by Kira Peikoff
The New York media was reporting that the man who had come to Natalie’s rescue was her ex-husband, with a picture of their embrace on every outlet’s home page, but Les was informed that her actual ex-husband had been tracked down in Oregon and knew nothing of her plight.
The close-ups of the man at the jail proved no help. His baseball cap and black aviator sunglasses covered half his face. What was left—a slightly hooked nose and overgrown stubble—was not enough to positively ID him against any other photos on file, though the FBI was trying to find a match. Les felt certain there would be none. Because if he was working for the Network, he was a clean specimen—an agent sent to do Galileo’s dirty work. Rounding up targets. Natalie. Her son. Zoe.
Now where was he taking them, and why?
By the time Les arrived in his chauffeured car at the Kincaid brownstone on a tree-lined Upper West Side block, he had received yet another disturbing update—one that he guessed would not go over well with Zoe’s parents.
Her mother ushered him inside, all pleasantries forgotten. From the look of the home, one would have thought a violent crime had occurred. Yellow police tape marked off Zoe’s upstairs bedroom. Police had clearly combed the entire house for evidence of an intruder. Furniture was out of place. Sofa cushions littered the floor of the living room, a chair was overturned in the kitchen, cabinet doors haphazardly flung open.
Pam, a curvaceous woman with auburn hair, showed Les to a spacious office in the rear of the apartment, which took up the first two floors of a brownstone. She halfheartedly apologized for the chaos. Behind them trailed Stephen, a big-boned, imposing man whose expression Les recognized. It was the realization that you were in hell. Last into the office came a slow, elderly man who wore a cast on his left arm and carried himself with the majesty of an older era. The grandfather. He also appeared concerned, though his body language lacked the anger of Stephen’s, Les noted. No one seemed relaxed enough to sit down.
Stephen crossed his arms. “Do you know anything we don’t already know?”
“We’re dying for information,” Pam said. “Please, anything at all.”
Les glanced at the old man, wondering if he knew what was coming. Was that why he was so quiet?
“In fact I do.” He cleared his throat and sat down in a black chair next to a large wooden desk. No one else moved. “I assume by now you’ve heard about Natalie Roy.”
“We’ve been watching the news nonstop,” Pam said. “Do you think the man who bailed her out is the same guy who took Zoe?”
“It is our suspicion, unfortunately.”
“If I could get my hands on that maniac—” Stephen began. He dug his fingernails into his palms.
“We’re doing everything we can,” Les said. “We’ve set up an AMBER Alert to find the car, and we’re tapping the phone records of those who could have even the slightest involvement. What we’ve found already is . . . startling.”
“What?”
Les leveled his gaze at the grandfather. “You received a call on your cell phone from Natalie Roy on the night she took Zoe into her lab. At 9:37 P.M. It lasted five minutes and twenty-two seconds.”
“Dad!” Pam exclaimed, whirling on him. “Is this true?”
“You checked into my records?” His eyes widened. “I barely even use the cell phone.”
“I knew it!” Stephen shouted in his face. “Goddamn it, Silas!”
“Honey, stop, let him explain. I’m sure there’s an explanation?”
“So you don’t deny it,” Les said. “You spoke to Natalie Roy that evening?”
“She called me,” Silas said.
“And what did you discuss?”
“Nothing really. I can’t remember that well.”
“Dad, you have to tell us,” Pam implored. “Come on.”
“Silas, Zoe’s life could be at stake. We absolutely need your full cooperation.” Les’s omitted threat hung in the air.
Stephen looked ready to explode. Pam put one hand on his back.
Silas shot his son-in-law a withering glare, then looked at Les. “I didn’t do anything. She called me and asked to talk to Zoe, so I let her. She was no criminal then. I went to sleep. The next thing I knew, Zoe was coming home in a police escort. I had nothing to do with it.”
“You facilitated it!” Stephen snapped. “What else do you know that you haven’t told us?”
“Nothing! I swear it!” His wrinkled hands flew up, and right then, Les noticed a crinkly bulge in the front pocket of his shirt. When Silas caught him staring at it, the guilt on his face was unmistakable.
You’re a terrible liar, Les thought, extending his hand. “Mind if I?”
“I’d rather not.”
Pam clutched his arm. “Dad, please. No one will be angry with you if you just cooperate.”
“Bullshit,” he muttered. But he stuck two fingers into his shirt pocket, withdrew a folded piece of paper, and reluctantly handed it to Les. “I found it this morning, under my pillow. I swear on my father’s grave, that’s the last thing I know.”
Les snatched it and read the bubbly handwriting aloud, the obvious script of a young teenage girl.
Gramps—Don’t come after me. I’m doing this for us. Destroy this note as soon as you find it. I trust you. ♥ Z
Pam clasped a hand over her mouth. “No. No.”
“They’ve brainwashed her!” Stephen cried. “How could we have let this happen?”
“Silas,” Les said. “What is ‘this’ she’s referring to? ‘For us’?”
He shrugged. “I can only guess. She’s been obsessed with this antiaging research ever since we found out about her condition. I know she’s desperate to try to help me live longer, and if she has a unique genetic mutation . . . which seems highly probable . . .”
