Sweet Talking Money. Harry Bingham

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       ONE

      1

      Sometimes you have to go crazy before you can come to your senses. Sometimes you have to lose everything to find the one thing that really matters. Sometimes – Hell, forget about sometimes. Here’s what happened.

      2

      It was eight thirty-five on a chilly Boston evening, and the scientists were beginning to ramble. Enough.

      ‘Let’s call a halt,’ said Bryn. ‘Who’s writing up?’

      He knew the answer. A scraggy scientist, looking like something put together from rags and pipe-cleaners, raised his hand. ‘Dr Lewinson. Excellent.’ Bryn turned on his smile, maximum beam. His show of goodwill was brief and insincere. Of the eighteen people in the room, fourteen would be fired as soon as the deal concluded. Bryn knew that because he was the architect of the whole transaction. The others didn’t, because they weren’t.

      The meeting broke up.

      As Bryn began to pack away, a further racking cough rumbled painfully from his chest. It was his second trip across the Atlantic that week, so his jet lag, coming at him from both sides, was having an echo effect on his battered system.

      ‘Dammit, look, I wonder if you can help,’ he said, grabbing one of the departing scientists. ‘I really ought to see a doctor.’

      ‘A medical doctor? Hey Steve, you’re not a doctor, are you?’

      ‘No. Why don’t you try what’s-her-face, Dr Dynamite downstairs?’

      ‘You think that’s safe?’ The scientist laughed. ‘Only kidding, really. She’s great, just … No, really, she’s great.’

      As he spoke, the scientist fussed around with pass keys and swipe cards, taking Bryn downstairs, past empty laboratories, silent storage rooms, the hum of computers. They emerged on to a corridor on the ground floor, dark except for the glow of streetlamps spilling in from outside. They raced along until they arrived at a lighted doorway, where a brass plate advertised its owner, Cameron Wilde, MD, PhD. ‘Here you go,’ said the scientist, shaking hands. ‘Good luck.’

      Bryn raised his eyebrows in enquiry. ‘Dr Dynamite, huh?’

      ‘She’s kind of explosive. That’s part of the reason, I guess.’

      ‘And the other part?’

      ‘Nobel prizes. Built on the profits old Freddie Nobel made out of dynamite.’ He nodded at Wilde’s door. ‘She’s a future winner, if ever I’ve seen one. And I have, actually. Several.’

      Through a frosted pane in the door, lights burned. There was a dark shape, which might or might not have belonged to a future Nobel Prize winner. Bryn put his hand to the door and knocked.

      3

      The room was a good size, thirty foot by twenty, lit by three or four anglepoise lamps. On the wall where Bryn entered was a small pool of tidiness, somebody’s workstation, a secretary’s, probably. Everywhere else was chaos. Stacks of paper on every surface. Sheaves of computer print-out. Journals, textbooks, e-mails, binders. Yellow Post-it notes tacked anywhere and everywhere. There was a workbench jammed with two PCs, a portable, a couple of printers, a scanner, and wiring arrangements designed by a five-year-old. There were two further work areas crowded with microscopes, two high-capacity clinical fridges, boxfuls of needles, blood collection tubes rolling around loose in cardboard trays, plus other equipment Bryn didn’t recognise. The room’s built-in shelving had long ago buckled beneath the deluge, and sheets of chipboard standing on concrete blocks acted as emergency reinforcements. There were four chairs in the room and on one of them sat Cameron Wilde, MD, PhD.

      ‘Dr Wilde?’

      ‘Uh-huh.’

      The doctor sat in a pool of light cast by one of the lamps, her face partly hidden by the hair which fell across it. She was pale-skinned, skinny, not much to look at.

      ‘I apologise for disturbing you. I’ve been working with the team upstairs and I needed a doctor urgently. One of them suggested you might be able to help.’

      Wilde was working on a stack of documents. She didn’t seem over-anxious to greet her new arrival. Holding her pen in her mouth as she sorted papers, she said, ‘What’s the problem?’

      ‘Flu. Had it for weeks. I got a prescription in England, but didn’t have time to fill it before I left.’ He held out the piece of paper, which was no good to him in an American pharmacy. ‘I apologise for bothering you.’

      She looked at the prescription, and let the pen drop from her mouth. ‘It’s no bother.’

      ‘Thanks.’

      ‘Your doctor gave you this? For flu?’

      ‘Right.’

      ‘Uh.’

      ‘Anything wrong?’

      ‘Wrong? Depends on what you want. If you want to get rid of your flu, this won’t help at all. If you just want to cover up the symptoms so you can go right on doing whatever it was that gave you flu in the first place, then this is just the stuff.’

      ‘Right. OK. I’ll take my chances. Thanks.’

      ‘And the more you go right on doing whatever it is you do, the longer the flu will stay.’

      ‘Like I said, I’ll take my chances.’

      She shrugged. ‘OK.’

      The pen went back into her mouth and her hands went back to sorting her papers. Bryn couldn’t see a prescription pad anywhere, but then again there might be five hundred of them hidden round the room.

      ‘You can give me the prescription?’

      ‘Can. Sure. But won’t.’ Each word came out with a little puff, as she began shifting big piles of paper to get at documents stuffed away at the bottom.

      ‘Won’t?’