The Reviver (29 page)

Victor Eldridge had worked for the Toronto Forensic Revival Department. Could he have been doing other things, on the side? Sure, his name hadn’t been in the list, but what if …

He shook his head.
Coincidence,
he thought.
Nothing more.

But could it be what Harker was drawing his attention to?

He read out only those names again, a sixty-second pause between each.

Armand Dion.

Isabeau Poulin.

Lafayette Girard.

Xavier Vernet.

Thirst.

He stared at it. Repeated it aloud.
Xavier Vernet.
That was what Harker was showing him, but he couldn’t see why. Was it a name he should recognize from Baseline? Perhaps it was a name familiar to Daniel but not to Jonah?

He said it again: Xavier Vernet.

Then he got it. Jonah swore and took a pen. He circled the name and in the margin wrote the man’s initials, pressing hard on the page, drawing over the lines repeatedly to thicken them.

He laughed.

‘Shit, Daniel. And I thought the Eldridge thing was a stretch. All these names. The chances of us finding
someone
who fits can’t be that low…’

But he knew this was what Daniel had been trying to tell him. And he knew there might be something there.

Jonah took out the pill bottle again and looked at it. Then he stood, walked over to the apartment door and set it on the shelf beside his keys.
It can wait,
he thought.
Right now, we need all the help we can get.

It was almost three in the morning, and his exhaustion was catching up with him fast. He took the page with Xavier Vernet’s name into his bedroom and left it on the bed while he got ready. As he slid under the covers, he looked at it again and smiled. He knew that, however much of a red herring it turned out to be, Annabel would appreciate what he’d found. And that felt good.

Xavier Vernet.

XV.

Fifteen.

22

Jonah woke eager to tell Annabel what he’d found and called her before ten. He said nothing of the continued presence of Daniel, claiming to have simply noticed Vernet’s name. She sounded intrigued but sceptical; two hours later she called him back with a single instruction. Be at the airport by 1 p.m. She hung up, and none of his subsequent calls were answered.

With no option, he headed for Richmond International Airport without any idea what he was about to do. When he arrived he called her again. This time she took the call, and told him which check-in desk to get to.

As he approached, she smiled at him. He smiled back, trying not to notice how good she looked. He pushed inappropriate thoughts out of his head.

‘So,’ he said. ‘What’s going on?’

‘It checked out, Jonah. Vernet worked on BPV. I called MLA Research and told them I was with human resources in a big pharma company out East. I had that company’s website up just in case they gave me anything awkward. Told them Vernet had applied for a position and had given them as a reference. I asked them to confirm various things.’

Jonah nodded, impressed. ‘Sly. By
confirm,
do you mean tell you stuff you didn’t actually know?’

‘Absolutely. He’s from southern France, joined MLA after three years in a biotech outfit in Paris. He left MLA five years ago and had indeed worked on aspects of BPV, although they couldn’t say more.’

‘OK, Annabel. But why are we here?’

She shrugged. ‘Oh, I tracked down his number and called him. He’s in Chicago. We’re booked on the next flight.’

He looked at her and blinked. She was serious.

*   *   *

On the flight, they settled into easy conversation. Little more than pleasantries, but the kind of thing that Jonah would normally find hard work.

Annabel gave him a selection of books about Baseline, including those her father had written.

‘I need to brush up,’ she said. ‘Anything you think would be useful, tell me.’

‘Does he know who we are?’

‘I thought it’d be less complicated if he didn’t. As far as he’s concerned, I’m Sarah Townes. You’re John Sullivan. We’re journalists, doing an article on the early days of revival from perspectives that haven’t been covered. An unsung-heroes thing.’

‘That’s all it took?’

‘Enough for him to agree to meet. Although today is the only time he could manage in the next two weeks, hence the rush. Let me do the talking; you listen out for anything unusual he says. Yarrow’s death hasn’t been made public yet, so I’ll try and drop his name in. We’ll see what reaction we get.’

Xavier Vernet had agreed to meet them in the north of the city; outside O’Hare, Annabel gave the address of the coffee shop he’d specified to their taxi driver and they reached it with ten minutes to spare, ensconced in a corner with a pair of cappuccinos. It was the kind of trip Jonah would have spent a week planning, and Annabel had done it on a whim.

