They entered a spacious office with its own view of the central garden. As well as Elena’s desk, there was a lounge suite in front of a coffee table looking out of the windows at the fernery. The lush growth provided privacy. Someone had placed a folder and laptop on the table.
‘Please sit down,’ Elena said. ‘The lounge is the most comfortable place. Coffee?’
‘Thanks,’ Harrigan said.
‘Not for me,’ Brinsmead said. ‘I can’t taste it.’ It was another barb, one so lightly spoken as to be almost delicate.
Harrigan sat in one of the lounge chairs, sinking into the leather. Brinsmead sat in one of the single chairs. Sam positioned herself near the door, the male bodyguard by the window. Both stood watching intently, silently. The silence became a dead weight. Elena poured coffee from a silver pot into fine white cups with complete calmness. In her high heels, she was taller than Grace. She had slender ankles, well-shaped legs. Harrigan observed all this coolly; she did not attract him. Photographs lined the top of a nearby cabinet. The largest was of an old man, probably in his mid-eighties.
‘My father.’ Elena had followed Harrigan’s line of sight. ‘Jean Calvo. He’s still very much in charge of his own business affairs, his mind is very active. I’m sure you’ve noticed how much older he is than I am. He was in his fifties when he married. My mother was only in her twenties. They weren’t a happy couple. She left when I was six. I hardly saw her after that.’
She handed him his coffee. Harrigan wondered why she’d want to introduce this kind of personal history into a meeting with a stranger like himself. Perhaps she thought she was softening him up.
‘I’ve met Jean a number of times,’ Brinsmead said. ‘He holds on to everything he has very tightly indeed. I don’t think I’ve met anybody with a stronger grip.’
‘I have a strong one myself,’ Elena said, almost offhandedly. ‘My father learned his strengths the hard way. Let me tell you his story, I think it’s significant. At the end of World War Two, my father was a displaced person, stateless. All I know about his war years is that he worked in a forced labour camp where most other people died. He refused to die. He survived by obliterating the first years of his life from his mind. He still won’t tell me where he was born. All I know is it was somewhere in Eastern Europe. Even his name isn’t his own. He took it from a list of the dead in a displaced persons camp one day. He said it would do for him. He built everything we have from nothing.’
‘Very successfully,’ Harrigan felt obliged to say.
‘It gave me an isolated childhood, one full of threats of abduction. I’ve lived with bodyguards all my life. I’ve learnt how to deal with it.’
Harrigan looked at another picture showing Elena with a man much closer to her own age. Both were smiling.
‘That’s me as I used to be,’ Brinsmead said. ‘I met Elena at a research institute in London five years ago. She was in management, I was in research. We know each other very well.’
‘We do,’ she said, an indefinable edge to her voice. ‘That’s how I knew Daniel was the right man to run our signature project. Not because of his terrible experiences but because of his skills. He has a lot of talent to bring to bear here.’
‘As soon as I heard Elena was setting up here, I asked her for the chance to be involved and she gave it to me. It was the opportunity of my lifetime.’
‘I like to be generous.’
Harrigan found himself wondering if she’d had the option to say no. Brinsmead was speaking directly to Harrigan and didn’t see the look Elena gave him. It was a strange mixture of emotional pain, distrust and deep anger. Old love gone bad.
In his photograph, Daniel Brinsmead was good-looking, fashionably dressed, the top few buttons of his shirt open. Around his neck he wore a square gold locket. Someone who could play the field, promise possibilities they could forget as soon as they started talking to the next woman in line. Elena Calvo could be vulnerable to someone like that. But why continue with a connection that seemed to have lost any mutual affection, even descended to a mutual antagonism? Maybe she was ruthless. If he was the best, then she wanted him regardless of what it cost her personally.
Elena had sat down and was sipping her coffee. She sat close enough to Harrigan to assume some kind of mutual purpose. She was a very attractive woman. He was glad he had no interest in her to complicate things.
‘What I’ve shown you is only one side of what we do here,’ she said. ‘We have a lot to offer besides our research program. Security is very important to us. I’m always interested to meet people like yourself who are specialists in that field.’
‘Why is security so important here?’ Harrigan asked.
‘Mainly because of industrial espionage. Our intellectual property is our most significant and valuable asset. We have to protect that investment.’
‘How does your company actually work?
‘You can call me a facilitator. Life Patent Strategies manages the patents on a very large body of genetic information, which my father and a number of other business people have purchased over the years, mainly in Europe and America but also here.’
‘They’re called the Abaris Group,’ Brinsmead interrupted. ‘You should tell the commander about them, Elena.’
‘We don’t usually discuss Abaris,’ she said, without taking her eyes off Harrigan.
‘Abaris are influential, Commander. They’re a small and exclusive club that you have to be invited to join. The group has investors from all over the world and includes some very well-known entrepreneurs and several ex-politicians. It’s very wealthy all told.’
‘Are you a member?’ Harrigan asked Elena.
‘She will be when her father dies.’ Brinsmead continued to speak for Elena. ‘He was the founder of the group. She’ll take over from him.’
‘It’s a cooperative,’ she said quietly. ‘I would have to be accepted by the other members.’
‘Why the name?’ Harrigan asked.
‘In Greek mythology, Abaris was a priest of Apollo,’ Brinsmead said. ‘He had special powers of invisibility and flight and also the power to cure diseases. Curing diseases is what LPS is about. This corporation is an offshoot of Abaris-its child, if you like. Elena is running it for them.’
‘Abaris is a financial group that has been very strategic in its purchases,’ Elena said in a cool voice. ‘It has focused throughout on the regenerative capacities of the human body. Buying patents is only part of the story. Patents are mainly nationally based and they expire after certain periods of time. Abaris has put considerable funds into researching the potential application of its patented gene sequences. As a consequence, it has built up a very substantial body of intellectual property. What my company does is offer other scientific research groups the opportunity to come here and develop the possibilities of that knowledge. We license access to our intellectual property while retaining ultimate ownership of any of the results of the research. Say if a vaccine were produced, we would market it and the profits would be ours. The glory and a very generous percentage of the royalties would belong to the research team.’
‘So no one here actually works for you,’ Harrigan said.
‘I do have my own in-house scientific staff. They have their own program. Daniel’s project is an example of that. But I built this facility mainly to accommodate people who aren’t employed by me. These research teams are bound by contracts. These contracts specify a certain ongoing amount payable for access to our intellectual property and, of course, our facilities, which, as I’ve said, are state of the art. I work very hard to make sure that all facilities available here continue to be of the highest standard.’
‘There’s something you should know about those contracts, Commander,’ Brinsmead said. ‘They’re a binding legal agreement on the product to be provided and contain a scientific specification of the work to be carried out. Imbedded in that information is also a record of the ownership of the genetic patent rights and the intellectual property. Every contract that Abaris has written has that ownership information. If you have the contract, then you have that information as well. It’s Abaris’s way of protecting its intellectual property rights and its profits. I’m the only researcher in this building who isn’t bound by one of those contracts.’