Elixir (18 page)

Alarmed by the banging sound, a security guard wearing a white collared shirt with the Swiss flag on the shoulder barges inside. He scans the scene, stopping on the weeping girl. “What’s going on here?” he asks Sean in the native language.

“Let us be,” Sean says in German with defiance.

The guard clasps his leather jacket. “Let’s go.” He begins dragging him toward the exit.

“I love you,” Sean says to her, legs kicking under him.

“No,” she says, still pounding the window. The yelling overwhelms her weak respiratory system. Wheezing, she drops to a knee.

“Baby?”

“Come on,” the clinic employee says, swinging the door open, shoving Sean into the hallway. He lunges for the entrance, but it slams shut. He rattles the handle. No budge. He’s locked out, Natasha no longer visible, nothing around but the cement beneath him and aluminum cages above.

About twenty minutes later Sean is advancing through a popular city mall, hundreds of people bustling, voices young and old and in-between going back and forth in German, mellow jazz music spilling from speakers.

Glancing at an overhead sign, he veers right. LCD screens on both sides of the hall advertise products via soundless video, neon shine from the monitors dancing on the side of his face. He closes in on an electronics store, weaving through a group of kids his age toward the automatic glass entrance.

He steps inside, shelves sparse after the recent Christmas shopping blitz. Skimming the aisle names, he heads toward the laptops area. He clutches a MacBook Pro, then turns into the music section and picks out a set of headphones, large studio-grade ones that cover the ears.

He carries both items to the cashier. “How’re you paying?” she asks in the local language, scanning them. He hands her a credit card. She studies it for a moment, then swipes it and passes it back, glimpsing his bloody shirt and bruised chin. “Thank you Mr. Crates.”

A bit later he’s outside climbing into a taxi with a light-blue plastic bag from the store. He situates it on the cloth seat next to him, closes the door, and blows in his hands. “Where to?” the cabbie asks in English, spotting him in the rearview, gauging him as American.

“I need a hotel.”

“I can take you to a lot of hotels. What kind?”

“Something with internet in the rooms. And a desk. Nothing too noisy either.”

He’s still for a moment, then nods as if he has a place. He pulls onto the road, tall streetlamps on both sides throwing cones of light through the air, snowflakes floating in the beams. He makes eye contact with his passenger in the mirror and asks, “You here on business?”

“No.”

“Pleasure?”

“No.”

They don’t talk for a while, driver glancing at him every minute or so, an unwavering concentration on the kid’s expression that intrigues him. Sean peers out the window at the rooftops whipping by, moonlight glimmering on about half, shadows blanketing the others.

In a bit they coast to a halt at the Hotel Merden, mounted on a hill next to a stone chapel. Sean hands him some cash and exits into the night with his new things, flecks of ice in the wind nipping his cheek. He scales the hill toward the entrance, church bells ringing above him.

In about fifteen minutes he’s marching down the fifth-floor hall of the hotel, tables with orchid flowers in vases at each end, recessed lighting on the ceiling. He stops at a door labeled “5327,” slips his Hotel Merden keycard in the slot, and opens it. He enters the dark room, snow from his clothes sprinkling onto the blue carpet. Flipping the light switch, he illuminates a bed with a striped comforter, white-lacquer desk, oil painting of a ship at sea.

He tosses his bag of electronics on the mattress, pillows toppling from its weight, and grasps the Apple laptop box, still chilly from outside. He sits at the desk and slides the computer out, then sets it down. Lifting the screen, he catches his reflection in the black glass. He thinks about how focused he is, hasn’t had a look like this his whole life.

The MacBook hums as he plugs it in. A white glow radiates on his face. He enters the required setup data, then connects to the hotel Wi-Fi. With a push of his boot heel he rolls himself in the chair to the bed, shimmies his headphone package from the shopping bag, and opens it. He frees the product from its plastic casing, its black wire springing out and dangling to the rug. He inserts the jack into his phone. Opening its music player with one hand, he wraps the earpieces around his head with the other. He scrolls to the album
Siamese Dream
by The Smashing Pumpkins. He hits play.

