No Time to Die

by Kira Peikoff

  “Leave them to me.” The strength in her own voice stunned her—she hadn’t known any was left. She pushed open the door, still holding the textbook close to her chest.

  “Take good care,” he said. “Call me anytime.”

  “I will,” she promised, stepping out into the deserted hall. “Bye.”

  They shook hands, his palm swallowing hers. Her grip was firm nonetheless. Then she walked down the hallway on wobbling knees, trying not to stumble. As she rounded the corner, she glanced back. Dr. Carlyle was watching her like a starstruck pedestrian, mouth partly open, his eyes ablaze.

  He smiled sheepishly when she caught him, making no attempt to hide his fascination. A prick of nervous excitement struck her then, similar to the feeling she got before boarding a plane. Whenever apprehension about flying overcame her, she’d think of Gramps’s favorite poem—Tennyson’s “Ulysses”—and remember to summon her sense of adventure for the trip ahead. “I will drink life to the lees,” she’d tell herself. “To follow knowledge like a sinking star, beyond the utmost bound of human thought.”

  There was no better time to apply it. She mustered up a smile for Dr. Carlyle, absolving him of embarrassment. He grinned back, electrifying the hallway with a tacit message that made her shiver, for she knew it could be true. Tucked into her body, inside her bones and skin and muscle, was a secret written in a language as universal as it was cryptic. Not just any secret, but one sought for all of time—the answer to the primeval mystery of why we age and die.

  CHAPTER 5

  Washington, D.C.

  10:20 A.M.

  Les’s cab crawled across town from Southeast back to the committee’s headquarters in Northwest for an hour, more than double the time of his little errand. Because he founded the committee from scratch five years ago, he felt he had tacit authority to cut any corners necessary in pursuit of his goal. Being the boss felt good after the suffering he had endured earlier in his career. The worst experience by far had been his position heading up the FDA’s division on drugs for rare diseases. Later, after that job spectacularly backfired—the memory of it still evoked horror and rage a decade later—he’d quit and defected to the law enforcement side: the FBI’s special unit on science and technology crimes.

  There, he became increasingly upset by the fact that no good federal oversight existed to regulate human experimentation in labs nationwide. Sure, there were local institutional review boards that were supposed to approve experiments, but who reviewed them? Officially it was the job of the Office for Human Research Protections within the Department of Health and Human Services. But that office was a joke. Les knew that their lax oversight had allowed corrupt review boards to get away with egregious acts like hiding industry financial ties, ignoring risks to human subjects, forgoing informed consent. The whole thing was an invisible public disgrace—and vulnerable people were getting hurt.

  And so, five years ago, with the President’s blessing, the Bioethics Committee was born. A specialized agency within the Justice Department, it was the optimal convergence of Les’s passion with his credentials and his Washington connections. No one else could have gotten it off the ground. Now, all researchers whose clinical trial applications were approved by local review boards had to gain secondary approval of their desired study by the federal Bioethics Committee—an extra level of regulation. The committee then maintained stringent oversight of the local boards responsible for ensuring that each study was carried out according to the rules. Sure, it could take twenty years and $800 million to bring a new drug to market this way, but that was the cost of getting it done right.

  Not only had the committee reformed the hierarchy of ethics oversight, it also had the power to investigate and police any suspected violations, with all the resources of the FBI at its disposal. As Les liked to say, it was a one-stop shop for protecting human subjects. No one else was better equipped to take on Galileo’s Network. Les had recruited many of the twenty committee members personally, but some, like Dr. Benjamin Barrow, had ingratiated themselves with the right political staffers on the D.C. social circuit and lobbied hard for a place in the elite group. Ambition could be just as dangerous as depravity, and Les thought he saw too much of it in Barrow. That man acted like he wanted to be chief—he was already second-in-command—and if Les didn’t break the Network soon . . .

  But of course he would. He had to. His heart pumped in anticipation—no challenge in his life felt quite as worthy of the formidable power he knew lay inside him, waiting to be tested.

