by Scott Britz
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To James Watson
Standard-bearer of a revolution
MONDAY
Four Days to Lottery Day
One
DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?” The woman with the short, black hair and striking violet-blue eyes glowered out of the open window of the little white Kia. The guardhouse was so close to the beach that the whoosh of the surf could be heard over the hum of the engine. Beside the road, fronting a vista of pine-covered mountains, a ledge of granite flaunted a row of platinum letters: ACADIA SPRINGS BIOLOGICAL RESEARCH INSTITUTE.
A body-builder type in a wide-brimmed, straw ranger hat and a blue uniform patterned after a state trooper’s leaned out of the guardhouse window. “Yes, ma’am. You pronounced it perfectly clear. Sandra Rensselaer-Wright.”
For the fifth time she began to explain her need to get through the gate. She was nervous, and her patience was wearing thin. “My father built this place. He took a two-room shack on Wabanaki Cove and turned it into one of the biggest molecular biology centers in the world. I was born here. I used to ride my bike up and down this road when it was just a one-lane strip of gravel.”
“Be that as it may, ma’am, your name is not on the list.”
“When did anyone need to be on any goddamned list? This is a research lab. People come and go.”
“I’m sorry. There’s a special event today, and Mr. Niedermann has given strict instructions that no one is to be—”
“Who the hell is Mr. Niedermann? Get Charles Gifford on the phone. I believe that Dr. Gifford is still the president of this institute. He’ll vouch for everything I’ve told you.”
“I’m sorry, Dr. Gifford is not available. He’s not to be disturbed. Really, I’m sorry. Why don’t you come back tomorrow?”
“Why don’t you kiss my ass?” The car door flew open as she sprang out of the Kia and ducked under the bar of the gate. She ran, desperate to get out in the open, away from the guardhouse, where she felt trapped. The guard gave chase, followed by a second man in blue—this one hatless, with a close buzz cut, but the same bulging deltoids and lantern jaw. They cut her off a few yards down the road, forcing her to veer into a grassy field.
“You have no legal right to keep me off this campus,” she exclaimed. “My daughter lives here. She’s a minor and I’m claiming a mother’s right. I have a goddamned custody agreement.”
“Look, I’m sorry. But orders—”
“Don’t even think about getting in my way.” She made a feint back toward the road, but Ranger Hat adroitly cut her off. The other guard reached for her sleeve.
“Don’t you touch me! Don’t you fucking touch me!”
The guard went into a crouch with his hand on his gun holster. “Would you please get back into your vehicle, ma’am?” he warned.
“You think you can scare me with that gun, little man? Nice try. I’ve faced down drug-wasted, sex-hungry militias with AK-74s and RPGs. You’re nothing.”
The guard’s eyes opened wide, as if he expected her to pounce. He took a step back, but still kept his hand on the gun. Disaster seemed to be in the offing. But just then all three of them heard the crunch of tires on the gravel shoulder.
The woman turned and saw a short but well-built man stepping out of a golf cart. He was dressed in an expensive-looking charcoal-gray suit and a baby-blue tie that complemented his eyes and his gray temples. But he had a haughtiness about him that she disliked on sight.
“What seems to be the problem?” he asked.
“Sorry to bother you, sir,” answered Buzz Cut. “It’s this woman—”
“I need to get through this gate,” she snapped.
The man in the suit pursed his lips and took his time studying her. “Acadia Springs is closed to the public today.”
“I’m not the damned public. I’m a staff medical officer with the Centers for Disease Control, and a professor of virology at Emory University School of Medicine. I’ve published more than a hundred and seventy papers over the past sixteen years. Does the name Rensselaer mean anything to you? Edwin fucking Rensselaer?”
“Of course. We’re standing on Rensselaer Drive.” The man looked to Ranger Hat for an explanation, but got only a shrug. “Excuse me. I’m Jack Niedermann, vice president for development, Eden Pharmaceuticals. Did the CDC send you?”
“Eden Pharmaceuticals? Never heard of it. What’s your business here?”
