Vitals (30 page)

"In 1953, when I was still a kid, we were ordered to help them find a safe zone in the United States. They had peculiar needs. So we out bid some drug companies and bought Anthrax Central before it was finished." He pointed to the gray cube across the street. "We handed it over to Silk in exchange for certain activities in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and China. Political sculpture, it was called. I took over the , day-to-day operations in 1961. It was a funny relationship. Half the time, they didn't do what we wanted them to. I always thought they were working other streets, maybe financial, in Europe or in China, even in Russia again, but that was outside our scope. The Agency told me to let it go, so I let it go. Hands off, don't provoke them, those were our prime instructions." "You were afraid," Rob said. "You bet your ass we were afraid. The more I knew, the less I slept nights. I'm pretty sure they called the shots from the very beginning. Nobody knew who they were running--in the State Department, the FBI, the military. The Oval Office. Even the Agency. Whenever we tried to authorize countermeasures, we were squelched at a very high level. In 1970, I was assigned elsewhere. Silk went offshore, to the Bahamas, and stopped its activities. I had a long and easier career and retired. The Soviet Union fell apart. Happy days. Then I got word I was needed again. Surprise, Silk had actually come to us with a proposal. They wanted a new and safer haven in a changing world. Someone decided that American industry could benefit from what Silk knew. Contracts were drawn up. I helped make sure the secrets were kept, even when some folks were eager to tell all. That was when I was ordered to discredit Banning."

Stuart leaned his head to one side and massaged his neck." They worked out a deal--not me, personally, you understand. It was a good deal, as far as it went. Now it's falling apart, and it looks like Dr. Cousins here is responsible."

"Shit, shit, shit," Rob said. He grabbed his door handle, discovered what I already-knew, then pounded the armrest and slumped back in his seat. He focused on Stuart. "You helped them go after AY3000 and me, too?" Rob took on the look of someone realizing he has been gut shot. "Have you gone after my brother?"

Stuart shook his head. "I don't know anything about that, and I don't want to know. But it's obvious you've pissed off someone who should never have been pissed off. And that makes a lot more work for the rest of us."

"This stinks, Stuart," I said. "What if you just let us walk away? The Tom-Tom club knows."

Stuart looked peeved. "You wanted to come here, Ben. We brought you here. We've done everything you asked, right?" The rain on the side window drew sliding beads of shadow over his face. "Nobody in the Tom-Tom will believe you. You were never the brightest member. You were a grunt in the bush, Ben."

It was an old slur. What do you get from a grunt in the bush? A pile of shit.

"Fuck you," I said to Stuart. To Norton, "You too."

Stuart let me see that his eyes could go cold if he wanted them to. "The dead don't fuck. They are beyond fucking and being fucked with. / don't know what they're going to tell you. Believe me. But I suggest you listen close. It may be your only way out of this mess. You, too, Dr. Cousins. You sure look like hell."

The car pulled around to a broad alley behind the building. Norton

squeezed out and opened my door. He, too, held a pistol, another SIG-Sauer. Stuart opened Rob's door.

Guttering streams fell in a thin curtain from the parapet at the top of the square gray mass. A big steel door covered with graffiti-eyeballs, grasping hands with thick splintered fingernails, thorn crowns on bleeding heads--opened to receive us.

"I thought it was shut down," Rob said. I could see the last of his starch going. "We were going to break in and get some samples."

"Don't say we didn't warn you," Stuart said.

Two earnest, tired-looking young men with short hair, wearing wrinkled business suits that had been sweated in for hours, stepped out of the shadows inside the door and stood at parade rest, waiting.

The building's breath smelled dry and warm and clean.

The young agents greeted Stuart and Norton. Stuart whispered something to the one on the left. Norton walked right on through.

"Let's go," he said.

Rob entered Anthrax Central. I followed, looking for places to duck, pull things down, get some confusion going. There wasn't much. We walked over a concrete floor. The concrete walls had been painted gray and red, and a raised loading platform crossed the rear. Big glass tanks filled with murky water stood along one side of the platform. It could have been a receiving area for a big metropolitan aquarium, but the tanks didn't seem to have any fish, just lumpy shadows like coral and pipes going in and out at the top.

