Sweet Talking Money Read online

  ‘The download,’ said Kati in a tear-laden voice. ‘The one Mungo got from Anita Morris. I’ve been going through it. Look at it. Look. They’re way ahead. Yesterday, they got their very first HIV peptide. They’re just getting the data in order, apparently, but they aim to be at the Patent Office within two or three days.’

  Cameron and Bryn looked at the screen. It was an e-mail from Anita Morris to Brent Huizinga, no less, reporting progress on ‘Project Champion’. There were a couple of dozen viral illnesses listed, with terse comments on developments in each area. On some diseases, they were no further ahead than Cameron. On most of them, they were literally months ahead. And, as Kati said, they seemed to have obtained their very first HIV peptide yesterday.

  ‘They’ve got the HIV peptide?’ said Bryn in shock. ‘HIV as in AIDS? They can cure AIDS?’

  Cameron shook her head impatiently. ‘No. There are several critical peptides at work in AIDS. They’ve got the first, most minor one. We’re only a few weeks away from it ourselves.’

  ‘No,’ said Kati. ‘We’ve just got it.’ She opened another file downloaded from Corinth, and stepped back to let Cameron view the screen. The file contained the full specifications of the peptide, and Cameron leaned forward to inspect it closely.

  ‘This seems to be in order,’ she said. ‘Have you checked it against our data?’

  Kati nodded, then, her voice absolutely breaking with tears, added, ‘Oh my God, it’s so heart-breaking. You know that stupid joke? About the Newfies – you know, Newfoundlanders – who tried to climb Everest. They had to stop because they ran out of scaffolding. I thought it would be like that. I didn’t think you could just hire an OK scientist and chuck money around and come up with the goods. I didn’t –’ Kati was sobbing now. ‘I honestly thought we were going to win.’

  Bryn rubbed Kati’s back with his big bear-paw, as Cameron massaged her hands and stroked her hair. None of them said anything. None of them had anything to say.

  3

  It was then that Mungo entered. ‘Lighten up,’ he said. ‘Old Hassie Baby kicked butt, didn’t he? Crack open the cherryade and let the rave commence.’

  ‘Professor Hass may have kicked butt, but Corinth is kicking ours,’ said Bryn roughly. Up in the rafters, Tallulah chorused her thoughts: ‘O-shi, matey,’ and let another shower of paint fall to the floor. In a few gruff sentences, Bryn explained the problem, with Mungo nodding and grinning like a halfwit.

  ‘They’re one day ahead? Just one?’ he asked. ‘’S no biggie.’

  ‘No, Mungo. This is serious.’

  ‘Lighten up. We can sort it.’

  ‘Now’s not the time,’ said Kati, still grief-stricken. ‘This is horrible news.’

  ‘Well, pardon me,’ said Mungo, ‘I know how upsettin’ it is. Bleeding funeral, everything pukka, everyone’s got a long face an’ a cup of tea that tastes like the cat widdled in it, then some nitwit starts handing out the happy juice. One minute, everything’s boo-hoo. Next minute, everything’s tee-hee, an’ the front parlour’s swarming with maiden aunties pecking away at the grass cookies and doing the foxtrot till their knickers show.’ He peered around the room, blinking, as though he might get into trouble for speaking. ‘What I’m trying to say is, wouldn’ it be a good idea to stop Corinth? I mean, I know all about the sacred nature of the prop’ty relationship an’ everything, but we could always say a couple of Hail-Marys an’ light a few joss sticks.’

  Bryn stared hard at Mungo. ‘You’re serious? You can stop them?’

  ‘Not for long. I don’t mean I can do it for long.’

  ‘We’d only need a day or two. We can get to the Patent Office every bit as fast as they can.’

  ‘Day or two, man. ’S no prob.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  Tension caused Bryn’s voice to grate as he asked the question, and both Kati and Cameron were by now staring at Mungo.

  Mungo wiggled his eyebrows at them and rushed, galumphing, upstairs to Pod Mungo. He came down again with a floppy disk and a mouth full of Waggon Wheel. He slipped the disk into Cameron’s PC and brought up a list of files. ‘LOVEBUG2, MAYDAY, PACMAN, AMDSPLAT, CONANZZZ, FATLADY, CORSAIR, MOUSE, MS-KILL.’

