by Ben Bova
Sobering slightly, Merriwether said, “You see, I am a product of the American way of life. A success story. Born poor in N’Orleans. Got a basketball scholarship, played college ball. And studied hard. College was an opportunity and I seized it. Went on to the NBA. Not a tremendous star, but I had a few good years.”
“Good for you,” said Tamara.
He smiled gleamingly at her. “Got myself an MBA at Wharton during the off-seasons. Eventually I became a drug lord.”
Startled, Luke gasped. “Narcotics?”
Merriwether tossed his head back and broke into a delighted laugh at Luke’s consternation. “No, no. Nothing illegal. When my basketball days were finished, I got a position at Brady & Brady.”
“The pharmaceutical firm?” Tamara asked.
“Indeed. Biggest pharmaceutical firm in Louisiana. Also the only pharmaceutical firm in Louisiana.” He laughed again.
“And then?” Tamara prompted.
“Eventually the Brady boys gave me a seat on their board of directors. Strictly affirmative action window-dressing. Former basketball star. Black. Up from the slums of N’Orleans.” His voice hardening, Merriwether went on. “After Katrina, they had me tour the Ninth Ward to show that ol’ B&B cared about poor flooded-out black folks.”
Then the bitterness evaporated and his eyes twinkled again. “I maneuvered the Brady boys out of their own company! Sent them into retirement and took over as CEO. How’s that for affirmative action?”
Luke couldn’t help smiling. “Pretty damned good.”
“And then I bought Nottaway. Discombobbled some of the old gentry, but there wasn’t much they could do about it. Not legally, that is. I survived a few potshots and a fire bomb and here we are, sitting on the veranda and watching Old Man River.” He winked at Tamara and took a sip of his mint julep.
Luke cleared his throat, then said, “Well, I really appreciate your taking us in.”
“Think nothing of it,” Merriwether replied graciously. “Quenton said you needed help, and I’m always glad to help friends of Quenton Fisk’s.” Then, with another wink, he added, “Who do you think gave me the wherewithal to oust the Brady boys?”
“So that’s the connection,” said Luke.
“Indeed it is,” Merriwether replied. Then he asked, “This treatment you’re giving the child, does it have anything to do with the p53 gene?”
Luke shook his head. “Not directly.”
“The p53 gene suppresses tumors, doesn’t it?”
“When you’ve got two copies of the gene in your genome, one from each parent. Angela only has one p53. That makes her vulnerable to tumor formation.”
“Oh. Too bad.”
Tamara said, “Professor Abramson’s treatment deactivates the genes that produce telomerase.”
“Really,” said Merriwether.
Slightly annoyed that Tamara had told more than he wanted Merriwether to know, Luke took up, “Suppress telomerase production and you suppress cells’ ability to reproduce.”
“And cancer cells reproduce endlessly,” Merriwether said.
“So if you suppress telomerase production, the cancer cells die.”
Merriwether pondered this information for a few moments, took another sip of his mint julep, then asked, “What effect does the treatment have on the other cells of her body?”
“Same effect,” said Luke tightly. “Suppresses their reproduction.”
“Doesn’t that cause harm?”
“The cancer cells die off more quickly. Then we can make up for the side effect, bring her telomerase production back to normal.”
“I see,” Merriwether said slowly. “So it’s a horse race, then, isn’t it?”
Luke glanced at Tamara before answering. “Sort of. But it’s a race we intend to win.”
Christmas Eve
JERRY HIGHTOWER GLANCED furtively at his wristwatch as he followed the two young men along the main corridor of the University of Texas’s cellular biology building. He had an appointment to talk with Professor Hiram Goldstein, and a reservation on the five-thirty flight out of Austin to Phoenix. The timing was going to be tight.
The students brought him to Goldstein’s office, but the room was empty.
“Where is he?” Hightower demanded.
One of the kids shrugged his skinny shoulders. “Prob’ly in one of the labs, sir.”
The other student went to the desk and picked up the phone. “I’ll have him paged. He’s around here someplace.”
Then they left him in the office, alone. Hightower sat heavily on one of the sculpted plastic chairs and glanced at his watch again.
