In such an internationally established, acclaimed and aggressive pharmaceutical conglomerate, there were obviously laboratories in every overseas division of Dubette Inc., but each was effectively a subsidiary of the North Virginia headquarters at McLean’s Priority Park, just off the 495 Beltway. That laboratory was designed to a rigid structure that provided the name by which it was universally referred to: never Research and Development but always the Spider’s Web, which was apposite. The office of the fittingly spindle-limbed, bespectacled vice president, Dwight Newton, was at the very centre of a concentric series of specialized research departments and divisions. Included here, because their cure or prevention was the Holy Grail of commercial medical research, were a variety of cancers, AIDS and its human immunodeficiency virus precursor, HIV, both A and B strains of hepatitis, the common cold and a variety of frequently mutating fatal influenza viruses. The final, outer circle was devoted to what was, with surprising unprofessionalism, suspiciously regarded as the new and unproven science of genetics and its engineering for medical benefit.

It was here that Richard Parnell had been allocated his laboratories.

Parnell liked America. He liked its can-do ethos and same-day deliveries of whatever he’d wanted to furnish the new, easily arranged apartment rented on the first day, and day-one car purchase – and most of all he liked the more than trebled salary that made everything affordable. And still left him with more money than he’d earned – apart, of course, from the international recognition that had resulted in his being headhunted from Cambridge – as a leading participant in Britain’s considerable contribution to the global genome project codifying human DNA.

It was a reputation Parnell was determined to increase, which made his relegation to the outer circle an absurd and irritating dismissal he was about to rectify.