Authors: Christopher Farnsworth
The others were girls. She was a woman, even though she had to be the same age as he was.
David realized he was staring at her again.
“I’m sorry,” he said, though he wasn’t sure why he was apologizing. He offered his hand. “I’m David.”
“I know,” she said. Her grip was warm and surprisingly strong. “You’re here to save Simon’s company. Solve all his problems. Change the whole world. Have I got that right?”
David laughed. “I don’t know if I can live up to that.”
“Simon thinks you will. He’s very impressed.”
David shrugged, embarrassed and pleased to have someone bragging about him to her.
Suddenly, the woman’s tone turned brisk and businesslike. “He’ll offer you a million to start.”
“A million?”
“Dollars,” she said. “It’s a big round number and he thinks you’ll be impressed by it. He knows you don’t come from money. You’ve got student loans and you’ve been living on grants and scholarships. He knows you’re smart, but he also knows you’re naive. He doesn’t believe you can use your intellect when it comes to money.”
David’s feeling of pride evaporated. He hated it when people made assumptions about him because of his background. She was right—he’d never had much money, not since his father died. He could remember wearing clothes that had other kids’ names in them. It was still a sore spot.
“Simon doesn’t think you’ll figure it out. That he needs you more than you need him. You can hold out for two.”
David’s head spun again, and not from the drinks this time. “Two million dollars a year.”
“Plus incentives. A car, a house, all that. Believe me, he’ll be happy to give them to you.”
“How do you know this?”
She smiled. “I’ve known Simon for a long time.”
David felt a sudden, irrational stab of jealousy. He tried to tamp it down and think of something smarter, or at least charming, to say.
But even with the alcohol fizzing in his blood, he felt like he’d missed a vital piece of the script. There had to be a reason this woman sat down and started talking to him about Conquest’s job offer. He just didn’t get that lucky.
He decided, after a split second considering all his options, to ask the obvious—and most useful—question: “Who are you?”
She smiled again and stood up. “See you around, David,” she said.
Then she walked away without another word.
David was about to go after her, but then Tiffani dumped herself onto his lap.
“There you are,” she said, giggling happily. She kissed him hard on the mouth, blocking his vision.
He pulled away, trying to get a glimpse of the other woman again.
She was gone.
T
HE NEXT MORNING
—afternoon, actually—David shoved Tiffani’s legs off his body and rolled out of the hotel bed. She flipped over and resumed snoring. Her expensive dress was wrinkled and discarded on the floor like old wrapping paper. She’d thrown him down on the bed when they got back to the suite, then abruptly stood and ran for the bathroom, where she began an Olympian session of vomiting.
David held her hair, then gave her some water and some privacy. At some point, he must have passed out on the bed, and she joined him whenever she was finished.
David tried to shake off the dull throbbing behind his eyes and realized he was hungover. He knew one thing: you could sweat out a hangover. He immediately dropped to the floor and began doing push-ups.
A few minutes and a hundred push-ups later, he went down onto the thick carpet, face-first. His sweat stung his eyes, and he stank like something left out in the sun too long.
A night to remember, but probably not in the way Simon had intended. He hauled himself into the bathroom to clean up.
David winced at the glare from the fixtures when he turned on the light. The bathroom alone was as big as his apartment back in Boston, done in marble and tile that had to be a thousand bucks per square foot. Like the rest of the suite, it was as if someone poured a thick layer of money over everything and then buffed it to a high shine. Simon had done some damage to the corporate account.
Tiffani was still snoring when David got out of the shower. He couldn’t help being relieved. He’d never been that good at one-night stands. Still wasn’t, judging by the evidence.
Suddenly, he remembered the woman. He felt a strange pang of regret. Maybe if he’d had more time with her . . .
Someone knocked loudly, shaking David out of his haze. He wrapped himself in a robe and hurried to the door.
It was Simon, with two paper cups of coffee, looking impossibly fresh and rested.
“I got a mocha and a latte. Didn’t know which one you wanted.”
David took one from Simon’s hand. “Doesn’t matter.”
“Good, because they’re both black coffee. I can’t stand that frothy garbage.” Simon walked past him without waiting for an invitation. “How was your night?”
He looked into the bedroom, where the door was still open, and saw the wreckage of Tiffani there.
“David. You animal.”
“It’s not like that,” David said, unsure of why he cared what Simon thought. He crossed the room and closed the door.
“You don’t have to explain to me. We’re both men of the world.”
He stretched himself out on the couch. Behind him, the big picture window framed the blue of the sky and the ocean and the already brilliant sun. In the middle of it all was Simon, like he’d arranged it just to have something to pose against.
“Sit down. Please,” Simon said. “Let’s get this over with, then we can get breakfast.”