Les shook his head, chilled by a sense of foreboding. If some mercenary scientists unlocked Zoe’s DNA for future generations to exploit—it was the beginning of the end.
He thought with disgust of the back alley near his childhood home in the Bronx. The place was teeming with cockroaches, their flat shiny shells skittering in all directions and spilling out into the street. Was that a microcosm for human life on Earth if too many people survived for too long? He thought of his mother, whose life had been marginalized already from poverty and disease, though she had deserved so much more. With even more restricted resources, what would become of all the people like her?
“I’ve got to get to work,” he declared, rising to his feet. “We haven’t got a minute to lose.”
“I wish I could help more,” Silas said. “That girl has a real mind of her own when she gets an idea in her head.”
“Did she keep a diary?” Les asked. “Or anything that might give us some more insight?”
Pam was wiping a tear from her cheek. “The police tore the house apart and couldn’t find a thing. Her laptop and cell phone are gone. We even broke the lock on her jewelry box, but there was nothing—”
“Wait!” Silas grabbed her wrist. “Has anyone checked her medicine cabinet?”
“Yes, Dad. Nothing was out of place, all her—” She broke off with a gasp. “Oh my God.”
“No! It was there?”
“What?” Les demanded, glancing between them. “What was there?”
“I can’t believe I didn’t notice before, I was just so frantic. She must have forgotten it.”
“She has a severe seizure disorder . . .” Stephen started, trailing off and shaking his head.
“A complication of her condition,” Silas added. “She requires a special pill every day, or else . . . and . . .” He seemed on the verge of crying. His arthritic hands were trembling.
Les shifted his focus to Pam. The sight of the dignified old man so upset made him uncomfortable, a reminder of how carefully constructed his own composure might be.
“Could she have taken another bottle?”
Pam shook her head. “Our insurance only covers one bottle at a time. The pill is a combination o
f two antiepileptic drugs that are mixed in a specific ratio just for her. It’s the only thing that works. And right now, it’s upstairs.”
CHAPTER 14
New York City
8:45 A.M.
“Theo! Zoe!” Natalie exclaimed, as the strange man jumped into the driver’s seat next to her and slammed on the gas. “What are you guys doing here?”
Before anyone could answer, she reached out to touch her son’s arm to make sure he was real. The sight of his handsome face seemed like a magic trick her deprived soul might have conjured up.
“Honey, are you okay? Are you hurt?”
“I’m fine, Mom.” Any anger he was harboring toward her seemed to have melted away. “We’re getting you out of here.”
Next to him in the backseat, Zoe’s indignation flashed in her eyes. “Did you think I was going to just sit back and watch them do this to you?”
“You’re behind this? But how did you—?” She twisted in her seat to stare down the driver, who was navigating the city’s narrow streets with the slick mastery of a native. She noticed they were rapidly heading northwest, toward the West Side Highway. “Where are we going? Who are you?”
“Galileo,” Zoe said, “tell her.”
Alarm spread through Natalie like a brushfire. She stared at him. “You’re not really—?”
He was still wearing the Yankees baseball cap, sunglasses, and the prosthetic nose, and upon closer inspection, she could see that his trim black beard was also a guise. The stubble appeared just a little too even. But his lips were real—and they were smiling at her.
“It’s great to meet you, too.” His words carried a hint of an accent she couldn’t quite place, faded British with a hint of something grittier, like Brooklyn.
Her fingers closed around the door handle. They were going sixty now, flying down the highway, much too fast to roll out. She glanced back at Theo and Zoe, examining them for signs of abuse or coercion. There seemed to be none—so far.
“Who are you?” she shouted. “And where are you taking us?”
“Mom,” Theo said, “calm down.”
“I will not calm down. What is going on?”
“It’s pretty simple, actually.” Galileo tore his eyes off the road to glance at her. “First off, anything you’ve heard about me is a lie.”
Les Mahler’s announcement in the meeting at Columbia last week came back to her. If he was right, this man was a dangerous radical who led some kind of shadowy cult that had claimed dozens of victims, all science-related, including—
“Where’s Helen?” she demanded. “What have you done with her?”
“Oh, she’s settling in wonderfully. I know she can’t wait to see you.”
Arctic cold prickled her arms. She whipped around to the backseat, her pulse racing in her fingertips. “Guys, we’re going to jump out of this car the second it stops, do you understand?”
Theo rolled his eyes. “Come on.”
“You’re coming,” Zoe said. “We’re fine.”
Appalled, Natalie fumbled to extract her cell phone out of the plastic bag of her possessions from the jail and jabbed at the power button.
The battery was dead.
“There’s no need for that,” said the man who called himself Galileo. “If you want to get out, I’m happy to let you off. In fact, I’ll turn around and drive you back to your apartment, where you can wait out the summer without a job until your court date. Given the severity of your charges and those police witnesses, I’d say odds are good you’ll do hard time.” He grimaced, as if it pained him to think of her returning to prison. “Or you can hear me out.”
