Marah Chase and the Fountain of Youth

by Jay Stringer

  Conte nodded. “They have a long history; most of it isn’t important. R18 came to risalto, ah, prominence in their current form during the Greek economic crisis. They killed a truckload of illegal immigrants on their way across the Turkish border, machine-gunned them all, and spray-painted ‘Reinheit 18’ on the side of the container. Red, to look like the blood inside.”

  “Good theater.”

  “As you say, they’ve been quiet for the last two years. Some of their senior members were linked to the London incidente. R18 seemed to fall apart after that, or to go quiet, at least, waiting for the situazione difficile to pass.”

  The London incident, known in the media as the Big Ben Attack, was still shrouded in secrecy and confusion. What Nash knew for sure was the same as everyone else: some kind of non-nuclear WMD had been used to destroy Big Ben and Buckingham Palace. There were rumors that the attackers had targeted the prime minister, but the weapon had seemed to malfunction or backfire at the last moment, taking out the person using it instead.

  The most fascinating part for Nash was what had happened next. Several versions of the story took hold, each one accepted by different groups along the political spectrum. If you were scared of Islam, then the attackers were Islamists. If you thought the government was out to get you, it was a false-flag operation. If you liked secret cults, then the whole thing was carried out by some ancient Egyptian religion. For those who were anti-capitalism, the clear enemy was an American billionaire, James Paxton Robinson, who headed up a modern, science-based religion. That theory gained a signal boost when JPR pledged to cover the rebuilding costs as a “goodwill” gesture. Why would he do that, if he hadn’t been involved? The UK government had launched an official inquiry into the incident, amid much media fanfare, but the whole process had stalled, superseded by a snap election and a referendum.

  The truth didn’t seem to matter much. It was malleable, taking whatever form was needed. The only other thing Nash knew for sure was that Marah Chase had been mixed up in it all somehow, with many people in the relic-running trade saying she’d foiled the attack. She couldn’t have done a good job of it, since they’d destroyed two of the most iconic landmarks in London.

  “They are becoming active again,” Conte said. “I have heard several reports of R18 in the last six months. Mostly in London.”

  “What’s this got to do with—”

  Conte’s dark eyes reflected the coffee as he looked over the cup at Nash. “Lothar Caliburn is working with them.”

  Nash sat upright, and his guts tightened. “That’s not possible.”

  “Impossible or not, they have someone called Lothar Caliburn leading their military wing. So, entrambi you killed the wrong man, or someone else has started to use the name. Entrambi casi, your name is being hurt.”

  Nash thought it over. He was known now for his achievements as a relic runner. Getting a job wrong over a decade ago wouldn’t have an impact, especially not as one generation was giving way to the next. But on a personal level, with the pride that drove him, he needed to fix this.

  Still, what was Conte’s angle?

  “Why are you interested?” he asked.

  Conte picked up the spoon from his saucer and stirred the drink steadily, the metal hitting the side in the same spot each time. “I think you’d be less interested in my reasons and more interested in my money. Half a million euros for Caliburn’s identity, and half a million for his head.”

  “So it’s a hit.”

  Conte smiled. Something dark sparked in his eyes. “As you said, find and remove. And I would expect the location of the Ark of the Covenant would allow you to make even more profit, once the job is done.”

  “And why me?”

  “Our friends Romain and Bakari might not have known who they were dealing with, but I do.” Conte set the cup down on the table. “If you want to catch a killer, you need to send a killer. I want Lothar Caliburn, I send August Nash. And since you’re the one who claimed credit for killing him the first time, I thought you would want to see the job done.” He slipped an envelope across the table. “There is one person I know of who’s seen his face and lived. Leonard Arno.”

  Nash held off a smile. Lenny Arno was a low-level arms dealer. Everything started to make a little more sense. Not only was there information that Conte didn’t have, but someone like Lenny, several rungs below him in the social order, did have it.

