“No. Worse. It was late and I was drunk and knackered and it was a stupid, stupid idea to begin with, but I’d already told the other guys I was doing it, and for some reason I felt I had to see it through.”

Compton’s face displayed dawning comprehension. “You messed up someone’s research.”

He nodded. “Yeah. Not just research but an entire room.”

“But how is that even possible? Surely screwing up a petri dish or two wouldn’t tank an entire lab.”

“It wouldn’t, no, but I made the very unfortunate decision to have a smoke while I was in there. I was a chimney back then, couldn’t make it two hours without a cigarette, plus I was nervous. I lit a burner and caught my hair in it when I leaned down.” He waved a hand at his hair, longer in front, clipped short in back. “Had long hair then. Managed to get my head put out but the sprinklers activated. It was possibly the dumbest crime in history.”

“The university pressed charges?”

“They did, yes.”

“Did you go to jail?”

Declan waited a moment and then said: “I didn’t go to jail, except for the night I spent there after my arrest. By then I was wrecked, absolutely demolished with shame. One of the faculty, a virologist named Ian Murray, called me into his office a few days later and offered me a position in a new lab he was starting in Spain.”

Hannah tried to work this out. “Unpaid? As penance?”

Declan shook his head. “He paid me. Not well, of course. But Murray said he didn’t believe in people working for free. He’d been planning to leave the university anyway to run his own private biotech lab where he didn’t have the same funding and oversight constraints, and he needed an assistant. He said with my test scores and research proposals he thought I’d be a good candidate when I finished my degree, but even more, he thought my guilt would make me loyal. And he was right.”

He went on to recap his career since then: before Murray died some ten years later, the fledging lab he’d founded had attracted the interest of a group of California venture capitalists intrigued by the research the company had been conducting. With a combination of loans and increased funding, Declan had advanced the work Murray had started.

“What kind of antivirals?” asked Compton.

“Nanobodies,” said Declan, for the first time sounding toneless. He gazed off across the wide sidewalk, where another little curbside café teemed with people sipping sangrias under striped awnings. “They’re fragments of antibodies. We sequence them after challenging animals with proteins from an RNA virus.”

Compton pressed her point. “RNA viruses like influenza?”

“Yes,” Declan conceded, “but we’ve been looking specifically at a different virus. The same one Kira studies.”