No Time to Die (10 page)

Mitch paled. Probation by the Justice Department's Bioethics Committee meant that all the Biology faculty's experiments would indefinitely need to be monitored and approved by a federal representative to ensure that no ethical lines were being crossed. It was worse than a hassle. It was an insult of the worst order, akin to branding the department with a scarlet letter. Often it led to an exodus of the faculty and an inability to attract new talent.

“Neither of you thought through the consequences of your actions,” Adler said. “You're both very talented”—he looked sadly at Natalie—“but I'm afraid that's not going to be enough to save you. On direct order from the dean, your terminations are effective immediately.”

 

 

The commotion downstairs roused Zoe from sleep—yelling, scuffling, the house phone ringing and ringing unanswered. A prickling sweat came over her as she heard Gramps's voice rise above it. She jumped out of bed and ran down the stairs in time to see her mother blocking the front door, clutching Gramps's arm, in an apparent standoff with her father, who was shaking a newspaper at them.

“I didn't do anything,” Gramps was shouting. “Stephen, calm down!”

Zoe raced up to them. “What's going on?”

Her father turned to her with rabid eyes. “You! Going behind our backs to Columbia!”

“Dad, I told you, I wanted the research. It's my body,” she said, trying to stay calm.

“You should have told us first,” her mother scolded. “Look what happened. You almost got caught up in some crazy scientist's web! And now the media's made a circus of it!”

“What?” She looked anxiously from Gramps to her parents. “What are you talking about?”

“That,” her mother said, motioning to the newspaper in her father's hands. He handed it to Zoe. When she finished reading, her face was white.

Her secret plan had backfired. But who was this Natalie Roy who wanted to help her?

“You led her straight into the tiger's lair,” her father was bellowing to Gramps in the foyer, “and it's only lucky that someone found out before she got hurt! She wouldn't have gone this far if it weren't for your encouragement.” He shifted his gaze to his wife. “Pam, I can't put up with him anymore, that's it.”

“Don't you dare accuse him of anything,” Zoe interrupted, standing as tall as she could, though even with her shoulders thrown back, she only reached up to her father's burly chest. “I went to Columbia all by myself. And
I
was the one who called the
Post
. I just didn't tell them the story they printed.”

“What?”
her parents screeched in unison. Gramps's eyes widened as his eyebrows shot up. It took a great deal to surprise him, but Zoe saw that this was enough.

“I needed you to take me seriously,” she told them. “I thought if I appealed to the media, they would print my story and put pressure on you to consent to the research. I knew you would never agree on your own. I mentioned Mitch Grover, the scientist I met at Columbia who turned me down, so I guess they called him, and then somehow things got all twisted. The article was supposed to be about the fact that I can't age, and how I'm looking for science to help me—not that I'm a little girl being exploited! I don't know what happened.”

Gramps sighed. “They'll always go for the more sensational story if they can find one.”

Her father blinked, while her mother crossed her arms, looking hurt. “You should have just come to us. I didn't know you were that serious.”

“It wouldn't have mattered, and you know it. You and Dad would never have signed those forms.”

“I don't know what to say, Zoe,” her father said in a quiet voice, which alarmed her more than his shouting. “You're totally out of control. You've ignored our warnings not to open this can of worms, and look where it's gotten you. Your mother and I will need to spend some time discussing a proper punishment, but until then, you're grounded. No cell phone either.”

“Seriously?” she replied in disbelief. “So I really am fourteen all over again?”

“You're living under our roof, and you will respect our rules, no matter how old you are. Now give me your phone.”

“It's upstairs. I'll go get it—but only if Gramps stays. You have to promise nothing will happen to him.” Gramps looked at her, and she could tell he was touched.

“He isn't going anywhere,” her mother said, still holding on to his right arm to keep him steady. His left hung by his side in the white plaster cast.

When her father reluctantly agreed, she turned around and hurried up to her room, knowing she didn't have much time. Finally there was a scientist who wanted to work with her—if only it wasn't too late! She shut the door and anxiously searched online for Columbia's number. She would delete the call history afterward.

An operator answered after one ring. “Columbia University, how may I direct your call?”

“I'd like to be connected to the office of Professor Natalie Roy,” she whispered. “In Biology.”

“One moment, please.”

The line clicked, and the on-hold music came on, a gorgeous violin concerto that she recognized as Tchaikovsky's. It was one of her favorites because its joyful melody always made her feel more happy and alive, more herself. She hummed it under her breath, her hope rising with each bar.

Then the music abruptly cut off.

“Miss, are you still there?”

“Yes, hi,” she said quickly.

“I'm very sorry, but Dr. Roy's line has been disconnected. She's no longer employed.”

Washington, D.C.
9:30
P.M.

L
es stared at the picture of Zoe Kincaid on his laptop, trying to wrap his mind around the very fact of her existence.

Biologically frozen.

Her smiling cheeks puffed out with remnant baby fat, framed by long blond hair that fell over her nonexistent chest. How could she be a college freshman? She seemed straight out of
Ripley's Believe It or Not!—
a sleazy late-night television show his ex-wife, Darcy, used to enjoy.