  Conte continued. “He’s being held by the Egyptian Homeland Security.”

  “You’re worried they’ll find the answer before you do.”

  “We have a small window of opportunity. He can lead you to Caliburn, but once he talks, the game is over.”

  ELEVEN

  Chase downed her drink. “Thanks for the ride, but I should be going.”

  Ted, standing, took the glass. “I’ll get you another.”

  “No, really. Thank you. This was… interesting. You have a strange way of meeting people. But I’ve had a long day, I’m tired, so…”

  Chase thought that would be enough. She got up out of the seat and turned, looking for the step out of the conversation pit. Ted, ignoring everything she’d said, headed for the bar.

  “Please, stay a bit longer,” Lauren said, putting her hand out toward Chase. “Give us five minutes. Just five. We’re paying you either way. If you’re not happy after that, Ted will drive you home. He’ll stop off on the way at any restaurant you like, and you can order the whole menu, on us.” She lowered her voice. “They’re all takeout if it’s me asking.”

  Chase hesitated on the spot. Ted walked back toward her and held out a fresh drink. She nodded, took it, and sat back down.

  “Five minutes,” she said. “But you should know, I’ve retired.”

  “Oh.” Lauren’s smile wasn’t believing a word of it. “When?”

  Chase’s memory flashed up Bekele standing with the robed guards on the dock, then to Nash in the bar. We’re getting old.

  “Today.”

  “And what will you do?”

  “Everything else. I have a whole life to get on with. The museum has been holding a job for me. I like my apartment, especially my bed. I owe my publisher a book. It’s time to try and be normal again.”

  “The museum has been holding that job for you for quite a while now, haven’t they?”

  “Too long, yeah. I can’t keep them waiting.”

  Ted handed Lauren a fresh glass and slipped down beside her onto the sofa.

  “We can fix it,” Lauren said. “My family name has pull.”

  “With the board?”

  Her eyes twinkled again. “With New York. I can make all those things happen for you, and more. Anything you want.”

  Chase was trying to decide if Lauren was flirting. She was tired, and her radar was off.

  “Thanks, but really, I’m out.”

  Ted leaned forward. “Is this eating into our five minutes? Can we get a ruling?”

  Chase laughed, a much easier sound than she’d made in a long time. She was warming to these kids. “Okay, five minutes starts now.”

  “Tell us what you know about the Fountain of Youth,” Lauren said.

  Chase shrugged. “It’s a romantic story, but it’s myth, and not even a real one.”

  “Go on.”

  “Okay. So the myth most people think of dates back to the 1500s. Ponce de León, a conquistador who came over with Columbus, was told about a magical spring by the natives. They said there was an island, can’t remember the name—”

  “Bimini.”

  “Bimini, that’s it. And there is a Bimini, but we don’t know which name came first, the real place or the myth. But there was a pool that could restore the drinker’s youth. These kinds of legends get all mixed up. Basically, he was told there was funky water, he went looking for it, landed in Florida.”

  “Okay.”

  “Except he didn’t. Historians have found no genuine mention of the fountain, or the pool, in any of de León’s writings, or
any other documents from the time. There’s nothing at all to suggest he’d even heard of it. The best we can figure, the next generation of politicians, wanting to consolidate their own power, created the story to make him look like a gullible fool who’d been tricked by natives. It’s just an old political smear job, passed into myth.”

  Lauren nodded. She sipped her drink, looking like she was processing everything Chase had said. “That’s all good so far. But where did they get the myth from? These politicians, when they were looking to make Ponce de León look like an idiot, why did they choose the Fountain of Youth? How would it resonate as a fool’s errand if it wasn’t already a legend?”

  Chase blinked. Once, twice. She’d underestimated Lauren.

  “Good question,” she said. “The idea of some kind of magical well, or water, is a lot older than the settling of America. Lots of cultures have a version of it. Europe, Africa, Asia. It’s a pretty basic idea. One of the first things we learned as a species was to equate water with life. But by de León’s time, it was already known to be a myth. It would be like if one of our politicians now suddenly went all-out searching for Atlantis.”

