by James Barney
Venfeld gunned the beemer and squealed out of the visitors’ lot. He’d lost a lot of time, and he knew Dr. Sainsbury’s car would be long gone by now. But it didn’t matter; he knew exactly where she was going.
As he drove, Venfeld plugged a small electronic device into his navigation system and pushed a button on the portable unit. Seconds later, a bright red dot appeared on the street map on the BMW’s navigation console.
Venfeld smiled. As it turned out, Zafer had managed to do something right after all. The small GPS tracker that he’d placed inside the wheel well of Dr. Sainsbury’s car was still working like a charm.
Chapter Fifty-Six
Sunset Knoll, Maryland.
“Sorry, visiting hours are over,” said Ellie McDougal, the evening shift supervisor at Garrison Manor. Her deep, booming voice reverberated throughout the cavernous lobby and down the long corridors leading to the residents’ rooms.
Kathleen Sainsbury stepped closer to the front desk and removed her dark glasses. “Hi, Ellie,” she said.
“Ms. Sainsbury, is that you?” Ellie exclaimed, finally recognizing her.
Kathleen nodded sheepishly. She knew she looked awful.
“Oh my word! Are you okay? What happened?”
“Let’s just say it’s been a rough day,” said Kathleen, forcing a smile.
“My goodness! Let me get you a wet towel.” Ellie began lifting her large frame out of her chair with considerable effort.
Kathleen held out her hand to stop her. “No, it’s fine, Ellie. Really.”
Ellie sat back down slowly without taking her eyes off Kathleen.
“I was actually hoping I could sleep in my grandfather’s room tonight. You think that would be okay?”
“Well, you’re supposed to get overnight stays approved in advance, but . . .” Ellie tilted her head to one side and pressed her lips together, weighing the situation. “I guess it would be okay. I’ll send the orderly with some extra sheets and a blanket.”
“Thanks,” said Kathleen with a relieved smile.
Kathleen made her way to her grandfather’s room on the third floor and unlocked the door. The room was entirely dark, save for several bright stripes of moonlight streaming through the Venetian blinds. Her grandfather was sound asleep in his bed, mouth open, snoring loudly. Kathleen approached him, put her hand lightly on his shoulder, and smiled. He’d always been a heavy sleeper. Alzheimer’s hadn’t changed that. She wondered what he was dreaming about and whether his dreams were more lucid than his memory.
Checking her watch, she was surprised to find it was already past eleven o’clock. She desperately needed a shower and some sleep. She fished her car keys out of her pants pocket and placed them quietly on the glass coffee table in front of the sofa. She was just about to slip off her grungy jeans when the lump in her other pocket jogged her memory.
She pulled out the contents of her right pocket then plopped down onto the couch to study each object carefully in the moonlight. There was Agent Wills’s business card, which she placed on the left-hand side of the coffee table. There was Bill McCreary’s business card, which she positioned beneath Wills’s card. There was the small, neoprene sample bottle with the smudged label, which she positioned upright next to the two business cards. And there was the tiny jump drive—no larger than her thumb—that Carlos had given her this morning, just before the explosion.
She held up the jump drive in the moonlight and considered it for a moment. What did Carlos say was on here? It took a while for her to remember—this morning seemed like an eternity ago. Then, it came to her. Carlos had said something about drafting a patent application, which he’d saved to the jump drive. Kathleen twisted the jump drive slowly between her thumb and forefinger, pondering that fact for a few seconds.
Suddenly, she sprang into action. Picking up her grandfather’s phone, she dialed extension 1000.
“Front desk,” answered Ellie McDougal in a quick, professional manner.
“Ellie, it’s Kathleen Sainsbury. Do you guys have a computer I could use?”
“A computer? Uh . . . well, there’s one in the rec room on the first floor, but it’s locked right now.”
“Ellie, I know I’m pushing my luck here, but could you unlock it for a few minutes? I need to check something really important.”
There was a moment of silence followed by a heavy sigh on Ellie’s end.
“Please,” Kathleen said plaintively, “I know I’m asking a lot . . .”
