The Immortalist

by Scott Britz

  Cricket chuckled. “Okay. You may be right.” Hank went on gazing at her, so warmly that it seemed to make her self-conscious. To avert her eyes she took a long, double swallow of coffee. “I wish I had your equanimity, Hank.”

  It crushed him to think that she was leaving now. He thought back to their abortive kiss from the night before. She had seemed so receptive then. Were there still sparks among the ashes? Certainly she was more beautiful than she had ever been—even now, or especially now, when anger had changed the color of her eyes a shade more red, from violet to pure purple. What if she had taken the directorship and stayed on? Would there have been a chance to start over?

  His musing was interrupted by the sound of a key scratching against a lock. The front door opened, and Emmy, in a loose ponytail and hip-hugger jeans, stood in the entryway. There was something pale and haggard about her. Without her usual make-up, her freckles seemed splotchier than usual and the rims of her eyes looked red. She fixed her gaze immediately upon Cricket, looking every bit like a bird snared in a trap.

  “Dad?” she said—a single syllable full of suspicion and the pain of betrayal.

  “Something’s come up, hon,” said Cricket. “I’ll explain it later, but I need you to pack your things right away.”

  “No! Can’t you understand? I’m not going with you.”

  Cricket almost broke her coffee cup as she slammed it down. “Don’t make things more difficult than they already are. I haven’t got the energy for this.”

  “You can’t make me go. You aren’t fit. Everyone knows it.”

  “I’m not—what?”

  Hank sat up on the edge of the couch. “Time out, girls. Cricket, let me handle this.”

  Emmy ignored him and glared at her mother. “Just go away, will you? I’ve got the worst headache of my life and the sight of you is making it worse.”

  Cricket shot up from the couch and charged toward Emmy. “Young lady, get your ass upstairs and pack. Otherwise, I’ll drag you into the car and we’ll leave this very minute. This is not under discussion.”

  Hank leaped over the coffee table to get between the two. “Easy, easy, Cricket.” He held his arms out like a point guard. “Emmy, sit down and listen. You do need to leave campus. There’s a dangerous virus—”

  “A virus? Jeez, Dad, let me guess who came up with that one.”

  “Just hear her out, Emmy.”

  “No! I’m calling Uncle Charles,” shrieked Emmy as she dashed for the wall phone.

  “The hell you are!” exclaimed Cricket.

  As Emmy grabbed the phone, Cricket made a dodge around Hank and yanked it from her bandaged fingers.

  “Ow! You hurt my hand,” Emmy cried.

  Cricket slammed the receiver back onto the hook and shoved Emmy toward the staircase. “Move it. Get up there and start packing—”

  Then Hank heard a smack as Emmy delivered a hard roundhouse slap to Cricket’s face. Cricket recoiled and glared in shock. “You spoiled little brat! Come here and try that again.”

  “Stop it, both of you.” Hank had never seen them clash so fiercely before. He was afraid what might happen next. “Emmy, get back! Cricket—!” Cricket reached for Emmy’s wrist, but Hank jumped in the way. When Cricket tried to duck around him, Hank lifted her by a bear hug under the armpits.

  “Let go of me!” shouted Cricket.

  “Not till you calm down. Count to ten, Cricket. Take a deep breath and count to ten.”

  “Fuck you!”

  Then both of them heard the front screen door bang shut. As Hank glanced toward the sound, Cricket wrenched free from his grasp.

  Cricket was out the door like a bullet. Hank tore after her. Emmy was already halfway across the parking lot. Leaping down the front steps, Cricket closed the distance and got to the rear of Emmy’s green Subaru before she could back it out. With loud thumps, Cricket beat her hands against Emmy’s trunk to command her attention.

  “Stop! Let me explain!”

  The car shook as it started and it immediately lurched forward over a concrete wheel stop. With a sharp squeal and a bounce the rear wheels cleared the stop, too. Then the little Subaru shot across the lawn, tearing twin tracks through the grass and narrowly missing a Japanese maple. Momentarily airborne at the bottom of the sloped lawn, the car landed on the roadway with a thud, then sped off in a cloud of tire smoke.

  Cricket gaped in shock. “Oh, God, Hank, I should have listened to you. I lost it.”

