The Enemy

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

I had forgotten that Gillian was not very pretty to look at and she came as a renewed shock. Her face was puckered and drawn with scar tissue and her right eyelid was pulled almost closed. The first few moments were not at all easy; there was the double embarrassment of condoling on the death of her father and coping with her dreadful appearance, and I hoped my face did not reflect what I felt. But she put me at my ease, cave me a scotch and had a sherry herself.

Of her father she had little to say beyond expressing a puzzled sadness and a total lack of knowledge of his motives. 'What can I say? There is nothing to be said, except that I'm deeply sorry and totally bewildered.'

Of herself she had come to terms with her affliction and was prepared to talk about it. 'Of course, it will be better after the plastic surgery. I'm told the best man for that is in America, and Penny wants me to go over. But my face is not so nice now, and I don't go out much.' She smiled lopsidedly. 'I saw you talking to Peter Michaelis outside. Do you know him?'

I said carefully, 'I met him at the hospital.'

'Oh, yes; you would, of course.' She smiled again, and there was a happy sparkle in her good eye. 'One never thinks of policemen as ordinary human beings-just shadows dashing about on television arresting people. Peter is such a delightful man.'

I agreed that a policeman's lot, etc., 'Must cramp their social lives.'

'He just told me about Mayberry. It appears the man is quite insane. Penny told me about… about the mistake.'

'So you know.'

'She waited until I'd been home a few days. I suppose she was right to withhold it until then. I wasn't in any condition to take more shocks. But how awful for her. It took a great deal of straight talking from me to make her carry on with Professor Lumsden.'

'I'm glad you did.'

Gillian looked at me closely. 'There's something wrong between you and Penny, isn't there? I think she's unhappy about it. What is it, Malcolm?'

'I don't know if the trouble altogether concerns me,' I said. 'I rather think she's unhappy about what happened to you, and then to your father.'

'No,' she said pensively. 'She appears to involve you in it, and I don't know why. She won't talk about it, and that's unlike her.' She turned her head to the window as a car drew up. 'Here she is now. You'll stay for lunch, of course.'

'Glad to.'

I was pleased to find that Penny was pleased to see me. 'Oh, Malcolm!' she cried, and hurried to meet me. I met her halfway across the room, took her in my arms, and kissed her.

'I was very sorry to hear about your father.'

She looked beyond me to where Gillian sat, and said quietly, 'I want to talk to you about that afterwards.'

I nodded. 'Very well.'

'A sherry,' she said. 'A sherry, to save my life. Lummy and I have talked our throats dry this morning.'

So we had lunch, at which we chatted amiably and kept away from controversial subjects. We discussed Gillian's forthcoming trip to the United States, and Penny asked about my experiences there. 'I was told where you were,' she said obliquely.

Later she said, 'Gillian and I have decided to sell the house. It's much too big for the two of us, so we've decided to set ourselves up in a decent flat in town. Gillian will be closer to the theatres and concert halls, and I won't have to commute to the lab.'

'That sounds sensible,' I said. 'When do you move?'

'I'll be going to America with Gillian,' she said. 'We're selecting some of the best pieces from here and the rest will be auctioned, the antiques at Sotheby's and the rest of the stuff from the house. But we'll be in America then. I couldn't bear to stay and see the place sold up. So I suppose the auction will be in about three weeks. I'm making the final arrangements this afternoon.'

And that would put paid to Michaelis's fun and games with the model railway. I wondered if he was preparing to put in a bid.

After lunch Gillian pleaded tiredness and went to rest in her room, but I rather think she wanted to leave us alone together. Penny and I sat before the blazing fire with a pot of coffee and I could tell she was getting set for a serious discussion. 'Malcolm,' she said, 'what's the truth about Daddy?'

I offered her one of my American cigarettes which she took. 'I don't think anyone will ever know.'

'Did he die the way they said? You must know, being who you are, even though you were in America at the time. You were investigating him, after all.'

'My information is that he was in a Swedish army proving ground where they were using live ammunition when he was killed.'

'And that's the truth?' she said steadily. 'You wouldn't lie to me?'

'That's the truth.' But not the whole truth, Jaggard, you bastard!

She was silent for a while, gazing into the flames. 'I don't understand any of it. What was he doing in Sweden?'

'Apparently nothing very much, from what I can gather. He was living quietly in Stockholm with Benson to look after him. He read a lot and went to the occasional concert. A quiet and placid life.'

'How do you know this?'

'The department checked, of course.'

'Of course,' she said colourlessly. 'I'm going to Sweden. I want to find out for myself. Will you come with me?'

That was a poser! I could imagine the expression on the face of the colonel of the Royal Sodermanland Regiment if I poked my nose into Strangnas again. I needed no imagination at all to picture the cold grey eyes of Captain Morelius of Swedish Army Intelligence.