  ‘Pick a virus,’ he said, jabbing his Waggon Wheel at the screen, ‘any virus.’

  Tallulah, scenting marshmallow filling, dropped down from the rafters and sat on the PC monitor, shaking white paint from her talons and pecking bits of Waggon Wheel from Mungo’s sticky fingers.

  ‘Mungo, what’s the idea?’

  ‘The i-dee-a, man, is we wipe out their computer system. Not for long, obviously. They’ll have pretty much everything archived an’ retrievable. But even a really top outfit’s gonna be knocked out for a day or two. That’s the i-dee-a.’

  ‘How do you get the virus into their system?’

  ‘First up, select your badster.’

  Bryn looked at Kati, whose face was still pained and tearful. ‘Kati,’ he said, ‘you want to choose?’

  She wiped her face on her shoulder. ‘I don’t mind. Something nasty.’

  ‘They’re all nasty,’ said Mungo.

  ‘CORSAIR?’ said Bryn. ‘Sounds OK to me.’

  Cameron nodded. ‘CORSAIR it is, guv, an’ CORSAIR for the lady.’ Mungo paused to gaze at Kati. ‘You alright? I’ve got some wet wipes up in the Pod, all nice an’ toasty on the laptop transformers.’ He mimed the wiping action for her, in case she didn’t know how to do it.

  She shook her head, and Mungo turned his serious eyes back to the monitor. Dialling in through a now-familiar modem sequence, Mungo brought up Anita Morris’s own log-on screen, and logged on using her name and password. ‘Welcome to Corinth Laboratories Data and Computing Services.’

  ‘Suits,’ commented Mungo. ‘Welcome to suit city.’ (His own log-on procedure at the clinic welcomed each user with a blaze of psychedelic colour and an uplifting message that turned cartwheels round the lurid pink-and-green screen. ‘Doctor Ganja’s Magic Smoke’ was today’s offering, with fluffy white clouds puffing out of the ‘i’ in Magic.)

  He entered Morris’s e-mail package and opened a new message addressed to ‘Corinth Norwalk – all employees’. In the message box he simply wrote, ‘Please see attached ASAP,’ then saved the virus as an attachment under the innocuous name ‘AM_0902’.

  ‘That’s it?’ said Bryn, astonished. ‘That’s all?’

  ‘Yep, ’cept for fusin’ and pretties.’

  ‘Which in English would be?’

  ‘Fusing. Gotta choose a time when the virus goes off. Far enough away so enough people have opened the file, near enough that they haven’t finished all their patent blah-de-blah.’

  ‘OK. Midnight tonight. East Coast Standard time. That’s five a.m. our time.’

  ‘You think Mr Corsair Virus-Man is gonna adjust his watch as he zooms across the Atlantic on a lil’ bit of cable?’

  ‘OK. Just midnight then.’

  ‘Midnight it is, okie-doke.’

  ‘And pretties?’

  ‘Don’ want people all knickers-in-a-twist over the message we send. I usually just make the attachment a blank page with some random ASCII symbols on it. That way everyone assumes it’s an error and waits for the proper message. Even if ’Nita Morris gets asked about it, she’ll be a bit puzzled, but it’s not the sort of thing anyone gets frazzled by. ’Course, if it ever happens to you, you should get frazzled big-time. Hurry up, Flash, we’ve only got an hour to save the world,’ he said, yelping the last bit in falsetto.

  ‘And that’s it? That’s all?’

  ‘Yep. ’Course, it takes time to build up a really good virus collection.’

  Cameron shook her head and laughed. ‘Tell me about it.’

  4

  They’d all intended to stay up to watch the fireworks, but come about eleven o’clock, Kati’s big brown spaniel eyes drooped with sleepiness, and Bryn sent her to sleep in his double bed in the barge’s grand stern gallery. Even Mungo, essentially a
nocturnal creature, disappeared off at about three a.m. and was found snoring amongst the junk food sediments on the floor of the Pod.

