The Methuselah Gene

by Jonathan Lowe

  “It’s me,” I announced, evenly. “Surprised?”

  “You’re not in Miami,” Clifford said first, and it was not a good sign. “You can’t be.”

  “Oh, you’re right about that.” I cleared my throat in preparation for what was coming. “What kind of fool do you take me for, Seagraves?”

  “A big one, if you expect to catch Jeffers.”

  A thread of hope bound my hand to the phone. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean he’s planning to take a cruise. A long cruise, most likely. Port of Miami. We know that much.”

  “We?” I asked. But there was no response. Hope springs eternal, though. “How do you know?”

  “Trust me.”

  I chuckled at that one. “I’m having trouble doing that right now, Cliff.”

  “And why is that?”

  “How do I know the police won’t be waiting for me in Miami when I arrive?”

  “Because I’ve taken care of that. You’re clean. Or as clean as we can make you without your catching Jeffers. It’s him and his accomplice who should be fingered for the theft now.”

  “Should? What about the CIA?”

  “What about them? There was no reference to them on Jeffers’ computer, although there is something cryptic about ‘the Studio.’ I sent a data recovery program to restore information that may have been wiped, and came up empty there too. But you needn’t worry, I think the truth will set you free now.”

  “You think,” I repeated. “Nice try.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I don’t believe you, Cliff. Which cruise ship will Jeffers be on, anyway?”

  “We . . . I don’t know. He sent an e-mail mentioning the cruise. The e-mail was dated last week.”

  “To who?”

  “A woman in Portifino, Italy. It is apparent they have communicated before. He doesn’t mention any date or time of meeting, or whether she is to come to him or he to her.”

  “The Italian Riviera,” I said, considering it. “So you’re telling me Jeffers sold the virus already, or is he just spending laundered drug money?”

  “His mutual funds have been liquidated to a bank in the Caymans. Jeffers has been on the payroll four-oh-one K plan at Tactar for twenty years, dollar cost averaging the maximum plus more into index and global aggressive growth funds at Fidelity and Vanguard. He did very well in tech stocks too, always cashing in just in time. His total portfolio exceeded four million. Whether he’s sold your M-telomerase elsewhere I have no idea. There was no record of suspicious interoffice manipulations in his computer files until now, although I didn’t expect there to be.”

  “What do you mean, until now?”

  “Like I said, we’ve created a link or trail that will lead investigators to conclude that Jeffers and Connolly were in the plant after-hours the night all the records were stolen, and not you. They, and not you, embezzled eighty thousand dollars from corporate R&D accounts, and Jeffers will have set up a numbered account in Grand Cayman by the end of today’s business. Computer user identification codes have been substituted too—theirs for yours. You were supposed to disappear, and not to survive this, I suspect. This is so that police would be looking for you, not a drug company executive on vacation, who would then decide to retire early to avoid all the bad press Tactar would be getting. But plans have changed, you see? Jeffers has cut his losses. Up to now he had it arranged for you to be implicated, along with Darryl. Connolly too on a double-cross, if need be. Whatever the plan is now, he appears to be getting away with it, although he’ll be hunted for the rest of his life unless he gets a new identity and a facelift.”

  “Or a new country of asylum?”

  “Yes. Anyway, he must have gotten help from Tactar security to pull this off. So it’s good you didn’t go to your office. I’ve sent a virus to destroy the records on your office system, and whatever physical evidence is there will be circumstantial. Or they’ll consider it to be planted by Jeffers, now. I’d suggest calling your company’s president and giving him a full report on your little vacation, though, or it’ll look suspicious, and you might be out of a job.”

  “Winsdon?” I asked, already dreading the call.

  “Yes. Now . . . have I left anything out? Probably so. But I’ve already said too much, even after sweeping our phone line for bugs and taps all the way to the relay terminal on the next block.”

  I took a deep breath, and looked at my watch. It was decision time. Call a possible bluff, draw, or fold? It didn’t feel as though I had a choice at this point. “There must be a hundred cruise ships docked in Miami,” I said, thinking aloud. “Going to every island in the Caribbean.”