“Okay,” Ellie relented. “Meet me down there and I’ll unlock it for you.”
Five minutes later, Kathleen and Ellie McDougal were standing outside the Garrison Manor recreation room. “I really shouldn’t be doing this,” Ellie grumbled as she unlocked the door using one of several dozen keys attached to an enormous key ring.
“I know. Thank you very much. I promise I won’t be long.”
“Just make sure to lock it behind you when you’re done, okay?” said Ellie, making no effort to conceal her discomfort with the whole situation.
“I will.”
Ellie McDougal walked away, and Kathleen entered the darkened rec room. She quickly found the light switch and flipped it on. At one end of the large room, several rows of couches and chairs were arranged in concentric semicircles around a massive, flat-screen television set. The walls at that end were adorned with old movie posters—Gone With the Wind, Casablanca, and the like.
In the center of the room were a number of game tables, each surrounded by four folding chairs. A few of the tabletops had preprinted checkerboards; others were covered with green felt.
At Kathleen’s end of the room, approximately fifteen upholstered chairs were arranged in groups of two and three, each group centered around a small, round coffee table. Magazine racks and several bookcases lined the walls. In one corner was a small wooden table holding a slightly outdated desktop computer and CRT monitor. Kathleen made her way to the computer and turned it on.
It seemed to take forever for the machine to boot up. But, eventually, it whirred to life and a version of Windows appeared on the screen, apparently functional and ready for use. Kathleen slipped the jump drive into a USB port on the back of the computer, and, seconds later, a small window popped onto the screen showing a single file named “patent_app.doc.” She double clicked and opened it.
The document was much larger than she’d expected—eighty-four pages in total. A smile crept across her face. “Carlos, you outdid yourself,” she whispered. She quickly scrolled down through the document and saw page after page of text like the following:
She’d seen enough. She sat back, crossed her arms, and thought about Carlos lying in a hospital bed somewhere.
“Left turn ahead in . . . two hundred feet,” announced the monotone female voice of Luce Venfeld’s navigation system. Venfeld slowed his BMW and spotted the red roof of the Garrison Manor retirement home ahead on the left. He was just about to make the left turn into the driveway when he changed his mind. Better to drive by, he decided. He straightened the wheel and cruised slowly by, taking note of Kathleen Sainsbury’s silver Subaru parked at the front entrance. Bull’s-eye.
Then something else caught his eye . . .
Immediately next door to Garrison Manor, in a bank parking lot, Venfeld spotted a white Chevy Suburban with dark tinted windows parked lengthwise along the hedge dividing the two properties. “Damn it,” he muttered as he drove by, being careful not to tap his brakes or speed up too rapidly.
A quarter mile down the road, well out of sight of Garrison Manor and the white Suburban, Venfeld doused the BMW’s headlights and pulled into the driveway of the Daniel J. Hicks Funeral Home, a small, white brick building with black shutters and a gray roof. He parked behind the building, out of view of the main road. He cut the engine and waited in silence for several minutes before finally emerging quietly from his car. He carefully inspected the chain-link fence at the back of the funeral-home property, beyond which lay the forty-seven manicure
d acres of Mount Hope Memorial Gardens.
After confirming that no one was looking, Venfeld scaled the chain-link fence and dropped down onto the cemetery grounds on the other side. He walked swiftly along the fence line, guided by the light of the waxing quarter moon, dodging tree trunks, prickly rosebushes, and the occasional stray burial marker, until he reached the back of the Garrison Manor grounds. Through the fence, he gazed at the facility’s two residential wings, stretching toward him like open arms. The building was nearly entirely dark, except for the flickering blue luminescence of TV sets in some of the rooms. As quietly as he could, he scaled the fence again and landed on the Garrison Manor lawn with a soft thud. Stooping low, he scurried to the nearest tree—a massive white oak—and crouched behind its trunk.
From his new vantage point some fifty feet behind the building, Venfeld scanned the ground floor, looking for an obvious way in. Almost immediately, his eyes came to rest on an orange pinpoint of light in a dark recess near the back door of the central hall. He stared at it for several seconds, trying to figure out what it was.