  Lauren’s I-don’t-believe-you smile returned. “Or the Ark of the Covenant?”

  Caught off guard, Chase fumbled as she said, “Exactly.” How much did they know?

  “You don’t think there’s anything to find?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I bet you said that a couple years ago about Alexander’s tomb?”

  Lauren sat back and waited, letting the silence hang there as she watched Chase’s reaction. Chase’s mind was racing. The full events of two years ago were classified, and Alexander’s tomb had never been publicly linked to the incident. The reporter who found Chase had never made that connection, being so focused on exposing the cool new subculture of relic running. But the smuggling community had been rife with rumors of Chase finding the tomb, and a large part of her newfound public profile had been as an expert on Alexander, which only strengthened the rumors.

  But officials can be bought. Getting to classified information was usually just a matter of asking the right questions and offering the right gifts in return.

  Chase pushed back. “Why are you interested? This some kind of PR gag? Going on a search for the ultimate drink?”

  Lauren’s lips pinched close together. “My parents died, three years ago.”

  Chase faltered, the wind taken out of her attitude. “I’m sorry.”

  “Cancer. Different kinds, can you believe that? There are so many different kinds of cancer, and they both got a different one, both suffering at the same time. And understand this, they tried everything. You have the money we have, you have every option available. Nothing worked.”

  Chase nodded, stayed silent. She had nothing to say to that.

  Lauren stared off at the Dosa sign for a moment, then perked up. “Do you know how Dosa Cola started?”

  Chase shook her head and settled in to wait for the story.

  “We’ve always been a family of healers. Doctors. Physicians. Chemists. Our ancestor Harrold Stanford owned a drugstore in the East End of London, selling remedies to the rich, giving them out to the poor. He was there right around the time of Jack the Ripper. There are stories passed down in the family about how scary it was back then, the level of inequality, people left to starve, die in the streets. He packed the family up and came to America, hung out a shingle right here in New York. Brooklyn, originally.” Her accent shifted for a second, becoming more local, less polished. “He started selling a new drink, a mix of sugar, flavoring, cocaine. He sold it cheap to workers, thinking it would give them the energy to work, keep them healthy.”

  “That’s where the name comes from, right?”

  “From acidosis, yes. Indigestion. He thought the drink eased people’s stomachs. He was always looking for ways to help, to heal. And that’s been our guiding principle ever since. Each generation raised to care about healthcare.” She paused, took another sip. “Do you know how close Bill Gates has come to wiping out malaria? It’s on the rise again now, with poverty and people pushing back against vaccines. He’s got to roll it all back up the hill. But twice in the last decade, he’s come close to getting rid of it. And I think he’ll be third-time lucky. Just because he woke up one day with more money than God and decided to cure a disease. The smartest people on the planet are wrapped up in medicine. Think what would be achieved if all those brains, all that money, could be turned to other advancements. Space. Climate change. Renewables. Agriculture. Take away the one universal thing we all worry about, rich or poor, and we can all focus on other things.”

  “I could certainly drink a lot more,” Chase said, “if I didn’t need to worry about my liver.”

  Ted offered her a high five. Chase took it, then questioned her life choices.

  Lauren bent forward and eased a tablet from beneath the sofa. She swiped the screen, flicking through pages as she talked. “Public health has always been an obsession in the family. And the Fountain of Youth is the perfect representation of that dream. But my parents, like their whole generation, took their eye off the ball. They loved the business side too much; they stopped caring about ideology. And…” Her voice cracked. She paused. It was either genuine or a brilliant act. “Look what happened. I want to get us back on track. I don’t want anyone else to lose a parent to something we should be able to cure by now. I’m open-minded about the Fountain, and from what I’ve heard, you would be, too.”

  Another hint she knew more details than she should. Chase figured that at her level of wealth, there were no secrets.