He wanted to spend Christmas with his brothers and uncles and their wives and kids at their family gathering at the Navaho Reservation in northern Arizona. Fly out to Phoenix after talking with Goldstein, pick up a rental car and drive to Chinle. Get there around midnight, if the traffic wasn’t too bad. Christmas was for the family, the whole horde of them.
But if the professor’s not here soon, he thought, I’m going to miss my flight. Getting another one on Christmas Eve will be impossible. Might as well try to hitch a ride on Santa’s sleigh.
Still, Goldstein had worked with Abramson in the past. He knew the man’s habits; maybe he knew where Abramson might have gone to ground.
So Special Agent Hightower sat there and waited, while his chances for having Christmas with his family ticked away.
* * *
ARLINGTON, MASSACHUSETTS, WAS aglow with Christmas decorations. Fat white flakes of wet snow were drifting down from the leaden sky, covering the streets and the cars passing by. Carols rang from every storefront as Del Villanueva trudged from the Mass Av bus stop toward his home, his hands dug into his parka pockets, his shoes getting soaked from the wet, fluffy snow he was slogging through, his mood anything but jovial.
For the first time in his life, Del appreciated Ebenezer Scrooge’s attitude toward Christmas. His father-in-law had kidnapped his daughter and taken her God knows where. His wife was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, the FBI wasn’t doing a fucking thing, and these goddamned shops were playing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” Bah! Humbug!
He dreaded going home. Dreaded seeing the house all lit up with holiday decorations, dreaded the tree that he and Norrie had dutifully decorated in the vain hope that Angie would be home with them for Christmas. Dreaded Norrie’s endless tears that tore at his heart.
If Luke was here right now, Del thought, I’d break his fucking head in.
* * *
ANGELA WAS SPEAKING delightedly to Luke’s open laptop, recording a Christmas message for her parents. Luke stood by her bed, alert to catch any hint Angela might give of where they were. He had put the laptop on the bed and angled it so that its camera showed nothing more than the luxurious bedspread and heaped-up pillows behind the little girl.
“… I’m feeling better, really I am,” Angela was saying to an image of her parents that Luke had put on the screen. “Grandpa says I’m coming along fine and maybe I’ll be home with you before long.”
Standing beside the bed, Luke told himself for the hundredth time that a Skype message to Norrie and Del was safe enough. It wouldn’t be traced. He’d arranged with Merriwether to have the message sent from an Internet café coffee bar in downtown Baton Rouge. That’d be safe enough, he tried to convince himself.
Tamara was sitting at the desk in the bedroom’s far corner, going over the results of the newest round of X-rays and blood tests Angela had gone through earlier in the day.
Merriwether had been as good as his word. Angela’s bedroom had been transformed into a clinical facility, with an IV stand and medical sensors stacked by the bedside.
Angela’s message was interrupted by the growl of a diesel engine rumbling outside. Going to the window, Luke saw a semi-trailer rig pull up and huff to a stop in the driveway, its flank emblazoned with BATON ROUGE MEDICAL CENTER.
“What the hell is that?” he wondered aloud.
Angela pulled th
e bedcovers off and hurried to the window, her eyes wide with curiosity.
Tamara went to the window, too. “The portable MRI rig is here,” she announced. “Courtesy of Mr. Lorenzo Merriwether.”
“I’ll be damned,” Luke muttered.
They quickly dressed Angela and led her downstairs, where a pair of medical technicians took her inside the trailer for the MRI scan of her brain.
Merriwether was standing by the door, grinning at them, when they brought Angela back inside the house.
“I didn’t realize it’d be so big,” Luke admitted. “When you said ‘portable’ I didn’t understand that it needs a semi-trailer to haul it.”
“Main thing is it got here,” said Merriwether, jauntily, as the truck chugged noisily down the driveway.
That afternoon two uniformed nurses arrived with their equipment and helped Tamara give Angela a complete physical.
