Forever and Ever

by Dan A. Baker

  “Was there a child here? Did that child receive any type of medical treatment here?” The pause was short.

  “Was Dr. James Easton here? Did he receive any medical treatment?”

  “Was Dr. Marjorie Cunningham here? Did she receive any medical treatment here?”

  “Where have you been today?”

  The questions went on for another five minutes. The detective, finally getting up as he looked out at the pool, turned to Will suddenly. “My mother asked me to ask you if it works,” he said, turning to Will.

  “Your mother asked?”

  “Yeah, she ran into Dr. Metcalf with the other woman in a clothing store, about six months ago. She lives right over there,” he said, pointing to the large white house above them, and she’s got a pair of Steinhart field glasses. She’s a bird watcher.”

  “Those are expensive glasses.”

  “And they’re excellent glasses for seeing detail,” the detective said.

  Will tried to put the pieces together while they were sitting by the pool. They would find human embryos at the lab, but these were listed as animal embryos. They would have to send them to a lab to determine species. He guessed the data library was already gone. With the mini-mainframe and the treatments missing from the house, there was nothing incriminating. What would they have to charge him with?

  “Where is the woman who lived here, the woman who did this painting?” the detective asked.

  They’ll find the bodies, Will thought. But how could they? There was a two-knot flow in the lake, and people were killed in boat crashes all the time on that lake and were never found. Something must have gone wrong.

  The younger detective approached. “We’ve concluded our search of your premises here, Mr. Behlen. The District Attorney’s office would like to see you both at nine a.m. Although you are not under arrest at this time, I advise that you not try to leave Lake Havasu City, and to contact criminal representation at the earliest time.”

  Will and Jasmine sat at the table while they left, leaving all the lights in the house on. Will turned them out and came back to the table by the pool, gently lifting Jasmine and taking her out into the big backyard. “Whisper,” he said.

  “Did they bug us?” Jasmine asked.

  Will shook his head and whispered in her ear. “They have everything: the data, the treatments, the dogs, the scans, and the modulation data. They have everything.”

  “Who is doing this to us?” Jasmine asked, crying softly.

  “Victor,” he whispered.

  “Victor!” Jasmine screamed.

  “Victor and the boys are behind this.”

  “But how could they do this kind of damage?” Jasmine asked.

  “Sunahara,” Will said, “they’re the lead player in the Singapore biotech world, which is tightly networked to Japan and China. I think we’re seeing a power grab; a serious run at capturing and monopolizing this industrial sector. The Japanese captured entire American industrial sectors during the eighties, but that was garden-variety mercantilism. This is about power and this is about the future. This is also about controlling the age of biology,” he said, as Ritzy licked his hand, “and getting a running start in the gene wars.”

  He looked at Jasmine. She was distant and crying silently, the tears flowing down her face, one after the other.

  “They killed them! They just tore the life out of them. They took our friends from us! That’s all I can think about now. I’m just hurting so much, I, I… can’t think anymore,” Jasmine said, crying softly.

  “We’re leaving tonight.”

  “How?” Jasmine sobbed.

  “I left the Jeep at Bob’s shop. I think they parked it outside. If we can slip out of here, I think we can leave in the Jeep,” Will said.

  “I want to leave here. I want to leave right now, and I want to talk to Victor very soon,” Jasmine sobbed.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  Will swept the big binoculars up and down the street slowly. He quietly let himself out the front door, walked to the end of the street, looking down the hill. A Ford Crown Victoria was sitting a block away, idling. He returned to the house quickly.

  “We’ll have to walk out,” he said, whispering.

  “I want to take Ritzy,” Jasmine whispered, her eyes red and swollen.

  “Okay, we might need her.”

  They dressed in dark clothes and packed a small backpack. They slipped out the front door and walked out into the desert, keeping the house between them and the big white house behind them. They walked as fast as they could for an hour.

  “I think we made it. It’s another three or four miles. Are you all right?” he asked.

