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Nick had isolated the product from his reaction and was waiting for some more data. He’d run a sample against the one from Thierry’s batch and he was sure he had isolated the correct material. In about half an hour he should have the additional data and then he needed to compare it with the printouts from the previous batches. He was in a positive mood. The conditions he’d suggested had borne fruit and this looked like the direction they should be following. It was by no means optimised but it should be a step up from the procedure they had to date. They would need to fine-tune the reaction conditions to improve on it even more and to scale up so there was lots to do. Nick hoped that either Seth or Hannah would be able to assist with some of the reactions.
Dan had only spent about an hour in the lab this morning. Once again he seemed anxious and kept leaving to check his mobile. At least there hadn’t been another outburst from him. He was obviously tense about his formal dinner this evening, who wouldn’t be, thought Nick. As he’d walked past Dan’s desk he noticed he’d printed off a few papers by Professor Zeng, so he was familiarising himself with his research.
Nick collected his data and sat down at his desk. He looked at it closely and to him, it seemed to fit the structure of the compound he was trying to make. However, as he was new to the project, he wanted to check it against previous batches to make sure he wasn’t seeing what he wanted to see. It could be a problem that you fitted the data to what you wanted it to look like rather than viewing it objectively.
‘Dan, do you have the data on UP-627-TK, for me to look at?’
‘Oh, yes, it’s here in this file,’ said Dan, walking over to a filing cabinet and rifling through the divided sections. ‘Wait a minute, no, it’s not here. Pat’s taken it, he’s writing it up for the patents. I think he’s taken it all off to a meeting room so he won’t be disturbed.’
‘I’ll see if I can find him,’ said Nick, starting to wander off down the corridor.
‘Hang on a minute,’ shouted Dan. ‘I’ve got Thierry’s data folder here. It will have the data for UP-627.’
‘Oh, great, I’ll have a look.’
‘Here, let me find it,’ said Dan and he started to flick through the plastic wallets containing the data.
He found what he was looking for and handed it to Nick. It was from the batch he’d sent off to the biologists the previous week. Everything looked nice and pure.
‘Thanks, I’ll compare it with mine,’ said Nick, taking it over to his desk.
As Dan was closing the folder, some of the data fell out on the floor.
‘Shit,’ he said, fumbling to pick it all up.
He shuffled the papers and put them back in the sequence of the pages. One of the last experiments Thierry had completed was the batch he’d given to the dealer the night before. He looked at it closely. A wave of panic washed over him. There were some extra peaks in the data which hadn’t been in the data he’d given to Nick. He opened up the printouts and continued to look at the data. Although the material had looked like a nice white crystalline solid it was clearly contaminated with something else. Exactly what, he couldn’t immediately tell. Wasn’t that just typical of Thierry not to let the team know that his batch was substandard? Now he realised that this batch was a second one from the same reaction and Thierry had neglected to make that clear. No doubt he felt he was coming to the end of his tenure at Persford and he just didn’t care. When Dan had been threatened by the dealer he had been so focused on providing the material he’d never thought to check its purity. He’d assumed that as Thierry had left the sample labelled up and for project use it met the required purity. However, would he have risked Jessica’s life by not supplying the material whatever state it was in? He put his head in his hands. His mind was in turmoil. He had lost the ability to think clearly. Questions raced through his mind. Would this be discovered? Oh, God, hadn’t they said they could analyse it? What would the consequences be for himself and more importantly, Jessica?
**
The infusion experiment had now been running for an hour. A sheen of sweat had formed on Karolina’s brow and wisps of her hair were looking damp. Her vest top had dark patches where it clung to her stomach. He took her temperature again, it read forty degrees.
‘Water, water, please,’ she moaned, ‘I’m too hot,’ and she started to try to get up from the chair.
The assistant came over and restrained her with his large hands.
Godfrey attached the blood-pressure cuff and took another reading. Waiting for the cuff to inflate and then deflate before giving the reading seemed to take an age. Finally, the figures flashed up on the display. Karolina’s blood pressure had now decreased markedly. It was seventy-five over fifty. The heartbeat reading was flashing a warning as it was reading and extremely high value of one hundred and forty-two. Godfrey started to panic. He realised something had gone tragically wrong. How had he ever got caught up in this ridiculous experiment?
He switched off the infusion equipment and disconnected the cannula from the port.
‘Bring that drip stand over!’ he shouted, ‘and that bag of saline!’
He quickly hooked up the bag of saline and attached the solution to the port. His hands were shaking and he was also sweating. Although Godfrey had strayed from the Hippocratic oath on many occasions when treating his elderly patients, this time it seemed different. The young woman in front of him had all her life ahead of her. She may not have had any illnesses at all. The sad fact was he’d not seen her medical history and she could well have had an underlying condition which had made her more susceptible to this new drug. In reality, she was being used as a human guinea pig and the calculations he’d made from the information he’d been given could well have been flawed.
‘Christ, what a mess,’ he said to himself.
At that point, Karolina moaned and her hand went to her chest. ‘I can’t breathe,’ she murmured. ‘Help me, help me,’ she uttered, her mouth open trying desperately to take air into her lungs.
‘Get her on the floor,’ shouted Godfrey to the thug of an assistant. Karolina was scooped up like a rag doll and placed on the floor. Godfrey scrabbled in his medical bag for his stethoscope and pulling up her vest top, listened to her heart. He tried several places but could hear no heart beat.
‘Her heart’s stopped. Press here on her chest, like this. Do it regularly about a hundred compressions per minute. That’s about two per second. That’s it. Count to thirty then stop.’ Godfrey opened her mouth and checked her airways were clear. He took a deep breath and blew into her chest. Her chest rose and fell. He listened to her chest, then repeated the process, shouting the instructions to his assistant to do another thirty compressions. He could see the chest rising and falling but there was no heartbeat. By now, Godfrey was red in the face, sweat dripping down on to his patient’s vest. After ten minutes he sat back on the floor, spent and shocked. The assistant stood up and went to sit down on the bed at the side of the room, bowing his head. It was over. Karolina was dead.
