White Eye Read online

  He was seated at the bar, dressed in his usual conservative gray trousers and navy jacket. She felt suddenly tired and irritated.

  “Anything wrong?” he asked, then smiled dryly. “Anything else wrong, I should say.”

  Diana shook her head. The image of that open mouth, the iridescent flies rushing out of it like sparks, would not go away.

  “I’d heard you and Carolyn Williams were, ah, related.”

  Diana gave a weary smile. People said that Carolyn was her half-sister, not Jack Williams’s daughter at all but sired by Doug Pembridge in his long on-again-off-again affair with Louise. “You must have seen her at the Research rabbit house. Do you think we look alike?”

  “I don’t believe I ever met her.”

  The only man in the world Carolyn neglected to seduce, Diana thought, reaching for the gin and tonic Jason had ordered for her.

  On Tuesday afternoon, in Bangkok, John Parker packed his overnight bag, ready to catch an evening flight to Sydney. By not washing his hair since he arrived in Thailand, he had managed to save three miniature bottles of hotel shampoo, plus five little soaps. They would be Sonja’s gift from Thailand. She didn’t smoke, so there was no point in taking an ashtray, but on the writing table there was a brass elephant paperweight that would appeal to her, he thought. She loved decorating small, pretty things. The elephant smiled and held aloft in its trunk an advertisement for “Tours You Will Never Forget.” He wrapped it in a pair of socks and shoved it in his bag.

  At 5:00 P.M., there was a knock on the door. It was the night chauffeur, whose long hair partly hid a missing ear—bitten off by a dog, Parker had been told.

  “You’re early,” he said.

  Somchai held out a stainless-steel box.

  “No!” Parker said. “Why wasn’t it done up at the farm?”

  Somchai shrugged. “Forgot.”

  “What about his teeth?”

  “Teeth fixed. We go now, you fix throat.”

  The airfreight storage area was close to the airport, north of the city, on the way to Saraburi. It was dark by the time they arrived at the Siam Enterprises warehouse. Parker stepped out of the air-conditioned car into the wet heat of the Bangkok night and from there into a cool, icily lit space that seemed at first to be a vast garden. Under halogen lights, thousands of orchids, palms, and ferns stood in still rows, ready for export to Japan and Europe. Siam was not only the biggest animal breeder in the region; it had the most advanced plant nurseries as well. The driver led the way through the vegetation, carrying the stainless-steel box. In the far end of the warehouse, barbarous noises erupted from a cluster of wooden crates.

  Arriving there, Somchai pointed to a crate with SAILOR stenciled on it. Black fingers moved like slow, thick tentacles through its slats.

  “Let me see,” Parker muttered. He did not trust Somchai to know which chimpanzee was which. Hunkering down in front of the box, he looked in. Two brown eyes full of intelligence and feeling looked back at him out of a long, mischievous face. A yellowish, thick-skinned palm pushed its way out of the cage, and from the creature inside there came a low pant-hoot. Sailor’s gums were still slightly bloody from the operation to remove his canine teeth. Animals in other boxes, excited by the sight of visitors, began to pant-hoot for attention. Then all at once the air filled with the ear-splitting noise of chimpanzees wraa-barking. They drummed their fists on the floor of their crates and yelled. The big young male in front of Parker was the most boisterous of all. Somchai handed Parker the stainless-steel box and went to fetch a wheeled cart.

  They trundled the crate to the far side of the warehouse, where some men wearing gum boots were hosing the floor. There was a branch of ripe bananas on the wall. The chimp saw it and pressed the back of his hand against his mouth eagerly. Somchai opened the door of the crate and held out a banana. Sailor loped forward on his knuckles, glancing at the humans with a nervous, open-lipped grin.

  The driver groomed him, while Parker, busy with the stainless-steel box, prepared a syringe of Pentothal. And then, when the chimp’s attention was settled on eating the banana, Parker jabbed him in the shoulder. They stretched him out, head tilted back and mouth open.

