Silent Night - By Tom Barber Page 0,20
my position would have just taken off with the cash and whatever was in the box.’
‘So why didn’t you?’
‘I got a reputation to uphold. All a man has in his word. In my business, most guys lose it real fast. And once it’s gone, it ain’t ever coming back.’
‘It saved your life,’ Marquez said, pushing Redial and lifting her phone to her ear. ‘Would you recognise this guy if you saw him again?’
Cantrell nodded, flashing a smile. ‘You make the weed and gun just a bump in the road, I’ll point him out in a crowd for you, Detective.’
Marquez nodded as the call connected to Briefing Room 5 at the Bureau.
‘Rach, I need your help,’ she said. ‘We need to track someone from last night using the city camera system.’
As she spoke, Cantrell turned to Jorgensen.
‘She calls the shots, huh?’
Jorgensen looked down at the smaller man.
‘You have no idea.’
NINE
Downtown at the Flood Microbiology building, Archer and Josh were absorbing what the doctor had just told them.
‘Tuberculosis?’ Josh repeated.
She nodded. ‘TB. One of the world’s most infectious diseases. It killed 1.4 million people in 2011. You mentioned chemotherapy. People generally know that radiation can be used to treat cancer in very high doses. But as I said, it can be severely debilitating. Healthy cells die too. Medical physics is constantly trying to find a way of targeting radiotherapy more accurately. And that’s where my father came in.’
Josh and Archer listened closely, concentrating, tuning everything else out. Although the lobby behind them was noisy, it might as well have been empty.
‘Given what happened to my mother his interest lay in curing lung cancer. His idea was to create a radioactive virus that could be inhaled. Once in the lungs, the virus would irradiate cancerous tumours from the inside. The TB would act as the cell in which the virus could replicate. Like a breeding ground and a vehicle to get into the lung tissue.’
‘Is that possible?’
‘Technically, yes. And if it worked, it would be revolutionary.’
‘When did he start working on this?’
‘He first broached the subject to us eighteen months ago. At first we thought he was crazy, but then we realised it could actually be feasible. And if it worked, it would change lung cancer therapy forever.’
She paused.
‘Our team here are biochemists. What we do isn’t glamorous. We spend all our time working out how and why little proteins work and their roles in long drawn-out cascades of reactions. So what my father outlined was very different and very exciting. He wanted us to find how a small amount of radioactive material could be incorporated into the capsid of a virus.’
‘Capsid?’
‘Protein shell.’ She paused. ‘Still with me?’
Josh nodded. ‘I think so. He wanted to get a radioactive substance inside a shell which would then be incorporated into the virus. That would then be grown along with the tuberculosis and inhaled, allowing it to get inside tumours in the lung.’
She nodded. ‘Spot on.’
‘You said radioactive material. Like uranium?’
‘No, no. That would be a terrible idea. When uranium is mixed with hydrogen it forms plutonium, which isn’t exactly an ideal atom to use in medicine. It also degrades into lead which is highly poisonous.’
‘So what did you use?’
‘Cobalt. It’s a metal which has a radioactive isotope which emits gamma radiation. It’s radioactive and worked medicinally for our cancer treatment. We spent last summer and fall figuring out how to combine the cobalt with the protein shell. It took us six months. But we did it.’
‘So what came next?’
‘We needed a virologist to take what we had, combine it with a strain of tuberculosis and culture the resulting virus into something strong enough to destroy a cancer cell but which wouldn’t infect the patient with TB. We had our own man here who is very good, but my father needed a top-level expert to work with him. He wanted a specialist. He went to South Africa and recruited one such man. His name is Dr Kruger.’
‘He came over here?’
‘Yes. He joined our team a year ago, working with our own virologist Dr Glover. Together, the two of them cultured the radioactive virus with the tuberculosis strain. I couldn’t even begin to tell you the specifics about how they did it. Kruger is a brilliant man. He modified the TB to grow at a much faster rate and neutralised its potency, making it the perfect vehicle for the cobalt. He taught Dr Glover a lot just by working alongside him.’
‘How many of you work here?’
‘Five.’
‘Names?’
‘Myself. My