The man smiled and the knife glinted in the flickering light of the street-lamp. He moved closer and when she stepped back, her heel caught the kerb. She stumbled, hit her head on the lamp-post and fell to the ground, dazed.
What a pathetic way to die, she thought, looking up at the thug's half-lit face. As he thrust the knife towards her, a shadow fell across his features, and she saw movement in her peripheral vision. Time seemed to slow and her visual acuity sharpened as the blade rushed towards her in a quicksilver flash. Then, it was obscured by a dark mass inches from her eyes. A huge figure had appeared above her, the light from the street-lamp illuminating his white-blond hair like a halo. Only now did she realize that he had shielded her face by thrusting his arm in the knife's path. He had wrapped his forearm in his linen jacket but the blade had still cut him: a bloodstain bloomed on the pale fabric. He made no sound, and his clear blue eyes betrayed no pain.
Her attacker, dwarfed by the man, looked suddenly uncertain as her protector locked his massive left hand on the attacker's wrist and twisted the knife from his grip. The other two moved forward, knives drawn, but her rescuer didn't retreat: he dropped his jacket and stepped protectively over her prone body.
For a second, the attackers didn't move, then all three lunged at once. From where she lay they looked like three snarling dogs attacking a lion. But they stood no chance. He moved with unhurried, deliberate precision, landing blows with such power that they were soon limping off into the night. Then he moved to the fallen man, who was groaning and struggling to his feet. Before he could reach him, though, the man clutched his battered head and stumbled off down the dark alley. The blond man shook his head and returned to her. Before she could scramble to her feet, he knelt over her, and gently felt the back of her head where it had struck the lamp-post. His face was so close to her that she could smell his aftershave. For a fleeting instant his blue eyes stared into hers and she thought he was going to kiss her. And she wanted him to.
Then she felt something at the back of her neck, a brush of air, and the spell was broken. 'Thanks, I'm fine,' she said, suddenly self-conscious.
He smiled and helped her to her feet. She was tall for a woman, five feet eight, but he towered above her. 'You've got an impressive bump, but you'll live.'
She was still trembling, but now that she was safe she felt something else: excitement. She returned his smile. 'I don't know how to thank you. Shouldn't we call the gendarmes?'
He put on his bloodied jacket. 'I wouldn't bother. Did you see how quickly the injured guy ran off?'
She reached for his hand and pulled back the sleeve. An ugly red gash sliced across his forearm. 'Let me look at that.' She felt the pulse on his wrist. It was slow, even for someone in repose, and she contrasted it with her own racing heartbeat. 'Takes a lot to get you going, doesn't it?' She probed the wound but he didn't flinch. 'It's okay to feel pain, you know? It shows you're alive.' The cut was ugly but clean. 'You had an anti-tetanus jab recently?'
'I'll be fine.'
She retrieved a clean white handkerchief from her handbag. 'I'll bind the cut for now but you must get it seen to as soon as possible.'
'If you say so.'
'I say so.' She smiled at his calm self-assurance. 'You live around here?'
'I have a house just up the coast. You?' 'I'm staying at the Eden Rock.' He nodded. 'I'll see you back there.'
As they walked to the hotel she studied his clothes. 'Let me pay for your jacket.'
He glanced down at the bloodstain. 'Don't worry about it.' 'At least let me buy you a drink to say thank you,' she said, when they arrived outside the hotel entrance.
Something flickered in his blue eyes. 'Thanks, but not tonight.' She was disappointed. There was something mysterious and dangerous about him that made Leo seem like a foolish boy. Suddenly he smiled. 'Be warned, though. I will see you again and when I do I'll take you up on that drink.' He turned away. 'Goodnight.'
'Goodnight. And thanks again,' she said, as she watched him disappear into the night. When she turned into the hotel lobby she realized she didn't even know his name. In the lift she rubbed the back of her neck, remembering his gentle touch.