  “Well, you didn’t do yourself any favors.”

  While Hank speed-dialed Emmy’s circle of friends on his cell phone, Cricket watched Emmy’s brake lights disappear into the distance. “I’ve blown it. I’ve really fucking blown it,” she moaned.

  “Relax. She’s got a short fuse like you, but she cools down fast.”

  “No. No, it’s more than that.” Cricket kept looking down the road. Hank was surprised to see tears running down her cheek, still rose-colored where Emmy had slapped her. “I’ve got a sickening feeling I’ll never see her again.”

  Four

  NIEDERMANN COULD HAVE PICKED BYRON BOOTHE out of a crowd in Times Square by moonlight. There he was, director of public relations for Eden Pharmaceuticals, waiting under the brass bas-relief of the Maison Française at Rockefeller Center, wearing a teal-blue suit, open-necked white shirt, lavender silk waistcoat, yellow socks, and black patent-leather shoes. His dark brown hair was tipped with peroxide and artfully tousled. He hunkered under his umbrella as though the rain would melt him.

  “Jack!” he shouted, as Niedermann got out of the cab. “Over here.”

  Niedermann darted across the sidewalk.

  “Phillip sent me to bring you in,” said Boothe, offering one-third of the umbrella. Boothe’s breath smelled like peppermint, which suited his pastel getup and all-around perkiness. But Niedermann found it a bit too much for his stomach.

  “Kind of cloak-and-dagger for you to fly in all of a sudden like this,” Boothe said, as he escorted Niedermann down the Promenade between the Maison Française and its sister building, the British Empire House.

  “Just needed a little face time with Phillip.”

  “You don’t know how lucky you are out there in your Arcadian Springs. This is the Colosseum, Jack. This is the zoo. Already over twenty thousand entries for the Lottery. More every minute. We’re way beyond what we planned for. The Promenade and the Lower Plaza can only hold so many. The place is hemmed in by walls of stone. What are we going to do if thirty thousand show up? Or fifty thousand? Move to Yankee Stadium?”

  “I wouldn’t worry. Gifford thinks it’s a stroke of publicity genius.”

  “It may be that, Jack. It may be genius. But think of the logistics. Simple things, like taking a dump. You see all these green Porta Potties? I ordered a hundred, counting on a party of maybe five thousand. Now I’ll need four times as many. Where am I going to put them, for chrissake? Look around you, Jack. Where?”

  They had reached the Lower Plaza, a deep, stone-walled depression at the end of the Promenade. Niedermann stepped out from under Boothe’s umbrella to look over the parapet. Down below, a dozen workmen were struggling in the wind and rain to put up an awning over the main stage.

  A sudden gust came up and turned Boothe’s umbrella inside out. “Oh, crap!” he exclaimed, frantically trying to push the ribs back into place.

  “They’re gonna lose that awning, Byron,” said Niedermann, as he watched the fifty-foot piece of canvas billowing out of control.

  Boothe looked. “Good God! Where’s your tie-downs?” he screamed. “Boys! Boys! Don’t worry about those poles. Get the edges tied down.”

  A couple of the men looked up toward the parapet as though Boothe were speaking pig latin. Just then, in fulfillment of prophecy, a big squall came funneling down the Promenade and tore one side of the awning from its moorings. Niedermann hear
d a crack like a bullwhip, accompanied by the sound of ripping canvas.

  “Oh, hell,” cried Boothe. “I can’t even bear to look at this. Let’s get out of here, Jack.”

  They hastened across the Upper Plaza. Entering the black and white marble foyer of the 30 Rock tower, they passed through the turnstiles and got into an express elevator.

  “Sixty,” said Boothe to the operator.

  Niedermann was trying to focus on the showdown ahead, but Boothe couldn’t stand silence. “Did you hear Charles Gifford’s idea for the big event?” the PR man prattled. “He wants all the winners onstage at once, to be injected at the exact same time. That’s a hundred people, Jack. A hundred chairs. A hundred infusion pumps and a hundred nurses. All in white uniforms, with caps, for Christ’s sake. I at least talked him down to twenty nurses. They can go in between the rows and turn on the pumps with a button. But the guy’s a megalomaniac.”