Two boys and two girls, late teens, dressed in denim overalls, supple as sea lions and alert as terriers, emerged from the shadows between the water tanks. They squatted on the edge of the platform as if waiting for a rock concert to begin.

"We stay here until the caretaker arrives," Norton said.

"I wouldn't go any farther without an escort for all the sin in Singapore," Stuart said, and winked at me as if we were still buddies.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a little gray wisp emerge from

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the dark between the tanks. It walked with a quick, shuffling step along the platform. I craned my neck. At first I thought it was an old man, head small and wrinkled, eyes large, frame shrunken, walking along the upper ramp, skirting the aquariums. But something about the way the wisp moved, a sway of the shoulders with each step, made me think again about its sex.

Rob watched with feverish interest.

"There she is," Stuart said.

"That's the caretaker?" I asked.

Stuart nodded. His Adam's apple bobbed. He did not look happy to see her.

The caretaker wore a calf-length black shift and a cloth cap like the ones they give newborns. The kids stood out of the way as the specter passed. She nodded to all and patted a slender boy of sixteen or seventeen on the head, folding her lips into a ghost of affection.

She glided down a flight of steel steps in a blur of tiny feet.

Stuart and Norton stepped back as she passed, as if they might catch something that would steal away their souls. She ignored them.

The caretaker walked around Rob and me, inspecting us with a patient, gray gaze, her head tilting left, then right. She smelled like wine left in a glass after a party.

"Rob Cousins," she said in a youthful tenor voice that could have been either male or female. She reached out and pulled Rob's hand close to her eyes. "You've made some mistakes, I see."

Despite his resistance, she thrust out the hand for our inspection. Between the tendons on the back, the skin had folded and puckered into tight little furrows. I had noticed the marks before and thought they might be scars from an operation.

"Gross mistakes," the caretaker said.

"What about you?" Rob said, his voice gravelly.

The caretaker held up her own hand: the same puckers, though smoothed over by the years. "How old do you think I am?" she asked Rob.

2 if.

Rob snatched back his hand. "You're suffering from progeria," he said. "Premature aging. You're forty, tops."

The expression on her face hardened. "No reason to be petty." She was not used to being judged. "Once I was the future, Dr. Cousins."

She walked back toward the ramp, shoulders undulating slowly, wrists hanging. When we held back, she turned and blinked like a thin old monkey at Stuart and Norton. They urged us to follow with a couple of shoves. To Stuart, it was just part of the day. Norton enjoyed shoving.

The agents in wrinkled suits stayed by the door, foreheads damp. The kids vanished into the shadows.

For some time now I had been looking for a way to start a mad minute, to provoke some hasty action from our captors--without getting killed ourselves. Nothing. They were tight and observant.

The caretaker walked ahead of us down a dark, tomb-quiet hallway. The polished floor shone in the milky fluorescence of a far-off ceiling fixture. Rob caught up with our guide. "You said I did something wrong. How wrong? How do you know?" She looked up. "Your chemistry runs like a spinning top first this way, then that. You cut too many channels between the Little Mothers. The puckers show me you will have the disease in a few months, perhaps sooner. Yes, you could live a long time. Maybe centuries. But you will spend years in rabid madness."

Rob looked like a dog about to throw up. He hung back, and Norton gave him an encouraging tap on the ankle with the tip of his hard black shoe.

"We're going to be killed," Rob told me, as if this was news.

I looked back at Stuart and Norton. "You're going to let this happen?"

Stuart shrugged.

I just wanted to see who was paying more attention. I knew how these guys thought, the exercises they went through at the end of a hard day to put away in drawers the things they had done and seen.

, I

25?

Maybe this was all I deserved. Christ, I had gotten slow the last few years.

All the corners, the edges between walls and floor, walls and ceiling, were covered over with curved runnels of ceramic. The linoleum was not linoleum, I realized, as we walked a few steps, but long sheets of blue tile sealed with a vitreous sheen. The walls were also tile, fitted and treated to eliminate seams.