David sat, squinting into the glare from the window. He realized that Simon had not taken off his sunglasses. It now seemed like a smart idea.
Simon swung his feet off the coffee table and leaned forward. Standard negotiating posture. Getting down to business.
“Look,” he said. “I don’t like to dick around. You know what you’re worth. I know what you’re worth. Believe me when I say I’ve talked to everyone in the field. We’ve checked your references, your dissertation, your grade-school progress reports. There’s nobody else who can do what we need to do.”
David took a sip of his coffee, hoping the caffeine would kick in fast. “What exactly is that, anyway, Simon? Nobody has ever mentioned any specifics.”
“I can’t tell you everything. You know that. A single leak, our competitors would be all over us. They find out what we’re working on, it could cost billions. That’s right, with a
B
. That’s real money.”
“So you expect me to take the job without knowing what I’ll do?”
“Head of research on our most important project. Unlimited budget. You answer only to me, and I’m not going to tell you how to do your job. You’re a brilliant guy, David. I wouldn’t insult you with something that wasn’t worth your time.”
“Unlimited budget?”
Simon smiled. “Zeroed right in on the key words. Let me put it this way: if the amount is anything less than eight digits, don’t bother asking for approval. Just buy it.”
“That’s a lot of money.”
“Yes, it is.”
“Seems like you’d be willing to spend a good amount in salary, then, too.”
Simon’s smile only got wider. “Right, where are my manners? Of course we’d pay you appropriately. Million-dollar annual base salary. Company buys you a home, a car—and not a fucking Hyundai, I mean a car—that are yours to keep, from day one. One hundred percent pension, for life, vested fully after one year. Health package, annual bonus, plus performance incentives. And perks. You’ve already experienced some of them.”
Simon gave a significant look at the closed bedroom door. David chose to ignore it.
“A million a year?”
“That’s right.”
David decided to test just how well the mysterious woman knew Simon. “Two.”
That slowed Simon down. “Beg your pardon?”
“Two million annual salary. Double that if I reach mutually agreed benchmarks in the first three years. And twenty percent profit participation on anything you manage to sell out of my research.”
Simon opened his mouth, then laughed. “That’s a pretty big chunk. What’s left for us?”
“More than you’d get if I wasn’t there to make it happen.”
Simon laughed again, as if he’d just put down a winning hand in poker. “Done,” he said.
David was surprised. He had the distinct feeling he could have asked for more.
Simon had his hand out, ready to shake on the deal.
David hesitated.
He had a healthy respect for his own intellect, but he wasn’t so arrogant as to believe he knew everything. One of the first things that propelled him on the path he’d taken was a moment when he was a little boy, looking up at the sky. Trying to count the stars. He must have been three or four, on a family camping trip. And he couldn’t number them all. He got a good way across the big, dark bowl of the night sky before he’d lost his place. It was then he knew—on an instinctive level—that the world was much, much bigger than he could ever possibly understand.
He resolved to understand it all. But he never forgot that there was so much he didn’t know. He would have to work hard. He’d have to learn.
Right here, right now, Simon was presenting him with a deal he’d have to be an idiot not to take. And everything inside him said that there was more to this. Maybe too much more.
He didn’t trust Simon, he realized in a flash. This had all been designed to shock and awe him, to overwhelm him with money and power. Even the woman last night. She’d been part of the manipulation. To set him off-balance. To keep him from thinking.
David didn’t respond well to being played. They thought he was a puppet. It was time to yank himself free from the strings.
David didn’t take Simon’s hand. Instead, he put the coffee down and said, simply, “No.”
Simon laughed again, as if David was joking. Then he looked at David’s face. “No?”
“No,” David said. “I don’t know what you’re doing. I’m pretty sure you don’t, either. So I’m not going to waste any more time on this. What I do could save lives. Millions of them. And yeah, you have a lot of money. But you haven’t the first clue how important this work is. I think you see it as a quick way to make more cash. When you don’t get the results you want immediately, you’ll get bored and move on. You don’t see anything here but a shiny toy, and you’ll throw it away eventually.”
Simon’s smile shut down. The expression that passed over his baby-faced features made him appear, for just a moment, much older—and much colder.
“I know a lot more than you think, David. About this field, about what’s at stake, and about you. You should reconsider. Believe me when I tell you: you and I should be on the same side.”
David wasn’t impressed or intimidated easily. “And if we’re not?”
“Then you’re walking away from everything you’ve ever wanted.”
“It’s a lot of money, but that’s not why I do this.”
“No,” Simon said. “You do it because of your sister.”
The words hit David like a blow. “What do you mean?”
“David. Come on. Give me a little credit. I can tell you think I’m a moron. But I am in charge of a multibillion-dollar company. You think I wouldn’t have people looking into your past?”
