by Seth Patrick
Jonah nodded, impressed. ‘Sly. By confirm, do you mean tell you stuff you didn’t actually know?’
‘Absolutely. He’s from southern France, joined MLA after three years in a biotech outfit in Paris. He left MLA five years ago and had indeed worked on aspects of BPV, although they couldn’t say more.’
‘OK, Annabel. But why are we here?’
She shrugged. ‘Oh, I tracked down his number and called him. He’s in Chicago. We’re booked on the next flight.’
He looked at her and blinked. She was serious.
* * *
On the flight, they settled into easy conversation. Little more than pleasantries, but the kind of thing that Jonah would normally find hard work.
Annabel gave him a selection of books about Baseline, including those her father had written.
‘I need to brush up,’ she said. ‘Anything you think would be useful, tell me.’
‘Does he know who we are?’
‘I thought it’d be less complicated if he didn’t. As far as he’s concerned, I’m Sarah Townes. You’re John Sullivan. We’re journalists, doing an article on the early days of revival from perspectives that haven’t been covered. An unsung-heroes thing.’
‘That’s all it took?’
‘Enough for him to agree to meet. Although today is the only time he could manage in the next two weeks, hence the rush. Let me do the talking; you listen out for anything unusual he says. Yarrow’s death hasn’t been made public yet, so I’ll try and drop his name in. We’ll see what reaction we get.’
Xavier Vernet had agreed to meet them in the north of the city; outside O’Hare, Annabel gave the address of the coffee shop he’d specified to their taxi driver and they reached it with ten minutes to spare, ensconced in a corner with a pair of cappuccinos. It was the kind of trip Jonah would have spent a week planning, and Annabel had done it on a whim.
They waited, watching each new customer. At last, in came a lanky man in his forties, whose eyes darted around the shop until they settled on Annabel. She smiled at him as he came over.
‘Sarah Townes?’ said Vernet, his French origins still very clear in his accent. ‘I’m Xavier.’
‘Good to meet you. John? Get Xavier a coffee.’
‘Double espresso, please,’ said Vernet.
Jonah went to order, choosing to wait for the coffee and give Annabel a chance to put the man at ease. While he was waiting, his phone rang. He glanced at it and answered.
‘Hello, Never.’
‘Your cat was hungry.’
‘You’re at my apartment? Are you stalking me?’
‘I thought I’d drop by and say hello, and you’re not even here. Where are you?’
‘A coffee shop.’
‘Can I come there? You’re worrying me.’
‘It’s, uh, in Chicago.’
Silence for a moment. ‘You’re in Chicago?’
The double espresso arrived. ‘Look, Never, I’ve got to go. I promise I’ll explain in a few days. OK?’
Silence again. ‘You already promised to explain. I’ll give you two more days, and then I’ll guilt-trip you so badly even your shit will be apologizing.’ He hung up.
Jonah sighed, then turned off the phone in case Never decided to pursue things. He grabbed the coffee and returned to the table to find Annabel and Vernet laughing like old friends. She has a knack, he thought.
Vernet took the coffee and thanked him.
‘Xavier was telling me he actually worked on BPV,’ Annabel said. ‘Isn’t that something, John?’
Jonah nodded, wanting to avoid speaking if he could, in case he called her Annabel rather than Sarah.
‘Not the original development,’ Vernet said. ‘This was one year on, some work on BPV variants. Improvements. Everyone who writes about this gives the impression that after the drug was developed that was it, you know? But BPV was a blanket term for a related family of compounds. Efficacy doubled, thanks to us.’
Annabel smiled. ‘Exactly the kind of thing we want to cover, Xavier. The man who gave us your name thought you’d be perfect for that kind of insight.’
Jonah almost flinched at the gambit; Annabel clearly didn’t want to tiptoe around things.
‘May I ask,’ said Vernet. ‘Who told you of me?’
‘Someone a colleague of mine knows,’ she said, her eyes fixed on Vernet’s. ‘Tobias Yarrow.’