Not a breath of air in the hall. Age showed here and there in the star pattern of an impact fracture or cracks from building settling. Some of them had been repaired--glazed over with another vitreous layer.

The caretaker touched the wall with a finger. "Once a day, they used to go through the corridors outside the labs with steam hoses and sterilize, in the evenings. The whole building smelled like a Chinese laundry. It was a lovely smell." She turned. "You keep looking at me, Mr. Bridger. You have obvious questions. I am Maxim's wife."

"Maxim Golokhov?" Rob asked.

"Yes," the caretaker said, so softly we could barely hear. She turned to the left and Norton pushed us again.

"We're going to ask you some questions," he said.

I tried to match this wrinkled stick with the woman in the video, lean but handsome, smiling. I couldn't.

Stuart took a position by the turn in the corridor and crossed his arms. One last pleading look didn't faze him.

Norton pointed to an open doorway. Inside a small office was a bare wooden desk and an old, scarred filing cabinet with labels in Cyrillic. Photos lined the walls. Norton pushed two chairs up to the desk. Rob and I sat. The caretaker stood by the wall of photos. I swept my eyes over the ranks of small black frames and their black-and white contents. I recognized none of the people in the photos on sight, except for one--in the lower left-hand corner, Joseph Stalin, standing beside another, younger man, both in military dress, both smiling. Stalin looked to be in his sixties. A war photo.

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"Let's get going," Norton said. "We don't want to be here too long."

The caretaker gave him a pinched look. "Dr. Cousins," she said, "your research is interesting, what you allowed to be published."

Norton kept his eye on us with as much intellectual engagement as a guard dog.

"My question for you is, will you stop your research?"

Rob looked up. "Would that do me any good? I'm a dead man already."

"We are at that crossroads, yes. But there is a way. We bring stability, not greed. Tell us what you have done that blocks our controls."

Norton nodded. The conversation was following the proper form now.

"I'd like to know what my mistakes were," Rob said.

The caretaker moved closer. Her eyes inspected him with a surprising heat and her voice rose almost an octave.

"When you seek to live forever, you cut yourself away from the Little Mothers and their ministrations. That can make it difficult for others to control you, yes. But not impossible. It just takes more, much more, over time, as a wife or lover might deliver, or all at once, a mix of product and maker, the pure form, then you can be run for several hours, even days, sometimes weeks."

"Why do I have wrinkles on the backs of my hands?" Rob asked.

I watched Norton--Melon--carefully. Stupid men always leave themselves open, but I was not at all sure Melon was stupid. He just knew what to pay attention to and what to ignore. And he seemed less ill at ease than Stuart.

He knew the place. It was Melon's assignment.

"You have cut off signaling paths used by both the body and the Little Mothers." That phrase kept popping up and it was bugging the hell out of me. "What are these Little Mothers?" I asked.

"She means bacteria," Rob said, his eyes on the caretaker, as if they

were playing a game of chess and he wanted to psych her out. Another bad move. Don't stare at the beast.

"The body feels lonely without guidance," the caretaker said. "It turns in on itself. You lose your connections to other humans. What you hate and fear becomes magnified."

She looked at Melon again. I could not read her expression, and clearly Melon did not want to try. Who was in charge here? Who was running whom?

"Dr. Golokhov--treated you first?" Rob asked.

"Skip it," Melon said.

"I was the first. I volunteered," she said. She wanted to talk. Rob was providing a sympathetic ear. A fellow traveler. I was back in Kafkaville with a vengeance.

"And it didn't work?"

"I am still here. I will be here a hundred years from now, barring accidents ... or losing control."

"But you said you went insane."

"You pass through the most horrible gates to escape death." The caretaker sighed like a little girl. "I remember the days we worked together, how he tended to me during my transition, and learned from my example to change his treatments, to avoid the most obvious side effects. He was wrong to leave me here. I could have helped him listen to the Little Mothers. That's the important thing, isn't it?"

"Listen to them--where?"

"Downstairs. In the tanks. Everything else we did was wrong. He drove me to this. Maxim was wrong."