They waited, watching each new customer. At last, in came a lanky man in his forties, whose eyes darted around the shop until they settled on Annabel. She smiled at him as he came over.

‘Sarah Townes?’ said Vernet, his French origins still very clear in his accent. ‘I’m Xavier.’

‘Good to meet you. John? Get Xavier a coffee.’

‘Double espresso, please,’ said Vernet.

Jonah went to order, choosing to wait for the coffee and give Annabel a chance to put the man at ease. While he was waiting, his phone rang. He glanced at it and answered.

‘Hello, Never.’

‘Your cat was hungry.’

‘You’re at my apartment? Are you stalking me?’

‘I thought I’d drop by and say hello, and you’re not even here. Where are you?’

‘A coffee shop.’

‘Can I come there? You’re worrying me.’

‘It’s, uh, in Chicago.’

Silence for a moment. ‘You’re in Chicago?’

The double espresso arrived. ‘Look, Never, I’ve got to go. I promise I’ll explain in a few days. OK?’

Silence again. ‘You already promised to explain. I’ll give you two more days, and then I’ll guilt-trip you so badly even your
shit
will be apologizing.’ He hung up.

Jonah sighed, then turned off the phone in case Never decided to pursue things. He grabbed the coffee and returned to the table to find Annabel and Vernet laughing like old friends.
She has a knack,
he thought.

Vernet took the coffee and thanked him.

‘Xavier was telling me he actually
worked
on BPV,’ Annabel said. ‘Isn’t that something, John?’

Jonah nodded, wanting to avoid speaking if he could, in case he called her Annabel rather than Sarah.

‘Not the original development,’ Vernet said. ‘This was one year on, some work on BPV variants. Improvements. Everyone who writes about this gives the impression that after the drug was developed that was it, you know? But BPV was a blanket term for a related family of compounds. Efficacy doubled, thanks to us.’

Annabel smiled. ‘Exactly the kind of thing we want to cover, Xavier. The man who gave us your name thought you’d be perfect for that kind of insight.’

Jonah almost flinched at the gambit; Annabel clearly didn’t want to tiptoe around things.

‘May I ask,’ said Vernet. ‘Who told you of me?’

‘Someone a colleague of mine knows,’ she said, her eyes fixed on Vernet’s. ‘Tobias Yarrow.’

Vernet said nothing for a moment, his eyebrows raising in surprise. ‘Tobias Yarrow?’

‘Yes. You remember him, surely? It wasn’t
that
long ago.’

Vernet thought. ‘Three years.’

‘Ah. I haven’t met him, I’ve heard things secondhand through my colleague. Apologies if I’ve got things wrong, but it seems you had plenty of things to tell
him,
and he certainly remembers you.’

Vernet still looked a little mystified. ‘So, he told you where we met…?’

Annabel simply nodded. Jonah was impressed by how authoritative that nod was, considering she had no idea.

Vernet nodded back, frowning. ‘Then you know more about me than makes me comfortable.’

‘None of it goes in the story, Xavier,’ she said.

Vernet lowered his voice. ‘I met Tobias Yarrow at an AA meeting. We went for a coffee after. Did the same the next week, and after that I didn’t see him again.’

‘But you remember him, so he left some kind of impression?’

‘He was very intense. I remember I told him some of the stories, and he lapped it up. A little too much, I think.’

Jonah leaned forward. ‘What stories?’

‘You know, the usual thing people want to hear about the early days of revival. I started my career working on Alzheimer’s and memory, then I found myself in revival work, rumours flying everywhere, knowing it was happening in the building we were in. People forget what it was like, you know? They forget how creepy it was. Time does that. We get used to it. We get used to dead people talking. I was drinking pretty bad at times – still do, now and again – but those first few years of revival work were the worst. Now some people, God … they love to hear about it. They
love
all that creepy shit. Yarrow, he seemed to get a kick out of it, so I told him things.’

Annabel nodded. ‘What did you tell him?’