  Parker had a drip of Scoline ready, which he injected. Almost immediately the limp body began to twitch wildly, making the men in gum boots titter. After a few seconds fasciculation stopped. “Quick!” Parker said. Somchai handed him an Oxy Viva pump and mask. Parker put the mask over Sailor’s face and pumped. He had almost a minute now to cut the vocal cords. He took the laryngoscope from the box, put it into the huge mouth, and pushed the tongue aside. From the light on the laryngoscope he could see the two pale, glistening strings. Somchai handed him long-handled scissors. The strings sprang apart like severed elastic, only a bead of blood appearing at the cut ends.

  Parker gave the chimp another slug of oxygen, then stood up and waited for him to regain consciousness.

  Everyone watched intently to see if the animal registered that something was wrong, but he only blinked and held out his hand for the new banana that Somchai offered him. “Boo!” Somchai said. “Boo!”

  Sailor gazed at the chauffeur, grinning fearfully.

  “Boo! Boo! Boo!” Somchai yelled. He began to laugh.

  Brown rubber lips formed into the shape that made a hoot, but there was no sound. The men in gum boots turned away.

  “Good now,” Somchai said. “Make no trouble.”

  Although in the budget a sum was set aside for travel to and from Bangkok based on the business-class fare, Parker chose to fly economy, for in the economy section there was no need to be polite to fellow passengers. Usually he was seated in the non-smoking section, but again something had gone wrong with arrangements, and he found himself sitting between two women who lit up as soon as the No Smoking sign went off.

  “D’you mind?” one asked.

  “Not at all. Smoking helps reduce the population,” he replied in a friendly tone.

  The one in the window seat needed to make frequent visits to the lavatory. “All that nicotine has to get out of your system somehow,” he remarked when she asked him for the third time if he would mind leaving his seat so she could get past his long legs. When she returned, she invited him to take her place by the window. He dozed and around 5:00 A.M. Australian time was woken by deep-pink morning light pressing around the edges of the plastic shutter. During the night they had flown over the Gulf of Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Arafura Sea, and crossed the Australian coastline. He could now gaze at the great dry continent down below.

  Parker felt communicative and turned to the women smoking next to him. “Thousands of years ago, when humans first set foot on this land, its forests swarmed with giant marsupials—kangaroos as tall as elephants, wombats the size of hippos, a marsupial lion—but they were no match for the new arrivals. The huge animals and their forests vanished, replaced by hectares of parched terrain.”

  One of the women squinted at him. “Are you David Attenborough?”

  Parker grinned at her, his long, fine lips pressed together. Then he looked out of the window again. It had taken millennia to create the wilderness below; in mere decades now, the same sterility was being achieved in other landscapes. The whole planet was facing environmental holocaust, as everyone knew, for man was now a plague on his own house—and everywhere there was self-disgust. You saw it in the epidemic of graffiti, in drugs, on T-shirts announcing LIFE’S A BITCH AND THEN YOU DIE, in the black tide of religious fanaticism. “We will be living like rats,” Jacques Cousteau warned—he and a thousand others. But nobody would act. Nobody would do the deed. Every six months the population of France was added to the world. Every decade there was another China. And these seething masses were added to the poorest parts of the world—to India, Brazil, Africa, Bangladesh. In the space of a long weekend there were an extra million humans to feed. This monster with five billion mouths killed off, every hour of every day, seven species of other living things. By the middle of the
twenty-first century, the ogre would have destroyed half of all the species of life on earth. With air, water, and soil poisoned, nations would collapse into fighting over resources; human flesh would be the most abundant source of protein, and the only question left unanswered was whether environmental holocaust would strike the next generation, or the one after. Parker smiled to himself.

  For some unfathomable reason, he still liked humans. He felt sometimes a cry arise within him: Make me indifferent to them! They deserve no pity and no respect! He closed his eyes again so he could visualize the bronze statue that would be erected in his honor one day not too far into the twenty-first century. He would look as he did now, craggy, a little worn around the edges, and he would hold in one hand a globe etched with the continents, the oceans and archipelagos, and in the other a twist of DNA. Around the base of the statue would be inscribed the basic method, the thirteen steps, that had led to White Eye Vaccine II.