  “I’m exhausted,” Jasmine said. “I loved Marjorie and Darla, and now they’re dead! This is not going to happen to me! This is not going to happen to me!” she said, spiraling into a rage.

  The Jeep was sitting in the yard behind the repair shop. Will slipped the key in and started it. He watched the gas gauge climb to full. “We’ll take the challenger Jeep road through the desert out of here.”

  Will slipped across Highway 95 and took the closest street to the desert. He switched off the lights and drove by the moonlight. They pounded through the dark desert for four hours before reaching Highway 40.

  “We’ll take the Jeep road up to Santa Claus, I think there’s a motel there,” Will said, as the blue light of dawn finally washed out the deep shadows in the desert.

  “Non-smoking?” the skinny old man asked, screwing up his face and looking at her sideways. “Everyone smokes out here, I mean, this is Santa Claus. Ain’t nothin’ to do but smoke in Santa Claus.”

  The stale cigarette smoke, Clorox, and cold fast food smell in the old motel room would have forced her to turn around and leave, but it barely registered on Jasmine now. The exhaustion was complete, and the stickiness from the heat felt like she was covered in salty cellophane.

  Jasmine watched the floor of the shower as the dust rinsed off them.

  “I never want to see another desert again,” she said to Will.

  “Deserts are all about punishment,” Will said.

  Maybe it was the diary she kept as a girl, that instilled the habit. As sleep reached up for her now, she began to rerun the day, trying to find a spot in the mattress where the springs didn’t poke through.

  Just before the phone rang that morning she was thinking how good the dogs looked, and how few problems there were in the gene cascades. The dogs wagged their tails so hard it hurt her legs.

  The Nobel award felt different than she had imagined. The giddy elation and rush of triumph wasn’t there now. Instead, she felt a deep responsibility, a responsibility to be a voice.

  Easton said something to her that resonated, “People listen to you.” That thought had stayed with her all day, through the bursts of joy and the high-flying elation with Marjorie. She thought about what the three of them could do, the joint voice they could be for an enlightened America: Easton, Metcalf, and Nielsen, two Nobel Laureates and a brilliant and powerful renaissance man who was the first man in history to become young again.

  The shock and fear of the murders on the boat, and the horror of being forced to dump the bodies of her friends in the water was so ghastly, her emotions simply stopped. Maybe that’s what becoming hardened was all about, she thought. The intensity of will it took to overcome the horror made her feel frozen, hard, and compressed inside, with a coating of intense bitterness.

  Jasmine looked at Will and saw anger in his face. I don’t think he’s going quietly this time, she thought. He had figured out exactly what had happened to them in less than half an hour, and he, intrinsically, felt the style. The style of thinking that was attacking them. This style was driven by strategic values, but there was more. There was a certain timing and touch to the attack. It was brilliant, and carefully planned. They wanted Will alive and charged with a series of crimes to trigger another constriction of American science.

  Anger was a terrifying su
rprise. Jasmine, who had never been driven by anger before, found it to be a very new feeling. It was hard and relentless. It burned in her like a bad chilidog, and it would not go away. It welled up in her chest and made her flex her muscles and clench her hands.

  Suddenly all of the frustration of trying to get a straight answer out of Victor flashed before her eyes. This time, Victor will answer my questions, she thought.

  She visualized their faces, as she and Will had slid them into the jade green water, and died inside each time. Marjorie’s round happy feminine face, so lively and intense, was a pale rubbery mask now. Her glittering brown eyes were only little windows, looking into the blackness of the nothingness place.

  Easton, a man who took up the challenge of a mystified German physicist sixty years ago, gave the world the key to nature’s greatest secret. He was a man who could have single-handedly turned the tide of battle for American science, but was now dead, still, and quiet forever.

  Darla didn’t look dead, Jasmine thought. She had half-expected Darla to complain when she eased her into the green water. There was still paint on her hands. “It’s not my fault, I was drawn this way,” she used to say, recalling Jessica Rabbit’s line from the movie Roger Rabbit. I wonder if she knew how accurate she was in her jest. People are drawn that way, Jasmine thought, almost chuckling.