  Lauren prodded. “There are legends saying Alexander went looking for the Fountain.”

  “There’s a story in the Alexander Romance about him traveling through a land of darkness to a spring of eternal life. But the romance era was mostly fiction—they added in things like Excalibur and the Grail to the King Arthur myth. Alexander’s link to the Fountain is probably just the same thing. And we have a pretty big clue that he didn’t find any well of eternal life, because he’s dead.”

  “And you know of the Macrobians?”

  “Sure. The ancient Greeks wrote about them. Either a nation or a race of people that lived on the southern edge of the known world. They were taller and stronger than usual and lived for a hundred, maybe a hundred and twenty years. Most people have always placed them somewhere in the Horn of Africa, but I think there’s a new theory going around that would put them in India.”

  “Two places we know Alexander visited.”

  Chase nodded, put both hands up to say, Okay. “But the Macrobians themselves are probably a myth. Or a misunderstanding. Herodotus is the main source of information on them, and he describes them having burial practices that sound a lot like mummification, so he could have meant the Egyptians.”

  “Or maybe the people the Egyptians inherited those rituals from?”

  “This is getting further out there. Look, I’ve gone after myths. I’ve found myths. Seems like you already know that. But I still had proof, something solid to get me going. We knew Alexander’s grave existed at some point; it was just a case of figuring out if it still did. The Alexander Romance, and the writings of Herodotus, are not enough for a serious investigation.”

  Lauren moved across to sit beside Chase, easing well into her personal space. She held up the tablet between them. The screen showed a high-resolution scan of what looked to be a very old photograph, yellow and faded. A line of men stood erect, holding rifles at their sides. They were dressed in military uniforms.

  “This is the last known photograph of the Ninth Rifle Regiment of the British Army. It was taken by a journalist traveling with the British across Sudan, on the way to the siege of Khartoum. But the Ninth Regiment never got there. Somewhere along the way, they got lost in the desert. Completely vanished. The picture was taken March 10, 1884.”

  Lauren swiped the screen to an embedded video clip and pressed play. The footage showed
starving black children, skeletal arms and swollen bellies, flies swarming over them as they stared at the camera. A plummy British voice narrated: “The people here haven’t seen fresh water in almost a year. Their crops have failed. We have the supplies we came with, but nobody was prepared for this…”

  Lauren muted the video. “Horrible, isn’t it? This is a BBC report from Ethiopia, 1984, during the famine. Those children, can you imagine?”

  And all those white saviors with cameras, Chase thought.

  Lauren fast-forwarded through the video, pausing on a middle-aged white man caught in profile, as thin and dehydrated as the villagers. “This is a man they found living in the village. The locals say he’d wandered into the village when he was younger, a generation before, talking in tongues, starving, and in need of water. They nursed him back, and he stayed with them, adopted like an eccentric old uncle. He helped look after the children, taught them soccer—but a really old version of it. I don’t understand the rules myself, but whatever he was showing them, I’m told, was a hundred years old.”

  She pressed play again, and the camera caught a second of the man speaking in a mix of an English accent and the local dialect. “The BBC reporters couldn’t get much sense out of him. He said his name was James, that he was a soldier, and that he got lost. But he would ramble, his memories seemed all jumbled up, like dementia. Figuring he was a British citizen and that he needed treatment, they took him back with them. But he didn’t seem to exist. No ID, no fingerprints in the system. He didn’t remember his home address, just that he came from Coventry. When a therapist tried taking him to Coventry, letting him walk around to see if a memory kicked in, he led them to a recent housing project, land that had been flattened by Nazi bombs during the war. All his stories were old, his memories—his clearest ones—were of childhood, and he insisted that had been the 1860s.” She swiped forward to a handwritten document, a list of names and military ranks. “These are the soldiers from the missing rifle regiment. See that one? Private James Angus Gilmore. Born in Coventry, England, July 12, 1864.”