ELIXIR (31 page)

Read ELIXIR Online

Authors: Gary Braver

BOOK: ELIXIR
8.69Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
“You just talked with him. He’ll be here tomorrow.”
Then Brett snapped his head toward her again looking at her as if she were alien. “How old are you?
The truth!
How old?”
She knew this would scare him even more than Roger’s condition—that his mother was suddenly fifteen years older than he had believed. “Fifty-five. For real.”
She barely got the words out when he dashed into his room. The door slammed like a gunshot through her heart.
Inside she heard the muffled sounds of him crying into the pillow.
Roger returned late the next night in sleeting rain. For the last week, unseasonably cold air had poured down from Canada and turned spring into winter.
After leaving Madison, he had driven to a wooded area and waited until nightfall for his drive to Minneapolis.
For most of that day Brett had stayed in his room, sleeping on and off, refusing to interact with Laura. He was in bed when Roger arrived.
The look on Roger’s face made Laura shudder.
“Wally’s in jail,” he said. He knew that she could not care less about Wally at the moment. He was somebody from thirty years ago. He was somebody associated with Elixir.
But she bit down on all that. “Is there anything you can do?”
“I tried.” And he told her.
“You could have been killed.”
“I couldn’t leave him.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means he’s going to die if he already hasn’t.”
“Oh, God. Can’t something be done?”
“No.”
“But he’s your friend. You got him into this. You got him on the stuff, now he’s dead or dying.”
“Look, I feel shitty enough about this. I did what I could. And don’t talk to me like I’m some dope peddler.”
She walked to the window. A hard white moon sat in the eastern sky setting the last of the storm clouds in motion. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m just scared.”
“So am I.”
“What do we do?”
“Nothing.” It wasn’t a good answer, but for the time being the condo was as safe as anywhere. Until that changed, they could hole up for a couple weeks, with Brett doing the food shopping and running errands. It was
their
faces that would be all over the media, not his. “How much did you tell him?”
“Everything.”
He nodded. “I suppose it’s best.”
Silence filled the room.
“Roger, I want us to turn ourselves in. I told you that I would not go on the run again. I will not put him through this.”
“Would you prefer Brett grow up with his parents on death row?”
“You don’t know that. We might get off. Even so, Brett can live with Jenny.”
“Jenny isn’t emotionally stable enough to handle another teenage kid.”
“She is his aunt, after all. And it’s better than moving from place to place in the middle of the night. Think of him.”
“I am thinking of him.” Once the media got hold of this, the same people who bombed the plane could get back on their trail. People more interested in Elixir than justice—people who could use Brett to get to it. “We stay here for a week or two, then move out.”
“No, we’re going to find a lawyer.”
“And put our fate in the hands of the judicial system?”
“It’s better than what we’ve managed on our own. We’re innocent, and we just need to find the right people to believe us.”
“We can’t prove a negative.”
“Their job isn’t to prove Quentin and his people are guilty. It’s to make a case that we’re innocent. And they have no evidence that links us to explosives.”
“For thirteen years we’ve fled prosecution, stolen property, forged credentials, and violated every mail-fraud law on the books.”
“They can’t execute us for that.”
“No, but they could give us life in prison. Wouldn’t that be the ultimate irony?”
“If you don’t do this I will.”
He looked out into the black and thought about it. “It could mean a witness protection program—new names, new locale, new identities.”
“What else is new? But at least we won’t jump at every cop car.”
“That’s if we could make a case.”
“We have no other choice. He’s not growing up undercover.”
She was right: Brett needed his parents, but more than that he needed the semblance of a normal life.
“And what about the stuff?”
She looked at him in dismay. “I don’t care about it. Take what you need and dump the rest.”
“I meant the scientific benefits.”
“There are no scientific benefits!”
He said nothing.
“We have to get out of here,” she said. “Even if nobody noticed, I’d go nuts cooped up like this.”
“For a few days till things cool down. Then we move out and find some good lawyers.”
“And what do we do for a place to stay?”
“There’s always Aunt Jenny’s, after all.”
“
I
don’t know how he died. I’ve never seen anything like it before. It was like hypertrophic melanoma accelerated a hundred times.”