Their two-bedroom apartment was quiet since she'd moved out. Now it contained only what he needed and nothing more. Minimalist white couches, a glass table, a stainless steel kitchen. He enjoyed standing next to the wall of windows in his bedroom, thirty stories high, surveying the roofs of the lesser buildings. He wasn't the type to get lonely. There were always women to call, if the itch needed scratching. Of course, that was the root of his problems with Darcy in the first place, but he was better off living his own life. Calling all the shots. He had never been good at compromising, not with his peers growing up, not with his nightmare of a father, and especially not with Darcy.

The only person who had ever truly mattered to him was his mother. The thought of her pierced him still, the decade since her death having done little to dull the loss. He would never allow himself to forget the big picture nor the small details of their life together: Not just the fact that she had rescued him at age eleven from his abusive father under cover of night and then started over—first in a homeless shelter, then in a dirty old studio apartment, working long hours on her feet as a waitress at Denny's to support them both on her meager income. She never asked his father for money and never asked Les to work—just wanted him to enjoy what was left of his childhood, though his innocence had disappeared long before.

He never could bear to tell her about the bullies at his new school, always explaining that this bruised eye came from a basketball game, those bad scrapes from a skateboard accident. It pained him more though to think of the secret
she
had been keeping from him during those difficult years. He'd been too absorbed in his own daily battles to notice her progressively jerky movements, her unsteady gait, her difficulty chewing and swallowing.

But then one day when he was seventeen, he'd come home from school to find her lying on the couch, instead of at her shift at the restaurant.

“What are you doing here, Stanley?” she yelled at him. “I told you to leave us alone!”

“What? Ma, it's me. Dad hasn't bothered us for years.”

Her glazed-over look cleared, and she seemed to awake to her surroundings. Her inevitable confession soon followed—she had Huntington's disease, a rare inherited illness that manifested itself in midlife. There was nothing the doctors could do to prevent her eventual death. After learning of her diagnosis, Les did everything he could to make sure she never had to work again. He held down three part-time jobs in college, living at home to take care of her, and earning scholarships all the way through. Once he graduated with his PhDs and got his first assistant professorship, he had scraped enough together with his savings, her disability checks, and his income to hire full-time help for her.

She was a fighter. Even on the days when she didn't remember him at all, when she was writhing in her wheelchair, her eyes roaming back and forth, Les knew her benevolent spirit was still there, pure and alive underneath the disease. All he wanted was for her to live the rest of her life in peace and comfort, and what he'd ended up doing to her instead—

He wrenched his thoughts away from the horror as his body clenched, the way it did every time his brain vomited up the memory.

After composing himself, he focused again on Zoe. There were so many scientists like Natalie Roy who were frothing to get at her, now that her case was public. He felt nothing but hostility toward them, even though he'd come from their ranks long ago. Of his desire to research, little remained. Many years had passed since he'd been in a lab, practically another lifetime ago, but he remembered dissections the most—the singular feeling of taking a knife to skin and splitting it open to reveal an animal's organs inside, like hidden jewels.

Les stood up and went to the kitchen to retrieve a steak knife out of the wooden block on the counter. It had been so long since he'd dissected anything. He missed it.

The search for treasure had compelled him since he was a little boy. It was an instinctual urge to dig below the surface, to peel away layers and unveil whatever was concealed. In biology, you could go ever deeper. It was the quintessential search to find the secret stuff at the heart of life itself. Inside the skin, the organs, the blood, the cells and their nuclei lay DNA, the master coder, the wizard behind the body's curtain. Within Zoe Kincaid's DNA lay perhaps the biggest secret of all. It was a secret that should never be found.

A secret that made her the biggest prey.

He ran his index finger over the edge of the knife.

 

New York City
9:30
P.M.

 

The worst part of Natalie's day was not getting fired, despite the horror of watching Adler speak the word “terminations” with the glum finality of a doctor calling time of death. She had pictured a fishhook gutting her career, spewing the bloody entrails of the scandal across her spotless resume, leaving stains that would never fade. Numbness overcame her, a strange tingling sensation crawled down her arms and into her fingertips. It had taken all of her grace to stand up, thank Adler for the best four years of her life, and walk out, suppressing her undignified urge to argue. She'd said nothing to Mitch and took little satisfaction in their shared fate. Justice served was only limp consolation for her own distress.

Even when Nick, her college sweetheart and onetime husband, had announced his affair all those years ago—while Theo was still in diapers—her sense of loss then did not compare to what she felt today. Not that she ever could have imagined a more painful loss, from the vantage point of a twenty-three-year-old mom just starting graduate school. But in retrospect, she saw that the fabric of her life had remained intact, in a way that now seemed impossible. Without a cheating husband, she still had the real love of her life—her son. But without her work—and without the prospect of any job in her field—she was an outcast.

Yet getting fired still wasn't the most agonizing moment of her day. It was telling Theo that his worst fear had come true.