Suddenly, it moved.
Reggie Jones took a deep drag from his joint, held it in his lungs for several seconds, then slowly exhaled a thin stream of marijuana smoke into the darkness. This was how he started almost every night shift at Garrison Manor, same as he had for the past two years. He didn’t do it to get high, necessarily. It was just a way to relax and put him in the right mood for a long night of cleaning up bathroom accidents, delivering linens and medications to residents’ rooms, helping old folks to bed, and—most draining on his psyche—dealing with Nurse McDougal. One “bammy” at the beginning of the shift and another halfway through usually did the trick.
Reggie reclined in a lawn chair and propped his feet up on the picnic table located just outside the back door of the main hall in a little patio nook that was mainly used as a smoking area by residents and staff. He took another drag of his bammy and cranked the volume on his iPod earphones, bopping his head and shoulders to his new favorite rap song, “2 Alive 2 Die.”
He did not notice the dark figure creeping up slowly behind him.
Venfeld plodded silently across the grass, arcing his path so that he approached directly behind the man in the blue scrubs. He was close enough now that he could smell marijuana smoke wafting through the air and could hear muffled drum beats from the man’s earphones. This was almost too easy.
At the edge of the patio was a rack of croquet mallets. Venfeld quietly eased one of them out of the rack and continued approaching the half-stoned orderly from behind, checking in all directions, one last time, to ensure no one was watching.
No one was.
At a distance of about three feet, Venfeld raised the croquet mallet high over his right shoulder and, in one swift motion, swung it hard like a baseball bat. It connected directly on the side of the Reggie Jones’s head with a sickening, wooden thunk. Jones fell sideways off his chair and let out a loud grunt. As Jones scrambled to regain his footing, Venfeld delivered another powerful blow to the top of his head with the mallet. This time, Jones’s body went completely limp, flattening to the ground.
Venfeld stood over the motionless body for several seconds with the mallet poised for yet another blow. After observing no motion for more than five seconds, however, he tossed the mallet onto the grass and crouched close beside Reggie Jones’s unconscious body.
He plucked Jones’s earbuds, still emitting the muffled strains of rap music, from Jones’s ears and unplugged them from the iPod. He wrapped one end of the earphone cord around each of his hands until about one foot of the cord remained slack between his clenched fists. Then, looping the cord around Jones’s neck and pressing his knee into the young man’s back, he pulled up hard with all his strength.
Even unconscious, Jones emitted an involuntary groan as the cord instantly cut off blood and oxygen to his brain. After that, he was silent. A minute later, his body began twitching involuntarily, legs kicking wildly, torso contorting in spasms. Thirty seconds later, it was all over.
“Reggie?” squawked the voice of Ellie McDougal.
Venfeld was startled for a moment, until he realized the voice had come from a two-way radio clipped to Jones’s belt. He unclipped the walkie-talkie and inspected it carefully.
“Reggie, you there?” McDougal repeated.
Venfeld pressed the talk button and mumbled, “Mmm-hmm.”
“Have you taken those linens up to Three-oh-eight yet?”
Venfeld thought for a moment, then muttered in a low, guttural voice, “Unh-uh.”
“Well hurry up and do it! Ms. Sainsbury is waiting for you.”
Kathleen made her way back to her grandfather’s room and let herself in quietly with her key. She tiptoed to the couch, placed the jump drive on the glass coffee table beside the sample bottle, and eased herself into the couch’s soft, overstuffed cushions. A shower could wait, she thought to herself. This felt too good.
Glancing over at her sleeping grandfather, she yawned and spoke in a quiet voice, mostly to herself. “I wish you could help me with this, Grandpa. You were always good with big decisions.” She yawned again. “And this one’s a doozy.” She closed her eyes and leaned back against the cushions, fingers interlaced behind her head, wondering what she should do. She alone held the INDY gene . . . and the power to change humanity forever. And she had no idea what to do with it.