Vernet said nothing for a moment, his eyebrows raising in surprise. ‘Tobias Yarrow?’
‘Yes. You remember him, surely? It wasn’t that long ago.’
Vernet thought. ‘Three years.’
‘Ah. I haven’t met him, I’ve heard things secondhand through my colleague. Apologies if I’ve got things wrong, but it seems you had plenty of things to tell him, and he certainly remembers you.’
Vernet still looked a little mystified. ‘So, he told you where we met…?’
Annabel simply nodded. Jonah was impressed by how authoritative that nod was, considering she had no idea.
Vernet nodded back, frowning. ‘Then you know more about me than makes me comfortable.’
‘None of it goes in the story, Xavier,’ she said.
Vernet lowered his voice. ‘I met Tobias Yarrow at an AA meeting. We went for a coffee after. Did the same the next week, and after that I didn’t see him again.’
‘But you remember him, so he left some kind of impression?’
‘He was very intense. I remember I told him some of the stories, and he lapped it up. A little too much, I think.’
Jonah leaned forward. ‘What stories?’
‘You know, the usual thing people want to hear about the early days of revival. I started my career working on Alzheimer’s and memory, then I found myself in revival work, rumours flying everywhere, knowing it was happening in the building we were in. People forget what it was like, you know? They forget how creepy it was. Time does that. We get used to it. We get used to dead people talking. I was drinking pretty bad at times – still do, now and again – but those first few years of revival work were the worst. Now some people, God … they love to hear about it. They love all that creepy shit. Yarrow, he seemed to get a kick out of it, so I told him things.’
Annabel nodded. ‘What did you tell him?’
‘I started telling him about the BPV manufacture problems. This is what I was telling you before, about how we improved the drug. Eight, maybe nine years back. We had three licensees, and the efficacy was variable. Not by that much, but enough to warrant suspicion. Quality control was the first candidate, but they seemed to be identical. Turned out it was enantiomers. Impurities with the same chemical structure, but mirrored. The manufacturing processes varied a little, and the proportions varied too, from one to four per cent of the mirrored version. A few months after identifying the problem, we were tasked to examine the properties of this taint. We started by increasing the proportion, see what it did to the effectiveness.’
‘Effectiveness?’ said Jonah. Annabel sat back a little to let him know he could take over.
‘Sure. BPV was a family of variants of a drug used for posttraumatic stress disorder. Messes with the memory systems that PTSD is caused by. Its main purpose is to disrupt the laying down of deep memory during a crisis, or in revival what the brain treats like a crisis. In short, it suppressed remnants. So to see what the mirrored drug did, we tried going the other way. Boost the levels…’
‘And?’
‘People we tried it with, hell … Hit them hard.’
‘Volunteer revivers?’
Vernet smiled. ‘They got paid well enough. Thing was, it boosted revival ability. Normal BPV does that a little, but the mirror was far more powerful. Now, the users of BPV, the revivers, they can have the drugs tailored, the proportions finely controlled. You want as much of the boost as you can get, without incurring the side effects. And there are other things that you can put in the mix to offset the downsides. We tried extremes, huge doses of the mirror with huge doses of countering drug
s. It didn’t improve performance any more than the lower doses. But then we were told to try certain other BPV variants, slight chemical modifications. Some of these were just as effective but didn’t form the mirrored version at all in manufacturing. Much cheaper to make pure. But we were asked to see what properties the mirrored versions of these might have. Forcing the mirrored forms wasn’t easy, but one of them gave a massive boost to performance. There were just a few problems. Hardly anyone could even tolerate it, and there were severe side effects that made it useless. We stopped testing it.’
Jonah tensed as he spoke. ‘What kind of side effects?’
‘Hallucinations. Remnant problems. Psychological disturbance. That kind of thing. Some of our test subjects still wanted it, though, when they knew we were going to just destroy it. Performance enhancer like that could get them some good money, they thought. None of them were high-rated revivers, and they figured it’d take them up a level, even though the side effects were eventually crippling. Crazy.’
