderson patted
Mirit's arm to signify that he'd recovered and got to his feet. Mirit rose with him and looked into his eyes to be sure that he was all right. She touched his cheek and Anderson wrapped his good arm around her. He indicated with sign language that they should try to get a look at the theatre through the fanlight and looked about him for something to stand on. There was nothing available but Mirit disappeared into the recovery room and returned with an instrument trolley. She moved very slowly to avoid noise and parked it directly below the fanlight, gesturing to Anderson that he should get on to it.

Mirit
held the trolley steady while Anderson sat on it and swung his feet up. He took the strain with his good right hand on a wall joist and pulled himself slowly and painfully upwards till he could see through the glass. He had been right; it was an operating theatre. The source of the light was a large, shadow free Mannheim theatre lamp which he was now almost directly above as he looked down on the table and the patient who lay on it.

Three people in anonymous surgical garb were
concentrating on the exposed left leg of the patient which was badly swollen and infected. Anderson saw the surgeon scrape material from an open sore with a steel curette and deposit the exudate in a small glass container that one of his assistants held out to him. They were collecting leprous body tissue. Anderson sank slowly down from the fanlight and whispered to Mirit what he had seen.

'Why?' she asked.

Anderson shuddered inwardly. He said, ‘They're collecting the bacteria that cause leprosy. That's where the foreign DNA must have come from for the cloning experiments. The Klein gene must come from the leprosy bacillus.'

'That's horrible!'

Anderson stood up again on the trolley and continued watching. They had finished collecting the infected material and the assistants were now bandaging the patient. So that's what the payments to the hospice were for, thought Anderson. They were buying leprosy! The surgeon removed his cap and mask and Anderson saw that it was Sam Freedman. The last vestige of hope that, somehow, he could be horribly mistaken about the Freedmans' involvement had now disappeared.

Anderson suddenly realized that they might want to use the recovery
room, but then thought not. The surgery involved was very minor and although he couldn't see the patient's face for the wide disc of the lamp, he reckoned that the procedure was being carried out under sedation and local anaesthetic. But they couldn't take that chance! They'd have to get back into the laundry chute for the moment.

Getting into the downward
sloping chute was a good deal easier than the upward journey. Mirit got in first and moved down to let Anderson in. She looked up questioningly to see if she'd moved far enough. Anderson signalled with his head that she had. He himself was now about three metres down from the mouth. They held their position and listened until it became clear that the recovery room was not going to be used. Anderson could hear movement from another direction and deduced that the patient was leaving theatre by another route. A few moments later he was about to start moving up the chute when the room above filled with light as someone came in.

Anderson froze as a shadow came over the end of the chute, then realized, almost too late, what was happening when a cascade of soiled linen fell on him, smothering his face in wet, sticky cloth. He had to fight the urge to tear it from him lest he lose his grip and fall on to
Mirit, but revulsion filled his throat as he shook his head violently to escape the clinging embrace of the diseased dressings.

Anderson held on desperately till the light above went out. As it did so,
Mirit lost her grip in struggling with the soiled laundry and slid down the chute in a tumbling flurry of arms and legs. Anderson followed her in slightly more controlled fashion but was still relieved to reach the floor without further damage to his hand. 'Are you all right?' he asked Mirit.

'Yes. You?'

'Yes. Let's get cleaned up.'

They were safe for the moment. The laundry had already been searched and it had no windows so they could put the light on in confidence. What was more, it had plenty of sinks and running water.
Mirit listened at the door for a moment before saying, 'Nothing.'

They washed and changed into clean surgical overalls that
Mirit fetched from the rack. They stood there looking at each other.

'Neil, are you scared?' asked
Mirit.

'Shitless,' said Anderson.

'Pardon?'

'Very,' said Anderson.

'Me too,' said Mirit. For a moment she seemed very small and vulnerable, just like a little girl.

Anderson said, 'There was a ventilation shaft running along the outside wall of the theatre. It looked big enough to get inside. If we can get into the system perhaps we can make it to the upper levels of the Institute.'

'Where do we get in?'

'Down here on this floor.'

Anderson listened outside each door in the cellar corridor till he heard what he was looking for, the sound of large fans. The noise coming from the electric motors was almost deafening when they got inside. Anderson pointed to a ladder leading up to an inspection hatch in the
trunking and climbed up to draw back a canvas screen. The wind velocity this close to the fans was close to gale force and he had to lean heavily against it as he crawled inside the trunking. Mirit followed and replaced the canvas screen behind her before starting out on a long horizontal crawl following the line of the main shaft as it hugged the cellar contour before branching out to all corners of the building. There wasn't enough room to turn round so Anderson decided on his own which path they should follow. He chose the central supply route, reasoning that it would probably be larger and offer them their best chance of reaching the upper levels and the possibility of a telephone call or even freedom.

