The Tightrope Men / The Enemy (52 page)

Cregar and I were in an odd position. Loathing each other beyond all belief, we were condemned to each other’s company for an unspecified period. The next few hours were to be extremely uncomfortable, but I tried to make them as comfortable as possible.

Archie Ferguson came back as soon as I had spoken to Ogilvie and the expression on his face was terrifying. He looked like one of the Old Testament prophets might look after inditing one of the more dire chapters of the Bible. ‘May their souls rot forever in hell!’ he burst out.

‘Take it easy,’ I said. ‘There are practical things to do.’ I thought of Ogilvie recording my telephone conversation and it gave me an idea. ‘See if you can find a tape-recorder. I’ll need it.’

Archie simmered down. ‘Aye, I’ll see what I can do.’

‘And we’ll need food in here, but you can give us food once and once only. What you do is this. You open the outer door of the laboratory and put the food on the floor just inside. Tell me when you’ve closed the door and I’ll come out and get it. It can be done once only because I can’t risk contamination through the air lock, so you’d better give us enough for three meals. If you can find vacuum flasks for coffee that would be a help.’

Ferguson looked past me. ‘Is yon man the Cregar you spoke of?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then he gets nothing from me.’

‘You’ll do as I say,’ I said sharply. ‘We both eat or neither of us eats.’

He took a deep breath, nodded curtly, then laid down the microphone and went away. Half an hour later he came back. ‘Your food’s there. I did better than flasks; there’s a coffee percolator to make your own.’

‘Thanks.’ I had another idea. ‘Archie, this laboratory is maintained at a lower air pressure than the outside. That means pumps, and pumps mean electricity. Put someone to watch the generator; I don’t want it stopping, either by breakdown or lack of fuel. Will you see to that?’

‘Aye. It won’t stop.’

I went into the air lock and got the food—a pile of sandwiches—and also found a small battery-powered cassette tape-recorder. I put everything on the table next to the telephone. Cregar was apathetic and looked at the sandwiches without interest. I filled the percolator from a tap on one of the benches and got the coffee going. Cregar accepted coffee but he wouldn’t eat.

Unobtrusively I switched on the recorder; I wanted Cregar condemned out of his own mouth. I said, ‘We’ve a lot to talk about.’

‘Have we?’ he said without interest. ‘Nothing matters any more.’

‘You’re not dead yet, and you may not be if Ogilvie does his stuff. When did Benson learn of Ashton’s interest in genetics?’

He was silent for a moment, then said, ‘Must have been 1971. He saw that Ashton was keeping up with the girl’s studies, and then starting to do a lot of work on his own, usually at the weekends—a lot of calculating. He tried to get
a look at it, but Ashton kept it locked away.’ Cregar brooded. ‘Ashton never did like me. I’ve often wondered if he knew what I was doing.’ He waved his hand at the laboratory. ‘This, I mean. It’s supposed to be secret, but a man with money can usually find out what he wants to know.’ He shrugged. ‘Anyway, he made damned certain that Benson didn’t lay an eye on his work.’

‘That empty vault must have come as a shock.’

He nodded. ‘Benson knew about the vault but never managed to get inside. And when Ogilvie told me it was empty I didn’t believe him. It was only when he offered to let one of my forensic chaps look at the vault that I accepted the fact.’ He looked up. ‘You’re a clever man. I never thought of the railway. I ought to have done. Ashton wasn’t the man to fool about with toy trains.’

Now Cregar had started to talk he positively flowed. I suppose he thought there was no reason to keep his silence. It was a sort of deathbed confession.

I said, ‘What I can’t understand was how you engineered Mayberry’s acid attack—and why. That’s the bit that seems senseless.’

‘It was senseless,’ said Cregar. ‘I had nothing to do with it. I didn’t even know Mayberry existed until the police tracked him down. Do you remember when you appeared before the inter-departmental committee, Ogilvie said something about you “exploding Ashton out of Stockholm”? Well, I exploded him out of England.’

‘How?’

He shrugged. ‘Opportunism combined with planning. I’d been wanting to have a dig at Ashton for a long time. I wanted to get him out of that house so I could get into that vault. I thought whatever he had would be ripe. I’d already made preparations—rented the flat and opened the bank account in Stockholm, got the Israeli passport, and so on. All I needed was a trigger. Then along came that maniac,
Mayberry—most opportunely. I got Benson to panic Ashton, talking of threats to the other girl, and so on. Benson told him my department couldn’t cope with that sort of thing unless Ashton got out, that we were prepared to help and that we had a safe hideaway for him, which of course we had. And after all that the damned vault was empty.’