Melon's eyebrow twitched. "Time's a-wasting," he said.

"Tell me about my errors," Rob insisted, his face as intensely focused as a cat's over a bowl of cream. "He must have done more work, more research. How can we avoid making his early mistakes?"

The caretaker looked up at Melon.

"Fuck this," Melon said. He pushed his gun against Rob's neck. "How do you block the tagging?"

Rob blinked. We were on a knife edge and he was discovering courage.

"How?" Melon insisted.

The caretaker held up her hand. However small, this gesture made Melon back down--but only for a moment. "Will you work with us?" she asked. "It is obvious we have so much information to share."

Rob looked pained and shook his head adamantly. "Never," he said.

"Give them what they want!" I shouted.

"They don't need me," Rob said. "This is a charade."

"We had to try," the caretaker said. "We are not monsters, you know." She faced the wall of pictures, head tilted to the right, then the left. She seemed to have tuned us all out.

"Tell them," I said to Rob. "Give them something!"

Melon waved his little gun. "Let's do it," he said. The caretaker swung around on her tiny feet and glided out of the small office.

We got up from our chairs and returned to the main corridor, where Stuart was waiting.

"Ready?" he asked me.

We all came to a wide doorway and stopped. Beyond lay a room that might have been an abandoned Turkish bath, slick gray surfaces rising into long benches against the walls. Seven blue-gray tile basins, as big as double-wide bathtubs, held the center in two rows of three, and one in the middle, forming an H. Dark, pudding-thick liquid spiraled in the tubs, stirred by hidden paddles. Long hoses connected to aerators hung off the far sides of each tub. I could hear small bubbling sounds. The room was mostly in shadow.

"Take off your clothes," the caretaker said.

The air smelled faintly of jungle. Seawater in an old tide pool. Fresh sweat on Janie's arms on a sunny day. I could not identify all the

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odors rising from the tubs, but they scared me more than the mephitis of rotting corpses or the gravy-tang of spilled blood.

I watched for a lapse of attention and put on an act--not much acting needed, really--that would suggest a mark about to lose his cool. A mark is someone who is all too aware he will soon be meat. Lieutenant JG Mark Wasserman changed his name as we flew into Laos because that was how we used to designate those who would soon be dead. "Look at all those marks."

"How old are you?" Rob asked the caretaker. "Why am I like you? Which receptors did I screw up?" Curious to the end. Like a young steer in the chute.

Stuart and Norton took their positions. I started taking off my clothes, but slowly. Prolong the inevitable.

The caretaker walked to one of the aerators and picked up a black wand with a brass nozzle. Two hoses hung from the wand, I saw, one going into the tub, the other snaking around to a row of brass nipples mounted in the back wall.

She inspected the nozzle. It resembled a showerhead and seemed to meet her approval. She turned the valve and a small dollop of goop smeared her palm. She approached Rob. Melon held his arms. Even with the difference in ages, it was no contest.

Rob drew his head back. Delicately, like a cosmetologist applying makeup, the caretaker dabbed her finger in the goop, then painted it beneath and around his eyes, under his lips. He jerked his head aside and Melon tugged at his elbows until he gasped. She applied greenish streaks to his gums, his cheeks, his temple, under his chin, with swiping jabs, her arms quick as wasp wings.

"Greed and stupidity," she said. "It is old history."

Melon let Rob go, leaving him to scrub at his face vigorously.

I had taken off my shirt.

The caretaker aimed the brass nozzle in my direction. "That is enough," she said. She turned the valve all the way. The stuff stung as it hit, like paint out of a spray gun. I felt the tingle over my skin,

involuntarily sucked some of it into my nose and mouth, choked and heaved, tried to spit it out. I fell on my back and wiped my eyes, flung strands of the slime against the floor, the side of a tub.

"I was Maxim Golokhov's student and assistant in 1924.1 became his wife in 1936. Beria and Stalin were at our wedding. We spent long years in Irkutsk and in Moscow, learning, always learning."