Th
ey weren't in complete darkness: every ten metres or so a grid would admit corridor light where fresh air was released from the shaft. As they came to the first vertical section of the trunking the wind had dropped to a gentle, pleasant breeze. Anderson found no difficulty in finding footholds in the frequent sectional joins of the trunking and climbed easily, even with his injured hand, to the next level. He looked back over his shoulder and could see that Mirit was keeping up. She tapped his trailing foot with her hand to indicate that all was well.

Anderson stopped moving when he heard voices and trained his eyes on a grating some two metres in front of him. He saw a trolley, escorted by two attendants, pass along the corridor below as they took another patient to theatre. One more level, thought Anderson, and they would be in the
Kalman Institute proper! He continued to crawl as soon as the voices had faded, now anxious to reach the next vertical section. Two more gratings and he saw the base of the shaft that would take them upwards. He looked back at Mirit and smiled but didn't risk saying anything. They were so near; they mustn't take chances.

Anderson pulled himself into the vertical section of the
trunking and looked up. His heart stopped! A face was looking down at him! There was a man in the shaft and he was coming towards them. He saw Anderson below and stopped moving. Through his fear Anderson suddenly got the impression that the man seemed as surprised and afraid as he was himself. 'Who the hell . . . ' he said.

'You're English?' sai
d the man in astonishment. Anderson didn't argue the point. 'You must be Anderson?'

Utterly confused but delighted at being alive, Anderson repeated his question.

'I'm Shamir, CIA.'

'You're the inside man that Dexter mentioned?' said Anderson.

'Yes. I finally worked out that there was something going on in the basement at night but I could never get down here.'

'Can we get out?' said Anderson.

'Up or down?' asked Shamir.

'Most decidedly, up.'

They climbed out of the shaft where Shamir had entered in one of the animal preparation rooms and found the smell of mice and wet sawdust strong in their nostrils as they descended the ladder that Shamir had left propped against the wall. They stretched their limbs and dusted themselves down, not quite sure where to begin.

'What's down there?' asked
Shamir.

Anderson told him, watching his face mirror his disgust. 'Leprosy! What the hell are they doing with that?'

'I think they're cloning genes from the leprosy bug into other vectors.'

'Germ warfare?'

'Looks like it.'

'What do you do here?'
Mirit asked Shamir.

'I'm a maintenance technician. I've been on the staff for six months but haven't been able to find out a thing. I was beginning to think that Freedman was innocent when Dexter told me about your conclusions from the accounts.'

'Why are the CIA interested in Freedman?' asked Anderson.

'He didn't leave the States of his own volition.'

'But he was an American citizen,' said Mirit. 'You couldn't deport him from his own country!'

'Let's say it was a high-level compromise,' said
Shamir. 'Freedman had been carrying out genetic experiments in contravention of the law, to such an extent that he was liable to a long jail sentence. He didn't want to go to prison and the US government didn't want the scandal of an Ivy League and influential professor in court. Freedman suggested that as a Jew he could apply to Israel for naturalization under the Israeli government's policy to accept all Jewish immigrants. He and his wife would go there, settle and never come back. The US government agreed.'

'What about the Israeli government?' asked an outraged
Mirit.

Shamir
looked embarrassed. They weren't told,' he said quietly.

Mirit's
eyes widened. 'You exported a criminal to Israel?' she asked incredulously.

'I suppose you could say that. But we've been keeping an eye on the
Freedmans ever since they arrived.'

'And not telling anyone why!' added
Mirit.

'We couldn't risk the scandal,' said
Shamir.

'And having the
Freedmans sent right back!'

'No. Nothing would change,' said
Shamir quietly.

'What do you mean?' demanded
Mirit.

'Captain Zimmerman,' said
Shamir, acknowledging for the first time that he knew who she was, 'the difference between us is that you are an idealist and I am a realist. In many ways I wish it were different. The simple fact is that even if your government found out about the real reason for the Freedmans coming here, it would change nothing. America couldn't tolerate the affair becoming public.'

'So what?'

'Israel needs America more than America needs Israel. Pressure would be applied, irresistible pressure, and nothing would change.'

'But Israel wouldn't . . .'

'Morality only exists at our level of society, Captain. Up top it's a luxury they do without.'

Mirit
looked to Anderson for support. 'I suspect he's right, Mirit,' he said gently.

Shamir
changed the subject. He asked Anderson, 'Did you find out everything that you wanted to know down there?'

Anderson replied that he'd still like to get his hands on Martin Klein's notes and would like to search Fr
eedman’s office. 'OK, why don't you two do that now while I call up the infantry?'

'Loud-mouthed Yank!' hissed
Mirit as she and Anderson crept along the darkened ground floor of the Kalman Institute. Anderson smiled in the darkness. He was glad to see that Mirit's spirit was back. They reached the reception area which Anderson recognized with its ornamental pool and tasteless abstract sculpture. 'Freedman's office is up there,' he said, pointing to the circular stairs which looked ethereal in the pale moonlight that filtered in through the glass cupola. 'Let's go!'

