The Sanctuary (41 page)

“They will. We can set up another press conference, say we caught some smugglers, make sure the book’s front and center.”
Kirkwood
looked at her with fierce determination. “Don’t worry. They’ll call. I’ll make sure of it.”

Mia nodded and looked out the window, lost in her thoughts.

After a moment,
Kirkwood
’s voice brought her out of her daze. “What is it?”

Weariness lined her face. “It’s hard to imagine.
That we’re doing this.
That something like this could actually exist.” She shook her head and scoffed, but it was more out of tiredness than anything else. “It’s like Frodo’s ring.
Tempting man with its power over nature, with its promise of long life.
Toying with our easily corrupted hearts.”

Kirkwood
pursed his lips doubtfully. “I wouldn’t call it a corruption at all. Dying is such a huge waste of talent. And wisdom.”

As the King Air skimmed the thin wisps of cloud, they discussed the profound changes a potential “magic bullet” of longevity would trigger, the seismic shifts in the way we live. Overpopulation was the obvious problem. From the hominids’ first appearance on the planet, it had taken us 80 million years to hit the billion
mark
in the early 1800s. It took well over a hundred years to hit the second billion in 1930, but ever since, we’ve been addding a billion more every fifteen years or so. This increase comes almost entirely from less developed countries; the more developed countries, in fact, are barely producing enough babies to maintain their current population levels. Still, having five or ten generations of the same family surviving concurrently would cause all kinds of upheavals. More natural resources, food, and housing would be needed. The welfare and pension systems, among others, would require even more of an overhaul than the one they already need. And human relations would be drastically, dramatically different.

Marriage—would the institution still mean anything when no one would really expect to stay with one other person for a couple of hundred years? Children—how would they age and behave relative to their parents? The changes would also extend to work.
Careers.
Retirement.
Would people have to work throughout their longer lives?
Probably.
Could they cope with that, mentally? What happened to the notion of the old moving on so the young could find their place in life? Would there be room for anyone to ever get promoted? And what about less obvious implications, such as on prison sentences, for instance? Was the threat of a thirty-year sentence as much of a deterrent to someone who expected to live a couple of hundred years?

The more they talked it through, the more Mia realized that if this was real, every aspect of life as we knew it would need to be radically redefined. She’d never really explored its ramifications beyond scientific conjecture and idealized what-ifs, but thinking about it as potentially real, it was as daunting, even frightening, a prospect as she could imagine.

“We’d be living in a ‘posthuman’ age,”
Kirkwood
said. “And that terrifies the conservative and the religious establishment. But then, that fear is irrational. It wouldn’t happen overnight. It would be a gradual change. The ‘fix,’ if it were ever discovered, would be announced and people would just, well, not age. Or they would age very, very slowly. And the world would adapt. We were already hugely different from those who lived a hundred years before us. To them, we’re already ‘posthuman.’ And we seem to be handling the improved longevity, the medical advances and the technological innovations pretty well.”

But then, Mia knew, common sense and the greater good didn’t necessarily always prevail. Fear of change, combined with a patronizing, arrogant, and pontifical worldview, was already aligned to block such a discovery. Beyond its dogmatic, conservative mind-set, the government was daunted by the potential costs—never mind the huge potential savings in health-care costs due to chronic age-related diseases—and organizational changes that significantly longer life spans would incur. Big pharmaceuticals were happy to watch our bodies fall apart and sell us disease-management drugs. The antiaging creams, supplements, and hormones that didn’t really work were also highly lucrative—$6 billion a year’s worth, in fact.

“The people against it,”
Kirkwood
concluded, “they’re usually either deeply religious, or they’re philosophers who don’t live in the real world anyway. They compare us to blooming flowers or use some other inane analogy to celebrate the importance of
death,
they quote Greek and Roman thinkers or, inevitably, scripture. For them, life is defined by death. I’d say it’s the exact opposite: Life is defined by the ambition, the need,
the
urge, to avoid death. That’s what makes us human. It’s why we have doctors and hospitals. We’re the only species that’s aware of our own
mortality,
we’re the only species that actually has the capability, the intellect, the awareness, to aspire to defeat it. It’s been an ambition of man ever since we’ve walked on the planet. It’s part of our evolutionary process.”

Mia studied
Kirkwood
and nodded. She agreed with him, but an uncomfortable thought was clawing at her heart. “And in order to get Mom back, we might be handing it all to a psycho?”

KIRKWOOD
WATCHED the confusion and uncertainty clouding Mia’s face.

He’d been wondering about that too.

He hated having to lie to her, and delaying the inevitable. He wanted to tell her the whole truth, then and there, but every time he tried, something pulled him back. He knew he’d have to. He knew he would. But he still found it staggeringly hard to face her and tell her what she didn’t know.

He had a lot to make up for.

Compounding his turmoil was the hakeem’s file.
Kirkwood
had flown to
Beirut
with a clear mission: to assist in getting Evelyn back, while trying to keep the secret safe. Reading the hakeem’s file had thrown those objectives into disarray. Countless victims had died horrible deaths, and many more were at risk.

He had to be stopped.

Kirkwood
and his partners were all agreed on this. It had to supersede all other considerations.

Including Evelyn.
Including the secret itself.

The hakeem couldn’t be allowed to carry on his murderous quest.

Where that left him, Evelyn, and Mia was another matter altogether.