  People are drawn by the still mysterious selection and expression of tiny molecules, so tiny they don’t have color, Jasmine thought, as she recalled Darla’s silly argument with Easton about the color of molecules.

  Nielsen should have been the easiest to dump. He was over ninety-four years in age, and he had lived a fabulous life, choosing enlightenment over engorgement. This was odd, Jasmine thought, suddenly sickened to think that a privileged, successful American is considered odd if he chooses an intellectual life instead of the pervasive wealth culture that had somehow come to define America. Nevertheless, Walter’s face was a kind and caring face, the face of a good father and a good leader. His face came to her more than the others and his loss seemed the greatest.

  “Where are the giants?” Where are the great American giants?” She could still hear Nielsen speaking this plaintive cry in his silvery voice. He reminded Jasmine of Earl in a way: a heartbroken, brave man, who had worked quietly, instead of fighting the fight he was called on to fight.

  As the relentless desert wind battered the tiny dusty cabin, she recalled reading that most ghosts were murder victims. They seemed to defy their deaths, driven by the horrible poison of injustice.

  “On the happiest day of my life, someone deliberately killed four of the most wonderful people I’ve ever known, right in front of my eyes.”

  Their faces drifted before her as she began to lose consciousness.

  Jasmine laughed - a crazy short laugh.

  “I’ll do their haunting for them,” she said aloud.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  “Yes, I can just hear it now. Quickly, give me the hard drive!” Koji said, taking off the earphones. “It’s receiving now.” He deftly plugged the small portable hard drive into the scanner. “It’s encrypted, but I think it’s just corporate gray line,” he said, adjusting the long square metal tube to point to the satellite dome on Victor’s condo.

  “I wonder if he’s in the country,” Will said, watching the windows of Victor’s penthouse condominium with binoculars from a hillside by the 101 freeway.

  “Probably not,” Jasmine said.

  “Someone is receiving some very large files,” Koji said.

  The white drapes began to move. A tall, beautiful blond girl opened them a few inches and looked out at San Francisco Bay, holding the drapes around her nude body. Will tapped Jasmine’s shoulder, and as he watched through the glasses, Victor’s head parted the drapes and nuzzled her neck, and then his hands circled her body as she dropped the drapes.

  “He’s here,” Will said, surprised. “I guess he figured we’d be in jail in Lake Havasu.”

  “This is a very long transmission,” Koji said. “It’s going to fill 500 gigabytes in another few minutes.”

  Jasmine watched as the LED’s on the hard drive counted down to the full bar. “That’s it,” she said.

  “It stopped, the signal stopped just after the drive did. It’s probably just a handshake,” Koji said.

  “Let’s go talk to Victor,” Jasmine said.

  “Let’s look at the data first,” Will said, holding the hard drive.

  Jasmine slipped the key into the lock at Marjorie’s house and turned the big deadbolt. The door opened silently. Jasmine looked around the lovely old house as they passed through the kitchen, remembering the long lunches and riotous conversations. She could still see Marjorie doing her wacky Go Go dance and baking Rammy’s cookies. Marjorie was gone.

  She’s gone forever, and her house was empty and silent. It seemed as if the house was covered with some kind of a glass shell.

  “It’s here,” he said turning to Jasmine. The mini-mainframe looked untouched. Jasmine went over to the big bookcase where Marjorie kept her data CD’s.

  “Her data’s gone,” Jasmine said.

  “That’s no surprise.”

  “Let’s just have a look,” Koji said, plugging in the hard drive and powering up the workstation. “Encrypted,” he said, looking at the file descriptions, “but it’s old. I can get it decoded.”

  “How long will it take?” Will asked.

  “An hour, maybe two,” Koji said.