Jonah stayed quiet and Annabel shifted forward again. ‘Is that all you told Yarrow?’ she asked.
Vernet looked at them warily. ‘What is this?’
Annabel put her hand on his. ‘It’s important, Xavier. Please.’
Vernet shook his head. ‘Well, for what it’s worth. After that, MLA Research did no more BPV work. We were studying some chronic degenerative diseases, a few broad-base approaches that looked promising. We had a little success with some. I was glad to get back to the areas I’d been trained for. My drinking stopped, mostly. Anyway, a few years after the BPV work finished I moved on, ended up in a great place here in Chicago. Not long after I started, I was at a conference where I ran into some people I used to work with who’d moved on too. That night we drank, you know? Like I said, I still do sometimes. The conversation took a turn where we’d try and outdo each other with the stories we’d picked up. One of them told how he’d heard something about that old forced mirror drug variant. Said it had been used since. Said it had boosted things so much that something went wrong in a revival. They’d brought the subject back, but when it started talking it wasn’t them. He said it was something long dead, something not human. Said they wanted to bring it back and make it stay.’
Vernet’s face was intently serious as he said it. He was looking right at Jonah, and Jonah could feel the colour draining from his face. Vernet broke into a smile and he laughed. ‘Hey, I’m sorry. This is just talk. You shouldn’t take these things seriously.’
‘Did Tobias Yarrow take it seriously, Xavier?’ asked Annabel.
‘Yes. Even when I told him it was nonsense. He didn’t find it funny. I told him to relax, but he didn’t seem the kind who could relax.’
‘Was that all you knew?’ Annabel asked, and got a nod in reply. ‘So did you tell him who it was that had told you?’
‘It was another couple years before I saw Yarrow. I was drunk the night I heard the story. I can’t remember who was there, let alone who said it. Pretty sure they’d heard it secondhand anyway.’
‘Have you ever heard of Unity?’
Vernet said he had not. Annabel and Jonah spent another twenty minutes with him but got nothing else. Annabel left him a card with her number, bearing the name Sarah Townes, just in case he remembered any more.
In the taxi to the airport, Jonah found his mind churning, unable to make the pieces fit.
‘Yarrow spoke to Vernet three years ago, Annabel. Why so long? Why so long before he did anything?’
Annabel shook her head. ‘Maybe not before he did anything, Jonah. Whatever Vernet says, he must have given Yarrow enough to go on. Yarrow could have tracked the story down and found the man who’d told Vernet in the first place. If that’s true, unless Vernet remembers what else he told Yarrow, we don’t stand a chance. And if Yarrow’s story to my dad left out something crucial, we’re equally screwed. Shit. I can’t believe we found Vernet and this is all we get. A campfire ghost story.’
She settled into grim silence for the journey to the airport, scribbling notes and looking more and more frustrated. Her terse mood kept up during the flight home; at Richmond International they went their separate ways, with Jonah strangely distressed by how distant she suddenly seemed.
‘I’ll hear from you?’ he said as they parted. ‘About Eldridge?’
She mumbled something non-committal and headed off to where her car was parked, leaving Jonah struggling to deal with how he was feeling.
In his apartment, he heated up some chilli in the microwave and ate it on the couch, flicking around the channels without settling anywhere, with Marmite huddled up and insisting on some attention. The meeting with Vernet had seemed immune to failure on the trip out. He understood how tired Annabel must be, and how disappointed that her best lead, while proving interesting, had really led nowhere. Jonah knew that if it had been him in her position, he would have shut the door and nursed his wounds for a while. Maybe that was all this was. Perhaps it would be for the best, he thought, if she stopped looking. Perhaps it would be for the best not to find Victor Eldridge too.
Jonah couldn’t help but think about what Vernet had said: Something long dead. Something not human. They wanted to bring it back and make it stay.
Wondering what kind of answers might come for him, and for Annabel, Jonah suddenly felt cold.
23
Annabel got home from the trip feeling uneasy, and not just about what Vernet had said.