By the time Angela returned to her bed and Luke’s laptop, her cheerful tone from earlier in the day had faded noticeably. “I wish I could be home for Christmas,” she said to her parents’ image, “but Grandpa says I’ve got to stay here for the treatments he’s giving me.” Brightening, she said, “For Christmas we’re going to have turkey with all the trimmings! Grandpa said I can even have some pumpkin pie!”
The child prattled on for several more minutes, then ran out of words. She ended with, “Merry Christmas, Mommy and Daddy. I love you.”
Luke patted her shoulder. “That was very good, Angel. Wonderful. Your mom and dad will be very happy.”
“I wish they could call me, talk to me.”
“They will, honey. In a few days, you’ll see.”
Luke took the DVD of Angela’s Christmas message to Merriwether, who assured him all over again that it would be sent to Norrie and Del that evening without being traced back to Nottaway. He was taking a chance, he knew. The FBI might be able to trace it anyway, and if they did they’d come swooping down on them.
But I couldn’t let Angie not talk to her parents on Christmas. That’d be inhuman.
He hoped his decision wouldn’t boomerang on them.
Angela looked good, he thought. The telomerase inhibitors were starting to have an effect on her. Her hair seemed thinner than before, not quite as golden as he remembered it. But that might be just a subjective outlook, maybe some guilt feelings working inside his head.
He took the child’s hand in his own and patted it tenderly. “You want to watch some TV now?”
“Can I play a game on your laptop, Grandpa?”
“Sure,” he said. “What would you like?”
It took half an hour of fiddling with the laptop before Luke finally acquired the computer game Angela wanted: something about a fairy princess in a castle.
Leaving his granddaughter leaning raptly toward the laptop screen, its glow lighting her face, Luke walked across the room to where Tamara was bent over the screen of her own laptop.
“How’re you doing?” he asked.
Without looking up at him, Tamara murmured, “The MRI shows the tumors haven’t progressed since her last scan.”
“That’s good.”
“But her blood test shows an elevated blood pressure. That’s not good.”
Luke leaned over her shoulder and peered at the graph on the screen. “High blood pressure,” he muttered.
Tamara turned toward him. “It doesn’t necessarily mean anything. It’s just an uptick in her pressure. But there’s no obvious reason for it.” She got to her feet and stretched, catlike. “We’ll take another look the day after tomorrow.”
“High blood pressure,” Luke repeated. One of the possible side effects of suppressing Angela’s telomerase production was progeria, premature aging. Luke had seen victims of the condition back in Boston: six-year-olds who had atherosclerosis, cardiovascular problems, kidney failure. Preteen kids who looked like bald, wrinkled, dying old dwarves.
Tamara caught the expression on his face. “Luke, what is it?”
“HGPS.”
“Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome.” Tamara looked shocked. “But it can’t be! That’s a genetic disorder. She doesn’t—”
“One of the effects of suppressing telomerase production is that the somatic cells stop reproducing, as well as the tumor cells. That causes the symptoms of progeria.”
They both stared at Angela, busily tapping away at the laptop’s keyboard. Luke thought the child’s arms looked wrinkled. And her hair was definitely thinning.
Merry Christmas, he said to himself.
Christmas Day
“MERRY CHRISTMAS!” LORENZO Merriwether loudly proclaimed as he wheeled a shopping cart piled high with brightly wrapped gifts into Angela’s room.
Merriwether wore a fire-engine red shirt, dark slacks, and an elf’s fur-trimmed cap. His face radiated good cheer.
Sitting up in her bed, Angela clapped her hands with delighted surprise. Luke, who had been shaving in the next room, stuck his lathered face through the doorway to see what the commotion was all about.
As he rolled the cart up to Angela’s bed, Merriwether explained smilingly, “Santa Claus came by last night and left all these gifts for you, Angela.”
Luke saw that Angela was beyond believing in Santa Claus, but she laughed as she got up on her knees and leaned into the shopping cart to start tearing open the wrappings.
By the time Luke finished his shave and pulled on a shirt, Tamara had come in from her room down the hall, wearing a forest green sheath decorated with Christmassy red jewelry. Angela was half-buried in torn gift paper, surrounded with digital games, a fully programmed smartphone, beautiful clothes, and a robotic fox terrier that was eagerly wagging its tail.