  Jasmine went out into the garden and sat down on Marjorie’s big wooden, over-stuffed lounge. It was so good to see trees again, and to be surrounded by green living things. She fell into a deep sleep as she breathed in the cool sea air. Will sat next to her stroking her hair and thinking about the wonderful life they could have. “Take a nap. I’ll come up and get you when we’ve decrypted,” he said, kissing her hand.

  “The first subsets are coming just now,” Koji said. “It looks like video.”

  “Is it high resolution?” Will asked.

  “Motion capture,” Koji said.

  “I know that file format,” Will said.

  “MRI data files,” Koji said. “I’ll convert it.”

  “Whole body scans with two patients. Open the notes section.”

  PRETREATMENT PATIENT #900765

  30 DAYS FROM TREATMENT PATIENT #900765

  60 DAYS FROM TREATMENT PATIENT #900765

  90 DAYS FROM TREATMENT PATIENT #900765

  “The last file is incomplete,” Koji said.

  “It’s our treatment! Those are the modulation frequencies on the right! Click on notes.”

  As the patients’ notes paragraph popped up, Will read intently:

  “Adult Male, DOB 8-13-20. That would make the patient 88 years old. Click on the photo,” he said. A mug shot of a distinguished looking elderly Asian man appeared. “Capture that in Photoshop and open the browser.” Will reached over and typed in Singapore Political Leaders. “Click on the PAP, the People’s Action Party. Now click on the pictures.” Koji clicked down the list, the oldest first.

  “That’s him.”

  Will reached over and operated the track ball with his left hand, clicking on the photo of the second patient. “I don’t believe it!”

  “You know this man?” Koji said.

  “I was in Indonesia in the Peace Corps in the sixties. You’re looking at one of the richest men in the world,” Will said.

  “It can’t be!” Koji said.

  “I thought he was dead.”

  “He must be very old,” Koji said.

  “Not for long, Victor, you son of a bitch,” Will said standing up suddenly.

  “There’re just the first few lines of an email attached to the last scan,” Koji said, running the decrypting routine.

  Condition is very grave. Urgent! You correct this immediately, or unimaginable conseqenc….

  Will looked at Koji, completely baffled.

  Jasmine was sleeping on the big lounge with the s
unflower print slipcover in the garden. She was pale and haggard. She looked like the gunshot victims he had seen in the emergency room, Will thought. He sat down gently on the thick pad, and watched the birds jump from tree to tree in the garden. Jasmine woke up suddenly, sitting up and slamming into Will. “Where am I?” she cried.

  “I’m here, right here,” he said comforting her.

  “What was on the drive?” she asked, blinking her eyes.

  “MRI scans. Victor has our treatment. I saw the modulation frequencies. Take a wild guess of who they treated,” he said, rubbing her shoulders.

  “I don’t know,” Jasmine said.

  “The guy who ran Indonesia for fifty years,” he said softly.

  Jasmine looked at him sleepily. “But he can’t still be alive.”

  “He’s alive and then some.”

  “Why?” Jasmine asked.

  “Because he’s dying of old age, and agreeable to parting with a few of his many billions,” Will said.

  “We need to talk to Victor right away, and Victor needs to talk to us,” Jasmine said groggily. “This time Victor will talk to us.”

  “We’ll go back over to his condo in the morning,” Will said.

  “No, I want to go now. I have some very dear very dead friends I want to talk to Victor about, and I want to talk to him about them now, right now!” Jasmine said in a hard, driving tone.

  They waited patiently for Victor to leave his condo. The late afternoon hours went by slowly. They discussed an option if Victor didn’t leave the condo, but there wasn’t one. The building was very secure and a call would tip him. “All we can do is to wait,” Will said, in a thin, hoarse voice.

  It was dark when Victor finally left the flashy building, and when he did they almost missed him. He had traded his black BMW for the new silver Ferrari Fiorano. Jasmine was ready. When the steel garage door opened, she stepped out in front of Victor’s car. He slammed on the brakes, almost hitting her, as the door closed behind him. Will then walked up to Victor’s window.

  “Are you in a hurry Victor?” Will said, leaning in the window.