The disappointment of reaching a dead end had been made worse when she’d noticed something in the way Jonah was looking at her. It was a look she’d seen many times before, and one she knew she may have to dampen down.
There was a reason her relationships all failed. She had an unofficial rule: don’t get involved with a guy you actually like. That way, distance was easier to maintain, and the inevitable breakup less painful.
She liked Jonah. She always had, she confessed to herself – ever since her father had told her about the boy who’d revived his mother yet still wanted to do whatever good he could with what most people would have called a curse. She’d been fifteen at the time. Things like that leave an impression.
When she’d recognized his name on the day of her father’s revival, it had seemed fitting that he be the one to do it. But actually seeing him had left her unsettled, and at the time she’d not given much thought to why.
It had been the morning after her father had made his appearance in Jonah’s stolen body when she’d understood what had unnerved her, finding it hard not to look at Jonah’s grey-blue eyes. Complications like that were to be avoided at all costs, especially now. She wondered what her father would have said about the situation, if he hadn’t taken that pill and left her alone.
She would have to dowse any interest Jonah had in her, and make sure that he knew she had no interest in him. Tackling it directly might not prove easy, but if things worked out the way she’d planned, it wouldn’t be a problem.
* * *
Jonah wasn’t entirely surprised when Annabel called him at nine the next morning. She said little, only asked him to come to her father’s house to discuss their next move, but her tone was upbeat again, her enthusiasm clear. He wondered where she got it from, those mental resources to fall back on. He knew he could do with some.
She greeted him at her door and brought him through to the kitchen.
‘I’m sorry for yesterday, Jonah. My hopes had been too high. This morning, though, I did a little planning.’
‘About what we do next?
‘Way I see it, either we wait for Vernet to tell us something he forgot, or we stumble into whatever else Yarrow found out. Neither of those appeals to me. So…’
‘Uh oh.’ Jonah smiled, but only on the outside. There was a look in Annabel’s eyes that he was starting to recognize. One that he wasn’t keen on.
‘I figure we have to find someone else who knew what was going on. Someone else who’ll be able to fill in the blanks.’
‘Who?�
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‘Michael Andreas.’
Jonah laughed.
‘I mean it. He’s notoriously hands-on. He’ll know something.’
‘Good luck seeing him. I tell you what else he’s notorious for: being hard to meet. Even if you do, what makes you think he’ll tell you anything?’
‘Jonah, what’s the one thing a reviver needs a subject to do during a revival?’
Jonah shrugged. ‘Talk.’
‘Exactly. If they talk, you can tell when they’re lying. You can tell when they’re evasive. I’m a journalist. What you do with the dead, I do with the living. I get the man to talk, and I’ll know. And as for getting to see him? I’m going to be the grieving daughter wanting to write a piece about my dad and his contribution to revival. Andreas was such a big part of Baseline, he’s a natural element of that. I’ve put out some feelers. If we get a bite, it’ll hopefully be soon.’ She smiled at him.
Jonah shook his head and smiled back. ‘I love the way impossible odds don’t faze you. But you could’ve just told me all that on the phone. Why did you insist I come out here?’
‘Partly because I wanted to apologize face to face. But there’s also something I owe you. You helped me find Vernet, and now it’s my turn.’ Near the sink was a folder, a handful of sheets of paper inside. She took it and handed it to Jonah.
‘Eldridge,’ he said, glancing at the first sheet. ‘Your guy in London again?’
She nodded. ‘Eldridge isn’t exactly in good condition. He spent the last four years in and out of a psychiatric hospital in North Carolina. Eight months ago he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. It’s run on and on, but he got a place in a hospice in south Baltimore that specializes in psychiatric patients. He’s been there four months now. He doesn’t have long left.’
‘What are the chances he’ll even agree to see us?’ Jonah asked. Annabel smiled and raised her eyebrows; Jonah felt his stomach knot as he saw that look in her eye again and realized what it meant. ‘Christ, Annabel. You don’t waste any time. When?’
