The Immortalist (2 page)

“I'm . . . fine. Just . . . need a minute.”

The two guards eyed her as if she were crazy. Perhaps she was. The anaconda had visited her so many times that familiarity alone ought to have dispelled its power. Yet each time the terror was exactly as at the first. She had learned nothing. She had overcome nothing. If that was not insanity, what was?

Pull your shit together. The dead are dead. The living need you now.

The little shield-shaped pills started to do their work. She felt a warmth inside her, and with its onset the anaconda's grip slackened. She was breathing more easily. Her heart eased its drumbeat. She loosened her grip on the rock. In a moment, she would be able to stand on her own two feet.

Get on with it, then. Finish what you came for.
She snapped the pillbox shut in her pocket.
God knows, Emmy's the one thing you have left.

Two

WHY? WHY SHOULD
DEATH BE INEVITABLE,
Madam Senator?” said Charles Gifford, just as the elevator door opened onto the lab.

“No one's beaten the Grim Reaper yet, Doctor,” said Senator Libby, a woman whose sagging face clashed with the youthful styling of her shoulder-length, brown hair.

“Irrelevant!” Gifford turned and swept his arm, inviting the group of visitors to step forward into the penthouse laboratory. It was unlike any other laboratory they had ever seen, certainly unlike anything they had seen on their tour today—awash in the morning light that streamed through the solid glass of the eastern wall, with its majestic view of the campus of Acadia Springs and, beyond it, Quahog Beach and the Atlantic Ocean. The light reflected off the marble-tiled floor and instruments of polished chrome and brass. There was nothing of the crazed pack-rat clutter that seemed to fill every square inch of the floors below. Here all was ordered space and light—more like a showroom than a scientist's workshop.

“That peak to the left is Cadillac Mountain,” announced Gifford. “The first spot to see the sun rise in the United States. This lab is a close runner-up. Fifty-seven seconds later, to be exact. I timed it with a stopwatch.”

“We didn't come here for the view,” said General Goddard, who, crammed into a green uniform one size too small, looked like a crew-cut sausage.

“Of course not.” Gifford smiled. “You came here to see the dawn of . . .
immortality
.”

There was a long silence. Like a symphony conductor wringing tension from a grand pause, Gifford toyed with the expectancy about him.

He scanned the faces of the group: Senator Harper Libby from New York. General George Goddard, chief of staff of the US Army. Roderick C. Baer, chairman of the Federal Reserve. Two governors: William Canning from California, and Cynthia Starkie from Gifford's own state of Maine. A quartet of industrialists: “Red” Armbruster, Miriam Rysdale-Sloane, Simon Guche III, and Oliver Bine. And capping it off, two members of Hollywood royalty: director Roy Mancus and, most famous of all, Rick Beach, aka Howard Schimmel, star of four of the ten highest-grossing action films of the past thirty years.

Between them—enough power, money, and brains to overthrow the government of a Central American country. And get it all on film.

Gifford was a little uncomfortable with them. He preferred talking to his own kind of people—scientists and medical men. But Jack Niedermann had picked this group. They could help the cause, he had said.

“Let me address Senator Libby's comment,” Gifford said at last. “Is death truly inevitable? I maintain that things are ‘inevitable' only because we choose to accept them as such. Before the Wright brothers, gravity was thought to be inescapable. Before penicillin, millions surrendered meekly to the pneumococcus, ‘the old man's friend.' Inevitability is nothing more than a failure of the imagination.”

Senator Libby sneered, “Do you expect me to believe—”

“I don't expect you to
believe
anything. I expect you to heed your own eyes and ears. Over the next two hours, if what I claim has not been proven to you as stark, incontrovertible fact, then go back to Washington and tell the world that the Methuselah Vector is a crock.” Gifford paused and raised one eyebrow. “But you will not do that, Madam Senator. Your own eyes and ears will not let you.”

“I'm with the senator,” said General Goddard. “I wouldn't even be here if my XO hadn't pointed out that your name has come up at the Nobel Prize Committee for the last three years running.”

“I'll take that as a compliment, General. But we're not in a prize contest. This is immensely more important.”

The lab was laid out in a square, with the elevator in the middle, leaving most of the outer walls plate glass, giving the sense that it was floating in air. The few interior compartments—a storeroom, a walk-in freezer or “cold room,” a level 3 biological containment hood, and, in the southeast corner, Gifford's office—all had inner and outer walls of glass as well, so as to preserve the view from every direction.

Gifford slowly led the group around the square, past thermal cyclers, incubators, tissue homogenizers, DNA sequencers, centrifuges, racks of spotless glassware—all arranged with meticulous, almost compulsive, neatness.

Rod Baer, a small, doll-like man, stepped on his tiptoes and peered into a cracked glass case, inside of which was suspended a little aluminum pan. “Everything here is so spotless. And yet, over here, your have this piece of equipment that looks broken.”

“It's an analytical balance. Yes, the glass has been shattered, as you see. I smashed it myself one night when . . . well, we scientists have our own version of the dark night of the soul.” Gifford chuckled, but his mind flashed to a woman, her once-beautiful face turned into gray putty, choking on her tears—no longer able to swallow them or even to cough them up. A voice that had once sung “O mio babbino caro” and “Un bel dì” had turned scarcely audible, like the rasp of a wire brush against clay tile.
Let me die, Charles. If you love me, let me die
. His hand was on the morphine pump. . . . Yes, he did love her. His beautiful, gleaming laboratory had failed them both. The night she passed away, he raged through it, smashing every piece of equipment he could reach. He collapsed onto the floor, falling asleep on a bed of glass shards.