  He cursed under his breath as the cab finally pulled up to his office. He was late for his morning briefing with Barrow and disliked giving his would-be rival any reason to fault him. Skimping on the tip, he jumped out and endured the elevator’s climb to the tenth floor. He was racing down the empty hallway toward his door, ignoring the hot coffee sloshing over his cup, when a voice stopped him.

  “Dr. Mahler.”

  He turned around, his back straightening. Barrow stood a few feet away, watching him with an inscrutable expression. He was broad-shouldered and tall, probably a former linebacker, with impeccable posture and a thick head of white hair that contrasted with his tanned face. Les wondered which parts of his appearance were by design—the tan, certainly, but possibly also the hair and the wrinkle-free forehead. They were about the same age, but Les wore it proudly. He wasn’t afraid to get old.

  “Dr. Barrow, good morning.” Of all twenty members of the committee, Barrow and he had the least friendly rapport. Les suspected that the coldness between them was due to Barrow’s rumored desire to displace him, but the irony was that Les was actually grateful to have him around. As a top internist and well-published activist against unregulated human experimentation, he was practically born to be on the committee. It was just too bad that he had refused to socialize like a normal human being after he secured his position several years ago, skipping out on many of the important cocktail parties and dinners and galas that the average person would kill to attend. Sometimes he didn’t come into the office for days at a stretch. There were whispers of depression. But he was so competent at his job that no one cared to confront him. It became tacitly agreed that he could work from home whenever he needed to. No one knew much about his personal life except that he was divorced and lived alone—something else he and Les had in common, along with their shared passion for their work. Yet a friendship seemed impossible between them.

  Barrow squinted at him. “I thought we were meeting fifteen minutes ago.”

  “Sorry, I had a personal matter to attend to. Come on in.” Les opened the door and Barrow brushed past him, carrying a sturdy black box under his arm—the evidence. They sat on the executive L-shaped white couch near Les’s desk, which was already cluttered with too many notes and files to allow a visitor any space.

  “I don’t have much time, so let’s get down to business.” Barrow unlocked the airtight box and Les scooted closer to peer into it. This was the closest they could come to the Network and its infamous leader.

  Inside was an array of identical postcards individually encased in clear plastic.

  Each one showed the same stock photo of the Earth circling the sun in space. Twenty-seven times now, Les had received a postcard with the victim’s name written in clear cursive. Then there was the strange phrase, handwritten in black ink: And yet it moves—again.

  Beneath it, the signature: Yours, Galileo.

  Les sighed. “The whole thing is bizarre.”

  “The nut thinks he’s Galileo reborn or something. Classic megalomaniac.”

  Les flipped over several more—they were all identical, except for the time stamps and postmarks—Cleveland, San Diego, Jacksonville. All likely stops on the so-called Galileo Underground, the Network’s rumored cluster of safe houses across the country that allowed them to transport people undetected—but to where? The location of their headquarters was unknown.

  These postcards were the only proof of Galileo’s existence—whoever
he was. The handwriting experts thought it was almost certainly a man. Something about the backward slant of the loops. Of course, it could have been someone else writing on his behalf, or he might not exist at all. One theory was that he was just an idea propagated by the Network to make their followers feel part of something historic, something legendary.

  “There is something about the handwriting that’s been bothering me. Look at this one.” Barrow fished out one from the pack, the one sent after Eliot Shipley’s death, postmarked in D.C. “See this?”

  “What about it?”

  “It’s slightly off. Look at the loops in the o’s. They’re more narrow than the others. And this dead body doesn’t fit the pattern of all the disappearances.”

  “So? What can we do about it now?”

  Barrow shook his head. “It’s just odd. I checked with the handwriting experts and they agreed. They think a different person wrote this one.”

  Les frowned. “Okay, so a lemming might have written it for him. What’s the difference? There might not even be a Galileo. It might just be a bunch of maniacs working together.”

