Apex (Ben Bracken 2) Read online

  ‘God, I have been sat here trying to work out what to do this whole time you’ve been out of it. It’s in a tin over there,’ she says, motioning to the work benches. ‘It’s quite clear it’s something interesting. Here, I’ll show you -’

  Hold your horses, missy.

  ‘Wait,’ I say, interrupting her. ‘You say nobody knows I’m here. That has to stay that way. And whatever we discuss here never happened, and you must not tell anyone.’

  That has her attention, and seems to catch her imagination. She stares at me, awash with seriousness for the first time, setting her jaw and sitting straight-backed.

  ‘Is that understood?’ I say.

  ‘Of course,’ she replies without delay. ‘Did you think I became a doctor just so I could look at mushrooms all day?’

  I pull myself up, but before I know it she is up and dragging me to my feet.

  She walks me, one painful foot at a time, over to the work benches, where she flicks on a couple of table lamps. She places me on another wheeled stool, and scoots hers over with the precision of someone who has done so many times. The glare of the lamps shine into a shallow tin that rests on the chrome bench, and inside, looking wounded, is the earring.

  Amina reaches for a biro from further up the bench, and uses it as a pointer.

  ‘See here,’ she says, gesturing with the blue-inked tip at the supposed-gold casing. ‘The casing has peeled away, almost like an onion skin.’

  It’s true - it has, the edges of the jewel revealing themselves from beneath the gold that has twisted away.

  ‘And here, if you look closely,’ she says, pointing to the jewel’s exposed edges, ‘is the pointed edges of the stone. But look at the soft fraying, the fibers peeling away.’

  Sure enough, the corners of the stone have tiny white strands protruding scruffily from them, giving a ragged impression.

  ‘A gemstone shouldn’t do that, I take it?’ I ask.

  ‘Absolutely not,’ says Amina, firmly. ‘These edges are plastic. It’s nothing more than worn plastic or rubber, these fibers fraying as they rubbed the fabric of your pocket.’

  ‘All this for a plastic stone?’ I ask.

  ‘All what?’ Amina asks. She looks directly at me again, imploring me to speak truths. ‘Mr Miller if you want my help here, I need to know what you know. I can do nothing with bits and pieces of information. I have a suspicion as to what it is, but I will only share it with you if you tell me the truth.’

  I am fatigued and beaten, mentally and physically. It’s been a lonely few days, and I have been so far unable to fathom the quest that I have been thrust into. Such is my weariness, I actually wouldn’t mind the assistance.

  ‘I can trust you?’ I say.

  ‘We are not going to go through that again, are we?’ replies Amina. I can tell by the tone of her voice that she means it. I sigh.

  ‘It’s Ben. My name... Just call me Ben.’

  ‘You are not Sean Miller, like your ID suggests?’ she says, keeping her own interest at bay.

  ‘Just call me Ben,’ I reply and quickly change the subject. ‘I do a bit of work in an anti-crime capacity, with the help of the National Crime Agency.’ That sounds really crap and vague, but I hope it will do.

  Amina just looks at me, no smart comebacks for the first time. I continue.

  ‘I was assigned the task of securing this earring a couple of days ago, from the wreckage of the plane that crashed off the coast.’

  Amina’s eyes flare recognition.

  ‘The plane crashed empty, except for a dead woman clutching that earring. I believe it has been reported that hundreds of people died on board. It isn’t true - not a word of it. There was no mass tragedy. The plane was empty except for a minimal crew and this woman, and it was brought down by God knows who... All I know here is a corrupt government connection is chasing me, and this, down. They want this, whatever it is. For what means I don’t know yet. And I was doing alright until the snake bit me.’

  Amina regards me with care, and suddenly seems a little bit in awe of the scale of what she is suddenly involved with. Now it’s her who looks as if she may have bitten off more than she can chew.

  ‘So... what do you think it is?’ I ask, trying to snap her back into the here and now.

  ‘I... think those rough worn edges are the telltale signs of a plastic mould. I think the ‘stone’ as it appears is not solid at all but a plastic shell. I think there is something inside.’

  I had never, not once, thought of that. It hadn’t even remotely entered my mind. Jesus, how could I have missed it. Amina seems galvanized by hearing her own theory spoken, and sets about showing me.

  ‘The weight is all wrong. A stone of this size would be much more obvious in weight. This is much lighter than you would expect, but no less solid. I think perhaps it is perspex. And look, you can see the edges of the mould where the plastic has been pressed and melted shut.’

  I can see straight away what she is referring to. Just next to the frayed strands you can see tiny remnants of the the flat excess plastic where the two sides of the mould were pressed together.

  ‘I think there is no doubt it is a container. I want to take off the rest of the gold housing to look for the opening,’ she says, looking at me for approval. I nod slowly.

  ‘Extra careful,’ I say. Now my mind is whirring with possibilities, the aftermath of the fever becoming a footnote to the mystery of the false-trinket.