‘But why did Benson kill Ashton?’

‘Standing orders from thirty years ago,’ said Cregar simply. ‘Ashton wasn’t to be allowed to go back to the Russians. If there was a chance of him falling into Russian hands Benson was to kill him. Benson had every reason to think you were Russians.’

‘Jesus!’ I said. ‘What sort of man was Benson to kill Ashton after being with him thirty years?’

Cregar gave me a lopsided smile. ‘He had gratitude, I suppose; and personal loyalty—to me.’

I remembered my musings in the dark room and, out of curiosity, said, ‘Cregar, why did you do all this?’

He looked at me in surprise. ‘A man must leave his mark on the world.’

I felt chilled.

There wasn’t much I wanted to know after that, but, the dam now broken, Cregar rambled on interminably, and I was glad when the telephone rang. It was Ogilvie. ‘There’ll be an RAF helicopter on its way with a medical team. Lumsden thinks you’re right about Porton and he’s made the arrangements.’ He paused. ‘He also wants me to pass on his apologies—I don’t know why.’

‘I do. Thank him for me. When will the chopper get here?’

‘They’re assembling the team now. I’d say six hours. How’s Miss Ashton?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said bitterly. ‘I can’t get to her. She’s in a coma. You can tell that to Lumsden, too.’

Ogilvie was inclined to talk but I cut him off. I wasn’t in the mood for that. Half an hour later the phone rang again and I found Archie Ferguson on the line. ‘There’s someone called Starkie wants to talk to the man Carter. Shall I let him?’

‘Let me talk to Starkie.’ The earphone crackled and a deep voice said, ‘Richard Starkie here—is that Dr Carter?’

‘Malcolm Jaggard here. Who are you?’

‘I’m a doctor speaking from Porton Down. Are you one of the infected men?’

‘Yes.’

‘Any symptoms starting to show?’

‘Not yet.’

‘If Carter manufactured this bug he’ll know more about it than anyone. I need the information.’

‘Right,’ I said. ‘If you don’t get satisfaction from him let me know. Are you on the line, Archie?’

‘Aye.’

‘Let them talk. If Carter wants persuading I’m sure you know what to do.’

They came for us seven hours later, dressed like spacemen in plastic clothing with self-contained breathing apparatus. They put us in plastic envelopes whole and entire, plugged in an air supply and sealed us up. We stopped in the air lock and the envelopes and themselves were drenched with a liquid, then we were carried out to the helicopter where I found Penny already installed in her own envelope. She was still unconscious.

A month later I was feeling pretty chipper because Starkie had given me a clean bill of health. ‘For three weeks now we’ve inspected every damned
E.coli
bug that’s come out of you and they’re all normal. I don’t know why you’re still lying around here. What do you think this is, a doss house?’

He hadn’t always been as cheerful as that. At the beginning I was placed in a sterile room and untouched by human hand for the next two weeks. Everything that was done to me was done by remote control. Later they told me that a team of thirty doctors and nurses was working on me alone.

Penny did better. For her they apparently mobilized the entire medical resources of the United Kingdom, plus sizeable chunks from the United States and the Continent, with a little bit from Australia. The bug she had was different from the one I’d caught, and it was a real frightener. It got the medical world into a dizzy tizzy and, although they were able to cure her, they wanted to make sure that the bug, whatever it was, was completely eradicated. So I came out of Porton Down a month before her.

Starkie once said soberly, ‘If she’d have been left another day with the minimal attention she was getting I don’t think we could have done it.’ That made me think of Carter
and I wondered what was being done about him. I never found out.

When I came out of purdah but before I was discharged I went to see her. I couldn’t kiss her, or even touch her, but we could speak separated by a pane of glass, and she seemed cheerful enough. I told her something of what had happened, but not everything. Time enough for that when she was better. Then I said, ‘I want you out of here pretty damned quick. I want to get married.’

She smiled brilliantly. ‘Oh, yes, Malcolm.’

‘I can’t fix a day because of that bloody man Starkie,’ I complained. ‘He’s likely to keep you in here forever, investigating the contents of your beautiful bowels.’

She said, ‘How would you like a double wedding? I had a letter from Gillian in New York. Peter Michaelis flew over and proposed to her. She was lying in bed with her left arm strapped to her right cheek and swaddled in bandages when he asked her. She thought it was very funny.’

‘I’ll be damned!’

‘It will be a little time yet. We all have to get out of our hospitals. Is four months too long to wait?’

‘Yes,’ I said promptly. ‘But I’ll wait.’

I didn’t ask anyone how Cregar was doing because I didn’t care.