“In English,” Eric Brown said.
“Skin cancer gone wild.” Ben Friedman was Madison’s chief medical examiner. “There was squamous cell carcinoma all over his body and tumors in his stomach and intestines. It was like he exploded in cancer.”
“The guard said his head didn’t look human, that it was twice the size and covered with growths.”
Friedman shook his head in total bafflement. “I don’t get it either,” he said. “My best guess is a speeded-up form of Werner’s syndrome.”
“What’s that?”
“A chromosomal defect that causes people to age abnormally fast and die before they reach forty. Except this guy appeared to have aged literally overnight.”
“You’re saying that’s impossible.”
“I’m saying that whatever happened to him has to my knowledge never occurred before. Besides the wildfire cancer, his body was riddled with diseases associated with advanced aging—arteriosclerosis, malignant neoplasms, osteoporosis, cataracts, liver and kidney morbidity. If I didn’t know better, I’d say the man was in his ninth or tenth decade of life.”
Brown had laid out the fingerprint matches of Wally Olafsson taken when he was booked the other day and after he died. “It’s the same man, birthdate February 13, 1943.”
“That’s the impossible part,” Friedman continued. “Because that would
mean that in a matter of hours his body experienced a total and cataclysmic decline. Just how beats the hell out of me.”
“What about one of those cell-eating bacteria?”
“Negative. Besides, no known bacteria is that virulent.”
“How about some unknown bacteria?”
“Bacteria doesn’t work that way.” He glanced at a photo of the dead man’s head. “This guy died from some monstrous genetic catastrophe.”
Ben Friedman’s bewilderment sent a cold spike through Brown. He was an unflappable professional who in three decades had seen every grisly form of human death. He was a man who was beyond shock. And now he was at a total loss.
But medical anomalies were not Brown’s charge. “Any evidence he had been in contact with Glover?”
“We questioned his colleagues, ex-wife, and girlfriend. Nobody ever heard of Roger Glover,” Zazzaro said.
According to the Glovers’ neighbors, they were nice normal people. They had a son, Brett, a terrific kid. They owned a flower shop. Nothing unusual. No known relatives. And no friend named Wally Olafsson.
“And they disappeared into thin air.”
But the fact that Glover had led them down an alley to a getaway car was a well-thought out emergency plan. The bastard was clever, Brown thought.
“I don’t know how Olafsson died or if it has anything to do with Roger Glover,” Zazzaro said, “but the son-of-a-bitch knew we were after him. He knew we had connected him to Eastern 219. Why else the chase? You don’t set up an elaborate escape just to shake tailgaters.”
“I want a cross-reference to anything connecting Glover, Bacon, Olafsson, the wife and kids,” Brown said. “Keywords, names of places, people, birthdates, anything.”
Zazzaro nodded. “We checked the house. Looked like they left at a moment’s notice. Closets were full of clothes. Toothbrushes still in the rack in the bathroom. Books in the kid’s backpack. Empty suitcases in the cellar. He must have spotted the tail and called his wife.”
That was Brown’s guess too. The Pierson baseball coach had said she appeared anxious to pull the kid out of the game. Something about her husband at the hospital. They checked and, of course, no area hospitals had a listing for either a Roger Glover or Christopher Bacon. “Anything connecting them to the Bacons?”
“Not yet, but we’re still going through letters, old bills, stuff like that.
But we found this.” From an evidence bag Zazzaro held up a pouch. “Hair coloring—blond for the wife, black for him. What’s interesting is, the small jar is theatrical makeup paint. White. For his beard and sideburns.”
“Why make himself look older? With a thirteen-year warrant on my head, I’d go the other way, like the wife.”
“You’d think,” Zazzaro said. “What also doesn’t make sense is that the black hair dye and white paint were stored in a box on the back shelf of his closet, but the Clairol was on a shelf in the bath. Like he was hiding the fact he colored his hair.”
“Women can spot these things in the dark.”
“I mean from the kid.”
“It doesn’t make sense,” Zazzaro said.
According to files, Christopher Bacon was fifty-six years old. And in his shop Glover told Zazzaro that he was born in 1962 which would make him thirty-eight. Why, wondered Brown, would a fifty-six-year-old man posing as a thirty-eight-year-old need aging makeup? Mike was right: None of it made sense.