MAX'S RETREAT WAS THREE MILES UP THE COAST IN ST LAURENT-DU-Var. The stucco-covered stone villa nestled in an acre of pine trees overlooking the Mediterranean. He invited few people through its high gates and never his family. Pictures of his mother adorned the walls, and locked in his desk was the US passport in the name of William Collins that she had given him in Hawaii. The house was a private place, where he dived, swam and thought, insulated from every other aspect of his life.
Max turned the hot dial on his shower until the water scalded his skin. He examined his wound, watching the blood flow down his muscled arm and drip on to the floor of the cubicle.
As the water flowed over his body, he processed what had happened, satisfied that his intervention had been quick and professional. If Isabella had been injured by the attackers, or worse, the experiment would have been compromised. It had also provided the perfect opportunity, while he examined her injuries, to inject her with the drug. It did not occur to him that the speed with which he had acted might have been due to instinct and emotion rather than cool professionalism.
He stepped out of the shower, dried himself and got out a bandage, surgical spirit and tape from the locked medicine cabinet by the bathroom door. The spirit stung, but the pain focused his mind. After he had dressed the cut, he wandered over the cool stone tiles and sea-grass mats to the open-plan lounge and a small bar where he poured himself a Glenmorangie on the rocks. When he returned to his bedroom, he reached for the PowerDermic vaccine gun in the pocket of his bloody linen jacket and ejected the spent vial. Traces of the drug he had injected into the back of Isabella's neck dusted its interior and the white label bore the legend NiL #069 (Romeo) in neat black type. Romeo contained the DNA code of his facial imprint. He had completed half of his mission.
He gazed out of the sliding glass doors to the bedroom's private terrace and could see the distant lights of Cap d'Antibes down the coast. Perhaps one lit her hotel suite. He wondered whether she was yet feeling, unwittingly, the drug's effect. He imagined her lying in bed, the powder entering her bloodstream. Perhaps it had put her to sleep. Even now his face might be intruding on her dreams as it reprogrammed her brain chemistry.
Assuming, of course, that it worked.
He opened a small black box on the oak bedside table. Inside were two foam-lined slots. The empty one had housed Romeo. The other held a full vial of powder labelled 'NiL #069 (Juliet)'. It contained Isabella Bacci's genetic facial imprint. Max removed it, placed it in the vaccine gun and laid it on the bed.
He took another slug of whisky and walked naked to the bedroom terrace. After Professor Bacci's presentation, Max had had no qualms about offering himself as a guinea-pig. No matter how convincing Bacci's scientific explanations were, his notion of nature-identical love was preposterous. And the idea that Max, of all people, could be made to feel love was inconceivable. He hadn't felt or needed love since he was a child -- and was glad of it. Love only made you sad. He got all the emotional release he needed from diving. He thought of the proposed merger with Banque Chevalier and smiled. At one moment his father had wanted to play Cupid between Max and Delphine Chevalier, and now he was to play Romeo to Isabella Bacci's Juliet. In his father's eyes, love was a commodity, a means to an end, and Max had no problems with that.
But what if the drug worked? He thought again of Isabella's face and those expressive eyes. How would it make him feel?
Despite the warm night, he shivered, sipped his whisky and looked out across the Mediterranean. He had a sudden urge toswim out, dive beneath its silver-tipped waves and seek the euphoric release of the deep. He glanced at the wardrobe where his diving equipment was stored and then at the primed vaccine gun on the bed. One offered safety, the other danger. He took a deep breath and leaned over the balcony, enjoying the breeze on his naked body. As he
looked down on the gardens, shrouded in darkness, he thought he saw a solitary figure standing outside the main gates. What was he or she doing? He peered into the darkness, but realized he must have been mistaken.
His cellphone rang. He moved to the bed and picked it up.
His father's rasp cut dirough his thoughts like a cold wind: 'Max, is it done?'
'I've injected her but not myself.'
Why not?'
'Don't check up on me, Vater. I'll do it in my own time.' He hung up.