  Cameron worked on her own, in her tower, with an apparently invincible ability to work at top pressure all hours of the day and night. At a quarter to five, as dawn was beginning to get its act together on London’s eastern horizon, Bryn arrived with a pot of coffee, a mug of peppermint tea, and a couple of sheets of paper. The scene reminded him of their first meeting: the cluttered office, the anglepoise lamps, the fluttering Post-it notes, the strange, attractive doctor – better-dressed now, better-looking, but still the same. He felt fond of her, warm. And as always, he was excited and alerted by the mood, the sense that, in her company, he was standing close to the edge of knowledge, perhaps only inches away from Nobel Prizes and the thanks of history.

  ‘Coffee for me,’ he said. ‘Wet hay for you.’

  ‘Liver support for me,’ she said. ‘Acid-forming, liver-trashing, adrenal gland destruction for you.’

  They sipped their drinks and Cameron examined her counterpart, this battered-seeming man who looked like he’d been put together by bulldozer and mechanical-shovel. She felt somehow reassured and comforted. It still seemed odd to her the way this man had come crashing into her life. Back in the New England winter, on that snowy night in Boston, was it really only money that had brought him to her? Had that really been his only motive? Cameron sighed. Those were questions for another day. She glanced up and realised that Bryn was smiling broadly, had been ever since coming upstairs.

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Good news,’ he said. ‘Fax. It came in just now.’ He handed Cameron the sheets of paper and she read them, perplexed.

  ‘Max Altmeyer? Am I meant to know him?’ She went on reading. ‘He wants to invest? In the clinic? You’ve found some money?’ Her voice rose in mounting surprise and delight.

  Bryn nodded. ‘Altmeyer heard Hass on the six o’clock news. He calls me up, we have a chat, and he sounds interested. He promised to send a proposal. This is it. He must have cranked right through the night. Twenty million pounds. We could have it within ten days.’

  5

  They spoke for a while about the money. ‘Twenty million pounds … Whew! We can go buy the mother of all peptide fractionation machines and really blast away. Hell, we can have two machines, three. Rick and Kati can each head up a research unit, and we could go out on a hiring spree. Wow! We’ll really begin to motor, especially with Mungo giving us access to their data.’

  Cameron laughed, hope once again glittering in her eyes. Bryn watched her excitement with delighted pleasure. Cameron was a wonderful scientist and a wonderful woman. For too long, he’d been obsessed only by her science part – the bit which would end up (he hoped) making him rich. He hadn’t just ignored her woman part, he’d been actively annoyed by it – a distraction he just didn’t need. That was gone. He understood that the woman and scientist didn’t have to be in conflict. He admired and liked her.

  ‘So. Tell me about Altmeyer,’ she said.

  ‘He was one of my A-list millionaires,’ said Bryn. ‘I was literally on the point of writing to him anyway. What else d’you need to know? He’s loaded. He likes us.’

  In fact, the Berger Scholes notes had been highly detailed. In his early twenties, Altmeyer had managed to persuade a small Italian pharma company to let him be the distributor of their product in the UK and the US. He’d had no capital, no organisation, no sales team. Despite that, through sheer force of character, he’d bombarded doctors into believing his product was one of the leading drugs in its category. Although the range of uses was small – at its peak the drug never did more than fifteen or twenty million pounds in revenues – Altmeyer had managed to negotiate himself a remarkable thirty-three per cent cut of sales. By the age of thirty, he had got through his first wife, his first yacht, was worth upwards of thirty million and his annual royalties were still several million a year. He’d ploughed most of the money back into developing his own research operation and much of the rest of it into building up a salesforce. He continued to license drugs from research companies too small to market them effectively themselves, and had a nice business earning royalties from other people’s innovations.

  ‘Can we trust him?’ asked Cameron. ‘Are we sure he’s not just a stooge for Corinth?’

  ‘I doubt it. It was only a few hours after Hass’s conference that Altmeyer faxed his offer. That’d be pretty fast work, even by Corinth’s standards.’

  ‘But still … it’s possible, isn’t it? If they had some prior relationship?’

  ‘True. Not likely, but possible. On the other hand, I’m not sure I even care.’

  ‘What?’

  Bryn nodded. ‘Thanks to the excitement you and Hass generated, I reckon we can get all the money we need by selling just forty per cent of the company. That way I’d retain total control.’

  ‘Because your sixty per cent can outvote the other forty per cent?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘But, like, every time?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘That’s democratic?’

  Bryn smiled.