  The door opened.

  “Sixtieth floor,” said the operator.

  The Export Office had double mahogany doors with raised brass letters: EDEN PHARMACEUTICALS. They stepped noiselessly over a plush-carpeted waiting area and past a half dozen small rooms, till they came to the corner office.

  “Mr. Niedermann’s here to see Mr. Eden,” said Boothe to the secretary.

  “Mr. Niedermann may go in.” As Boothe followed, the secretary caught his sleeve. “Just Mr. Niedermann.”

  Niedermann closed his eyes, took a deep, anxious breath, and opened the door. Eden was almost invisible in his high-backed leather chair, upstaged by a breathtaking backdrop of midtown Manhattan. Niedermann could see Broadway, the Empire State Building, and in the distance the hive of towers that was the Financial District.

  “Welcome to New York. Did you have a nice trip?” Eden stood up to give Niedermann a vigorous two-handed handshake. Eden, a small man, had a stiff, almost military, bearing. As if to hide his encroaching baldness, he had trimmed what little hair remained around his temples to an eighth of an inch—barely a light dusting of gray. His small, pale eyes, with an ever-so-slightly drooping left upper lid, seemed quick but cold.

  “I came straight from LaGuardia.”

  “Good, good. Can I offer you a drink? Anything to make you comfortable? Suck your dick, perhaps?”

  “Excuse me?” Niedermann was sure he had misheard.

  But Eden underlined his question with an unsettling smirk that bared two rows of tiny, pearly-white teeth, like the razor-sharp incisors of a mongoose. “That’s what you want, isn’t it? To be number one around here? Alpha dog? I might as well get in practice.”

  “Look, Mr. Eden—”

  “Would you like my chair, perhaps?” Eden stepped to one side and kicked the base of the chair, sending it spinning halfway around. “Break in this nice, top-grain leather with your ass? No need to wait for Saturday.”

  “No, thank you,” said Niedermann in a businesslike voice. “This chair will be fine.”

  He sat down on the small, cloth-covered chair in front of the desk. But he took it as if he owned it. Eden’s petulance he treated with silent contempt. After a minute or two of smirking and staring and scowling, Eden gave up the theatrics and plopped into the leather chair. Parking his gray ostrich-skin shoes on the desk, he began to fan his lips with his fingers, as if he were about to speak.

  Niedermann took the initiative. “Now, as to Saturday. The stockholders’ meeting—”

  “Which you instigated!” Eden shouted. “You think you have the balls to take this company away from me? You weaselly shitass! My father built this company up from a corner drugstore. We survived the Great Depression, half a dozen wars, class-action suits, government takeovers . . . and now we’re going to be taken down by the likes of you? Mr. John Niedermann—an empty suit from Nowheresville, with an MBA from Hack State U and hardly a fuckin’ dime to your name?”

  The shrill sound of Eden’s voice alone was enough to send a shiver down Niedermann’s spine. But this was no time to cave in. “Investors don’t like the direction the company is going,” he replied icily.

  “Investors? I’m the only investor that counts around here.”

  “Not anymore.” Niedermann swallowed hard—a dry, spittleless swallow. “You used to own an outright majority of the common shares. But you diluted those shares when you issued stock to cover the buyout of Charles Gifford’s start-up, Aeterna Enterprises. You’re down to about forty-five percent now.”

  “Which you talked me into, you conniving little fucker. The Methuselah Vector was gonna be so big it would be worth it to go out on a limb, just to keep the big players like Pfizer and Novartis from getting ahold of it. You were setting me up all along.” Eden spat into the wastebasket. “But even so—what have you got, you horse’s ass? A few hundred grand in options? That’s like a thousandth of a percent.”

  “Not if the stockholders vote with me.”

  “Who? Who’s gonna vote with you? That prick Armbruster? Rod fucking Baer? Hollywood?”

  “We’ll find out on Saturday.”

  “Oh, sure—Charles Gifford.” Eden laughed derisively. “You think because you gave him a blow job or two you own him. Well, you don’t know Gifford very well. He won’t put his name to shit like this. I’ve treated him pretty well, kiddo. He won’t fuck me over.”