Through the haze, watching for her next move, I saw that she could still cry. "I helped him build this facility after we were finished in Russia, after we fled. The Politburo wanted nothing to do with us, even though we had saved them. Maxim, he was the brave man, but he had other concerns than our marriage. He went to the islands in 1965 and left me here, and I became a caretaker. I earned my keep."

The stinging subsided. I started to enjoy the sound of her voice. She checked my eyes and nose and lips, like a vet looking over a dog. "Your friend has treated you with something, an antidote maybe?" she said confidentially.

I nodded. The slime dripped off my chin.

"But not expertly. Do you like me?"

I did, actually.

"Rob Cousins is a dead man. Do you see this? Do you see and feel why?"

Her voice was really something. I felt like a tree about to topple from its stump, but somehow stayed on my feet.

"You are covered with Little Mothers making a palette of persuasive chemicals, all over your outside, soon inside, too. Insinuating. It's not unpleasant, is it?"

It wasn't. I was feeling pretty good now. Confident.

"Listen to me, Mr. Bridger. I tell you the truth, then I tell you what to do."

"Let's hurry it up," Stuart said. "How do you know they're under? Silk couldn't work them."

"I could teach my husband a few things," the caretaker said. "But I don't think Maxim's heart is in it anymore. Maybe he's learned all he

wants to know." I could have sworn that pruned, wrinkled face was sneering. She looked at me. "You are not a rich man, are you?"

I shook my head. "Far from it."

"Rob Cousins asks the rich and powerful for money. He would make them immortal. But would you trust these plutocrats with your most precious things? Would you leave your children and grandchildren, for ten, a hundred generations, with them? Would you make that mistake again? These rich and greedy and ignorant people, tyrants, robbers of all the resources, all the money, for all time?. Do you trust them with that power, for all time?"

As if for good measure, she sprayed Rob full in the face with the wand. He fell over on his hands, choking and gasping. She lifted the wand and turned. She stared at Stuart and Melon--Norton, I corrected myself. Best to be respectful.

They dropped back. They were distracted, their guard was down. But it was for too late to make my move. I was on the deck myself, writhing, feeling little orgasms work up my spine. The skin on my back sucked along the slick floor.

I wondered how Rob was doing. The caretaker leaned over him and showed him the back of her right hand, as if she might slap him.

"Do you know how old I am?" she asked in a shrill tenor. "I am 107.1 will not age. I will be ugly forever and ever. Do you know how many years I was mad?"

I rolled over to see Rob's reaction. I was starting to feel pissed off at him for causing all this trouble, and for going to all those rich people.

"Ten years. Maxim watched over me," she said. "I was kept in a cage. He took notes and made improvements on the treatment. He wanted to live a long time so he could decipher the voice of all the Little Mothers, from the deeps and the salt seas, but Beria and Stalin were more practical. They insisted they be treated next or we would all be executed. They had killed so many and yet they were such cowards. They did not go quite so mad." Another dead smile.

Just shoot us!" I shouted at Stuart, with the last of my will to resist.

Stuart actually leveled his gun at me. There was a scrap of decency still in him.

"What can she learn from that?" Melon asked him. Stuart lowered the gun.

The caretaker turned one last time to Rob. "There is always your brother."

Rob tried to grab her. Melon batted his arm down and kicked him in the stomach. He curled up, retching.

The caretaker leaned over me and pouched out her lips like a wizened little gibbon. "Here are some numbers," she said, and pulled a small sheet of paper from the pocket of her overalls. "Tell me what they mean to you."

AUGUST 13 ARIZONA

We were still driving east in the blood-red Mercedes, through desert caught up by morning. Bridger and I had been talking for hours, telling our stories. Banning spoke only rarely and kept checking his maps.

Bridger's story was coming to the conclusion I did not want to hear.

"The kids sprayed us down with water to get the slime off," Ben said. "We were both pretty limp by then. I was having visions. I was able to fly, I thought. I was in touch with powerful people all over the world. I could hear my intestines talking to me--as if they were stuffed with angels.

"They took us out to the loading dock and pushed us into that goddamned Crown Victoria. We got the seats wet, I remember. Rob was talking a mile a minute about cells and channels and receptors, about how he could feel the pathways opening up inside him. He said he could identify the ones he'd missed, the ones he'd got wrong. He seemed happy as a clam, eager to get back to work. "They're letting us go!" he said. "We're getting off easy!""