As Tamara began clearing away the wrappings, Luke said to Merriwether, “You didn’t have to do that.”
With a dazzling smile, Merriwether replied, “I couldn’t let the child have Christmas without any presents. And I knew you weren’t going out to do any shopping. So…” He gestured toward Angela, who was aglow with pleasure.
“Thank you,” said Luke. “I owe you a lot.”
“Think nothing of it. As I told you before, any friend of Quenton Fisk’s is a friend of mine.”
Luke started to say, “We’re not exactly friends—”
“By the way, he’s coming here. This afternoon.”
“Quenton Fisk?”
Merriwether nodded vigorously. “He’ll be here in time for Christmas dinner. Says he wants to talk with you.”
* * *
FISK ARRIVED IN a chauffeur-driven black sedan in midafternoon. He was wearing a navy blue blazer over gray slacks. No luggage. Not even a briefcase or a computer.
He bounded up the front steps of the mansion, where Merriwether and Luke stood to greet him, a small, intense man with a luxuriant crop of dark wavy hair and penetrating gray eyes who radiated energetic good health.
“Lonzo,” he said, with a big grin, as he took Merriwether’s hand. Then, turning to Luke, “Professor Abramson,” less warmly.
Luke blurted, “What brings you down here on Christmas Day?”
Draping a hand on Luke’s shoulder, Fisk replied, “You do, Professor. I’ve left my home and hearth to talk with you, face-to-face.”
“Really?” Luke felt impressed.
Fisk laughed brittlely. “Actually, Lonzo’s more like family to me than any of my ex-wives.”
As they walked inside, Merriwether asked politely, “How was your flight, Quenton?”
“Uneventful, thank God. Even though we filed our flight plan at the last minute my pilot got into the Baton Rouge airport, despite all the little creeps buzzing around in their Cessnas.”
Luke realized that Fisk had come in his own private jet. Must be nice to have money, he thought. Come and go when you please, where you please.
Christmas dinner was festive, the five of them seated at one end of the long dining room table, by the ceiling-high windows that looked out on the Mississippi. The room was decked with bright
green loops of ivy, tinsel dripping from the ornate crystal chandelier, and flickering candles in silver holders at the middle of the table.
Sitting between Luke and Tamara, Angela wilted noticeably as the various courses were served. Just before the pumpkin pie was served, she asked if she might be excused.
“I’m tired, Mr. Merriwether,” she said, her voice soft, weak.
“It’s been a big day for you,” Merriwether said. “I hope you enjoyed it.”
“I did. I really did.”
Tamara took the child back to her room, and Merriwether promised to have a helping of the dessert sent up to her.
Luke watched them worriedly. He himself had eaten more than he had expected to. And drunk several glasses of the excellent Beaujolais that Merriwether’s servants had poured generously. Now the three men sat together over the crumbs scattered across the tablecloth.
Without preamble, Fisk said, “I came here to get a few things straight with you, Professor.”
“Luke. Call me Luke.”
Fisk nodded briskly. Then, “I want you to sign a privacy agreement.”
Surprised, Luke asked, “Privacy agreement?”
“It’s strictly routine,” Fisk said, with an impatient wave of his hand. “Since the Fisk Foundation is funding your research, you agree not to reveal details of your work to anyone outside the foundation.”
“You mean I can’t publish?”
“In time, of course you can. Publish in any journal you like. But first we have to go through the legal process of establishing our proprietary claim. That takes some time, I’m afraid.”
Luke objected, “But the university—”
“The university has fired you, Professor. You’re a fugitive from justice, a hunted man.”
“I’ve got tenure!”
Shaking his head, Fisk said, “Not anymore, you don’t.”
“This FBI business is all a misunderstanding,” Luke said. “I didn’t kidnap Angela, she—”
Waving his hand again, Fisk said, “My lawyers will straighten all that out for you. Once you’ve signed the agreement.”
Merriwether, sitting at the head of the table, had been swiveling back and forth like a spectator at a tennis match. Seeing the discomfort on Luke’s face, he asked, “This is about your work on aging, Luke?”
