Dead End Read Free Page A

sniggered. ‘There are a lot of units. I don’t do it all by myself!’
    â€˜Any breakthroughs?’
    The girl hesitated. ‘Not yet. Ever hopeful.’
    â€˜Still quite a responsibility for someone who considers themself at the back of the bus.’
    â€˜There’s a line manager checking me and a section head checking him. It’s all very structured. Haven’t you appreciated everything’s run here to a tightly ordered and controlled set of rules?’
    â€˜I’m beginning to get the idea.’
    â€˜I told you my secret. Now tell me yours.’
    Parnell looked blankly at her. ‘I don’t know what you’re asking.’
    â€˜How come you got shifted so quickly from the back of the bus?’
    Parnell no longer regretted putting his magazine aside, trying to separate the discordant echoes of this exchange from the earlier one with Russell Benn. ‘How can you imagine there’s something secret about it, just like that?’ He snapped his fingers.
    â€˜Everything’s very structured,’ she emphasized again. ‘You were given your space but you moved it.’
    â€˜It was temporary,’ avoided Parnell.
    Rebecca regarded him doubtfully over her coffee mug, her sandwich abandoned half eaten. ‘You’re at the heart of the Spider’s Web now. That’s where the real research is.’
    â€˜And where I want – and need – to be to fulfil my appointment and justify the creation of the new department,’ said Parnell.
    â€˜ You want to be,’ she isolated, at once.
    â€˜Where I have to be,’ Parnell reiterated.
    â€˜You really think genetics could bring about miracles?’
    â€˜No,’ Parnell immediately answered. ‘I think it’s an avenue with medical benefits that has to be explored, to discover what its engineering can achieve.’ And I’m going to be among the first to achieve it, he promised himself.
    â€˜I don’t think he’s our sort of team player,’ judged Russell Benn.
    â€˜It’ll take time,’ predicted Dwight Newton. ‘In time he’ll learn – or come to accept – the way things work here.’
    â€˜I’m not so sure.’
    â€˜Keep a tight handle on things, Russ. On him the tightest of all. You think there’s anything I’ve missed, you come tell me right away. I don’t want any disruption to the smooth way things always work here.’
    â€˜I know you don’t,’ said the black scientist. ‘But he’s got a proven track record. I’ve got an odd feeling, an instinct, that professionally he’ll be useful.’
    â€˜Sufficiently useful to put up with his attitude problem?’
    â€˜Arrogance is an irritation, not a cause for censure,’ said Benn. ‘I’m suggesting we let things run their way for a while, to discover for ourselves how good he really is.’
    â€˜That’s what we’ve got to decide,’ agreed Newton. ‘Just how good he is.’
    â€˜And how amenable he can be made to commercial reality,’ came in Benn, on a familiar cue.
    Three
    I t was Richard Parnell’s first ever commercial-firm seminar and even though he was not looped into the internal machinations of Dubette Inc., he was conscious of a frisson ruffling the faint strands of the Spider’s Web. It was, however, peripheral to his establishing himself in his new, inner-circle surroundings, which, coincidentally, on the day of the seminar, he finally completed. To achieve his self-imposed deadline, Parnell got to his section by six to supervise the technicians’ last installations, and was fully set up, with time for an unhurried breakfast of an egg-topped corned beef hash. He saw Rebecca Lang’s approach from some way off. The nameplated laboratory coat was replaced by a dark grey business suit which, by the severity of its cut, showed off an even more attractive figure than