The Methuselah Gene (48 page)

Before boarding the helicopter, I visited Jeremy one last time.
 
He answered on the fifth knock, and let me in.
 
I walked past him into the room, and rested my hand on a small bronze sculpture on the end table next to the sliding glass doors.
 
I hadn't noticed it before, but then I was preoccupied at the time.
 
It was a ballerina on point arching a graceful arm toward the ocean.
 
The sea beyond it looked deceptively calm.
 
A gently rolling rhythm, hiding both life and death in its depths, as one and the same.
 
Predator and prey.
 
There was no moral compass out there that I knew.
 
But it was the wrong place to look, and I was not searching for that, yet.
 
Not for that, right yet.

“Thank you, my friend,” I told Jeremy.
 
“My life was in your hands, and you gave it back to me.”

“No,” Jeremy said.
 
“You took your life back, and I'm taking mine back, too.
 
I'm not going to hide on this ship.”

“Who do you have to hide from, Jeremy?”

“Myself.
 
But not anymore.”

“Good for you.”

We shook hands, and he saw me off.
 
I gave him one of my throw-away cameras, and he snapped a photo of me with it for posterity.
 
Then I gave him my other camera and made him promise to take photos of
Winsdon
and Levy when they finally emerged under custody, and to send me the dupes in care of a reporter I promised would be nameless.

“Don't you want to take the photos yourself?” he asked me.

“Not anymore,” I confessed.
 
“Now that the truth's out, I just want to get this over with.
 
Then I need to find someone I've been searching for all my life.”

“Good luck,” Jeremy said.

“And to you, my friend.”

It was all over quickly, except for the legal traffic jam stepped into by the special prosecutor assigned to direct the flow of denials with finger pointing.
 
Tactar's
lawyers disavowed knowledge of Jeffers' and Connolly's schemes for saving the company out from under the nose of the FDA.
 
Even
Winsdon's
involvement was described as an “unfortunate fluke,” just after his “unfortunate heart attack” and the mysterious burning of the Jensen Hog Farm.
 
These were men who had acted alone for their own interests, without the knowledge or consent of
Tactar's
board of directors, they claimed.
 
And even the CIA and CDC fell short of admitting culpability in anything, while not disclosing what the FBI and NSA promised to root out.
 
Although they did once again promise to talk more to each other about national security matters in the future.
 
Like over lunch one day.

My own testimony in the matter consisted of two lengthy sessions on the Hill, where I related what had happened from the night my nightmare began . . . the same night our files were wiped from the mainframe at
Tactar
.
 
Afterward I then privately asked the FBI for help in finding Julie, and was denied.
 
The only letter I got from a government agency came from the IRS in the form of an audit.

I was grateful to Rachel for attending Darryl's funeral with me, because I didn't know what to say to Darryl's wife except that I was sorry for not trusting him with my suspicions when I could.
 
Also that he was a good man.
 
Was, and is, in my memory.
 
My words seemed empty, as all words do at such a time, except those breathed in a prayer.
 
For those with nothing to believe in, of course, all that remained were colored pills in a bottle.
 
That didn't describe me anymore, either.

Rachel and I talked afterward about those things you do following a trauma.
 
Death has a way of confusing conversation, though, and interjecting little silences that are punctuated by random thoughts.
 
Pensive and reflective, I said something about wishing I'd known Darryl better, and had made more friends like him.
 
But also that my old life was over, and that I'd found some closure in starting a new one.
 
Rachel didn't hear that the way I meant it.
 
Rachel, being Rachel, wondered when my savings would be exhausted.
 
And for an instant the same kind of feeling swept me that a new retiree must own after thirty years living the same routine.
 
The fear that clock faces would melt like
Salvadore
Dali's if one stared at them too long, now that there was no time clock to punch anymore.
 
But I knew that I couldn't go back to
Tactar
, even if it did survive.

“You shouldn't wear makeup either, Sis,” I said.

“What?”
 
She studied my face, looking worried for me, now.

“Time ticks in everything and
every body
,” I said.
 
“Maybe we can slow the clock, maybe we can't.
 
But it can't be stopped forever.
 
We're like a walking countdown timer, each of us with a different zero point.
 
We think that makes us separate, but it doesn't.
 