  “Port Everglades,” Seagraves corrected. “A dozen, tops, that go further. Remember Portifino?”

  “But they’re like floating cities. How would I . . . why couldn’t you . . .”

  “We tried, but the cruise lines computerized ticketing and registration records are proving to be tough nuts to crack. Tougher than most government agencies, including the Pentagon and the White House’s own guest registry. I have someone working on it, but it’s very time consuming. And Jeffers will have registered under a different name, you can bank on it.”

  “His new identity, already? He’s the one banking on it. Great.”

  “At least he’s on the run now, not you.”

  I deliberated asking Seagraves to track down Julie through Thurman, but decided against trusting him that much just yet. “And not Darryl,” I said, “who I suspected at first. So revenge is my motive now?”

  “Can’t think of a better one. Why do you think we’re helping you, Alan?”

  “There’s that ‘we’ again. Who exactly are you people? I’m freakin’ dizzy.”

  There was a pause before Seagraves said, “Call me when you get to Port Everglades and I’ll let you know if . . . we . . . have any more information.”

  There was a click, and a dial tone. In the glassed smoking room opposite me images of survivors from the tragedy in Zion were being aired, and some of the women visible were being interviewed. In the background I thought I saw someone I recognized, but her dress, hair, face, and even her bearing did not register to me because it was an impossibility. Then I saw that her hand rested on the head of a little boy. Both wore blue.

  “Wow,” I heard myself say in amazement as I dropped the phone.

  In the smoking room a young man with scraggly hair suddenly lifted a small object over his head and toward the TV in the upper corner of the hazy cubicle.

  A remote control.

  “No!” I yelled, and ran toward him. I bounced off a startled businessman who I intersected in the wide aisle, and who lifted his briefcase to shield himself. The kid in the smoking room couldn’t hear me, and was oblivious to my accident as he changed channels to finally stop at a Seinfeld rerun. I burst into the inadequately ventilated haze, yelling. “Turn it back!”

  The kid with the remote was in his early twenties, and resembled deceased Kurt Cobain come back to life wearing Army fatigues with several service patches ripped off. “Huh?” he said dully, sticking the remaining stub of a lit cigarette into the corner of his mouth.

  “The station, get it back!” I demanded.

  He stared at me as though I was the drill instructor who’d caused him to go AWOL. He gave me a nervous half smile as I approached him. “You can’t have it,” he said, after glancing down at my bandaged hand. “It’s mine.”

  I held out my good hand, frantically gesturing. “Come on!”

  “I said it’s mine, man. A universal remote. Got it?”

  He pocketed it to prove it, then took a final puff, blew a smoke ring at me, and stamped his cigarette under one booted heel. I looked up at the monitor, which was now doing a night cream commercial involving talking iguanas. “Turn it back.”

  “Screw you, man.”

  There were no knobs on the TV. No way to change the channel back. So I advanced toward the kid in green. And he got up to leave.

&nb
sp; “Hold it,” I warned. “Or I’m getting the airport police.”

  “So get’em,” he chided me. “And get stuffed.”

  I shouldn’t have done it. It was stupid. But I tackled him on his way out. He collapsed along the side glass wall, beyond where everyone in the terminal could now watch us struggle. I put my good arm around his neck and jerked as far back as I could to keep him off balance. “Turn it back,” I said, “now.”

  From the kid’s throat emitted something like the bleat that a goat makes, just before he pulled out the remote. He found the channel, too, but just as I thought I glimpsed Julie, another commercial started to air.

  “Ya happy, ya wacko?”

  I froze, stunned at what I’d just seen. As an elderly black man on a chair in the back of the room put a cigar back into his mouth, and clapped, the kid pulled free, and rushed out, possibly looking for airport police. I’d given him the idea, after all. You need to make a run for it, to the gate, now, my mind screamed. And I knew that I needed to do this, but for a moment I couldn’t. Because part of my brain still couldn’t answer the question which the image that had been burned on my retina still asked: had I really just seen Julie on TV, holding her backpack and eating an apple?

