"Elixir" - читать интересную книгу автора (Braver Gary)

5

Chris arrived home around nine, still badly shaken. Methuselah's death was like nothing he had seen before. Other animals had experienced accelerated senescence before dying, but over a period of days or weeks-not minutes, and never so extreme. Held in submission for six years, cancer had apparently invaded healthy cells and replicated with explosive vengeance. To make things worse, Quentin was surely questioning Chris's dedication to Veratox.

As Chris stretched out on their big double bed, he knew his days at Darby Pharmaceuticals were numbered. Quentin had all but said he'd replace him, no doubt with some younger talent with hot new strategies on creating synthetic pathways. Now he'd been caught red-handed in his own private project, using company materials, time, and funds. How the hell at forty-two was he going to find a new job when the industry was hiring fresh grad students? How the hell were they going to live on an English teacher's salary?

Chris tried to compose his mind to rest. His eyes fell on the framed plaque on the opposite wall of their bedroom. It was an old Armenian wedding toast etched in beautiful calligraphy in the original language and English-a gift from a college friend on their marriage day.

"May both your heads grow old on one pillow."

For a long moment he stared at the words, then he closed his eyes.

Wendy was taking a shower, and the hush of the water filled his mind like whispered conversations. On the inside of his forehead he watched a closed-loop video of Methuselah erupting in cancerous growths, then shriveling up to a burnt-out pelt.

Who'd want to dip a needle into that?

Just ten wee minutes was all it took.

Like he died on fast forward.

It could take years to work out that limitation-first on mice, then rabbits and dogs, then primates. And that was assuming he could determine the genetic mechanism. Sadly, he had neither the expertise nor the equipment to do what was required. No way to do it alone and undercover.

No way.

No time…

Chris didn't know how long he had dozed-probably just a few minutes, but in that time his brain had dropped a few levels to dream mode. He was at the door of the nursing home, and Sam was sitting in his wheelchair, but everything had an Alice in Wonderland absurdity to it. The wheelchair was too big for Sam, who was the size of a child, sitting in diapers and grinning but still an old man in wispy hair and sad loose flesh. A little boy and old man at once. And he was waving. "Bye Bye, Sailor."

"Hey, sailor, wanna party?"

Chris's eyes snapped open.

Wendy was standing by the bed, naked but for a flimsy negligée.

The room was dimmed and from the tape deck Frank Sinatra filled the room with "Young at Heart."

"I said, you want to party?" She was grinning foolishly.

Suddenly Chris was fully awake. Wendy climbed onto the bed and straddled his thighs.

"My God!" he whispered. "It's the Whore of Babylon."

She laughed happily and kissed him.

"What's the occasion? Fancy meal, expensive French wine, now Playboy After Dark." He had bought the negligée as a Valentine's gift several years ago but had all but forgotten it.

The light from the bathroom gilded her features. "How about I'm in love with you."

"Even though I'm a madass Frankenstein trying to fool Mother Nature?"

"Love is blind."

"Thank God."

She smiled and brought his hands to her breast. He undid her negligée and dropped it on the floor. At least they could joke about it, he thought.

In a moment, he pushed away all the muck in his mind. And while Wendy fondled him, Chris lost himself in loving her. In the amber light, he studied the beautiful fine features of her face and large liquid eyes, her long arms and swanlike neck outlined in a fine phosphorescent arc.

Wendy guided his hands across her body from her breasts to her stomach and pubis. Gently he caressed her as she lowered her face to his, moving her hips in slow deliberate cadence to the music. She hadn't been this romantically aggressive in years.

The scent of her perfume filled his head. He kissed her and felt himself flood with sensations that rose up from a distant time. Suddenly he was back in their cramped little apartment in Cambridge where they had settled after marriage. She had just gotten her masters in English at Tufts, and he had finished his postdoc at Harvard. Greener days, when their passion seemed endless, and the sun sat idle in the sky.

"You're not wearing a diaphragm."

"That's right."

"Is it safe?"

"No."

"Isn't that taking a big chance?"

"Yes." She took his face in her hands. "Let's have a baby."

"What?"

"You heard me."

"Wendy, a-are you sure, I mean…?"

She put a finger to his mouth. "Yes, I'm sure. Very."

"But we should maybe think about it, talk it over. I mean, we're forty-two. Aren't we a little long in the tooth?"

"But young at heart."