He drained his whisky, then padded to the bathroom and cleaned his teeth. He returned to the bedroom, picked up the vaccine gun, placed it against his arm and pulled the trigger. He watched the powder disappear from the glass vial as the drug exploded silently through his skin.
Then he turned out the light, lay back on the bed and waited for sleep, wondering what tomorrow would bring.
NIL# 069 (JULIET) EXPLODED PAINLESSLY THROUGH THE STRATUM corneum of Max's left arm at three times the speed of sound. The microscopic powder dissolved into his bloodstream and sped to his heart. The drug was a bullet within a bullet: each fine grain of powder contained a microencapsulated retroviral vector, which in turn carried a bundle of genetic instructions. After the powder reached his heart and was pumped out into the arteries, the outer structure of each 'micro-fine granule broke down, releasing a retrovirus programmed to deliver its payload to a precisely targeted location in Max's body.
From his heart, each retroviral bullet raced north until it reached the blood brain barrier, the border patrol at the base of the brainstem. Here, it released a string of peptides, which acted as a passport, allowing it to continue unhindered to the protected brain cells. In Max's brain, it searched through the specialized regions until its RNA messenger material detected a match with cells in the inferotemporal cortex. Finally it entered the nucleus of the first receptive cell and delivered its DNA, overwriting the cell's natural genetic code with its own instructions.
The face genetically imprinted on the inferotemporal cortex appeared in Max's dreams, but die reprogrammed DNA lay dormant in his genome, and would cause no symptoms until he next saw Isabella Bacci's face.
THE NEXT MORNING
ISABELLA WASN'T A MORNING PERSON. USUALLY SHE NEEDED A least two cups of coffee before she regarded herself as fully awake. Today was different. She woke early, alert and refreshed, and when she checked her watch and saw that it was only six o'clock she didn't groan and roll over. She sprang out of bed, showered and stole out of the suite, careful not to wake Phoebe.
Isabella always felt better by the sea, but as she walked through the dew-damp gardens to the beach, she couldn't remember ever feeling so alive. She seemed to experience everything more intensely: the morning sun on her skin; the smell of the sea; the turquoise of the water; the sound of the waves lapping the shore. She put it down to the excitement of last night. The attack had been terrifying but also exhilarating, especially when she relived how her guardian angel had come to her rescue. She had tried to stay awake to tell Phoebe all about it but had fallen asleep before her friend returned.
On the deserted beach, she breathed in the salty air, took off her sandals and walked across the sand to the jetty that jutted out into the millpond-Calm Mediterranean. On the water, a few yards beyond the end of the jetty, a small buoy with a brilliant scarlet flag stood proud against the seamless blue of sea and sky. When she looked back at the cape and the hotel, she couldn't see another soul. She searched the beach and an irrational sense of anticipation prickled the back of her neck, as though something was about to happen. A memory from a dream surfaced, then slipped away.
Suddenly she was starving. She glanced at her watch and was relieved that breakfast would soon be served on the terrace. She turned back, wanting to wake Phoebe and tell her about last night, when a movement in the water caught her eye. By the red flag a black shape broke the surface of the water. It looked like a seal or a shark, but disappeared before she could get a closer look. When the shape reappeared she saw it was a diver dressed from head to toe in black neoprene. A mask obscured his face but he wore no oxygen cylinders. He was oblivious to her as he swam, taking quick breaths and preparing to dive. He moved with such grace in the water that she sat down on the jetty to watch him.
His first dive was short, the second longer. She timed the third at over three minutes. When he dived for the fourth time she held her own breath. She managed less than two minutes before she had to gulp air, but he stayed under for twice that long. It was his fifth dive that really impressed her, though -- and worried her. After five minutes she stood and paced the jetty, searching the water to see if he had surfaced elsewhere. After six minutes she perched on the end and peered down into the clear blue water. When she saw how deep it was, far too deep to see the bottom, she began to panic.