  “I disagree. For the Underground to be so well organized, someone’s got to be running things. Any group that effective must have a leader who’s the real deal.”

  Les eyed him. Jealous much?

  Barrow plastered on a smile, more a poorly concealed sneer.

  “Well, we can’t prove it one way or another. And Shipley’s long dead. There’s nothing we can do for him now, but this woman—” He grabbed the most recent postcard from the stack, the one received after Helen McNair’s disappearance. “There might still be hope.”

  Everything about the postcard was predictable—the handwriting, the message, the fingerprints from multiple people all over it, a tactic surely meant to obscure the source. The postmark was from New York, dated four days earlier. If she wasn’t dead already, she probably would be soon.

  “So,” Les said, “she was fired from Columbia on Wednesday, vanished on Thursday, and this postcard arrived at our office on Friday.”

  “Yep.” Barrow’s nostrils flared, as if he were annoyed by the return to obvious facts.

  “What were the circumstances of her firing?”

  “We already went over—”

  “I want to hear the exact circumstances again.”

  Barrow didn’t hide his exasperated tone. “She was found to be exploiting her lab on campus for unauthorized research. Attempting to create synthetic life. The dean found out after a security guard caught her there in the middle of the night. She confessed and he let her go immediately on Wednesday.”

  “And then?”

  “And then she disappeared the next day from her apartment in Manhattan. There was no evidence of a struggle or break-in, but she’s sixty-seven, so figure she didn’t put up much of a fight. Then on Friday, this postcard arrived here.”

  Les found himself pacing, though he didn’t remember rising from the couch. “Was her termination announced in any way before she disappeared?”

  “No. The dean was embarrassed by the whole thing.”

  “So no one else knew?”

  “Not that we know of. It was a very quiet affair. Of course, we’re still waiting to access her private accounts. She has no husband or kids, but maybe there’s someone she was close to. It will be important to determine those contacts and talk to them, if any exist. In my experience, women tend to spill secrets. I’ll follow up with the Justice Department today.”

  Les suppressed a smirk. I’m two steps ahead of you, buddy. “The timing is interesting, isn’t it?”

  “How so?”

  “This nut job only targets scientists or doctors, right? We can agree on that being the common denominator?”

  “That, and people with serious medical conditions.”

  “So McNair disappears right after she was fired. How did Galileo know to target her the very next day?”

  Barrow grimaced. “That’s the question.”

  A loud chime interrupted them from Les’s front pocket—his cell phone. He tried not to betray any excitement when he read the caller ID.

  “Excuse me,” he said. “I have to take this.”

  Barrow seemed in a momentary trance, eyeing Les with his upper lip slightly curled. His long legs stayed planted.

  “It’s my ex,” Les lied. “Sorry.”

  Barrow hopped to his feet, taking the box with him. “I’ll see you at the next meeting, Chief.” His emphasis on the last word sounded almost pointed, but not enough to merit a reaction. We’ll see which of us knows how to get a job done, Les thought.

  When the door closed, he hissed into the phone. “Well?”

  “I got in.” Cylon’s nasal voice sounded proud. “Just now.”

  “Already? You’re a genius!”

  “It wasn’t that hard. I have her e-mails right here.”

  “Can you tell if there’s anyone she wrote to often? Friendly seeming?”

  There was a pause. “I’m scrolling. Here’s e-mails from students, a couple from the dean . . .”

  “Anyone else?”

  “Someone named Natalie Roy. Says on her signature that she’s another professor, same department. They seem pretty friendly.” Les heard clicking sounds. “Looks like there’s more from her than anyone else.”

  “Don’t move. I’m coming over.”

  Les slipped the phone back into his pocket with a smile. Too bad Barrow couldn’t know. Les hated to admit that he liked him for his coldness, his skepticism—the very qualities that would have repelled anyone else. Les felt drawn to people whose respect was a prize, not a party favor. With time, Barrow would come to recognize that Les deserved to be chief, and that propagating a rivalry would only hurt one of them. But Les was forgiving. He wanted to keep the best men on the team after all. So with every move, he would chop away at Barrow’s icy exterior and thaw him into an ally.