  Niedermann crossed his legs and pulled in his shoulders. He wished to God he had Gifford’s signature on the proxies. Eden seemed to smell blood. Anxiously, Niedermann tried to change the subject. “Shall we talk about the Lottery?”

  Eden guffawed. “Hell, no. You’re history, Niedermann. Did you really think I would let you walk out of here with your job intact? See how much charisma you have with the stockholders when they find out I canned your ass.”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Not what, you little fuck?”

  “Not getting canned. Not by you. Not now.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Eden jolted forward in his seat and snatched up the phone. “Put a pinch of reality in your crack pipe and smoke that.” He punched a single number. “Get me Security,” he barked into the handset.

  Slowly, deliberately, fighting to cover up the trembling of his hand, Niedermann reached into his pants pocket, pulled out a black memory stick, and slid it across the desk.

  “What’s this?”

  “It’s a dictation of an autopsy on my secretary, Yolanda Carlson.”

  Eden yanked his feet off the desk and sat bolt upright. “Yolanda? Jesus, Jack!”

  “She got sick all of a sudden and died.”

  Eden hung up the phone. “What of?”

  “Well now—that’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.” Niedermann delighted in the worry he saw in Eden’s eyes. “I don’t understand all the medical mumbo jumbo, but this molecular biology genius on Dr. Gifford’s payroll ran some tests. So did the virus lab at USAMRIID. Both of them exonerated the Methuselah Vector. It looks like some kind of weird herpes infection.”

  “We’re off the hook, then.”

  “Not so fast. There’s this woman, Dr. Rensselaer-Wright. She’s an investigator with the CDC, and she just happened to be at Acadia Springs at the worst possible time. That’s her voice on the autopsy recording. She doesn’t believe the tests. She thinks it’s the Methuselah Vector. And I suspect she’s not above going public with that.”

  “Could she be right?”

  “No. She’s actually a nutcase. And I”—Niedermann drew out the first-person singular for maximum effect—“have the proof.”

  “You’d better be pretty fucking sure of it. Do you remember a company named Dow Corning? They made silicone for breast implants. Some women got sick. Not killed, just sick—and to this day nobody knows whether the silicone was really at fault. But Dow settled for over two billion dollars anyway, and one of the largest companies in the world went bankrupt. What do you think would happen to u
s if we started injecting people with the Methuselah Vector and a few weeks later they dropped dead? We’d have an army of lawyers swarming over us. You can’t hide a thing like that. Not people dying. There wouldn’t be a bone left for an ant to feed on.”

  “So cancel the Lottery.”

  “Are you nuts? Not without proof. Our stock would vanish quicker than piss down a drain. There’d be full-scale investigations. Not just the FDA but the SEC. We’d be ruined.”

  “You’d be ruined. I don’t work here anymore. Remember?”

  “Don’t be a prick. What does Dr. Gifford say?”

  “He says it’s all bullshit. A medical impossibility. The Methuselah Vector is clean.”

  Eden eased backward in his chair. “Thank God. Him I believe.”

  “Don’t pop any champagne corks yet. You still have this Rensselaer-Wright problem. I don’t know how Yolanda got herpes, but she got it living on campus. There weren’t any red flags on her physical when we hired her. It’s something very weird, very scary—and made for the six o’clock news. If it turned out to be a virus that escaped from one of the labs, that could put the whole institute in a bad light. The institute and the Methuselah Vector with it. To say nothing of Eden Pharmaceuticals.”

  “Let me guess—you’re the one that’s gonna keep the barbarians from our gates.”

  “Hell, what for?” Niedermann smiled. “I thought I’d just leave this dictation with you and let you figure out how to keep it out of the New York Times. Then again, you could stop trying to bust my balls and leave me in peace to go back to Acadia Springs and use all the resources I have on the ground—including people like Red Armbruster and Rod fucking Baer—to contain this problem. Your call, Phillip. I have other ways to win against you. You may own forty-five percent of this company today, but if this scandal gets out, I’ll be able to buy it lock, stock, and barrel tomorrow with the change from a two-dollar bill.”

  “Are you blackmailing me with this? Seriously?”

  Niedermann spread out his hands melodramatically. “Still wanna call Security?”