But when he awoke the next morning, his eyes opened, as if at an inner sunrise, upon a vision of the Cell Gate—the final, crucial idea that made the Methuselah Vector come to life.

Ding!
The elevator door opened, and Gifford was relieved to see Jack Niedermann step out. “Ah!” he exclaimed. “Mr. Niedermann has rejoined us.”

Niedermann walked directly toward Gifford without looking at the guests. “We have a situation,” he said, taking Gifford by the arm and conducting him away from the group, toward the glass-walled office. “There's a woman demanding to be let in at the gate. . . .”

Gifford chuckled. “Surely you and all your men can handle one itsy-bitsy woman. Is she with the press? A demonstrator?”

“She claims her father built the Institute. Gives her name as Sandra Rensselaer-Wright.”

“Cricket?”
Gifford's jaw went slack. “I thought you said she wasn't coming today.”

“No, what I said was that we couldn't locate her to send an invitation. She was off in Africa, collecting data on some kind of a viral outbreak.”

Gifford tried to picture Cricket out in the bush, in khakis and pith helmet, chasing after mosquitoes with a net. It brought back memories of her tomboy years—dungarees, braces, her dark hair tangled with leaves and catkins. Back then, she was almost a daughter to him. He used to take her hiking and snorkeling, teaching her the names and the lifeways of each species they found. Then one day she was running around in a ratty crimson Harvard T-shirt, which she soon traded for an equally ratty Harvard Med shirt, and then something black and gold when she went down to take her PhD at Bob Gallo's new Institute of Human Virology in Baltimore. When she came back to Acadia Springs after marrying Hank, her look had softened a little, her hair had grown out, and he had a memory of her pushing a baby stroller across campus in a green skirt with accordion pleats.
God, that was sixteen years ago.

“Where is she now?” Gifford asked.

“At the gate.”

“What the hell for? Let her in, Jack. She has every right to be here.”

“I . . . I don't know. . . . There are risks to think about. We don't want any disruptions. Not with all the press on campus.”

Gifford scarcely heard him.
Accordion pleats. There was a laugh!
Pretty young mom and devoted wifey was not what Cricket Wright was cut out for. The bush called to her. Bush, jungle, desert isle—Cricket knew Kampala and Lagos the way you were supposed to get to know Paris or Milan. After Ed Rensselaer died, she was gone even more, and then, with the divorce that surprised no one, she went off to let the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta finance her safaris.
Oh, yes—safaris.
Some people hunted big game. Cricket hunted the littlest game there was—viruses you couldn't see with anything short of an electron microscope. She had an idea that every disease had a life cycle of its own—something like babyhood, followed by maturity, and ending in toothless old age. It had made her famous. There wasn't a virologist or epidemiologist in the world who hadn't heard of the intrepid Cricket Rensselaer-Wright.

“Do you understand my point?” asked Niedermann. “There are legal implications. The patent on the Methuselah Vector is worth billions.”

“What has any of this to do with Cricket?”

“Her father, Edwin Rensselaer, was a coauthor with you on the paper that announced the discovery of aetatin ten years ago. Without aetatin, no Methuselah Vector.”

“That was just basic work. It took years of toil and sweat to turn that basic insight into a working drug, and Ed, God rest his soul, had no part in any of it. The patent is clean. Legally, it's open-and-shut.”

“Lawyers can make havoc out of anything nowadays. If she were to press her claim
today
, in front of the press and all these VIPs, well, it would make a scandal. She could force a settlement just by threatening legal action.”

“Cricket wouldn't do that.”

“Then why is she here? Today? It's no coincidence.”

Gifford was annoyed by the way Niedermann always saw the worst side of everyone. “Maybe that invitation you never sent found its way to Africa, after all,” Gifford snapped. Down the hall, the Central American Overthrow Committee was staring at them impatiently. “Never mind, Jack. I'll take care of this myself.” After straightening his tie in the reflection in the glass of his office window, Gifford squared his shoulders and headed back toward the group of VIPs.

“Gentlemen, I'm afraid institute business calls,” he said, slapping the call button of the elevator. “Mr. Niedermann will finish the tour with you. If you need anything—secure wireless access, fax machines, refreshments—just let him know. I'll see you down at the track field at noon.”

The elevator door opened and Gifford got in. A minute later, he hopped into the golf cart Niedermann had parked behind the lab building. As he turned the ignition, he whistled sharply and called out,
“Hannibal!”
An enormous gray Irish wolfhound uncurled itself from where it lay in the morning sun outside the back door of the lab and sprang onto the seat behind him. “Good boy!” He gave the dog a pat on the neck. Then he hit the floor pedal and swung out onto Rensselaer Drive, heading toward the campus gate.

Cricket! After all these years.
Five, to be exact. Acadia Springs hadn't been the same since she left. How he had missed her sardonic sense of humor, her taste for fillet of sacred cow. The truth was, discovering the Methuselah Vector had brought him nothing but loneliness. He was now a certified genius—no longer a man. Brilliant researchers that he had once thought of as equals were now tongue-tied in his presence. He could probably get the president of the United States to come to the phone, yet there was scarcely anyone he could really talk to.