She was smiling and her eyes were radiant-as if a light had gone on inside of them, one long-extinguished. He wanted to ask what had brought on the change of heart, what magical snap of the fingers had ended the dark spell. Maybe it was four days of Abigail in the house.

"I want another baby. I do. Really."

His mind raced to catch hold of any objections but found none. For years he had wanted another child, but two miscarriages and Ricky's death had the effect of a long-acting poison. Wendy had refused to take another chance; he had complied, and had fallen into the mindset of remaining childless the rest of their lives.

She kissed him warmly and grinned. "What do you say?"

"Yeah, sure," he whispered.

"I love you."

He slipped himself into her and pulled her face to his. "I love you. Oh, do I ever!"

A moment later, they were in tight embrace and moving in rhythm to an all-but-forgotten love song.

"Christ!"

Quentin sat in his office hunched over the computer. Everybody else had gone for the day.

Three weeks ago he had wired Antoine $2.5 million for a single ton of apricot pits, and another two hundred thousand to Vince. He felt sick. He had juggled the books to disguise profits from a neuropeptide and other products sold to a Swiss firm. But his problems weren't over. In six months he'd have to pay another $2.5 million unless Chris Bacon's lab had some kind of breakthrough, which didn't seem likely. The only good news was that Ross's press on Reagan had paid off with the FDA giving top priority to expediting Veratox.

For nearly an hour Quentin had been studying financial records on the toxogen, nearly sick at how they had spent millions of research-and-development dollars for a compound too expensive to manufacture.

But as he scrolled the figures, something caught his eye that made no sense.

Over a six-year period, they had purchased some nine hundred mice from Jackson Labs in Maine -most for Chris Bacon's group. What bothered Quentin were the dates and prices. According to the catalogue he found in the office library, Jackson raised hundreds of different hybrid mice bred with any number of genetic mutations or biomedical conditions-diabetes, leukemia, hepatitis, etc.-including certain cancers.

There had to be some mistake. The average price for a mouse with malignant cancers was about four dollars-the price paid for some three hundred over the years. However, Darby's records showed that they had also ordered a breed listed as "special mutant" which at $170 each was the most expensive mouse in the catalogue by a factor of five. And over a six-year period they had purchased 582 of them, totaling nearly $99,000.

The signature on each was Christopher Bacon's.

But what held Quentin's attention was the catalogue notation: "Shortest-lived breed-Gerontology studies."

It was a quiet Friday morning a few weeks later when the envelope arrived. Chris had taken the day off because he was burned out. In seven months, sometimes working twelve hours a day, he had increased the yield of Veratox by a thousandth of a percent. The synthesis could not be done-not with the science he and his team knew. Wendy was seeing her doctor. She had missed her period, but she wanted to be sure because drugstore kits were not foolproof.

The envelope, whose postmark said Canton, Ohio, contained a small card and a newspaper clipping dated last month.

Canton, Ohio. Medical authorities are baffled by the unexplainable death of a former Ohio man, Dexter Quinn, who died while eating at the Casa Loma restaurant.

According to eyewitnesses, Quinn, 62, a recent retiree from a pharmaceutical company in Massachusetts, was just finishing dinner when he apparently experienced convulsions. Patrons and staff tried to aid the man, but Quinn appeared to rapidly age. "When it was over, he looked ninety years old, all wrinkled and scrunched up," reported Virginia Lawrence, who had sat in a nearby booth. "It was horrible. He just shriveled up like that."

Even more bizarre, several witnesses say that before the strange affliction, Quinn looked considerably younger than his age. "I thought he was about forty," said waiter Nick Hoffman. Karen Kimball, proprietor of the Casa Loma, who had served Mr. Quinn was too distraught to take questions.

According to George Megrich, the medical examiner who performed the autopsy, "no unusual chemicals signatures" were found in Quinn's system. But he did say that his internal organs resembled those of the elderly. "His prostate gland was greatly enlarged, and his liver and kidneys had the color and density associated with dysfunctions of older people."

Baffled, Megrich speculated that Quinn had died of some virulent form of Werner's syndrome, a rare genetic disorder that causes victims to age abnormally fast. "Fifty years of aging can be compressed into fifteen years," Megrich said, "but not fifteen minutes. Frankly, I have no idea what happened to this man. It's very very weird…"

"A medical card in his wallet had your name on the back." The card was signed: "Karen Kimball, an old friend of Dexter's."

Chris felt himself grow faint. He thought about flying out to consult with the doctor and medical examiner. But he knew what had happened.