It felt so good to have her eyes closed that before long she began to succumb to the powerful urge to sleep. Her thoughts were soon drifting, to the ocean . . . to the beach . . . to the French Riviera. What would life be like there? Could her grandfather live with her? How was the sailing there?
Then, darker questions began intruding into her thoughts. Why were her parents killed all those years ago? Why were Dr. Sargon’s wife and daughter killed? And Sargon, himself, why did he take his own life? There seemed to be something about this INDY gene that wreaked death and destruction everywhere it went.
At some point in her semiconscious state, Kathleen began indulging even more irrational thoughts—ideas that otherwise never would have been allowed into the conscious mind of Dr. Kathleen Sainsbury, Scientist. What if there was a larger force in the universe—something supernatural, or at least beyond her capacity to understand—that was causing all these events to happen? What if that force was trying stop the INDY gene technology from being exploited? Who was she to defy such a force? And what would happen to her if she did? What would happen to the human race?
Somewhere amongst this tangle of irrational thoughts, Bill McCreary’s words crept into the mix. “Sometimes science can be its own worst enemy.”
With that, Kathleen snapped her eyes open wide. She was no longer sleepy. Her thoughts had become too absurd, too irrational, and she was afraid of where they were leading.
She picked up the remote and clicked on the TV, turning the volume down to a barely audible level. Hoping for nothing more than a distraction, she flipped randomly through dozens of channels, frowning as she surfed through a depressing morass of home-shopping networks, infomercials, reality shows, and B-grade movies. She was starting to understand why some folks might not want to live an extra forty or fifty years.
Suddenly, something on the TV caught her eye. She flipped back one channel to CNN.
Bryce Whittaker.
His head and shoulders appeared in a square box in the top right-hand corner of the screen, sporting an electric blue shirt, unbuttoned—Hollywood style—to the middle of his chest, and a stylish black blazer. His face was ruggedly unshaven. Below him, a man with a thick white beard and moustache appeared in another square box of equal size. Kathleen immediately recognized him as Frank Fitzgerald, a well-known biologist and a member of the U. Conn. team that had originally discovered the INDY gene in fruit flies. The moderator, who filled the remainder of the screen, was Randi Rice, the annoying yet wildly popular host of Randi Rice Tonight, a one-hour topical show with a quasi-judicial theme. A text ba
nner at the bottom of the screen asked, in bold red letters, IMMORTALITY GENE DISCOVERED?
“You have got to be kidding,” Kathleen muttered as she turned up the volume.
Rice was talking. “I’d like to turn to you now, Dr. Fitzgerald. Can you tell us a little bit more about this so-called INDY gene?”
“Well, first of all, let me point out that this is not an ‘immortality’ gene. In our studies, we have found that fruit flies with the activated INDY gene can live two or three times their normal life spans. But certainly not forever.”
Rice frowned, clearly unhappy about being corrected on her own show. “Well, Dr. Fitzgerald, you’d have to admit that living two hundred years is getting pretty close to immortality.”
“Well, I . . .”
“Actually, hold that thought,” said Rice. “Mr. Whittaker, I’d like to get your thoughts on the spectacular fire that happened earlier today at the QLS headquarters in Rockville, Maryland.” As she spoke, the screen switched to a helicopter shot of the QLS building engulfed in flames. It made Kathleen sick to her stomach to watch. “What can you tell us about this remarkable turn of events?”
Whittaker spoke in a deep studio voice, as if he’d been doing this for years. “Randi, we still don’t know what caused the fire and explosion at QLS this morning. We do know that one employee was taken to the hospital for non–life-threatening injuries.”
“Were any bystanders injured?” Rice asked.
“My understanding is that no one else suffered any serious injuries.”
The screen switched back to the talking heads.
“Well, that’s good news,” said Rice. “Now, Mr. Whittaker, you’re the reporter who originally broke this story, correct?”
Whittaker smiled and nodded with faux modesty. “That’s right, Randi.”
“And how did you uncover this truly remarkable story?”
Kathleen wanted to scream: He betrayed me! That’s how he ‘uncovered’ this story!