'That may not be easy,' I said. 'I've just been transferred and my time isn't my own.'

'Transferred from your department?'

'No, just within the department, but I may be office-bound from now on. Still, I'll see what I can do.' Which would be precisely nothing. 'Look, Penny, how would it be if I arranged for you to talk with my chief? He can tell you all that's known about your father in Sweden.' And he can tell my damned lies for me, I thought savagely.

She thought about it, then said, 'Very well. But that doesn't mean I'm not going to Sweden.'

'I'll arrange it.' I rose to pour us some more coffee. 'Penny, what's happening to us? I still want to marry you, but every time I get near the subject you edge away. I'm very much in love with you and it's becoming damned frustrating. Have you turned off?'

She cried, 'Oh, Malcolm, I'm sorry; I really am. Everything turned topsy-turvy so suddenly. First there was Gillian, then Daddy-and then you. I've been going about looking at people I know and wondering if what I think I know is really so. Even Lummy has come under scrutiny-I'm beginning to worry him, I think. He imagines I'm going paranoid.'

'It's not been too easy for me, either,' I said. 'I didn't want to have anything to do with the Ashton case.'

'The Ashton case,' she repeated. 'Is that what they call it?' When I nodded, she said, 'That takes the humanity out of it, doesn't it? When it's a "case" it's easy to forget the flesh and blood because a case is mostly dockets and paperwork. How would you like to be referred to as the Jaggard case?'

'Not much,' I said sombrely.

Penny took my hand. 'Malcolm, you'll have to give me time. I think-no-I know I love you, but I'm still a bit mixed up; and I don't know that I'm too happy about what you do with your life. That's something else which needs thinking about.'

'My God!' I said. 'You make it sound as though I go about eating live babies. I'm just a dreary counterespionage man specializing in industry and making sure too many secrets don't get pinched.'

'You mean weapons?'

I shook my head. 'Not necessarily. That's not our pigeon-and we're not interested in the latest toothpaste additive, either. But if an engineering firm has ploughed a couple of millions into research and come up with something revolutionary, then we don't want some foreign Johnny nicking it and going into competition with a head start. And, don't forget, the foreign Johnnies from the East are state supported.'

'But these things are patented, aren't they?'

'Patents are a dead giveaway. The really big stuff isn't patented, especially in electronics. If you produce a new electronic chip which does the work of eleventy thousand transistors the opposition can put the thing under a microscope and see what you've done, but how the hell you've done it is quite another thing, and our boys aren't telling. They're certainly not going to disclose the process in a published patent.'

'I see,' she said. 'But that means you're just another sort of policeman.'

'Most of the time,' I said. 'Our problem is that the theft of information, as such, is not illegal in this country. Suppose I stole a sheet of paper from your lab, say, and I was caught. I'd be found guilty of the theft of a piece of paper worth one penny, and I'd suffer the appropriate penalty. The fact that written on that paper was some formula worth a million quid wouldn't count.'

Her voice rose. 'But that's silly.'

'I agree,' I said. 'Do you want to hear something really silly? A few years ago a chap was caught tapping a post office line. The only charge they could get him on was the theft of a quantity of electricity, the property of the Postmaster-General. It was about a millionth of a watt.' Penny laughed, and I said, 'Anyway, that's my job, and it doesn't seem all that heinous to me.'

'Nor to me, now you've explained it. But where did Daddy come into this?'

I said, 'You may not realize how important a man your father was. The catalysts he was developing were revolutionizing the economics of the oil industry and helping the economics of the country. When a man like that goes missing we want to know if anyone has been putting pressure on him, and why. Of course, if he's just running away from a shrewish wife then it's his affair, and we drop it. That's happened before.'

'And what conclusions did you come to about Daddy?'

'At first we tied it in with the attack on Gillian,' I said. 'But that's a dead end; we know Mayberry was a loner. As it is, as far as the department could make out, your father was living quietly in Stockholm and apparently taking an extended holiday. There's nothing we could do about that.'

'No,' said Penny. 'We're not yet a police state. What's being done now?'

I shrugged. 'The committee of brains at the top has decided to drop the matter.'

'I see.' She stared into the fire for a long time, then shook her head. 'But you'll have to give me time, Malcolm. Let me go to America. I'd like to get away from here and think. I'd like to…'

I held up my hand. 'Point taken-no further argument. Change of subject. What were you doing in Scotland?' I was damned glad to change the subject; I'd been shaving the truth a bit too finely.

'Oh, that Acting as adviser in the reconstruction of a laboratory. It's been worrying me because they're only willing to go up to P3 and I'm recommending P4. I was arguing it out with Lumsden this morning and he thinks I'm a bit… well, paranoiac about it.'