  “Good joke?” the woman next to him said, having another stab at conversation. Parker turned away to hide his smile. Once he began thinking of the surprise he was going to give Grossmann, he could not keep the grin off his face. He recalled the day he had made an emergency trip to Bangkok, demanding that Otto see him immediately, in private. “Mr. Grossman,” he said, “I was running an ELISA to test cell supernatants for the presence of a recombinant secretory protein I’ve been working on, and I used White Eye-infected chimp serum as a negative control. I thought I was going barking mad when I saw that a protein in the chimp serum carried the ß galactosidase flag that I’d used in my own recombinant protein. Naturally, I wanted to investigate this unexpected event, so I compared the mode of action of White Eye with a range of bacterial and viral proteins capable of generating similar responses. I selected several antibodies for serology testing. The tests came back positive for gonorrhea, botulin toxin, and Legionnaires’ disease.”

  Otto yawned and took a sip of jasmine tea. “I assume you’ll translate that into English or German for me.”

  “Yes! Yes, Mr. Grossmann. Simply that people put flags on proteins they have made. What I’m saying is White Eye is recombinant. Somebody created this bacteria.”

  Grossmann nodded.

  “It’s got an LD ratio of two. An LD ratio means—”

  “I know what a lethal dose ratio is,” Grossmann interrupted.

  Why isn’t he outraged that it’s recombinant? Parker wondered. He was still in a whirl of self-important excitement from his discovery. “I’m writing a paper on it for Nature,” he blurted. The silence stretched around the teak-paneled room.

  Grossmann gave a faint smile. “I don’t think writing a paper for Nature is such a good idea.”

  Parker felt a moment’s pain as he realized that up to this moment he had understood nothing. A desire to flee overwhelmed him, and he rose from his chair, but across the desk, Grossmann’s eyes pinned him.

  “I’ll shred my notes,” Parker said. A warm, strong palm cupped his pale, sweaty hand.

  “That’s my man,” Grossmann murmured.

  Since then, Parker had discovered that Otto had a colony of White Eye in the Siam laboratory in Bangkok, ready for the day when he would order it to be bred up and let loose in the animal breeding houses of his competitors. When their primates began dying like flies (and taking their keepers with them), healthy chimps that sold for five thousand dollars would be worth twenty thousand dollars overnight. A fifty-million-dollar company would become a two-billion-dollar company.

  But back in 1985, things had gone awry. The vaccine to protect Siam’s animals had not worked, and they had died, along with two keepers and the vet. The biochemist who drowned had produced the faulty vaccine. This same scientist, Parker suspected, had developed White Eye for Grossmann—and the man’s fate made him wonder what was planned for him, once he had achieved the vaccine Grossmann needed. He had no intention of disappearing into a klong. Parker guessed that once Grossmann had an effective vaccine, he would arrange for an outbreak of White Eye in some obscure but respectable institution: a university monkey house in Canada would be the right sort of place. The disease would probably be hushed up so as not to jeopardize government funding. A few months later, another outbreak would occur, somewhere else, and Grossmann would leak news of this disaster to the media. There would be denials. When finally one of the major newspapers reported the existence of a virulent new disease, Grossmann would pounce: Siam Enterprises, he would announce, had been working since the 1980s on a disease of primates that sounded identical to the infection.…

  Siam would make a fortune from Vaccine I. Parker himself stood to earn two million dollars in bonuses. All his basic work had been done for him by the man who drowned, whose lab books on the vaccine had been handed on. It was still so crude that side effects ranged from fever to vomiting and headaches. They had tested it on rat, rabbit, and chimp, and finally on a couple of the keepers at Saraburi. When they survived, suffering nothing worse than fever and loss of appetite, Parker infected them with White Eye. They were symptom-free. Since then, all staff at the breeding farm and in U-1 had shots every six months.

  “But it’s a sledgehammer,” Parker complained to Grossmann.

  “It works,” Otto said.