MAX WAS FAR FROM PANIC. HE WAS AT HOME, FALLING THROUGH A liquid world to a place in which he could find total peace. He had awoken early, unusually refreshed, with a huge appetite and dim memories of a dream that featured Isabella Bacci. He was excited by the prospect of seeing her again and curious to know how, or if, the drug would affect him when he did. It was a flawless morning, so he had changed into his diving gear and hurried to the beach by her hotel.
In the water he began with rapid breathing exercises, loading his bloodstream with oxygen and reducing the amount of carbon dioxide, then undertook a series of short dives. Eventually he took a deep breath and made his final descent. Wearing a weight belt and using the buoy rope for guidance he headed down into the deep blue. He moved fluidly, making so little apparent effort he seemed to fall through the water. After dropping thirty-three feet, the pressure on his body doubled, after sixty-six it trebled, and by the time he was a hundred feet down the weight of water above him exerted four times the pressure humans usually experience on dry land.
The physical consequences on those parts of Max's body that contained no air were minimal since the tissues and bones were being squeezed by an equal amount of pressure on all sides. His lungs, however, had shrivelled to a fraction of their normal size.
As he descended he equalized the pressure on his sinuses and eardrums, and lowered his heartrate to eight beats a minute, preserving the oxygen stored in his abdomen. After less than a minute, most humans feel an almost irresistible urge to breathe, but Max had trained himself to ignore this impulse. Where his body had once betrayed him, he now had control over it. He cleared his mind and focused on an image that always calmed him: his mother's hand stroking his forehead as he fell asleep. After almost three minutes in the deep blue, where die sun's rays barely reached, she appeared before him, dressed in her glowing white nightdress, beckoning him deeper. He reached out with his right hand, as if to touch her, and smiled as the euphoria of oxygen starvation came to him like an old friend. In the blue silence, aware only of his slow heartbeat, an overwhelming sense of peace washed over him.
He knew of experienced scuba divers who used compressed air to dive to great depths in order to experience the early euphoric effects of nitrogen narcosis, ensuring that they headed for the surface before the 'rapture of the deep' made them remove their mouthpieces and drown. Max distrusted narcotics and preferred the purity of free diving. Ever since his mother died, however, he had been addicted to the light-headed hypoxia and emotional release he experienced when diving at depth. Free diving to the euphoric brink of death had become his drug of choice.
On land he felt*no emotion for his father, or from him. He had no need of it. It was irrelevant. But this was his mother's realm and he could vent the feelings he supressed on land. It was better than any trip to a psychiatrist: it was as though, for a few fleeting moments, he had returned to the womb. This was where he could connect with his mother, admit his love for her and acknowledge her love for him.
He noticed the time on his wrist. He would have to kick for the surface now or risk drowning. The upward ascent against gravity and under pressure required eighty per cent of a diver's effort
and was therefore most dangerous. He checked the illuminated pressure gauge beside his watch. He had descended almost two hundred feet. It seemed that he was increasingly forced to go deeper to achieve his secret pleasure. For a moment he thought he saw his mother again and felt such joy that he was tempted to continue his descent.
Then an image of his father's face cut in, reminding him of his duty and his place in the world. Suddenly he felt cold and weary. Holding on to the buoy's anchor rope, he kicked his fins and headed for the surface.
THE DIVER HAD BEEN SUBMERGED FOR SEVEN MINUTES BEFORE Isabella saw him surface and gasp for air. When he headed for the shore, with long, powerful strokes, she walked down the jetty after him, but he swam so fast she had to run to keep up.
When he reached the shallows and stood to his full height his size made her stop and stare. His broad back was turned to her as he pulled off his mask, then removed the neoprene balaclava that covered his head to reveal a mop of white-blond hair. When he faced her, her heart began to pound and her palms felt damp. He was too far away for her to see his features clearly but she knew he was her saviour from last night.
True (2004) Page 8