  ‘That’s business.’

  6

  They smiled, and their eyes met. The moment lasted for a second or two longer than was normal.

  Then Cameron looked away, and Bryn glanced at his watch. It was gone five. Over in Norwalk, Connecticut, Mungo’s virus had either gone into action or been located and disabled. It was time to check.

  Watched in solemn silence by Cameron, Bryn logged in to Anita Morris’s machine. Or rather, tried to. ‘Dialup sequence aborted’, it commented. ‘Remote modem not responding’.

  For a brief moment, Bryn felt a flash of annoyance. Why was it that systems always failed when you needed them? Then it clicked. That was the point. The system had failed. Not when he needed it, but when Anita Morris did.

  He turned to Cameron. Her eyes, like his, were shining in triumph.

  7

  That night – or morning, rather – Cameron got to Allen’s flat just as he was getting up.

  He raised an eyebrow. ‘When you said you’d be working late, I didn’t think … Were you working?’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ said Cameron airily. ‘Partly working. Partly not.’

  ‘And the partly not part?’

  ‘Oh, you know, this and that. Industrial espionage, blowing up computer systems, that kind of thing.’

  ‘The big bad wolf at Corinth, I hope.’

  ‘You bet.’

  Allen’s getting up had progressed as far as a shower, a shave and a pair of clean underpants. Cameron swung coquettishly from one of the rough oak pillars of the bed frame, playing with her hair. ‘I see you’re all ready for me,’ she said.

  ‘Ready …?’

  Cameron explained herself by slipping out of her dark-blue dress and underwear. She stood in front of him, naked, leaning against the wooden bedpost with her arm around it.

  ‘It’s seven o’clock in the morning,’ he said. ‘I’ve an early meeting.’

  Cameron slipped into bed, tugging at his elbow. ‘Aren’t you even going to tuck me in?’ Her lips began fluttering in small circles round his back, heading towards his waist.

  ‘You know what day it is today? It’s the eighteenth of August.’

  ‘So?’ Her monosyllabic reply wasn’t meant to be curt, it was just that her mouth was busy doing other things.

  ‘So, the big bad wolf needs to know if I’m applying to them for a job or not. Remember? We did talk about it. We agreed to make up our minds by today.’

  Oh,’ Cameron was disappointed. They had talked about it, but Cameron had been sticking her head in the sand, hoping the problem would go away. Allen simply didn’t believe Cameron’s ‘conspiracy theories’, and laughed at the idea that there was anything other than healthy competition between Corinth and the clinic. He genuinely wanted the job – not for sinister reasons, but just because it was a good job, with a great salary,
in a research field which was Allen’s particular favourite. ‘You still want to go ahead?’

  Allen pulled away from Cameron and spoke seriously. ‘Look, of course I’m still keen. You said you’d think about it and let me know.’

  ‘And if I said no?’

  ‘If you said no, I’d think you were being very silly. I’m not suddenly going to turn into a vampire just because I’ve got a new employer.’

  ‘But Corinth … I know you don’t think they’re so evil, but believe me, they fight dirty. And their anti-viral drugs are just the worst.’

  ‘Yes, we’ve been through that. I wouldn’t be working on the anti-viral side. You said yourself that their respiratory work is first-rate.’

  ‘I know.’

  Cameron cuddled into Allen’s tall, unyielding frame, trying to soften him, as though a bit of foreplay would make the issue melt away.

  ‘We need to resolve this,’ he said.

  Cameron sat up, holding the sheet over her breasts. ’OK, two questions. One, if I said no, would you apply to them? If it was that important to me?’

  He considered. He had a beautiful intelligent girlfriend, sitting naked in his bed. She had cranky views about one of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies, but that was OK. If he applied to Corinth, he mightn’t even get the job anyway. The choice wasn’t hard. ‘If you said no, I’d be disappointed, but I wouldn’t apply.’

  ‘And two, if you did work there, could you swear – like, totally, absolutely on-your-mother’s-grave swear – that you’d stay loyal to me, not them, come what may?’

  Allen smiled benevolently, already guessing how this conversation would end. He kissed her lingeringly on the lips. ‘My mother is alive and well and living in Brighton. Apart from that, I swear.’

  ‘Whatever happened?’