  “Give me time,” Parker pleaded. “I can make a better vaccine. I can make a vaccine that will sterilize animals.”

  “Are you crazy? I want my animals to breed!”

  “Otto,” Parker answered quietly, “not your animals. Only theirs.”

  Grossmann gave a bellow of laughter, roaring until the buttons on his safari suit threatened to fly off. “You’ve started to think the way I do!”

  “I got the idea from a biological-control program in Australia,” Parker said. “I’d like to explain—”

  Grossmann stopped smiling. “John, explain nothing. To tell you the truth, I don’t like this sterilizing-vaccine idea. People might ask, How come Siam’s primates are all breeding, but nobody else’s? Hey? That raises problems, I think. You have two more years to improve what we’ve got. I need two years to build the facilities we’ll need when we begin rapid expansion.”

  Already the two years were up. “Another twelve months,” Parker begged Grossmann. “Otto, please let me explain the process to you.…”

  He had made this request only yesterday, when they were standing on the lawn behind the reception building, in the steamy heat of midmorning. Gray monkeys ran free across the grass, rushing forward a few meters, then squatting on their haunches, brilliant eyes jittering, before leaping up and running on. The photographer, Michael Romanus, was near the house, taking pictures with a camera covered in a plastic helmet that silenced the noise of its shutter. He was able to stand extraordinarily still, Parker noticed. With the silent camera and his camouflage clothing, he would be invisible in a forest.

  A gibbon that had been feeding near Romanus loped away, then noticed Grossmann and came rushing forward as he held his arms open in welcome. The gibbon leaped into them and lay back, a slender coal-black hand pressed to its brow to shade its eyes from the sun. Otto made kissing faces and asked, “Do you want to listen to a scientific rigmarole, Kitty?” It stretched out a long black arm and grabbed hold of the buckle of Parker’s belt. “Naughty,” Grossmann said. It yanked the buckle. “Kitty!”

  Stop playing with that ape! Parker wanted to shout. Make the wretched thing let go of my pants! He felt desperate. Of course Grossmann wanted to be able to deny knowledge of any unethical aspect of his product. “There could be a fortune in this process if you use it in other areas,” Parker said. He needed to arouse Otto’s enthusiasm for a commercial application of Vaccine II. “A fortune,” he repeated.

  “Let go!” Grossmann said, and slapped the gibbon’s face. It leaped from his arms with a scream, bounded across the lawn, and disappeared up a mango tree. “I’m listening,” he said.

  “In the domestic pet market,” Parker blurted. “You see, Otto, I am linking two proteins to Vaccine I—”

 
“What do you mean, Vaccine I?”

  Parker babbled on. “The vaccine we have against White Eye. I link to Vaccine I two proteins. One of these affects the zona pellucida of chimpanzee ova, the other affects the acrosomal membrane of chimp sperm. The sperm cannot get into the egg. The egg is locked, so there is no fertilization. But the hormonal system remains untouched; the sex drive in both male and female animals is normal. There will be no change in behavior. Animals will copulate as usual, but they will never reproduce.”

  Grossmann became thoughtful. “I can see that could have some application.”

  “We could send out mixed batches. Some Vaccine I, some Vaccine II, but nothing to discriminate between them. It would be impossible to prove that the animals were not breeding because of the vaccine, because some would be.”

  “You’re developing a head for business,” Grossmann remarked. “I need a good commercial product ready to go into production by the end of 1993. I have a lot of capital invested—you have no idea …

  No, you have no idea, Parker thought. The majesty of his vision filled him with excitement.

  At the royal-blue customs desk in Sydney, he handed over his British passport to a snub-nosed person, who remarked, “Y’like staying there?” as he examined the immigration card.

  Parker, who from habit had been checking out the air-conditioning vents, gave him a puzzled look.

  “The Regent, sir.”

  He had forgotten that on his immigration card he had written that while in Sydney this time he would be staying at the Regent Hotel. Sometimes he invented penthouse apartments in Vaucluse. On forms that asked his brand of motorcar, Parker liked to print with his left hand in an illiterate script, “Daimler.”