Not really.
 
It makes us the same.
 
Makes us human.”

Rachel looked at me oddly, her confused amusement backlit by fear.
 
“What on earth do you mean now?”

I hugged her as we prepared to part once again.
 
“I don't know.
 
I was blind, but things change.
 
I'm not who I thought I was.
 
Time to stop planning or thinking so much.
 
Time
itself's
an illusion, anyway.
 
Just like security.”

“I see,” she said, although I wasn't sure if she had.
 
“So . . . what are your plans?
 
Or haven't you got time to tell me?”

I could have said I was just doing what she once did, long ago.
 
But what came out was: “Didn't you hear me, Rachel?
 
I think I just said life is what happens while we're making other plans.”

She cocked her head, and became philosophically predatory, with a wry smile.
 
“Wasn't it one of the Beatles who said that?
 
The one who got shot?”

After my final clearance in Washington, I returned to the Sunshine state for an interview with the same
Miami Herald
reporters I'd first given the story to.
 
I finished up with them late the same day.
 
By then, of course, the SS Seven Seas had long passed through Gibraltar, but in Miami the traffic was getting worse, just as Dr. Kyle Metcalf had warned me.
 
Franchise fast food signs blazed in the night as I breezed my way up A1A past gaggles of fatherless kids in baggy clothes and starched white tee shirts—kids who were seven times more likely to go to prison than college, when America needed them most.
 
To my right the moon hung low over the ocean like a pepperoni pizza with stringy layers of cheese.
 
So much traffic for so late, and so much motion and light.
 
It felt unreal.
 
Maybe it was unreal.

Tired and emotionally drained after hearing about the Feds finally angling for dismissal after throwing blame on a few ‘rogue agents' and ‘overzealous scientists' looking to start up their own biotech company as partners in a major discovery, I was now especially motivated to find Julie.
 
But for the time being a beachfront motel north of Lauderdale would suffice.
 
The owner of the
Seabreeze
Terrace promised it to be roach free, and it was.
 
But after a sleepless night of tossing and turning to the sounds of the head bangers next door, I found a crushed bug of some unknown species in bed with me, and I discovered the beach to be a wide and littered collection of tire tracks.
 
As for the ocean, it was not as blue somehow, but copper in the early morning light.
 
Pretty in its own way, but not the same as I imagined with those hulking trawlers out there on the horizon, and the lingering chill of late autumn in the air.

On the road again, I tuned into a morning talk show host on the radio, a middle of the road guy trying out a conservative time slot.
 
He had the expected radio voice, but was short on bombast.
 
He'd been a print journalist, and sounded a little like Larry King one moment, and a little like
Winsdon
the next . . . a cigar smoker too, no doubt.
 
Callers enjoyed open lines on this particular morning, and when one of them asked just how long the hearings on Zion would continue, the host rightly suggested it would end only when a bigger story broke, and probably soon.
 
But when someone asked about
Tactar
Pharmaceutical's stock as a potential investment, I had to turn the radio off.
 
I'd had enough of pills and sound bites, both of which served the same purpose.
 
I had something more important to do, after all, and it was long overdue.
 
A promise to keep, which I remembered as I remembered our every word.

Montana?
 
That would be next.
 
Until death did us part, whenever that was.
 
Hopefully later rather than sooner, if luck was on my side for once . . . and if Julie really hadn't put an apple from home into her backpack, but had breached Eden's gate herself.

First things first, though.

It was nearly noon when I pulled into the big horseshoe-shaped parking lot of the Halifax plaza in Daytona, parked next to the bowling alley, and walked across the street toward the neglected and vandalized trailers there.
 
The palm trees surrounding the park were disease-ridden, with missing fronds and high yellowed cusps of vegetation.
 
The pool was empty, cracked, and even the weeds were dead and lay crisped on the patchy lime green bottom.
 
Seeing that, I shook my head.
 
And so I almost passed the dozing old geezer who was stretched out in the battered lawn chair just above edge of the deep end.
 
He didn't stir at my approach, either.
 
Not until I kneeled beside his empties, and took off his hat.
 
Only then did Dad open his eyes.
 
A moment later, a faint recognition.
 
I waited, though.
 
I was in no hurry, anymore.
 
I had all the time in the world.