“How old does the wife claim she is?” Brown asked.
“Thirty-eight.”
Brown checked the shots he had taken of her at the Town Day Race. She could pass for thirty-eight, although in a couple closeups she looked older. He slid one to Friedman. “How old would you say she is?”
The phone rang and Zazzaro took it while the others talked.
Friedman studied the photo for a moment. “Mid-forties.”
“How about thirty-eight?”
“Possibly, though time’s not been generous with her.” He studied the other photos. With a pencil he pointed things out. “Look at her neck here. The skin shows creases and folds of an older woman. I’m not saying she is, but it’s one giveaway. That’s why women with facelifts wear scarves. You can stretch a seventy-year old face like Saran Wrap, but it’ll be sitting on two inches of chicken skin.”
Zazzaro jotted something down then hung up. “We got a background ID,” he said. “Roger and Brett Glover of Wichita, Kansas died in a car accident in 1958. Laura Gendron Glover, age twelve, died ten years later. Three bogies.”
“Big goddamn surprise,” Brown said.
Friedman picked up the photographs of Roger Glover and Christopher Bacon and studied them. “And this is the same guy?”
“We got a print match.”
Friedman held them side by side in the window light. “I see the resemblance. But if it’s the same guy, how come this Roger Glover looks younger than Christopher Bacon?”
“I don’t know how come,” Brown snapped. “And I don’t give a damn. But I want these photos printed and flashed everywhere in the universe. We’re going to get this son-of-a-bitch no matter what.”
CAMBRIDGE
A
t the bottom of the front page of
The Boston Globe
was a photograph of Roger Glover made from the video shot by the late Walter Olafsson. It was in color and slightly fuzzy, though recognizable. Beside it sat the familiar 1988 media photograph of Christopher Bacon. The caption read: “Same man? FBI claims that Roger Glover of Eau Claire, WI, is Christopher Bacon, a ‘most-wanted’ fugitive who allegedly blew up Eastern flight 219 in 1988.”
On an inside page where the story continued was an additional photograph of Glover doctored by FBI artists to resemble the original of Christopher Bacon. The hair had been electronically cut and lightened and the beard removed. The men looked identical.
An all-points bulletin had been issued in the midwestern states for Glover, who was believed to be armed and dangerous.
The morning television led with the same story. The comment raised most was how Roger Glover appeared younger than when he was Christopher Bacon nearly fifteen years ago. The consensus was that Bacon had undergone facial surgery.
But Quentin Cross knew otherwise.
Sitting in the president’s office of Darby Pharmaceuticals, Inc., he felt the old billion-dollar fantasies quicken his heart again.
Even after all these years, the company had not fully recovered from Bacon’s sudden disappearance. For five of those years Quentin had gone into great personal debt paying off Antoine and Consortium investors. Even more capital was lost trying to duplicate Elixir from memory.
By 1991, he had given up trying to locate Bacon, assuming he had
moved to a foreign country or died. He had also abandoned all attempts to reproduce the compound.
Until that morning.
The news was like a transfusion.
Besides all the financial promise, Quentin at fifty-one was feeling the ever-sharpening tooth of time. And Christopher Bacon had defied time.
But locating him would be impossible on his own. Especially with an army of Feds after him.
Quentin got up and walked around his suite. It had been years since he had thought about Antoine Ducharme. The last he knew, the man owned a string of health clubs and other legitimate businesses. He probably still trafficked in narcotics, and had an assumed identity. Quentin had no idea where he was or what name he went by or if his real name was even Antoine Ducharme. The man lived a layered existence.
But Quentin did have an old telephone number. It had probably been changed long ago. His heart racing, he dialed.
Remarkably, he heard Vince Lucas’s voice. “Your old buddy’s been spotted,” he said right off.
“That’s why I’m calling.”
“You on line?”
He was concerned about phone taps.
“Yes.”
“Good, turn it on, I’ll find you.”
Quentin went on line. In a matter of minutes Vince sent him an e-mail.
What do you have in mind?
Quentin wrote back:
I
think
we
should resume our former plan.
