The Immortalist (47 page)

Frankie called up the stairs, “I'll fry up some tagliatelle and make coffee while you're in there.”

Dom went to the banister and shouted back, “The doc don't drink coffee. Just orange juice, if you have it. And no sausage with the noodles. He don't eat meat.”

“Chicken seasoning okay? Olive oil?”

Gifford nodded. “That'll be fine,” he said softly as he closed the bathroom door. Alone at last, he let out a weary sigh and sat on the edge of the bathtub. Opening his trench coat, he saw a dark red stain on the front of his shirt. When he pulled the gauze pads from his wound, they were soggy with blood. The wound didn't seem to be actively bleeding, but a slight push against the blue-tinged edges of the bullet hole brought out a burp of dark red blood.
That's old blood, not fresh
.
It'll be all right.

After putting clean dressings in place, Gifford rinsed his shirt under cold water. Then he wrung it out and put it back on, still damp. It felt as if his head were splitting.
Maybe a face wash will help.
When he took off his sunglasses, he was startled to see that his eyes had turned completely red—red as rubies, with his irises like two insets of blue topaz. But there was no pain. No problem seeing.
Hyposphagma,
he concluded.
A harmless hemorrhage beneath the conjunctiva. It will clear up in a day or two
.

When he ran his hands through his hair to massage his migraine, he was alarmed to see strands of hair clinging to his fingers. Only an inhuman degree of stress could produce such changes.
I'll never forgive them for what they've put me through. Cricket. The press. Niedermann. Eden.
His blood boiled up inside him. As he stood shaking, a Hieronymus Bosch–like procession of grotesque images of revenge and mutilation passed through his mind. He wanted to hurt Cricket worst of all. To strangle her as he had Niedermann. To tear her limb from limb. His thoughts were so savage that they frightened him. He wished he could get back into his plane and take off for Newfoundland, or Bimini, or any place where he could live alone and undisturbed. But today he must endure, he knew. Today there were sacrifices to be made. He would have centuries ahead in which to find peace.

Gifford combed what was left of his hair, put on his trench coat and sunglasses, and went back down to the kitchen. He sat with Loscalzo at a small Formica table, but didn't feel like eating. He barely touched a forkful to his mouth before he dropped it back onto his plate. The smell of the fried noodles turned his stomach.

“Not hungry, Doc?” asked Loscalzo.

“Not just now.”

I will not eat nor drink . . . I will not drink . . .
He searched his memory for a saying that came to him, something from the Bible.
I will not drink again of the fruit of the vine until I have entered the kingdom.
Yes, the kingdom was at hand.
The Age of the Methuselah Vector. Eating and drinking could wait. His inner spirit would carry him through the next few hours.

Loscalzo seemed to sense it was time to go. “Frankie, the Doc and I need to borrow your car for a while. Business in the city.”

“Sure, Dom. I've gotta pick up a load of PVC pipe with the truck this morning. But you can have Vonda's Merc.” He took a key from a ring and tossed it to Loscalzo.

“Grazie bene.”

A strand of hair drifted through the air past Gifford's eyes, settling upon the table. “Might I trouble you for a hat?” he asked Frankie. “I seem to have gotten a bad sunburn.”

Frankie shrugged. “There's a nice fedora hangin' on the front porch. Size seven and a half.”

“That will do nicely. Thank you.”

“Hey, anything in this house is yours. After what you did.”

Loscalzo collected his and Gifford's plates and set them in the sink. As an afterthought, he grabbed a pinch of Gifford's uneaten noodles and dropped them into his mouth. “You ready, Doc?”

Gifford nodded. “How long to New York?”

“Forty-five minutes by the Major Deegan Expressway. Maybe more if we hit rush hour.”

They went out quietly through the front porch. The car, a four-year-old white Grand Marquis, was parked on the grass to one side of the house. Mindful of his wound, Gifford eased himself into the front passenger seat, with the ice chest on the floor between his legs. Loscalzo got behind the wheel, jerked his seat forward a notch, and adjusted the mirror. As the car started, he rummaged through some compact discs in a bin between the seats.