"Did he tell you what the receptors were?" I asked Ben.

Ben gave me a look, as if I were some kind of curious and disgusting insect. He faced front, squinting at the long two-lane highway. "No, fuck it, I'm sorry, Hal, he didn't. Not in so many words, and how in hell would I know, anyway?"

"Rob had the other half of the secret. That's what Lissa said. If I get that list, I could finish the work. I would know everything Golokhov knows. Maybe more."

asked, didn't he?"

Ben nodded. "It was the most important thing in the world to him," he said, his voice seeming to come from outside the car.

"They've tried to kill us, they've murdered innocent civilians, just to stop us from knowing." I held off for a second, face hot, before adding, "And my brother."

"Yeah," Ben said

We were five minutes down the road when Ben resumed.

"We were dropped off near Times Square, soaking wet. In an alley. Stuart stuffed a pistol into my hand, and said, "I'm sorry." He looked genuinely disgusted at what they had to do. Then he and Norton went to the end of the alley to wait. I honest to God tried to aim the gun at them, but I couldn't. I was focused on Rob."

I felt my breath take a hitch. "You shot him," I said, hoping he would end his story now.

"It wasn't that simple," Ben said. "First, I had to get mad. So I punched him, right there in the alley. I broke his nose, I think. There was this awful voice in my head, it kept telling me "Go for the snot locker. That'll get him angry and that will make you angry." His face was covered with blood. But Rob danced and sang a song about which genes he'd work on next, which proteins he would block. He said we'd all live forever."

"Shit," I said, and covered my ears.

"Goddamn it, listen to me!" Ben shrieked over the back of the seat, pounding it with his fist. "Listen to me and, Jesus, give me some sort of absolution! Your brother came to me, he dragged me into this! You two stirred up the hornets, and they all used me\"

We were both crying. I reached out and tried to touch his arm. He flicked my hand aside.

"Then something changed. The flag went down and Rob got

brother. He wanted me to tell you what he knew, if I survived. He said, "Tell Hal I know why it works on you and not on me." Then he rattled off some names, didn't make sense. Peace keeper or peace maker or something was the first."

"Piecework?"

"That's it. Then ... Revolver or regulator."

"Regulus?"

Ben nodded. "I told him to shut up. He found a chunk of wood from a crate. He was pitiful. I had the gun but he was waving that stick of wood. The last word was chopper. I remember that, because he was chopping at me with the wood. He wanted to get away, but I blocked the alley. He kept shouting that if I just remembered who I was and what we were doing, we could get out of here. "There's so much life, there's so much more to see," he said. But I couldn't stop."

Piecework, regulus, chopper. I was familiar with two of them. Piecework was a common bacterial gene that regulated the creation of adhesins. Toothpaste companies were interested in it because it stopped Streptococcus and Actinomyces from binding in the human mouth and reduced plaque on teeth. Regulus was a human nuclear gene that coordinated mitochondrial functions. Mess with regulus in the wrong way and you could end up with Parkinson's. That's why I had avoided it, though it was a clear candidate for my work. Our work. Chopper wasn't a gene. I couldn't immediately place where I had heard the name.

I dropped my face into my hands.

"Rob couldn't take it anymore," Ben said. "He made a run at me, and I shot him. Then I threw away the pistol and ran out of the alley. asked didn't he?" Ben nodded. "It was the most important thing in the world to him," he said, his voice seeming to come from outside the car.

"They've tried to kill us, they've murdered innocent civilians, just to stop us from knowing." I held off for a second, face hot, before adding, "And my brother."

"Yeah," Ben said

We were five minutes down the road when Ben resumed.

"We were dropped off near Times Square, soaking wet. In an alley. Stuart stuffed a pistol into my hand, and said, "I'm sorry." He looked genuinely disgusted at what they had to do. Then he and Norton went to the end of the alley to wait. I honest to God tried to aim the gun at them, but I couldn't. I was focused on Rob."