Sounds good. A’s already got people working on it. We’ll keep you
posted.
Quentin was amazed. They didn’t miss a beat.
A.
Antoine. Still in power. Still in command. And he had come to the same conclusion about Bacon’s condition.
Quentin tapped the keys:
He’ll
need to be tested. Call.
A few minutes later Vince called from a cell phone. “What’s this ‘tested’ stuff?”
“If his system has stabilized, we’ll need to know his body chemistry, the dosages, side effects, stuff like that.”
“You mean, you want him alive?”
“Yes! Absolutely. Nothing must happen to him or his wife if she’s on it too.”
They had to understand that this went beyond making the stuff for
high-rolling clients. It was a quest for godhead. Christopher Bacon was the most valuable specimen in the universe. Once found, they’d strip him down to his atoms.
AIR FORCE ONE
President John Markarian remembered the bombing of Eastern 219, but knew nothing about Elixir.
Before departing for a speech in San Diego, aides had dredged up memos from the Reagan White House and spoken to members of that administration intimate with the efforts to locate Christopher Bacon.
As he listened to a summary of the report, his thoughts were not on the efforts to solve the first case of domestic sabotage in recent times, but the implications of the serum.
“Do people really think he had something?” he asked an aide, Tim Reed.
“Apparently Mr. Reagan did.” Reed handed the president a report of the meeting between Ross Darby and Reagan.
The language was not very technical, but detailed enough to convince Reagan that Bacon had manipulated the DNA sequences to stop the cellular clock.
When he was finished, the president was shown that morning’s
Washington Post
with the side-by-side wire photos.
“It’s the same guy,” he said.
“Which would you say looks younger, sir?”
“Except for the white hairs, the guy with the beard.”
The aide nodded. “That was taken four months ago, the other in 1985.”
“No retouching?”
“None.”
“Is Darby still with us?”
“No, sir. Coincidentally, he died in his sleep of cardiac arrest a few days following his visit.”
“What are we doing to find Glover?”
“Everything possible.”
“And alive and unharmed.”
“We’ll try.”
While the Republic rolled by thirty-seven thousand feet below, the president’s mind considered the same implications that had fascinated
Ronald Reagan. Given recent medical advances, the populace was growing older. The downside was the ballooning of the age-related diseases. He envisioned a great graying future of Baby Boomers on walkers and in wheelchairs, collecting social security and Medicare checks that totaled in the trillions.
Already, more than half of federal spending—beyond defense and the interest in the national debt—went to pensioners in some form. In ten years when the last of the boomers had retired, more than half of the next generation’s taxable income would be used to pay the costs. By 2020, the nation would go bankrupt. It was a crisis too monstrous to resolve for any administration.
However, Markarian speculated, if this Elixir actually prolonged life for a decade or two, it could solve the Social Security crisis and save the nation. If people lived longer, they would work well beyond sixty-five, which would mean a phenomenal reduction in health care as well as a greater tax base.
Of course, the Reagan report mentioned mice living six times their lifespan. Nothing about humans. So his speculations were demographic fantasies.
Yet his mind kept coming back to how much younger Roger Glover looked today than fifteen years earlier. Was it possible the guy had tried it on himself? Sounds like something right out of some sci-fi tale.
But it got him thinking about hereditary averages, averages that suggested John Markarian had about ten years left. Were he to serve a second term, that would leave him three wee years to write an autobiography, work on his golf game, and spend time with his grandchildren.
As he stared out the window into endless blue skies, all he kept thinking about was “biological retrogression” and how he wanted to see this Christopher Bacon/Roger Glover guy up close and personal.
The large white jet touched down a little after one in warm California sunshine. The president and his entourage were picked up on the tarmac.
When he was settled into the limo, Tim Reed slipped beside him to say that CNN and had just announced that an unnamed former employee from Darby Pharmaceuticals was spreading rumors that Christopher Bacon had discovered some kind of “fountain of youth” drug.
“Great! Now everybody and his cousin will be gunning for him.”
“We can squelch it.”
“You can try like hell, but it’ll be like getting toothpaste back into the tube. What I want is to bring this Roger Bacon guy in.”
“Glover. Roger Glover.”