“Nothin' but fuckin' opera. Jeez, that's Vonda for ya.”

“Opera would be just the thing, Dom.”

“Oh, yeah? Pick one.” Loscalzo made a right turn onto the highway.

Gifford flipped a couple of CDs. “This one.
Madama Butterfly
. Callas.”

Loscalzo inserted it, while Gifford lowered his seat as far as it would go and closed his eyes. Immediately a woman's voice rose over the rumbling of the automobile—clear, incisive, like a cup of cool water drawn from an alpine spring.

Un bel dì, vedremo

levarsi un fil di fumo

sull'estremo confin del mare.

One bright day, we'll see

A thread of smoke arising

Over the far rim of the sea.

Was it Callas he heard? Or did memory carry him back to another voice, a voice that once sang for him alone. Five years gone? No, not gone at all. He felt her presence, as though the five years of loneliness were but a catnap of a lazy summer's afternoon, and now, just now, she had awakened him, ice clinking, as she carried a sweating pitcher of lemonade onto the veranda.

For a moment, he felt as if he were home, really home. He pressed his eyelids together, and for the first time in a week, he slept.

Three

AS CRICKET AND
HANK STEPPED OUT
of Paul Hobbs's twin-engine Baron G58 onto the tarmac at Teterboro, they were met by a New Jersey state trooper in a sky-blue jacket with a military-style Sam Browne belt slung over his right shoulder and a round, visored cap that set off his broad, dimpled chin.

“Dr. Rensselaer-Wright?”

“Yes.”

“Trooper Chris Dayton.” He stiffly extended a hand.

“From the radio?”

“Yes, ma'am. Unfortunately, your man's not here. Tail number N364CG has not been spotted or picked up on radar. I'm afraid you may be on a wild-goose chase.”

“No, I'm certain he's headed for the city. Rockefeller Center. That's where the Lottery was going to be held.”

“You mean that Methuselah business?” Officer Dayton let slip a lopsided smile. “My Uncle Louie and Aunt Verna signed up for that. Camped out all night to get near the stage.”

“Can you take us there? It means crossing state lines.”

“I've got orders to take you anywhere you want to go, ma'am.”

Moments later, they were speeding down Route 17 in a white police cruiser, heading for the Lincoln Tunnel. Sitting with Hank in the backseat, Cricket could see the flashing blue roof lights of their cruiser reflected in the side-view mirrors. She studied the gray-brown skyline of Manhattan across the Hudson, home to 1.5 million—the most densely populated county in the nation. Behind each window of those colossal buildings sat a living, breathing, working, playing, loving, and beloved person—every one of them a target for Nemesis. It was the mother of all breeding grounds for an epidemic.

Gifford had to be stopped. But how? Since yesterday, Cricket had carried with her a manila folder stuffed with blood-test results and DNA sequence data, hoping to use it to persuade Gifford that the Methuselah Vector had created Nemesis and that he himself was sick. But he had already rejected that idea. He had killed Niedermann for listening to it. What more could she say?

Even then, they would have to find him first. Out there—one man on an island of 1.5 million.

As they came out of the tunnel onto Forty-Second Street, traffic seemed more chaotic than usual. Sixth Avenue was snarled in gridlock. On every corner, police were out diverting cars away from Rockefeller Center. When Dayton tried to turn down Forty-Eighth Street, the roadway was blocked by a throng of pedestrians that extended as far as Cricket could see. The same with Forty-Ninth and Fiftieth Streets.

“Whoo-hee!” said Dayton. “This is like Times Square on New Year's Eve.”

“The Lottery's being held on the Lower Plaza. Are we near there?”

“Couple blocks. Through
that
. Lemme see if I can get us a little closer.”

