The Immortalists (28 page)
EPILOGUE
Near Munich, Germany
25 Years Later
“Your meeting with the architects doing the expansion of the genetics lab has been moved to three, and I’ve rescheduled your interview with
Time
magazine for after.”
Richard Draman tapped his temple with an index finger. “No problem, Greta. I’ve got it all in my head.”
His secretary scowled in a way that only Germans could—a veritable treatise on his inefficiency and absentmindedness. And she was probably right. She usually was.
“One last thing,” she said. “Your wife called and said she’ll be a few minutes late for lunch. Traffic, apparently.”
Richard gave her the thumbs-up, prompting another scowl before she turned on her heels and marched out of his expansive office. He reached for his keyboard with the intention of finally getting around to the overdue budget reports, but instead opened an encrypted photo of Susie, Carly, and Burt Seeger. It had been taken the day they left Laos on Xander’s private jet. Almost twenty-five years ago now.
Susie stared out from the screen with a mix of excitement and apprehension, everything in her life having just been turned upside down. She’d eventually travel the globe and collect the experiences of ten lifetimes over the course of just a few years.
A fight with melanoma at eighteen had hardly slowed her down. She’d even found time to fall in love with the son of a South African diplomat—a wonderful kid who had stuck with her until she finally succumbed to leukemia at the age of twenty-two. Seeger had followed a year later, and though he normally didn’t believe in such things, Richard suspected it was from a broken heart.
His gaze shifted to Carly, but it was hard now to put the woman in the photo together with his wife. Xander’s surgeons had altered their appearances before creating elaborate new identities for them. And then, of course, there were the years.
He spun his chair to face the glass wall behind his desk and looked out on the grass-covered research campus below.
Xander hadn’t been as durable as he’d given himself credit for, dying a few months after he’d created the Cancer Venture and installed Richard as its director. Strangely, that was less an end than a beginning. He’d left not only
his
money to the Venture, but the money that he had inherited from his group of would-be immortals. Richard now controlled billions of research dollars and was the driving force in the world’s still unsuccessful quest to cure cancer.
He heard the door behind him open, and a moment later Carly leaned over the back of his chair and wrapped her arms around him.
“You left before I woke up this morning,” she said.
“Couldn’t sleep.”
“It’s always that way, isn’t it? You always get so melancholy on your birthday. You know what they say. Seventy is the new fifty.”
“Is that really what they say?”
“As far as you know.”
He smiled and ran a hand slowly along her arm. “Do you ever wonder, Carly?”
“Wonder about what?”
“What it would be like to be young again?”
He watched her reflection in the glass as she considered the question.
“Never.”
Kyle Mills is the
New York Times
bestselling author of eleven political crime thrillers. The initial inspiration for his novels was his father’s career as an FBI agent and director of Interpol, and it is that connection with international law enforcement that lends such striking realism to his work. He and his wife are avid rock climbers, skiers, and mountain bikers, happy to call Jackson Hole, Wyoming, home for almost twenty years.