“Whatever. But get him. It’s like having Jesus on the loose.”
By the time he reached his suite atop El Coronado, the television was blaring nonstop reports of the anti-aging drug.
By early evening, the networks were airing testimonies from unidentified former employees of Darby about animals living far beyond their lifespan, even rejuvenating.
Countering the rumors were biologists who claimed that prolongevity breakthroughs were highly unlikely. Such advances were decades away, unless, of course, Bacon and his group had made some truly miraculous discoveries. Even then, the scientific world would have known about it. Great discoveries don’t happen in a bell jar.
One geneticist said he wished he knew what the compound was. “We’ve known about the telomerase enzyme for years. But if what you’re saying is true, then he’s found the silver bullet.”
Another researcher declared that such a discovery would be the greatest in human history.
One religious leader went so far as to claim that Elixir would make possible a new order of human existence—something akin to the angels.
But others took a darker view. A spokesman of the Witnesses of the Holy Apocalypse, a fortyish-year-old man identified as Reverend Colonel Lamar Fisk, proclaimed that if Elixir could prolong life indefinitely, it would be a sign that Judgment had arrived, closing the long cycle that began with the Fall and to end with the Savior’s return. When asked what that meant in human terms, Fisk happily proclaimed that the world would end in conflagration.
“This would not be a war between Arabs and Jews, Serbs and Muslims, black and whites,” he said to the camera. “But a war between those who live forever and those who die. This is the handiwork of the Antichrist himself.”
Then he lapsed into passages from
Revelations:
“‘Woe unto the inhabitants of the earth for the devil is come to deceive you with false miracles …’Only through Jesus Christ the Lord shall men live forever.”
Markarian hit the mute button on the remote. “Didn’t take them long to plug in the old equations,” he said to Reed. “They yapped the same lines when Galileo discovered sunspots and Morse invented the telegraph.”
“Except he’s no harmless Luddite. His sermons are heard on a hundred different stations.”
“Where did the ‘Colonel’ come from?”
“Desert Storm.”
The scene shifted from Lamar Fisk to public opinion polls. According to the announcer, a survey conducted that afternoon showed 79 percent of those questioned would take the Elixir were it safe; 14 percent said they wouldn’t; the remaining 7 percent had no opinion.
In another poll, only 9 percent said there was no government coverup, while a whopping 81 percent said they believed the government was not telling the truth.
One man even speculated that the original project was intended to grant prolonged life only to “the chosen.” It reminded him of
Dr. Strangelove
where only top government officials, military brass, and scientists were allowed into bomb-proof shelters. “The public be damned.”
Somebody else complained about how the government always kept secret “the really good stuff’ like Roswell, New Mexico, and Area 51.
Markarian shook his head. “This makes one yearn for Oliver Stone.”
“When asked again today about a government coverup, the president flatly denied the claims, saying that the media is to blame for the wild rumors. ‘Democracy survives on honesty, not deceit,’ the president said.”
The scene switched to a reporter in Lexington, Massachusetts, trying to get a statement from Quentin Cross, president of Darby, on way to his car.
Cross acknowledged that Christopher Bacon was a former employee wanted for murder but that there was no substance to the Elixir rumors. “It’s all nonsense. We never had any fountain-of-youth drug.” And he got into his car and drove off.
“Get somebody on this guy,” Markarian said.
“We already did. He knows nothing.”
HILTON HEAD, SOUTH CAROLINA
Antoine Ducharme checked his watch.
He knew it was around six-thirty because the news was on and the sun
was slanting on the sea. He also had a finely tuned internal clock that was always within a few minutes of the actual time.
He lay down the mystery he was reading. He had loved mysteries ever since he was a boy in Marseilles, where he exhausted the library’s collection of Georges Simenon. It was how he now filled his time when he wasn’t at one of his health clubs or at the computer.
He clicked up the volume on the television.

Other books

Distraction by Tess Oliver
Second Shot by Zoe Sharp
Maxine by Sue Fineman
The Merchant Adventurer by Patrick E. McLean
FireDrake by Bianca D'Arc
Tuck by Stephen R. Lawhead
Second Chance Cowboy by Rhonda Lee Carver