“We never told people.”
“Doesn’t take much to get medical records. Or a death certificate. Even ones that are supposed to be protected by privacy laws.”
David realized he was clenching his fists. “That’s none of your business.”
“I think it’s exactly my business. Because what happened to your sister is what drove you to become the world-class scientist you are today.”
“You—you had no right.” He realized he sounded like a little kid. But by mentioning his sister, that’s exactly where Simon had dragged him: back into the past.
SHE WAS YOUNGER THAN
he was. And then she was so much older.
At first, Sarah was the typical pink, pudgy, gurgling little baby that his mom and dad had promised. David was five. He didn’t pay a lot of attention to her, but he had to admit she was cute. She crawled around the house after him and subjected his toys to drool and teeth marks, and hugged his knees fiercely until she finally stood up on her own.
She gave him kisses all the time, and sometimes, it was just too much. She’d still laugh and giggle, even when he pushed her away. He would go into his room and close the door so she couldn’t toddle after him. He figured she’d get more interesting later.
But then, one day, he noticed she wasn’t getting any bigger. He mentioned it to his mom. She said something about all babies being different, and growing at different times, but he noticed: she looked worried.
His father always took his observations more seriously. He knew that David was smart—very smart. And so that began a series of trips. First to one doctor, then another. And another. Sarah came home with lots of stuffed animals and different brightly colored Band-Aids on all her fingers and toes from the needle sticks.
The disease became evident in those months. Her skin, once soft and pliant, bunched and wrinkled. Her face became stretched and birdlike. When she smiled, people no longer smiled back. Adults looked away. Other children stared.
It was about this time David became interested in medicine. A therapist would make a big deal of that, but it seemed logical to him. He spent a lot of time with his mom and Sarah at a lot of different hospitals and clinics. There wasn’t much else to pay attention to. So he began soaking up as much information as he could on those visits.
His father, on the other hand, spent more time away from the house. At first that struck David as strange, because he knew his dad was some kind of doctor. But his father explained, as patiently as he could, that he was a doctor who looked at very small parts of a person: their genes. And if he could find the genes that were going wrong in Sarah, he might be able to help her.
Sarah kept getting older. She had a hard time walking. David slowed down so she could keep up. Kids who made fun of her at school quickly found that David could fight. It rarely came to blows after Sarah’s first year in elementary school, however. David was, even then, a golden-blond picture of the perfect kid. Everyone, students and teachers alike, wanted his approval. So they treated Sarah with the same respect he did.
Which isn’t to say it was always easy on David. There were many times he got sick of Sarah being sick. Got tired of her endlessly cheerful demeanor, that toothless smile in her face as she went through treatment after treatment. None of them worked and she never complained, never got angry. It made him feel cheap and stupid somehow. He could never whine about a test or a bad day, because she was always there to remind him how much worse he could have it.
He felt a little relief when she could no longer go to school with him. Her condition worsened. Her bones became too brittle for any kind of sustained activity outside the house. He was free to be himself, to be someone other than Sarah’s protective big brother. He could go a whole day at school without thinking about her. And it nearly choked him with shame on his way home, when he suddenly remembered her.
So he did everything he could to bring the outside world to her. He read to her from his books; he drew her pictures; he watched TV with her in bed when she could not manage to do much more than stay awake. The shades were always drawn—light hurt Sarah’s eyes and her skin. She couldn’t eat much, either; her teeth had fallen out, and her stomach couldn’t handle much of the bland blended mixes he and his mother spooned into her mouth. He gave her ice cream once and the resulting vomiting and diarrhea nearly drove her into seizures. His mother slapped him for that, and he didn’t blame her.
His father was barely ever home in those days. His mother would go into the bathroom and turn on the fan and cry. She didn’t think David could hear it. Sarah couldn’t. She was partially deaf by then; they had to turn the volume all the way up on
Rugrats
just so she could hear. But David’s ears were fine.
He had the sense something huge and awful was coming down on the whole house. He could almost feel it placing a large, clawed hand on them all.
Then one morning, Sarah died.
His mother wouldn’t let him into her room. She was crying and wouldn’t stop. His father told him, in clinical terms, what had happened. He talked like a robot. The words “heart failure” and “pneumonia” were the only ones that really came through.
His sister was dead. She was seven years old.
“COCKAYNE SYNDROME, TYPE TWO
variant,” Simon said. “It must have been terribly hard for your father. That’s probably when the drinking started, wasn’t it?”
David felt numb for a moment. It was a couple of years after Sarah. He remembered the police coming to the door the morning after his parents went out. There had been a car accident, the officer said. It wasn’t until the funeral that he heard the words “driving drunk.”