On the day I came out of the sterile room Ogilvie came to see me, bearing the obligatory pound of grapes. I received him with some reserve. He asked after my health and I referred him to Starkie, then he said, ‘We got the tape cassette after it had been decontaminated. Cregar won’t be able to wriggle out of this one.’

I said, ‘Had any success with Ashton’s computer programs?’

‘Oh, my God, they’re fantastic. Everyone has claimed the man was a genius and he’s proved it.’

‘How?’

Ogilvie scratched his head. ‘I don’t know if I can explain—I’m no scientist—but it seems that Ashton has done for genetics what Einstein did for physics. He analysed the DNA molecule in a theoretical way and came up with a series of rather complicated equations. By applying these you can predict exactly which genes go where and why, and which genetic configurations are possible or not possible. It’s a startling breakthrough; it’s put genetics on a firm and mathematical grounding.’

‘That should make Lumsden happy,’ I said.

Ogilvie ate a grape. ‘He doesn’t know. It’s still confidential. It hasn’t been released publicly yet.’

‘Why not?’

‘The Minister seems to feel…well, there are reasons why it shouldn’t be released yet. Or so he says.’

That saddened me. The bloody politicians with their bloody reasons made me sick to the stomach. The Minister was another Cregar. He had found a power lever and wanted to stick to it.

Ogilvie took another grape. ‘I asked Starkie when you’d be coming out but he isn’t prepared to say. However, when you do I’ve a new job for you. As you may know, Kerr is retiring in two years. I want to groom you for his job.’ Kerr was Ogilvie’s second-in-command. He smiled. ‘In seven years, when I go, you could be running the department.’

I said bluntly, ‘Get lost.’

He was not a man who showed astonishment easily, but he did then.
‘What did you say?’

‘You heard me. Get lost. You can take Kerr’s job and your job and stuff them wherever you like. The Minister’s backside might be a good place.’

‘What the devil’s got into you?’ he demanded.

‘I’ll tell you,’ I said. ‘You were going to do a deal with Cregar.’

‘Who said that?’

‘Cregar.’

‘And you believed him? The man lies as naturally as he breathes.’

‘Yes, I believed him because at that point he had no reason to lie. He did proposition you, didn’t he?’

‘Well, we talked—yes.’

I nodded. ‘That’s why you won’t get me back in the department. I’m tired of lies and evasions; I’m tired of self-interest masquerading as patriotism. It came to me when Cregar called me an honest man, not as a compliment but as someone to corrupt. I realized then that he was wrong. How could an honest man do what I did to Ashton?’

‘I think you’re being over-emotional about this,’ Ogilvie said stiffly.

‘I’m emotional because I’m a man with feelings and not a bloody robot,’ I retorted. ‘And now you can take your bloody grapes and get the hell out of here.’

He went away moderately unhappy.

And they all lived happily ever after. The hero married the principal girl, the second hero got the second girl, and they moved out of the poor woodcutter’s cottage into the east wing of the king’s palace.

But this is not a fairy tale.

On the day Penny came out of hospital she, Peter Michaelis and I went on a wing-ding in the East End and the three of us became moderately alcoholic and distinctly merry. On the day Gillian arrived back from New York the four of us went on another wing-ding with similar effects. That American plastic surgeon must have been a genius because Gillian’s new face was an improvement on the one she had before the acid was thrown. I was very glad for Peter.

The clanging of wedding bells could be heard in the near future. Penny and Gillian were dashing about London denuding the better stores of dresses and frillies for their trousseaux, while I scouted around for a house, introduced it to Penny, and then secured it with a cash deposit against the time the lawyers had finished their expensive wrangling over the deeds. It was all very exhilarating.

Ten days before the wedding I felt it incumbent on me to go back to see Starkie. He heard what I had to say and frowned, then took me into a laboratory where I was
subjected to a battery of tests. He told me to go away and return in a week.

On the day I went back I read of Cregar’s death in
The Times
. The obituary was sickening. Described as a faithful public servant who had served his country with no thought of self for many years, he was lauded as an example for coming generations to follow. I threw the paper out of the train window and was immediately sorry; that sort of stuff could pollute the countryside very seriously.

Starkie was serious, too, when I saw him, and I said, ‘It’s bad news.’

‘Yes, it is,’ he said directly. ‘It’s cancer.’

It was a blow, but I had half-expected it. ‘How long do I have?’

He shrugged. ‘Six months to a year, I’d say. Could be longer, but not much.’

I walked to his office window and looked out. I can’t remember what I saw there. ‘Cregar’s dead,’ I said. ‘Same thing?’