  She pulls over another tin, this time stocked with delicate, shining tools. She plucks out two pairs of tweezers, and with each pincering set grips the broken metal of the casing. Very gently, she begins to slowly ease them apart.

  ‘It’s coming,’ she says, concentrating. ‘It’s a little tougher than I thought it would be.’

  My mind is bubbling with possibilities, as to what it might be. None of them good. When there is the involvement of an authority using force to retrieve something, that something is rarely intended to be used for good. Just ask Indiana Jones.

  ‘Look,’ says Amina. ‘There.’

  She points with closed tweezers at the now-revealed plastic corner. Protruding from the corner, is a small clear nub poking from the plastic, with a tiny sort-of metal screw covering its end.

  ‘We need to get this in there, if we are to go any further,’ she says.

  ‘In where?’ I ask.

  ‘The anaerobic hood and glove box,’ she say, nodding to the far end of the bench, where a long glass rectangle sits fitted with four round gloved openings. I can see inside the box is, among clean work surfaces, a microscope, the viewfinder for which is poking back through the glass to be used from the outside. ‘It’s a controlled atmosphere in there, and... if this is worth crashing a plane over, it’s certainly worth taking that extra precaution.’

  We scoot our stools to the anaerobic hood, and Amina pulls a tray out from beneath its reflecting frame, on which she places the trinket and all its pieces. She also places the two clear glass rectangles I have seen in countless movies, between which fluid is trapped for closer examination. She presses a couple of buttons on the unit control pad, and it whirrs into life, with a light popping on and an internal fan activating.

  ‘I think that beneath that screw cap is a modified pipette tip, or something like it,’ she explains, ‘and that would mean the contents of this container can be... squirted out.’

  ‘I’m glad you are putting it in there then.’

  She replaces the tray beneath the glass box, twists a lever, and the tray appears behind the glass. Amina rolls up her sleeves and slips her delicate wrists through the openings into the black gloves. I stand so I can see what’s going on.

  ‘I am going to do everything very carefully, and sparingly,’ she says, while her gloved hands lift the trinket up onto a higher surface, closer to our vision.

  ‘Are you used to doing things like this?’ I ask.

  ‘This is what I do for a living. I do this everyday. This lab is my workshop and playgroun
d. Am I used to aiding and abetting a plane crash looting, crime agency wilderness man carrying mysterious trinkets loaded with God-knows-what? No.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  She takes a small pair of pliers in her right hand, and holds the object in her left hand. In the soft blue light, amid the hum of the box vent, she carefully twists the object’s metal screw with the pliers.

  ‘It is coming away quite easily,’ she states, providing me a welcome running commentary since, I must say, I feel quite impotent sitting here, weakened, letting Amina take the lead. ‘The housing must have been its primary form of protection, during its journey. Do you know anything about where it came from?’

  ‘Aside from taking it from that woman in the plane wreckage, I can’t say I know anything more than that. And the woman herself wasn’t much use. She was missing her head.’

  Amina pauses for a second, seemingly unsure as to whether I am messing with her or not. She carries on, no clarification necessary. The metal cap twists right off, to reveal, just as she guessed it, the tip of a pipette.

  ‘You were right,’ I tell her. ‘Good call.’

  I watch as she gently places the screw cap back onto the tray, and takes one of the glass slides instead. She inverts the container, and readies it between finger and thumb.

  ‘Here goes nothing,’ she says. ‘Gently, gently,’ she whispers, as she squeezes.

  We watch intently as a solitary clear bubble appears at the end of the pipette, but it is not a bubble at all - it is a drop. Amina maintains pressure, and gives the container a tiny shake. The drop falls gloopily and reluctantly onto the glass slide.

  ‘That will be just fine,’ she whispers, almost to herself. She then takes her time resealing the container with the cap, and binding the other glass slide atop the drop. It smears the drop out into a wider clear blob, affixed between the two pieces of glass. She places it under the microscope.

  ‘Do you want to go first?’ she asks, showing the first hint of trepidation I have noticed.

  ‘I’m afraid I have no idea what I am looking for,’ I reply, shrugging. ‘Tell me what you can see.’

  She takes a deep breath, and ponders things for a moment. I feel bad for her. By helping me, and simply being inquisitive, she has been sucked into this ludicrous scenario that has befallen me. That phrase about curiosity and cats springs to mind...

  Abruptly, she sits straighter, and aligns her eyes above the microscope eyepieces. Her gloved hands gently manipulate the focus and magnification controls beyond the glass, and she concentrates.

  I watch her, as opposed to anything else, and watch her eyes beyond her glasses rapidly hopping from one thing to the other, all within the locality of the viewfinder. She adjusts the settings again inside the box. Then again. She eventually stops, and gazes out into her own reflection staring back at her from the glass of the box.

  ‘Well?’ I ask.

  ‘All I can say so far is that it is not a bacteria, that’s for sure. And because it isn’t that, it immediately alarms me.’

  I’d love to know why, but she abruptly starts moving to the other side of the room.