She suspected he knew what had happened as soon as she returned home that morning armed with boxes and Helen's gardenia plant, the salvaged remains of her office. That was ten hours ago, and she still wasn't over her shock at his reaction.

“It pisses me off that they fired you,” he told her. “I've been thinking about it. That article was totally biased and makes you out to be a monster, but I know you would never hurt anyone.”

She dropped to the couch beside him, flabbergasted. Their 32-inch flat-screen television was showing a baseball game, and Theo had his feet propped on the leather ottoman, a soda in hand. Not the posture of someone about to scream at her.

“I mean, come on,” he went on. “You're the most caring person I know. You always used to worry about the city corrupting my innocence. And now you stress about whether you're overworking your students or tipping cabbies enough. It's crazy to think
you
would exploit someone, no matter the reason.”

She closed her eyes, picturing the vicious notes she had received that morning. “You don't know how much that means to me.”

Theo turned to her. His wide green eyes had retained the sweetness of youth, in spite of the manly stubble dotting his chin. “You've always been obsessed with defeating aging, and then this miracle girl shows up, so how could you just walk away? I get it.”

“You do?”

He touched her arm. “I don't blame you, Mom. You're always telling me to go after my dreams and take risks. So you took a big one and it didn't work out. Things don't always, do they?” His face darkened, and she knew what—whom—he meant.

She smiled through tears of gratitude. “I'm afraid not.”

Then he grinned. “I never knew you had such balls.”

“Theo!”

“Well, it's true. Posing as an assistant? That's pretty badass.”

She rolled her eyes, noticing how tall and handsome he had become almost overnight—gone were the acne and braces of his early adolescence, replaced by clear skin and straight teeth. His light brown hair looked thick and soft, and she wished she could still run her fingers through it like the old days.

He was smiling at her, and she wondered if he was trying to project strength for her sake, in spite of his own disappointment. At eighteen, he really was becoming a man.

“I'm still out of a job,” she reminded him. “I don't know what I'm going to do, but my savings will last us a little while. And I will find a way to keep putting money in your college fund, even if I have to flip burgers.”

“Actually, don't sweat it.” His smile brightened. “There were a few college recruiters at my track meet right before graduation, and I just found out one's scouting me. If I train hard enough this summer, I could get a full ride to USC. No community college.”

Natalie gasped, throwing her arms around him. All of her anger and frustration melted before his happiness. “Honey, that's fantastic! I can't believe it!”

“Me either.” He grinned, bouncing his knees. “So don't worry too much about me. I'm going to make this happen. I already ran five miles this morning.”

His words soothed her like a balm. She trusted his determination as much as her own. If possible, she would have kissed the recruiter who had given him hope when he needed it most.

“And I'll make us lemonade,” she vowed. “Just you wait.” It was their shorthand for turning an unfortunate circumstance into something worthwhile.

“It's a deal,” he said, extending his hand.

She shook it.

Now that he was finally in bed asleep, she had some time to think. A plan was hatching in her mind to follow through on her vow, but its window of possibility was quickly closing. She would have to act—fast.

It was audacious, to be sure, more so than anything she had attempted before. But great rewards often came at great risk. And what more did she have to lose? Theo was less reliant on her than ever. She could see clearly, for the first time, that he was capable of taking care of himself. In a way it saddened her that their shared daily life would soon come to an end, but it was also liberating. All she'd have left in life was her work, and of that, nothing remained to her except one thing. Her ongoing experiments in her lab would be shut down or divvied up among the remaining staff, her papers would go unpublished, her classes would be reassigned.

Nothing was left except her ardent desire to meet Zoe Kincaid.

The chance to conquer aging—and to spare millions of people tremendous suffering and death—beckoned to her like a time machine would have to Einstein. How could she ignore it? Pretend as if a major moment in scientific history wasn't within reach? The temptation was more than she could bear. Even failure would be more acceptable than apathy.

There was also the tantalizing fact that her access pass to the lab was still in her purse, tucked in an inner pocket. It was Columbia property that she should have returned. Tomorrow, someone would surely notice, and she would have to hand it in.

It was already 9:30
P.M.
All she needed was a blood sample containing Zoe's precious DNA to store on slides until she could find another lab to carry out the experiments. But finding that next lab could take years, and in the intervening time, Zoe could move or get sick or fall out of reach. So tonight was like a rare eclipse: When else would she, Zoe, and a lab perfectly align again?

She pulled her computer onto her lap and typed Zoe's name into Facebook, but her profile was private. Of course, her cell phone number would not be listed in a public directory, and Natalie couldn't exactly call her parents' house, even if she could track down their number.

She clutched her own cell phone, willing herself to recall Zoe's number. Squinting, she could almost picture the digits—but was it (917) 479-7302 or (917) 479-2703? Damn Adler for taking the files! If only she'd known to memorize it. What else—

She bolted upright, nearly knocking her computer to the floor. The number of Zoe's emergency contact was a palindrome. Yesterday, she had smiled to herself for inadvertently recognizing its pattern, and now the pleasing digits returned to her like a boomerang: (917) 333-3719. His name was Silas, she remembered.