‘Yes.’

‘How?’

Starkie sighed. ‘That damned fool, Carter, was doing shotgun experiments. That means he was chopping up DNA molecules into short lengths, putting them into
E.coli
, and standing back to see what happened. It’s not a bad technique if you know what you’re doing and take the proper precautions.’

‘He was taking precautions,’ I said. ‘The stuff got loose because of my own damned foolishness.’

‘He wasn’t,’ snapped Starkie. ‘Cregar was putting pressure on him—wanting fast results. He couldn’t wait for a consignment of genetically weakened
E.coli
from the States so he used the normal bug. There was no biological containment at all. The stuff went straight into your gut and started to breed happily.’

‘To cause cancer?’ It didn’t seem likely.

‘I’ll try to explain this as simply as possible,’ said Starkie. ‘We believe that in the genetic material of all normal cells there are genes which can produce tumour-forming chemicals, but they are normally repressed by other genes. Now, if you do a shotgun experiment and introduce a short length of DNA into
E.coli
you’re in danger of introducing a tumour gene without the one that represses it. That’s what’s happened to you. The
E.coli
in your gut was producing tumourforming chemicals.’

‘But you said the
E.coli
coming out of me was normal,’ I objected.

‘I know I did, and so it was. One of the most difficult things to do in these experiments is to get a new strain to breed true. They’re very unstable. What happened was that this strain began to breed back to normal
E.coli
almost immediately. But it was in your gut long enough to do the damage.’

‘I see.’ I felt a sudden chill. ‘What about Penny?’

‘She’s all right. That was a different bug entirely. We made sure of that.’

I said, ‘Thank you, Dr Starkie. You’ve been very direct and I appreciate it. What’s the next step?’

He rubbed his jaw. ‘If you hadn’t come to see me I’d have sent for you—on the basis of what happened to Lord Cregar. This is a type of cancer we haven’t come across before; at least it hasn’t been reported in the literature in this particular form. Cregar went very fast, but that may have been because of his age. Older cellular structures are more susceptible to cancers. I think you have a better chance.’

But not much better, I thought. Starkie spoke in the flat, even tone used by doctors when they want to break the bad news slowly. He scribbled on a sheet of paper. ‘Go to this man. He’s very good and knows about your case. He’ll probably put you on tumour-reducing drugs and, possibly,
radiation therapy.’ He paused. ‘And put your affairs in order as any sensible man should.’

I thanked him again, took the address, and went back to London where I heard another instalment of bad news. Then I told Penny. I had no need to give her Starkie’s explanation because she grasped that immediately. It was her job, after all. I said, ‘Of course, the marriage is off.’

‘Oh, no; Malcolm!’

And so we had another row—which I won. I said, ‘I have no objection to living in sin. Come live with me and be my love. I know a place in the south of Ireland where the mountains are green and the sea is blue when the sun shines, which it does quite often, and green when it’s cloudy and the rollers come in from the Atlantic. I could do with six months of that if you’re with me.’

We went to Ireland immediately after Peter and Gillian were married. It was not the happy occasion one would have wished; the men were sombre and the women weepy, but it had to be gone through.

At one time I thought of suicide; taking the Hemingway out, to perpetrate a bad pun. But then I thought I had a job to do, which was to write an account of the Ashton case, leaving nothing out and making it as truthful as possible, and certainly not putting any cosmetics on my own blemishes. God knows I’m not proud of my own part in it. Penny has read the manuscript; parts of it have amused her, other parts have shattered her. She has typed it all herself.

We live here very simply if you discount the resident medical staff of a doctor and three nurses which Penny insisted upon. The doctor is a mild young American who plays bad chess and the nurses are pretty which Penny doesn’t mind. It helps to have a wealthy woman for a mistress. For the first few months I used to go to Dublin once a fortnight where they’d prod and probe and shoot atoms into me. But I stopped that because it wasn’t doing any good.

Now time is becoming short. This account and myself are coming to an end. I have written it for publication, partly because I think people ought to know what is done in their names, and partly because the work of Ashton on genetics has not yet been released. It would be a pity if his work, which could do so much good in the right hands, should be withheld and perhaps diverted to malignant uses in the hands of another Cregar. There are many Cregars about in high office.

Whether publication will be possible at all I don’t know. The wrath of the Establishment can be mighty and its instruments of suppression strong and subtle. Nevertheless Penny and I have been plotting our campaign to ensure that these words are not lost.

A wise one-legged American, in adapting the words of a naval hero, once said, ‘We have met the enemy, and he is us.’

God help you all if he is right.