  Until then, he knew just where his next meeting would be—New York.

  New York City

  10:20 A.M.

  No one spoke right away. Zoe looked from her mother’s stunned horror, to her father’s angry disbelief, to Gramps’s quiet amazement. Her blurted announcement hung in the air. She imagined it sinking down into their skulls like a gas, paralyzing them on impact. Ripped open in her father’s lap was the dreaded credit card bill. Everything was out.

  Seconds ticked by like drops of Chinese water torture. Her mind was an overblown circuit. She thought nothing, felt only the rubbery burn of her calves from sprinting the mile and a half home from Dr. Carlyle’s office. A tinny ringing in her ears filled the living room’s silence. Then her father’s voice burst out in a snarl.

  “So this isn’t a joke, Zoe? You’ve spent ten thousand dollars on medical tests without our consent?”

  “I had to know,” she whispered.

  “What kind of quack doctor did you find on the Internet?”

  She blinked. “Dad, he’s one of the leading diagnosticians in New York.”

  “This is an outrage! I didn’t raise you to be a thief!”

  “But the tests—”

  “Forget the tests!” he snapped, tearing shreds of the envelope apart like tinsel. “I thought we raised you to be more sensible than this!” He turned to his wife, who was sitting beside him on the faded beige sofa’s edge. “What did we do wrong?”

  Zoe watched her mother’s face. A tear slid from the corner of her eye along the thin bridge of her nose. She met Zoe’s gaze as if seeing her for the first time in months—not just as a reminder of her own failings, but as a human being, a daughter in distress.

  Sitting in his shabby leather recliner, Gramps was watching them all. Behind his head hung a framed portrait of the four of them grinning in beach chairs and sunglasses, shot during last summer’s vacation to the Outer Banks. The peacefulness of their family on that trip struck her now as unbearably distant. Gramps noticed her grimacing and shot her a glance of compassion, but said nothing. She wondered if his
silence was a sign of his agreement with her father, or merely his reluctance to be burned in the fray. It wasn’t like him to shy away from a fight.

  “Stephen,” her mother said. “Can’t you see she’s hurting? Her health is more important than the money. Maybe there is some truth to what he told her. I mean, we’ve never had a proper diagnosis all these years.”

  Zoe gave her a grateful look.

  “Pam, please. To claim she is still fourteen years old—who’s ever heard of such a thing? I’ll have my firm file for malpractice before he knows what hit him. No asinine doctor is going to mess with my kid”—he turned his fiery gaze at her—“even if you did ask for it.”

  She jumped to her feet, clenching her fists. “You think I asked to be born this way?”

  “Enough,” came a voice, low yet so steadfast that everyone froze. Gramps was standing without the aid of his cane, holding his palms out to signal quiet. Zoe had never seen him with such a severe expression, like that of a prison guard toward a delinquent. He spoke slowly to her father.

  “How you raise your daughter is not my business—until you cross the line. I tried to respect your parenting, Stephen. I tried to back off like you wanted—” Her father made a motion to interrupt, but Gramps’s eyes narrowed. “Stop. Yes, I know I’m a guest in your house, but you know what? I don’t give a damn. That’s who I am, and if you don’t like it, throw me out. But over my dead body will I stand by and let you bully either of my girls.”

  He spoke with the authority of a judge, even as his hands were quivering, reaching for the steadiness of the couch. Pam rushed to hand him his cane and Zoe felt a sob rise up in her throat. Endless love poured through her. She looked at her father: He was sitting completely still, his lips pressed hard together.

  Gramps lowered himself back against his recliner. “Now that that’s out of the way,” he said, “we can get to the real issue. What you have failed to recognize”—he paused, looking at each of them—“is that Ray Carlyle is no fraud. Zoe, you’re a medical marvel.”