  33

  Despite the liquor I’d consumed, the flight to Miami reduced me to nervous distraction. Not just because of the sporadic news reports I listened to on my headset, but because of a storm over Orlando that caused the 727 to pitch and shudder under the duress of wind sheers which couldn’t entirely be bypassed. Small comfort to me was the fact that the news media had still not linked the devastation in Zion to M-Telomerase. The identities of several soldiers-of-fortune found dead there were being released instead. Members of some clandestine tactical surveillance organization filming a bizarre snuff flick. When the key words “Tactar Pharmaceuticals” finally came, I winced. But then I learned that the mention was because two of the bodies found among the other scattered corpses had been discovered to be Tactar employees. When the reporters asked whether the drug company might be involved in what had happened, the FBI field investigators wouldn’t speculate on camera. But they were looking into it.

  I couldn’t get Jean or Julie out of my mind, and I was only getting myself in deeper by the second unless the link to Jeffers was coming next, and soon. It had to be, if Seagraves wasn’t an SOB insider linked to the theft and test. But what if Clifford’s real name was Mohammed-something, and he’d been in on the plan to steal and test both viruses from the beginning? Considering that prejudiced supposition, and since there hadn’t been time to drive from Iowa to Miami, I then imagined seeing Jeffers skating past authorities at the Miami airport while they whisked me away in handcuffs, perhaps even wearing the same kind of face mask used to restrain Hannibal Lecter.

  So it was a jittery, paranoid walk for me up that blind sided gangway “plank” into the Miami airport terminal. And only after it was over did my heart settle down. Then I was more inclined to believe that Cliff really was Cliff, and that he did have tape on his glasses and used a pocket protector. What worried me now was that if Julie and Jean were both in Zion and talking, they were probably in trouble too, for withholding information. Because wouldn’t the FBI think to run my last name through interline computers for a match placing me on a flight to Miami?

  I took a cab directly to the cruise ship docking area, tipping the cabbie an extra ten for breaking the speed limit, and offering him an extra hundred if he ever spotted a blue El Dorado with Virginia plates among all the cars parked at least a mile away. Port Everglades held a number of cruise ships at anchor, including the MS Rotterdam, SS Norway, the SS Seven Seas, and even the original Love Boat. Along the bustling paved docks rushed shuttles, supply trucks, and cruise line personnel amid a flurry of preparatory activity. I stared past them all toward the open blue sea, wondering what ships might have sailed recently, carrying newlyweds or retired pharmaceutical V.P.s to the Bahamas, the Windwards, and beyond. With over ten cruise lines represented in the port, no doubt with strict rules regarding passenger records, I calculated that—even if Jeffers was in Miami already, having flown here ahead of me—my odds of finding him amid the thousands of people coming and going was roughly equivalent to winning at Churchill Downs with a plow horse. All I knew for sure was that time was running out for discovering his escape plan.

  Not knowing whether cruise ships sailed from Miami to the Mediterranean, I went to the port authority to ask. I figured it wasn’t likely, although it was possible the woman Jeffers had e-mailed was supposed to meet him here. Unless the claim of an intercepted e-mail by Seagraves was still somehow untrue, I would find out easily enough.

  As I approached the harbormaster’s office, I tried to recall the few times Jeffers had mentioned cruise ships to me. There were quite a few. He’d even favored me with a subscription to Cruise Holiday once, as part of a meager bonus. It had been his favorite vacation, although this time his “vacation” would be permanent. Given this, was there a ship more likely to attract Jeffers? In getting an answer to that question, I quickly narrowed my interest to the SS Seven Seas—a new ship sailing trans-Atlantic into the Mediterranean, with stops along the Riviera for a Suez passage and a continuing voyage around the world. A single word had indeed popped in my brain, at hearing about the ship:

  Bingo.

  “It’s a maiden voyage,” the assistant harbormaster explained to me, glancing up from his paperwork. “The ship has a private level of condos for sale on board. Millionaires can actually buy their cabin, then live in it or lease it out on a time share basis. Several condos are still vacant, if I hear what you’re asking, but the Seven Seas should sail in two hours, so you really can’t go on board to check it out. Sorry.”

  “Two hours?” I said.