No virus, no plague, no known diseases.

It was tabulone. Dexter Quinn had tried it on himself.

Veratox was the lead story on the eleven o'clock news. With Wendy beside him, Chris tried to lose himself in the report, but his mind was elsewhere-stuck in a booth in a restaurant in Canton, Ohio. He had told her how he had just learned of Dexter's death, but did not show her the news clipping. He simply said it was a heart attack.

You want to know when you're old? When all that's left is the countdown.

Chris tried to convince himself that he just wanted to spare Wendy the horror. But deep down he knew the real reason. Wendy was dead set against the tabulone project. The truth would only confirm her revulsion.

What bothered him even more was how he had let his life split into a kind of dual existence-one open, the other hidden. Like Jekyll and Hyde.

The Channel 5 anchor announced that the FDA had approved a new and highly successful treatment for cancer called Veratox to be marketed by Lexington 's own Darby Pharmaceuticals. It went on to describe the unprecedented results with malignant tumors. The report jumped from supermarket shots of apricots to cancer patients at the Massachusetts General Hospital to an interview with the head of oncology holding forth on what a miracle compound Veratox was.

But Chris could barely concentrate, and not just because all the TV hoopla was hollow-FDA approval notwithstanding, they still couldn't synthesize the toxogen to make it marketable. What clutched his mind was that Dexter had died like Methuselah. He had probably absconded with undetectable amounts of tabulone and saved it to administer to himself after retiring. But something had gone horribly wrong. Maybe he had run out of supply. Maybe he missed a treatment. Maybe he had miscalculated the dosage. Maybe none of the above.

While physicians on the TV screen recommended hospitals everywhere give Veratox usage top priority, something scratched at Chris's mind.

"I thought he was about forty." How was a sixty-two-year-old man mistaken for one two-thirds his age, especially since Dexter was not a young-looking sextarian? He had a bad heart, so he couldn't exercise much. At best he could pass for the late fifties. Not forty. It was as if he had somehow rejuvenated.

Ross Darby beamed at the camera from his office desk. "I have every confidence that Veratox could prove to be a turning point in the battle against what is surely the greatest threat to human health and longevity…"

Maybe Dexter's death is a dark little godsend, Chris told himself. Maybe this is a warning to keep in mind the next time you think about jabbing a needle in yourself.

"Congratulations." Wendy squeezed Chris's hand and snapped him back into the moment.

"You knew about this last week."

"I'm not talking about Veratox, silly." Wendy's eyes were wide and intense, and she wore a huge grin, the kind that was just this side of erupting into giggles.

"What are you telling me?"

"Dada, mama, goo-goo."

Chris bolted upright. "What?"

"We are with child, my love-preggers, knocked up, all of the above." She was beaming happily.

"Yahooooooo!" And he pulled her to him.

"When's it due?"

"November third."

She wrapped her arms around him.

"I don't believe it," he said, and rocked her in his arms.

In a few moments the lights were out and they were naked under the covers, arms embraced. Chris let himself dissolve into the warm joy of the moment, as he made love to his wife and reveled in the thoughts of being a father again.

And through the window, a crescent moon smiled down on them through a bank of fast-moving clouds.

The same crescent moon smiled down on Antoine Ducharme, fifteen hundred miles to the south.

He woke with a start. Everything was still, including Lisa asleep in the big round bed beside him. The ceiling fan hummed, the only sound other than that of the Roman shades swaying gently in the breeze. If there had been an intruder, the security guards would have heard, and the dogs would be barking their brains out.

At forty-six years of age, Antoine had become a light sleeper; the slightest disturbance aroused him. But that was all right, since he would take a catch-up nap tomorrow. Besides, he loved the night from the balcony. It gave him a chance to reflect on his fortunes. And if he was still alert he would open a good book. Antoine was an avid reader of mystery novels, particularly women writers, both the classics-Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers-and American contemporaries. He liked how women treated crime with such delicate sensibilities, driven by a greater urgency for order than male writers.

Antoine padded through the French doors onto the veranda off the master bedroom-a balustrade marble structure that overhung the northern peak of the island. His villa-named La Dolce Vita after the movie-was a palatial structure nestled high on a hilltop with a three-quarter view of the sea. The daytime vista was particularly splendid: voluptuous green slopes sweeping down to turquoise water edged by a white sand beach to the left and the small protected harbor to the right where night lights illuminated the flanks of Reef Madness. It was a view that could make the hardest man ache.