'You've lost me,' I said. 'What's P3? To say nothing of P4.'

'Oh, I forgot.' She waved her hand at the room. 'I was so used to talking things out here with Daddy that I'd forgotten you're a layman.' She looked at me doubtfully. 'It's a bit technical,' she warned.

'That's all right. Mine is a technical job."

'I suppose I'd better start with the big row,' she said. 'An American geneticist called Paul Berg…'

It seemed that Berg blew the whistle. He thought the geneticists were diddling around with the gene in the same way the physicist had diddled around with the atom in the '20s and '30s, and the potential hazards were even more horrendous. He pointed out some of them.

It seems that the favourite laboratory animal of the geneticists is a bacterium called Escherichia coli and it is the most studied organism on earth-more is known about E.coli than about any other living thing. It was natural that this creature be used for genetic experimentation.

'There's only one snag about that,' said Penny. 'E.coli is a natural inhabitant of the human gut, and I don't mean by ones and twos-I mean by the million. So if you start tinkering around with E.coli you're doing something potentially dangerous.'

'For example?' I asked.

'You remember Lummy's example of genetic transfer from Rhizobium to make an improved wheat. I said we'd have to be careful not to transfer another, more dangerous, gene. Now, consider this. Supposing you incorporated into E.coli, accidentally or on purpose, the gene specifying the male hormone, testosterone. And supposing that strain of E.coli escaped from the laboratory and entered the human population. It would inhabit the digestive tracts of women, too, you know. They might start growing beards and stop having babies.'

'Christ!' I said. 'It would be a catastrophe.'

'Berg and some of his concerned friends called an international conference at Asilomar in California in 1975. It was well attended by the world's geneticists but there was much controversy. Gradually a policy was hammered out involving the concept of biological containment. Certain dangerous experiments were to be banned pending the development of a strain of E.coli unable to survive outside the laboratory and unable to colonize the human gut. The specification laid down was that the survival rate of the new strain should not be more than one in a thousand million.'

I smiled. 'That sounds like certainty.'

'It's not,' said Penny soberly, 'considering the numbers of E.coli around, but it's close. I think that was the most important conference in the history of science. For the first time scientists had got together to police themselves without having restrictions thrust upon them. I think at the back of all our minds was the bad example set by the atomic physicists.'

'Fifteen months later the development of the new strain was announced by the University of Alabama.' Penny laughed. 'A writer in New Scientist put it very well. He called it "the world's first creature designed to choose death over liberty".'

I said slowly, 'The first creature designed… That's a frightening concept.'

'In a way-but we've been designing creatures for a long time. You don't suppose the modern dairy cow is as nature intended it to be?'

'Maybe, but this strikes me as being qualitatively different. It's one thing to guide evolution and quite another to bypass it.'

'You're right,' she said. 'Sooner or later there'll be some hack or graduate student who will go ahead with a bright idea without taking the time to study the consequences of what he's doing. There'll be a bad mistake made one day-but not if I can help it. And that brings us to Scotland.'

'How?'

'What I've just described is biological containment. There's also physical containment to keep the bugs from escaping. Laboratories are classified from P1 to P4. P1 is the standard microbiological lab; P4 is the other extreme-the whole of the lab is under negative air pressure, there are air locks, showers inside and out, changes of clothing, special pressurized suits-all that kind of thing.'

'And you're running into trouble with your recommendations in Scotland?'

'They're upranking an existing P2 lab. In view of what they want to do I'm recommending P4, but they'll only go to P3. The trouble is that a P4 lab is dreadfully expensive, not only in the building, but in the running and maintenance.'

'Are there no statutory regulations?'

'Not in this field; it's too new. If they were working with recognized pathogens then, yes-there are regulations. But they'll be working with good old E.coli, a harmless bacterium. You have about a couple of hundred million of them in your digestive tract right now. They'll stay harmless, too, until some fool transfers the wrong gene.' She sighed. 'All we have are guidelines, not laws.'

'Sounds a bit like my job-not enough laws.'

She ruefully agreed, and our talk turned to other things. Just before I left she said, 'Malcolm; I want you to know that I think you're being very patient with me-patient and thoughtful. I'm not the vapouring sort of female, and I usually don't have much trouble in making up my mind; but events have been getting on top of me recently.'

'Not to worry,' I said lightly. 'I can wait.'

'And then there's Gillian,' she said. 'It may have been silly of me but I was worrying about her even before all this happened. She's never been too attractive to men and she looked like turning into an old maid; which would have been a pity because she'd make someone a marvellous wife. But now-' she shook her head '-I don't think there's a chance for her with that face.'

'I wouldn't worry about that, either,' I advised. 'Michaelis has a fond eye for her.' I laughed. 'With a bit of luck you'll not have one, but two, spies in the family.'

And with that startling thought I left her.