The first song pumps. He lets it take over him, closing his eyes, bouncing his knee. The analytical mindset he’s been suppressing the last few years starts resurfacing, a constant questioning of things, an inclination to dissect ideas down to their component parts, a need to solve.

He imagines the virus inside his girlfriend. He pictures it laughing at him, smug in the wake of the tens of thousands of doctors who tried and failed to defeat it in the past. The disease has won so far. But it hasn’t come across him yet.

He taps his fingers on the Mac’s black keys, deciding where to begin. He remembers Dr. Obrecht mentioning an experimental drug discussed at a Paris conference by a company called Colzyne Systems. He figures that’s the best place to start.

Visiting Google, he searches for “Colzyne Systems Paris medical conference.” The top result is a PDF of a transcript from something called the Legrand Medical Assembly. He selects the link and reads the entire forty-three-page document in a little over a minute and a half, every iota retained. He learns the firm is in fact working on a genetic-based anti-viral serum as part of something it calls Project Michelangelo.

The meeting record only contains an overview though. Craving more information, he goes to the source. He Googles “Colzyne Systems” and clicks to its homepage, on it an image of a pretty lady in a lab coat, graphic of a DNA strand in her palm, “Our Work Is Your Life” in bold letters above. Since the corporation would never post Project Michelangelo material on its public website, he realizes he needs to hack the site and break into its server.

He cracks his neck, then knuckles, envisioning the algorithm he created for the Traveling Salesman Problem. He downloads a hacking application and types in his formula. He runs it against the Colzyne firewall. In about ten minutes he busts through, gaining full access to the private network.

With a quick scan he locates everything related to the project. He opens and reads the first file, a summary of tests performed with the latest version of the drug. Then the second, an analysis of where the mixture fell short in the experiments. Then the third, a chemical diagram of the eight major ingredients used. Perusing all three documents in just a few minutes, he becomes aware the company has started something but is far from finishing it, the medication having major holes, no possibility even for human trials.

He opens a fourth file, containing solutions engineers have proposed to fix the problems. He reads all twenty-three and concludes none of them would ever work. The engineers were overlooking things, important things deep in the details that he can see. If he’s going to do this he needs to think of something new, something the other minds haven’t even considered.

He looks out the window, Lake Zurich stretching to the horizon, little dots of people circling it, moon casting its light on everything. He pores over the medical possibilities. For a while. An hour passing, then two, then five.

He gets up, walks to the bathroom, and turns on the sink. Bending, he gulps cold water, then splashes some on his forehead. He smacks his right cheek twice, grunting, trying to invigorate himself.

He leaves and begins pacing by the bed, corner of the striped comforter grazing his knees as he goes back and forth. He contemplates thousands of different compounds he might be able to combine with Colzyne’s initial eight to finish the serum. He has to not only pinpoint the substances but the exact amounts, just as Herculean of a task.

His mind battles with a swarm of questions as he assesses how new chemicals and their portions would interact among themselves and the existing eight. Would any cancel out the others? Would they work but with bad side effects? Would they quiet the virus only for a patch of time, enabling it to regenerate in the future? He fights through these and dozens more like them.

He treads the carpet for about half an hour, palms tapping the sides of his thighs. Then he stops. A thrill bursts in his chest. He thinks he might have something. Rushing back to the desk, he yanks open the drawer and fishes out a hotel-stationery pad and pen.

He starts sketching a diagram of a genetic mutation, drawing dots, connecting them to each other with short lines. As soon as he’s done he rips the sheet off, lets it fall, and begins on a second. His eyes are intense, his breath quick.

He writes for a while, his fingers sore, fifty or so pieces of paper scattered on the rug. His heart pounds. He’s close. Scanning the sheets on the floor, he snatches one labeled “Path 3.2.3,” then another “Path 4.9.5.” He scurries to the corner, picks up one marked “MR37: Cascade,” then carries all three to the mattress, laying them on the striped bedspread between the electronics bag and pillows.