His watch said 3:12. On a chaise lounge he stretched out under an outrageously starry sky. As usual the midnight air was comfortably cool and laced with spices and apricot perfume. He poured himself some brandy and let the sweet miasma fill his head.

He knew the realities. Once Veratox was synthesized, Darby would have no need for his apricots. But he also knew that the synthesis was very difficult and could take years. Meanwhile, Antoine had Darby Pharms over the barrel, as the Americans liked to say. It had cost Quentin a finger, but he paid up. That was the nice part of being on top. You got others to do the enforcement. Not that Antoine had lost his stomach for it. He had killed eighteen people in his day, most when he was an upstart. He had even taken pleasure in killing. But he was in his middle years now and could afford others to do that, leaving him more time for more genteel pleasures. Life was good.

Out at sea a freighter blinked along the horizon. A few shooting stars streaked across the Pleides in the constellation of Taurus, which was unusual for this time of year. A portent, he thought. As he stared at the heavens, he thought about Lisa asleep inside, about waking her and making love. She had a goddesslike body which was a source of great physical pleasure for him-the key reason he had spared her life. After discovering her infidelity with Marcel, he had hired a homosexual guard who did not let her out of sight. She had begged Antoine to forgive and forget what had happened. He agreed to half her request. The day would come when she would get fat and he would tire of her-and retribution would need be redressed. But, now, things were in place. The center held.

At about 30 degrees northeast he could just make out Kingston airport. A few degrees further east the freighter's lights rippled in the air. Behind it, flashes of heat lightning. There would be rain tomorrow, but it would be short, then the sun would come out and dry things up-a pattern of nourishment and splendor, the natural rhythms of paradise. And he was part of them. In fact, he owned some of them.

He closed his eyes and thought about how rich life was. He thought how wonderful it would be to freeze his life at such moments to live them out forever. A pity man could not stop the clock. With all his millions, he was just as mortal as a pauper.

Antoine's eyes snapped open.

A strange sound. Beyond the crash of the waves against the shore. Beyond the chirping of tree frogs. Beyond the whispers of the Antilles trade winds through the bougainvillea. For a moment he thought it was the brandy playing tricks on him.

Engines. But not a security vehicle. Nor a boat. A persistent rumbling drone. From inside he returned with a powerful pair of binoculars. The sound grew louder.

No freighter. Too many lights and getting larger. Antoine felt his heart kick up. Airplanes were heading directly toward the island from the northeast. But no flights were scheduled tonight. And no planes ever approached from that direction. Nor so low. They couldn't be flying more than a hundred feet above the water. And so many. There must have been half a dozen in tight formation bearing down on Apricot Cay. Small planes, and moving fast.

Somewhere the dogs began barking. Then guards were shouting. The security phone rang inside, but before he could get it, eight jet planes rocketed up from the water's surface about a mile off shore and fanned out over the island.

Suddenly there was a volley of explosions that shook the villa and lit up the heavens. The planes were bombing his island with napalm. In a matter of minutes the forests were ablaze with jellied fire and filling the sky with thick black smoke.

He could barely hear Lisa scream for the noise. Security alarms wailed and guards fired automatic weapons helplessly as bombs continued to rain across the island, filling the night with choking fumes from incendiaries and burning orchards of apricots and marijuana.

To the south two direct hits destroyed the marina and the processing plant as drums of ether sent flaming mushrooms into the sky. Another sweep took out the airstrip where three of his own planes were blown to shrapnel. When a bomb hit the road behind the villa, Antoine dashed inside. Lisa was on the floor crying hysterically, but no rockets had hit them. Antoine Ducharme's death was not the object of the raid. Just his operation-to destroy it now and forever.

It took less than thirty minutes for eight F-14 fighters to set ablaze half the island and every processing building and storage shed, including, Antoine would later learn, a small barge containing a load of apricot pits destined to leave tomorrow for Boston Harbor. And what the napalm didn't kill, a solitary B-52 bomber did in three passes over the southern slopes, spewing Agent Orange.

When it was all over one fighter jet peeled off from formation and sent two rockets into Reef Madness.

Crouched behind a window, Antoine Ducharme watched the boat explode. As his rainforests raged with fire, all Antoine Ducharme could think was that this was not supposed to happen. That his man had a friend in the White House. That his man's father-in-law was "bosom buddies" with Ronald Reagan.

That weasely little bastard, Quentin Cross. He would pay for this with all he had.