They ran quickly and quietly upstairs, anxious to be exposed for only the minimum of time. They flitted across the landing like two spectr
es of the night and tried Freedman's door. It was unlocked. They went inside and closed it.

'Use the torch,' said Anderson, not wanting to risk anyone seeing a light from outside.
Mirit turned on the beam and they began a systematic search of drawers and filing cabinets. Ten minutes later they stopped. There was no trace of the book.

Anderson slumped into the chair that he'd sat in on the last occasion he'd been in Freedman's office and faced
Mirit's unspoken accusation that the book did not really exist. For some reason he thought about the accident Freedman had had with the whisky. Had that been a misunderstanding or something else? If so, what? Could Freedman have kicked over the tray deliberately to create what Mirit would term a 'natural diversion'? But why? What had he been about to do at the time?

Anderson thought hard. He remembered that he had been on his feet when he had heard the crash behind him. He had been making for the bookcase to look at the titles.

'Give me the torch,' he said to Mirit. He went over to the books and played the beam along the rows. The light tracked back and stopped. Anderson cursed softly under his breath. There, next to
Gene Expression
, was a dark blue notebook. It had St Thomas's Medical School crest on it.

'What is it?' asked
Mirit.

'Klein's book,' said Anderson quietly. He flipped open the cover and saw again the immaculate handwriting of Martin Klein. That look
on Freedman's face,' said Anderson, 'he must have thought for a moment that I'd seen the book when I was here last.'

'Maybe you did,' said
Mirit, 'but it didn't register at the time. The crest is so familiar to you. But it might have registered one day, and that was a chance that Freedman couldn't take. That's why he still tried to kill you at the Red Sea.'

Anderson sat down in the chair again and read by the light of the torch.
Mirit kept silent in the semi-darkness until, after ten minutes, he slapped the covers shut.

'Was it what you thought?' she asked.

'He was extracting DNA from the leprosy bacillus and cloning it into PZ9.'

That's it then?'

‘I suppose so,' said Anderson thoughtfully and feeling vaguely deflated. 'We'd best get back to Shamir.'

Anderson had not told
Mirit everything he had learned from the book. Klein had carried out his experiments with leprous material obtained from a number of patients and someone, presumably Freedman, had ringed one of the names in red. Anderson reckoned that there must be a good chance that this was the patient that the Klein gene had come from. He had memorized the reference number: 6713. When Shamir's infantry arrived he would try to locate reference 6713 and destroy it before the CIA could get their hands on it. There was, of course, the agreement with Mirit . . .

They returned along the route they had come, hurrying through darkened corridors till they reached the prep-room in the animal labs.

'I got it!' said Anderson as they entered.

'Did you indeed?' said Myra Freedman quietly.

Anderson's blood turned to ice at the sight of the gun that was trained on his stomach.

'And little Miss Israel too ... do come in.'

The man who had captured them, and whom Mirit had felled with the pipe, moved forward to ensure that they didn't back out. The malevolence that shone from his eyes above a bloody and toothless mouth made Anderson wish that Mirit had incapacitated him more permanently while she had the chance. 'God! What a fool I was,' he exclaimed, looking at Myra.

'I won't argue,' said Myra.

'Why? For God's sake, why?'

'Perhaps I can best answer that,' said Sam Freedman, coming into the room. 'For the advancement of science and medicine.'

Anderson was outraged. 'Do you call biological warfare advancement?'

'Don't be stupid, Neil,' said Freedman as if he were chiding a small child. 'Don't be a complete cretin. The Klein gene was an accident.'

'An accident! How could it be an accident when I've just seen you collect leprous material for cloning?'

Freedman adopted a patronizing grin as if Anderson were a mental defective. 'I'm working on leprosy, Neil. I'm working on a vaccine, a vaccine against leprosy!'

'But how . . .' stammered Anderson.

'No one has been able to grow the leprosy bacillus in the lab so there's never been enough material available to work on a vaccine against it. We've been cloning genes from leprosy into plasmids so that we can bypass the growth problem and produce all the antigenic material we need in other vectors. We are very close.'

'And Klein?'

'One of the patients from the hospice was a serum hepatitis carrier. Klein cloned a gene from the hepatitis
virus by mistake. As luck would have it, it was the gene for the viral toxin. An accident, just an unfortunate accident, that's all.'

'That's all!' exclaimed Anderson. 'Do you realize just how many people have died because of your unfortunate accident?'

Freedman pursed his lips and sighed. He said, 'How I'm sick of people whining about other people. People are the most plentiful commodity on earth! Do you honestly expect me to give up my work over a few interfering people?'

'And what do you expect to get at the end of it all?'

'I expect to get the Nobel Prize. I expect to be celebrated as the man who wiped out the scourge of leprosy. I expect to take my rightful place among the great names of science.'

'And the Klein gene? What will happen to that?'