  ‘I’m going to do a mass-spectrometry test, that should get us an identification.’

  She takes a small metal slide from a drawer by the computer units, and puts it into the tray loader for the anaerobic hood, introducing it to the contents.

  ‘I’ll need another drop,’ she says.

  ‘What are you doing? And what is a mass-spectrometry test?’

  The new metal slide has a number of round indentations on it’s polished surface, and she squeezes a solitary drop from the trinket’s pipette onto one of them.

  ‘I’m adding some of our mystery chemical to this plate. It’s for the MALDI-TOF machine. It’s the quickest way to get a breakdown of a protein, which I can only assume this is given what i saw in the scope, and we have one here. We do a lot of research from this facility, and it’s not just do with the national park, so we are lucky enough to have been given some nice toys.’

  ‘Moldy what now?’

  She ejects the plate from the anaerobic hood and snaps on some latex gloves, before moving across the room to a machine that looks like a very fancy coffee maker.

  ‘A MALDI-TOF machine is essentially a mass-spectrometer attached to a database. It analyses the material after it has been introduced to an enzyme matrix. These enzymes digest the protein into smaller fragments for weighing. It’s really cool. The fragment sizes are run through the database and from these measurements you can work out the entire structure of the protein.’

  ‘Umm, right.’

  ‘So I simply add the matrix, load the plate into the machine, and we should get an answer in no time.’

  ‘OK then.’

  She takes another preloaded pipette and squirts the solution onto the plate, before loading the plate into machine’s opening. A computer screen next to it blinks to life, and Amina starts typing. Within mere seconds, the screen begins to change. I give up trying to keep up. I’ve no idea what it is I’m looking for. I’ll just leave this one to the expert, who is now studying the screen.

  In low hushed tones, belying far more dread than I was expecting, she speaks.

  ‘You swear, you have no idea why this was coming into the country?’

  Her seriousness has really taken me by surprise, not to mention scared me.

  ‘None. I was just told to stop anyone else from getting their hands on it.’

  Amina looks at me, then right through me. Her manner is transformed, that quirky bounce she carried just moments before erased by what she has evidently seen on the screen.

  ‘Amina, what is it?’ I ask.

  She looks at the floor, takes off her gloves, and swivels to face me. Her hands reach for each other, and squeeze as if seeking comfort from one another’s touch.

  ‘In short, it bears all the hallmarks of a modified isoform of botulinum toxin. It’s had its amino acids... altered.’

  ‘It’s a chemical?’ I reply, the penny not dropping.

  ‘Yes - well, a protein,’ Amina says, glancing back through the viewing glass of the hood at the innocuous little trinket sitting broken in the box.

  ‘Amina, what does it do?’ Chemistry was never my strong suit, so I’ll really need this spelling out.

  ‘It’s a bespoke synthetic toxin, that started as botulism.’

  ‘Botulism,’ I say, the penny rattling somewhere distant within. ‘I’ve heard of that.’

  ‘It is really a beautiful system, in which the toxin is perfectly designed for it's function. The toxin is a protein made up of two chains, heavy and light. The heavy chain targets the effect to nerves by binding to proteins on the surface of the nerve cells at the terminals, and once bound to the surface of the cell the toxin is taken into the cell using the cells' normal transport system. That’s endocytosis. The light chain of the toxin is an enzyme which digests one of the proteins that cause the neurotransmitters to be released from nerves so it stops the nerve signals to your muscles to make them contract.’

  ‘Amina, you have lost me. What does this mean? Simple terms - what does it do?

  ‘Paralysis, and soon after, horrible death. It’s a well-known chemical weapon, which has proven popular as it can be, by the right people, readily synthesized and weaponized.’

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ I can only whisper. And I had this thing in my pocket?!

  ‘That’s not the half of it with this thing, Ben,’ Amina says, now fixing me with a focussed stare. ‘The amino acids have been altered, their sequence has been changed. That will have taken a great deal of calculation, time and effort. What bothers me is the aim of such a change. I know that, by doing such a thing, you could recalibrate the protein in such a way as to maximize potency. It will now, on contact with human cells, focus on specific receptors with a more targeted effect.’

  ‘Is there a way of working out which receptors?’ I ask, hoping I am keeping up.

  ‘Not without extensive
time and testing. But that’s not what concerns me. This modification has created a new unfamiliar sequence to the toxin, unique only to this particular form we have in this glove box. If you don’t have the code, you can’t make an anti-toxin.’

  ‘So if you are exposed to it -’

  ‘No anti-toxin exists that can help you. An anti-toxin would have to adhere to the blueprint set out by the new structure of the toxin - which nobody knows apart from us, here, right now. And whoever made it.’

  Shit. I cast my mind back to when I found the thing in the first place. Did I miss the anti-toxin? Was it on the plane somewhere, traveling similarly?

  ‘So, what you are saying is that this is a modified super-toxin that is extra-potent, and no known cure exists?’