T
hrough the cloth shroud covering his head, Corben concentrated on the whir of the chopper’s turbine. The sound was throatier, lower-pitched,
very
different from the Hueys, Blackhawks, and Chinooks he was used to. The seat he’d been shoved into confirmed his suspicion. It was positioned sideways, along the outer wall of the cabin, and its fabric was rough and starchy,
its
padding thin, its metal frame biting into his thighs uncomfortably.

The chopper was military.

Russian-made.
A Mil, no doubt.

He’d know soon enough, as he sensed the machine slowing down and banking heavily, both of which suggested an imminent landing. Sure enough, it lurched and began its descent.

He wasn’t sure how long the flight had taken, but the feeling he’d gotten of it tallied with the journey he assumed they were making: two hours of flight time or so.
Comfortably within the range and airspeed of the big choppers.

They were soon on the ground. He was hustled out of the cabin and heard some shouted orders before the big turbines strained back to full power and the brunt of the rotor wash plowed into him. As the chopper lifted off, he used the likely moment of distraction among his captors to raise his nylon-cuffed hands and pull the sack off his head. Omar spotted it and barked out angrily at him, but it was too late. Corben glimpsed the Mi-25 as it banked and headed back south. He couldn’t make out any markings on its camouflaged flank, but it was a military helicopter, and only one country within a few hours’ driving range of
Beirut
had them.

He gave Omar a small grin, an unspoken middle finger, then looked around. Omar had brought three other men with him. They were toting some impressive gear: Corben spotted two sniper rifles, several submachine guns, and a couple of packs of additional gear. All of which confirmed that whoever the hakeem’s sponsor was had some serious muscle. The man seemed to have access to significant support and firepower, as well as a seemingly inexhaustible supply of drones. They’d been able to chopper straight into
Turkey
at the drop of a hat, no doubt aided by the symbiotic, enemy-of-my-enemy relationship between
Turkey
and
Syria
, which were both engaged in an ongoing struggle to subdue the nationalistic aspirations of the stateless Kurds.

Corben realized that any ideas he’d entertained about possibly collaborating with the hakeem were seriously misguided. Besides being a hard case himself, the man clearly had some heavyweight sponsors to answer to. Whoever they were, they were heavily invested in him. They’d have serious issues with inviting an American intelligence agent to their party.

It didn’t necessarily displease Corben. He’d taken a serious dislike to the man and to the leather sole of his hand-sewn moccasin. He looked forward to possibly ramming it down the man’s throat if this mystery buyer proved useful.

He noticed Omar pulling out the phone they’d taken from him and snapping its battery into place before pocketing it and checking a handheld GPS device. Corben scanned their surroundings. They’re been dropped off in a clearing on a small hill, at the edge of a vast plain of arid land. Small patches of greenery dotted the edge of a river, the
Tigris
, that cut through it, snaking south, where it would eventually cross all of
Iraq
. About a mile north of their position, looming down on the parched flatlands from its elevated
mound,
was the ancient city of
Diyarbakir
.

Omar walked over and handed Corben his phone. “No messages for you,” he said in a heavily accented tongue. “So the position of Abu Barzan is still the same.”

“Still the same,” Corben confirmed. “But we’d better keep it on from here on, in case they call with any changes.” If Olshansky didn’t come through for him soon, things might get tight. He just had to find an opening and take it.

“I’ll keep it with me,” Omar said.
“For now.”

Corben smiled. It didn’t even try to find his eyes.
“Intal rayyis, ya Omar.”
You’re the boss.

Movement caught his eye as two dusty SUVs drove up to meet them. Omar waved them over and yelled out an order to his men to load up.

Within minutes, they were on their way.

THE KING AIR WAS MET on the tarmac by one of
Kirkwood
’s security consultants. Typically ex-SAS or Special Forces operatives, their services were in high demand since the chaos had overwhelmed
Iraq
. Per
Kirkwood
’s request, he and Mia were able to disembark in a remote corner of the small airfield, away from prying eyes. They sat in the back of the car that was there waiting for them, a Toyota Land Cruiser with heavily smoked windows, while the hired gun, an Australian who gave his name as Bryan, took their passports in to be stamped at the small terminal. Moments later, they breezed out of the airport compound and were headed to their meeting with Abu Barzan.

“You’ve made contact with him?”
Kirkwood
asked the Australian.

“Yeah,” he confirmed. “He was a bit put out by the change of venue, but I told him it was just a safety precaution. One of my guys is there, with him.”

Mia listened to the exchange with slight puzzlement. “What change of venue? He knows you’re coming?”

“I had him moved this morning,”
Kirkwood
told her.
“Just in case Corben and the others were onto him.”

Something about it wasn’t sitting well with her. “Is he under guard or something? I mean, aren’t you worried he’ll just bail on you?”

Kirkwood
seemed to read her suspicions. “I’ll explain everything when we’re with him, I promise.”

THE TWO DUSTY SUVS made their way across a narrow concrete bridge and climbed up towards
Diyarbakir
.

The city had grown to become the Kurdish capital of eastern
Turkey
. The ancient town, squatting on its elevated mound, was surrounded by a massive Byzantine defensive wall. Only the
Great Wall of China
was bigger. Built of large blocks of black basalt, it housed five imposing gates that led into the old town and had sixteen keeps dotted around its circumference. Newer buildings crawled down its outer ridge and spilled out into the plain around it.

From the back of the lead vehicle, Corben studied his captors. Omar was seated next to him, studying the GPS coordinates on his handheld screen, with one of his men riding shotgun next to the local driver. The back car had Omar’s two remaining henchmen, and another driver.