‘I started telling him about the BPV manufacture problems. This is what I was telling you before, about how we improved the drug. Eight, maybe nine years back. We had three licensees, and the efficacy was variable. Not by that much, but enough to warrant suspicion. Quality control was the first candidate, but they seemed to be identical. Turned out it was enantiomers. Impurities with the same chemical structure, but mirrored. The manufacturing processes varied a little, and the proportions varied too, from one to four per cent of the mirrored version. A few months after identifying the problem, we were tasked to examine the properties of this taint. We started by increasing the proportion, see what it did to the effectiveness.’

‘Effectiveness?’ said Jonah. Annabel sat back a little to let him know he could take over.

‘Sure. BPV was a family of variants of a drug used for posttraumatic stress disorder. Messes with the memory systems that PTSD is caused by. Its main purpose is to disrupt the laying down of deep memory during a crisis, or in revival what the brain
treats
like a crisis. In short, it suppressed remnants. So to see what the mirrored drug did, we tried going the other way. Boost the levels…’

‘And?’

‘People we tried it with, hell … Hit them hard.’

‘Volunteer revivers?’

Vernet smiled. ‘They got paid well enough. Thing was, it
boosted
revival ability. Normal BPV does that a little, but the mirror was far more powerful. Now, the users of BPV, the revivers, they can have the drugs tailored, the proportions finely controlled. You want as much of the boost as you can get, without incurring the side effects. And there are other things that you can put in the mix to offset the downsides. We tried extremes, huge doses of the mirror with huge doses of countering drugs. It didn’t improve performance any more than the lower doses. But then we were told to try certain other BPV variants, slight chemical modifications. Some of these were just as effective but didn’t form the mirrored version
at all
in manufacturing. Much cheaper to make pure. But we were asked to see what properties the
mirrored
versions of these might have. Forcing the mirrored forms wasn’t easy, but one of them gave a
massive
boost to performance. There were just a few problems. Hardly anyone could even tolerate it, and there were severe side effects that made it useless. We stopped testing it.’

Jonah tensed as he spoke. ‘What kind of side effects?’

‘Hallucinations. Remnant problems. Psychological disturbance. That kind of thing. Some of our test subjects still wanted it, though, when they knew we were going to just destroy it. Performance enhancer like that could get them some good money, they thought. None of them were high-rated revivers, and they figured it’d take them up a level, even though the side effects were eventually crippling. Crazy.’

Jonah stayed quiet and Annabel shifted forward again. ‘Is that all you told Yarrow?’ she asked.

Vernet looked at them warily. ‘What is this?’

Annabel put her hand on his. ‘It’s important, Xavier. Please.’

Vernet shook his head. ‘Well, for what it’s worth. After that, MLA Research did no more BPV work. We were studying some chronic degenerative diseases, a few broad-base approaches that looked promising. We had a little success with some. I was glad to get back to the areas I’d been trained for. My drinking stopped, mostly. Anyway, a few years after the BPV work finished I moved on, ended up in a great place here in Chicago. Not long after I started, I was at a conference where I ran into some people I used to work with who’d moved on too. That night we drank, you know? Like I said, I still do sometimes. The conversation took a turn where we’d try and outdo each other with the stories we’d picked up. One of them told how he’d heard something about that old forced mirror drug variant. Said it had been used since. Said it had boosted things so much that something went wrong in a revival. They’d brought the subject back, but when it started talking it wasn’t them. He said it was something long dead, something not human. Said they wanted to bring it back and make it stay.’

Vernet’s face was intently serious as he said it. He was looking right at Jonah, and Jonah could feel the colour draining from his face. Vernet broke into a smile and he laughed. ‘Hey, I’m sorry. This is just talk. You shouldn’t take these things seriously.’

‘Did Tobias Yarrow take it seriously, Xavier?’ asked Annabel.

‘Yes. Even when I told him it was nonsense. He didn’t find it funny. I told him to relax, but he didn’t seem the kind who
could
relax.’

‘Was that all you knew?’ Annabel asked, and got a nod in reply. ‘So did you tell him who it was that had told you?’

‘It was another couple years before I saw Yarrow. I was drunk the night I heard the story. I can’t remember who was
there,
let alone who said it. Pretty sure they’d heard it secondhand anyway.’