He gave two blasts of his siren and forced his way up to Fifty-Second Street. Finding it clear, he cut through to Fifth Avenue and tried to swing back toward the Promenade—a broad, open walkway that led to the Lower Plaza. But the crowd was denser here than anywhere else, and sullenly unimpressed by a flashing blue light or a screaming siren. After an interminable shift of nudging forward a foot at a time, Dayton pulled over in front of Saint Patrick's Cathedral.

“I'm afraid this is it. We're gonna have to hoof it from here.”

As if a cage door had been opened, Cricket bounded out of the car, sucking in a lungful of fresh air. But on foot, progress was even more difficult. What looked like a static crowd of onlookers was in fact an enormous battlefield—thousands vying to get to the Lower Plaza. With every step, Cricket collided with elbows and hips and swinging backpacks. Even with a police escort, people swore at her as she tried to cut in, and not a few blocked her way altogether.

It was a strange crowd, like a septuagenarian Woodstock—thousands of gray- and white-haired people, many with walkers and canes, many in wheelchairs. Some were bald from nature, some from chemotherapy. With her trained medical eye, Cricket picked out those who were pale from heart failure, puffy from emphysema, emaciated from cancer. She heard a Babel of accents and languages—word of the miracle had spread around the world.

But it was not a Woodstock mood. Faces were grim. Rumor had it that the miracle was a fraud. They had been tricked into coming. Someone was damned well going to have to pay.

It took twenty minutes of constant struggle just to reach the end of the Promenade.

Cricket was too short to glimpse the Lower Plaza until she had begun to descend the steps that led down to it. She saw a fifteen-foot-deep basin about a hundred feet wide and sixty feet from front to back. In wintertime she knew it was popular as an outdoor skating rink. In summer, it was filled with open-air dining tables, but these had all been cleared for today's event. Part of the far wall was recessed to accommodate the most striking feature of the Plaza, a massive golden statue of Prometheus, beckoning with one outstretched arm, and carrying in the other a torch of divine fire—his stolen gift to mankind. Two concentric pools of water extended in front of the statue. Barely projecting from the surface of the water were rows of spotlights and sharply pointed water-spray nozzles. Most of the nozzles had been turned off, except for a single row in the narrow space behind the statue, which threw a glistening sheet of water against the back wall.

Covering both of the gray marble walls flanking the statue, Cricket saw huge banners displaying the smiling, bearded Santa Claus face of the biblical thousand-year-old man, just as she had seen it at Adam's footrace, along with the legend:

EDEN PHARMACEUTICALS:

A PRESCRIPTION FOR THE CENTURIES!

NOW PRESENTING

THE METHUSELAH VECTOR

She saw a canvas-roofed stage abutting the outermost pool set up for the Lottery. Four feet above the ground and sixty feet wide, it was furnished on either side with ten rows of five blue folding chairs, each accompanied by a small tabouret and an IV pole hung with a bag of saline. A ten-foot-wide aisle separated the groups of chairs and offered a view of the great golden statue. At the very front was a lectern of clear Plexiglas, wired with a microphone.

Except for the stage itself, every inch of the Lower Plaza was packed with the lucky thousand or so who had stayed up all night to hold a place. The doors to the underground concourse having been roped off, the only way in or out of the well was by the split staircase from the Promenade. So heavy was the crush on the steps that Cricket had to exhale to squeeze through, one step at a time. For once, her tiny stature gave her an advantage, for she was able to wrest her way through the narrowest of crevices between a pair of walkers, or to vault over the side of a wheelchair. Hank and Dayton, on the other hand, were slowed down by their bulk and soon got separated from her on the upper landing.

When at last she managed to scramble onto the stage itself, she saw two men at the back, huddled together in craven fear of the crowd.

One, nearly bald, wore a gray pin-striped suit. “No one's allowed onstage,” he shouted at her. “Go back.”

“I'm Dr. Rensselaer-Wright. I've just come from Acadia Springs.”

“Dr. Wright—I didn't recognize you. I'm Phillip Eden.”