“But you can’t go back!” Zoe protested, leaning forward against her seat belt. “Not after all we’ve gone through to get you out.”
Natalie, still clutching the door handle, stared from her to the man. “You better talk fast.”
“I should correct myself,” he said, a slight smile returning to his lips. “You do know one true thing about me—my name.”
“Your parents named you Galileo?”
“Our given names are irrelevant. It’s how we identify ourselves that counts.”
Outside, the gleaming gray river snaked by along the highway. Now they were doing seventy-five. How come, the one and only time she wanted it, there was no traffic?
“As you seem to be aware,” he went on, “I’m the leader of a grassroots movement that’s in the midst of waging an underground scientific revolution.”
“Oh,” she muttered, “I’m aware.”
“Let me guess. In a meeting at Columbia, Les Mahler told you we’re a cult?”
She raised her eyebrows. “How could you know that?”
“Well-placed sources, my dear.”
Then she remembered. “The mole!” It was probably Mitch. No one else in the department could match his spirit in ugliness. “I know just who it was, too.”
Galileo chuckled, not at all insulted. “First off, the Network is no cult. We’re a band of volunteers that have gotten together to accelerate progress.”
They were about to exit Manhattan, speeding toward the Lincoln Tunnel. At least, she thought, they might pass through a tollbooth on the other end—maybe she could wave down an attendant somehow. But unless they hit congestion in the tunnel, she’d only have a split second . . .
“All of the people who’ve appeared to vanish,” he was saying, “actually sought out my help or someone on their behalf did. Our mission is to give experts like you the total freedom required to pursue biomedical advances as quickly and efficiently as possible. No board-required approvals, no drug companies or bureaucrats pushing agendas, no byzantine FDA regulations. We started several years ago, funded by venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, with one specific project in mind—and that’s multiplied as more and more scientists and doctors have escaped their traditional careers to join our movement.” Darkness descended as they raced into the tunnel. Galileo paused as he switched lanes to avoid an aggressive driver who was riding his tail.
“We now have about six hundred allied members in strategic locations around the country, who enable us to privately transport our crew and supplies. In return, they and their families are first on the list for our innovative therapies currently under development. It’s like the Underground Railroad for science. This time the slavery is less obvious—though no less insidious.”
She frowned. “Who’s enslaved?”
“You.”
“Me?”
“You. And other unconventional, risk-taking scientists like you.”
“By whom?”
“Good old Uncle Sam.”
“How do you figure?”
“Les Mahler’s Bioethics Committee is a great example. They’re just a bunch of glorified policemen with fancy degrees and a fear of change.”
She opened her mouth to retort, but realized she didn’t disagree. The way Les Mahler had studied her and the other scientists at that meeting, it was as though they were a bunch of wayward tinkerers who required his close watch, lest their experiments upend society. It was worse than a lack of respect, it was disdain.
“And a million other ways that come together to inhibit brilliance and risk and innovation,” Galileo added. “Maybe it’s refusing your grant requests, or your tenure, or cutting off your funding, or pulling your clinical trial, or delaying approval of your drug, depending on the politics and the powers involved.” He did a quick check over his shoulder and switched lanes again, accelerating into a spot ahead of a slow driver.
“Or maybe it’s big pharma,” he went on, “only funding research that will help their bottom line, not necessarily the real revolutionary work that’s crying to be done, but that won’t yield a profit for years or decades to come. That’s where the Network comes in. At our headquarters, we’ve now got refugees from the system researching stem cells, cloning, memory manipulation, synthetic life, 3-D organ printing, and our biggest project of all. The project that united the movement with a single
vision, that got us our funding, and that I believe will change the world as we know it.”
Natalie’s heart was pounding. She was no longer aware that they had passed through the tunnel, out into the bright open sunlight. “Which is?”
“To finally address the question people have asked since the beginning of time—Why are we mortal?” He took off his sunglasses and looked at her, and in his blue eyes, she was surprised to detect a profound sadness. “You and Zoe are the two people we need to help us find the answer.”
“See?” Zoe piped up in her girlish voice from the backseat. “This is totally legit, it’s the best thing that could have happened to us!”
Natalie closed her eyes, her mind reeling. “So what you’re telling me is, there’s a secret lab somewhere in America where you want to take us to research the cure for aging?”
“Not just a lab. We’ve got forty-five of them, mostly underground, with a whole team in place who can’t wait to meet you. Geneticists, biostatisticians, physiologists, radiologists, endocrinologists. I have to say, your paper from last year in Rejuvenation Research on the developmental theory of aging is very popular in the compound.”
She snorted. “If you’re trying to lure me to my grave, that’s a good one.”
“Ever the skeptic, aren’t you?”
If anything, her doubt seemed to please him.
“What scientist worth her weight isn’t?”
He nodded, keeping his focus on the road. Now they were in New Jersey, and the spiky skyline of Manhattan was little more than a box of matchsticks through the rear window.
“Helen warned me you were stubborn. Here.” He reached into his pocket and tossed a silver cell phone into her lap. “Call her.”
Natalie’s mouth fell open. “Really?”