  “It’s supposed to leave now. But there’s been, shall we say, a slight delay?” He gave me a slightly ironical smile as his phone began to ring. “It involves a freighter not a mile offshore.” He hooked a thumb toward the window and the open ocean, where I saw a hulking gray shape beyond the headland, lumbering like a wounded seal. “It’s spilled some diesel fuel.”

  “Some?”

  He favored me with a broader gallows smile. “Quite a lot, actually.”

  “Thank Allah,” I said, and sighed. Then I left him to answer his phone while he stared after me with the look of a man who had just lost a bet over the spelling of the word insouciance.

  I found a pay phone and called the administration offices of the cruise line that owned the Seven Seas under a Panamanian registry, no doubt to avoid U.S. taxes. I asked about contacting one of the passengers, a Carson Jeffers. It was an emergency, I said, and I claimed to be Carson’s brother, Tom. I recalled Jeffers mentioning a brother once, and for some reason the name “Tom” had stuck. I waited while Jeffers’ name was checked.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” the response came back, “but we have no Carson Jeffers on the passenger or resident manifests. May I ask the nature of the emergency?”

  I hung up impulsively, then cursed, using up all the four letter words that came to mind. Then I called the same number back again, because I’d forgotten to verify for certain that access to the ship was unavailable. Luckily, I got a different representative this time, and asked permission for a tour prior to launch, saying I was interested in viewing a model condo. “That would be impossible at this time,” I was told.

  “At this time,” I repeated, by now hating the word time enough to add it to my four-letter-word list.

  “But if you give me your name and address we’ll be happy to send you a brochure and video tape, along with an application to tour the facilities at some future date. When the ship returns, that is.”

  I asked, “Are all the passengers on board?”

  “Most are, yes. That is right. So it would be inappropriate for you to view the model rooms right now. We are really very busy, I hope you can understand. Your name and address, sir?”

  I hung up.

  For a m
oment I thought about retiring to write my memoirs for Pharmaceutical Lab magazine, perhaps while riding the roller coaster at Dollywood until my savings ran out. The moment passed. All I really needed was a photo of Jeffers on board the SS Seven Seas, hiding under some new identity. After that, the FBI would be more inclined to believe me, and they could take it from there. One photo would do it, too, and I needed to be the one to take that photo, just before breaking Jeffers’ nose with an uppercut. Then maybe I would take another photo of Jeffers as a souvenir. One I’d later blow up and hang on my wall to throw darts at whenever I couldn’t sleep due to nightmares. Immediately after taking both photos, of course, I’d call Winsdon and the FBI. Then Julie and I would be free to decide what to do next. Yet if I didn’t spot Carson’s pre-battered face near the docks and surrounding shops, and since I didn’t have a pass or ticket, I didn’t know how in hell I would even get on board the SS Seven Seas to take my double shot, straight up. Although my good fist was already tightening like a rock.

  Yet if chance was not on my side, maybe my bad luck had run out at last. Because no sooner had I posed the question when something else decided to intervene. Call it fate.

  And fate had a face.

  It was a face I hadn’t expected. I was not one hundred percent certain of it from a distance, only about ninety-seven percent. Something about the hair and the chubby, grizzled look . . . the way he stood, as I’d seen him stand before, with feet a little too wide apart, as though expecting to be tackled from behind. The man he conversed with was a stranger to me. But the stranger held my attention too, even from a hundred yards away. They stood near the entrance to a restaurant/bar across the breezeway from where the cruise line’s shuttles ferry luggage and passengers from the airport and the parking lots. The second man was older, thinner, with a mustache, and he wore a lime green sport coat with white slacks. He looked like a retired used-car salesman whose boozy overweight wife had just died of a stroke and left him with a Chihuahua named Fritzi—a dog that he had thrown out the window of his bus on the way here. His rat face now telegraphed intensity as he listened to what might have been whispered instructions. Then a brown camera case was passed between the two men, and they turned away from each other. Ratso into the restaurant, and Fate toward a waiting cab. No time to intercept. No time to question, or even to snap a photo with a camera I hadn’t yet purchased. And there were no other cabs available either. So I was forced to watch an escape, with Fate looking back only once in the direction of the restaurant before settling back into his seat.