“Mine?” Niedermann raised his eyebrows. “Eden Pharmaceuticals is operating a joint research and production venture with Acadia Springs, and I just happen to be the executive officer on-site. And you are . . . Doctor Rensselaer, is it?”
“Rensselaer-Wright.”
“Very well, Dr. Rensselaer-Wright.” Niedermann looked away when he spoke her name, a nervous gesture that made Cricket suspect he knew damned well who she was. “The fact is, no one enters the campus today without my express permission. If you’re here on behalf of the CDC—although you really didn’t answer my question, did you?—I’m sure you won’t mind if I call your headquarters in Atlanta to confirm.”
“CDC didn’t send me. I’m here for my daughter, Emmy. She lives on campus with her father, Hank Wright. He’s a mathematician. A statistician. Look, I just want to pick up Emmy, and then I’m out of here. That’s it.”
“I can arrange to have your daughter brought to you here at the gate.”
“No, that won’t work. She won’t—I mean, I—look, why am I even explaining this to you? Let me talk to Dr. Gifford.”
“I’m not going to bother Dr. Gifford. Not over this.”
Cricket gave him a steely glare. “I have ways of making myself heard, Mr. Niedermann. I will speak to Dr. Gifford, whether you like it or—”
Niedermann cut her off with an upraised hand. “I don’t have time for threats.” He flipped open his cell phone, punched a few numbers, and paced back and forth on the pavement with the phone to his ear. After trying a couple more times, he snapped the phone shut. “Dr. Gifford’s not picking up. He and I were conducting a VIP tour until you interrupted us by storming in and assaulting my security men. I’m going to have to go back to the lab and find him. Wait here.” Niedermann got into the golf cart, put it into reverse, and swung back in a semicircle.
Ranger Hat, the nearest guard, wiped his brow with his sleeve. “I need to ask you to move your vehicle, ma’am. There are parking spaces in front of the entrance where you can wait for Mr. Niedermann.”
“No. I’ll wait right here, thank you.” Still breathless from her tussle with the guards, Dr. Rensselaer-Wright sat down on a rock and watched Niedermann drive down the asphalt road named after her father that ran like the spine of the campus, past the blocks
of dorms and old mansions and sparkling high-rise laboratories.
You shouldn’t have let them fluster you, she said to herself. You have enough on your plate. She tried to catch her breath as she looked at the mountains, blue-green in the morning sun. In the six years since her father had died, so much had changed here. Charles Gifford was running things now. God knew who these Eden Pharmaceuticals people were. But at least the mountains were the same. The herring gulls still glided over the beach, punctuating the heaves of the surf with their shrill cries. A sweet, mintlike fragrance filled the air.
But neither the mountains nor the sea could calm her. Her breathing became even faster and more irregular. She looked at the two armed men who stood watching her every move. Her car still stood beside the guardhouse, engine running, door ajar. Everything seemed strangely static and remote. What is it, then? What’s wrong?
She looked anxiously about her, until her eyes fell upon the flowerbed in front of the rock ledge. There, in rows of little white trumpets pointed to the sky, she found the source of the strange, sweet, minty scent.
Freesia.
Oh, fuck. Not here. Not now, she thought, with a growing panic.
Her chest began to tighten. It was as though an invisible anaconda, conjured out of the scent of freesia, were slithering around her, gripping her, coil by coil. Her heart beat frantically. It was a struggle just to breathe. Her ribs seemed to bend inward, almost to the cracking point. Her vision receded into a little, bright disk, as though she were looking down a telescope backward.
She clung to the rock, digging in with her fingernails. A feeling of impending doom came over her. Each breath seemed as if it would be her last.
“Are you all right, ma’am?” asked the guard.
The guard’s words jarred her back to the here and now. Struggling to free her arm, she reached into her pocket, popped the lid of a plastic pillbox, and lifted two white, shield-shaped pills to her mouth. She crushed them dry between her teeth, savoring their bitterness, like a miniature act of self-destruction.
“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.