He stares at them, the moon throwing ovals of light on him from the window. He has four new compounds, along with their amounts, he feels he can merge with the initial eight to complete the drug. He seals his eyelids and starts running the slew of possibilities through his head of the twelve substances combining, making sure nothing counterproductive can arise as their particles collide.

As his mind rips through the potential outcomes, it conjures up an old memory. When he was three his mother took him to a cognitive specialist in Philadelphia for an IQ test. After he broke the ceiling, the expert told them he never observed someone like the boy in his career or even came across documented proof of similar abilities. The results of the exam were the motivation for him getting sent to a special school. Sean descending from parents of average mental capacity, the analyst explained it was a random genetic mutation when his brain was developing in the womb that caused such a high level of intelligence.

He always wondered about that mutation. What caused it? Why him? The memory of that day in Philadelphia has haunted him his whole life, a constant reminder of how different he is, a constant reminder of why he had to go to special school, a constant reminder of why his parents are dead. For well over a decade he’s associated every feature of the experience with torture, the colorful paintings of rabbits on the office wall, the nasally way the researcher spoke, the confused look on his mother’s face when she was informed how unique he was. Each of these memories has evoked nothing but gut wrench in him.

However, as he finalizes the cure in the hotel room in Switzerland, his subconscious begins re-evaluating the event in Philadelphia. And the story surrounding that slice of space and time of his life morphs. The rabbits, the man’s voice, his mom’s expression, are all getting pulled out of their existing cave in his head and becoming reborn in a brighter nook. This is happening because he’s convinced himself in the last couple minutes that maybe, just maybe, there was a reason those microscopic DNA fragments came together in the precise way they did in his fetus brain eighteen years ago. They did for this moment right now.

His eyes open. He solved it. The four new components work, their particles colliding and combining in just the right fashion. He’s certain. Hunching over, he clamps the bed sheet. He feels drained of everything. His knees give out and his stomach drops to the floor, rug fibers pressing against his cheek. He lies there for about ten minutes, his mind focused on nothing but the rhythm of his breathing.

Once recovered from the initial shock of it all, he pushes himself to his feet. The answer in his head, he realizes he needs to make it a reality, a physical solution Natasha can consume. His attention darts around the room and stops at the computer, unauthorized information he hacked into all over it. He figures the first thing he needs to do is destroy the evidence. Any police interference can only slow him down.

He dashes to the desk, clasps the MacBook, and bolts into the bathroom, tugging the shower curtain to the side. He lifts the laptop high above him and spikes it in the fiberglass tub, screen severing from the base with a boom, a dozen or so dark keys shooting around the polished white surface. He flips on the shower, drenching the metal guts, eliminating any chance of someone repairing them.

The hum of the water behind him, he hustles out of the bathroom and starts scooping up his sketches, more evidence. He fills his arms with a heap of pages, dumps them on the bed, then reaches for the rest. He crams them in a pile, folds the striped comforter around it, and knots the top. Swinging the comforter over his shoulder, he snags a book of Hotel Merden matches with his free hand off the dresser. He clenches them between his teeth and exits.

Murmurs of two bellhops in the background, he advances up the fifth-story hallway. He enters a stair shaft, spirals his way to ground level, and bursts into the parking lot, three dozen or so cars around, snow plowed into tube-shaped stacks along the curb, darkness outside at around three thirty in the morning. Crossing the pavement, he approaches a dumpster, the weight of the bedspread digging into his collarbone.

The smell of garbage in the air, he stops at the metal bin, an open doorway a few feet to the side, sound of footsteps through it, a conversation in German about eggs, some laughter. He figures it’s the room-service cooks. He heaves the comforter into the dumpster with a groan. He checks the entryway on the building, no movement, still just talk. Loosening his mouth, he frees the matches into his right hand. He breaks one off, strikes it, and watches the tip go hot. He tosses it in the bin, chemical diagrams engorging in fire.

A glow rising in front of him, heat hugs his face while the back of his neck stays cold against Zurich’s winter air. “What’re you doing?” a voice asks in German. Sean turns to it, a man with an apron hanging out of the hotel, stare jumping with suspicion between him and the flames. Sean sprints away, the employee screaming something inside he can’t make out.