by Jamie Metzl
“What does that mean?” Sierra asks.
“It’s the ultimate insurance policy. He was extremely nervous the secret process for age reversion might get into the wrong hands,” I say. “Unless the catalytic compound formula can also be found, the only reversions possible will be using the contents of those two vials.”
“I need to get back to my lab,” Chou says feverishly. “It means that our impossible job just got a quantum leap tougher.”
38
My mind swirls as I strain to assimilate the massive amount of data on Jerry’s walls.
If there are two existing vials and a secret catalytic compound critical to unlocking one of the greatest secrets of all time, who wouldn’t kill to possess them? Heller must have known that, which was why he took so many precautions and had so many compartmentalized layers of hidden information. Whoever killed Heller must have been searching for the vials and trying to get Heller to reveal the formula. Did they get it? It’s impossible to know. If they got what they needed from Heller before killing him, why go back later to destroy the lab? To cover their tracks? If they were covering their tracks, why not destroy the lab when they killed him? Or did they worry someone else might get the information? If so, where else might they look? My gut twists as I come up with only two options: Sebastian and Toni.
And Sebastian is already dead.
The idea begins to expand in my mind.
With my constant motion, I’d almost overlooked the few moments Toni spent with Heller in the darkened jellyfish room in the back of his lab. He said we’d arrived at a serendipitous moment. She’d come out of the room with a beatific look on her face and an expression that made clear I was not to ask. Could Heller have delivered some kind of message to her in those moments, told her something about access to the formula? Could that explain why her house was targeted? But who could have known, other than me and Heller, that she’d been in that room with him alone?
You are such an idiot! The message screams from the depths of my subconscious. Hadn’t Heller said the jellyfish room was its own little world, the only place where he could truly be alone, that my u.D couldn’t connect to the network from inside? Didn’t Maurice’s radio not work there? Is there some connection between Heller’s private meeting with Toni and the fact that his dead body was found in the same room hours later?
My mind darts back to Heller’s words in his letter encoded in Sebastian’s DNA. He said he had strong indications his anxiety was not misplaced, fears for his life and safety. Could he have feared his lab was being monitored somehow and seen the jellyfish room as some kind of communications safe room where outsiders couldn’t spy on him?
I’m tempted to race back out to Callahan and the Lincoln, but something stops me in my tracks. If I run home to Toni, what will I do? I’ll get every piece of information I can about her private time with Heller. And then what? Will she be any safer? I need more backup. I call her on my u.D as the Lincoln speeds toward KCPD headquarters.
“Baby, are you okay?” I say breathlessly.
“Yeah,” she says cautiously, reading my nervousness. “We’re starting to go through the insurance claim forms.”
“Are the police there?”
“Of course. What’s going on?”
“I need to ask you a question. It’s incredibly important.”
“Go on.”
“When we were in his lab last Friday, Heller invited you into the back room with the jellyfish tank and asked me to stay out.”
“He did,” she affirms slowly.
“I need to know exactly what happened in that room, every detail.”
Toni pauses. “I’m not sure I can share it.”
I don’t know what to make of her words. “Baby, you’ve got to. This is incredibly important.”
“I’m not hiding anything from you, it’s just that my memory is blurry. I remember walking into the room and Dr. Heller asking me to look deeply into the bell of the jellyfish,” she says, “to tell him what colors I saw and the shapes that contained them.”
“To stare at the medusa. And?”
“I started to describe the colors and the shapes. They were fluorescent and reverberating. He told me to look deeper.” Toni stops speaking.
“Go on.”
The line is silent.
“Baby?”
“I’m just thinking about these strange dreams I’ve been having,” Toni continues after a pause. “I hadn’t really thought of it before now, but the neons of the dream are reminding me of the colors of the jellyfish.”
“But can you remember what happened in the room?”
“I can’t. Even focusing on it now, I don’t seem to remember.”
“What do you mean?” I ask impatiently.
“It’s like time stops. I remember walking in, I remember Heller asking me to look deeply at the jellyfish, and then I remember walking out of the room and seeing you.”
My mind races back to Joseph’s briefing notes on Heller. The specifics had added up to my impression of him as an incredible Renaissance man, but had I focused sufficiently on the details? I tap my u.D and scroll through the notes. Expert in computer science, biology, psychology, advanced mathematics. Psychology?
“Do you think he might have hypnotized you?”
“Maybe. I just don’t remember. It’s really weird. It’s just that the colors of the jellyfish and the colors of these dreams seem to be the same and—”
“Tell me about your dreams.”
“It’s more like fragments of dreams,” Toni says contemplatively, “like floating colors.”
“Anything more you remember?”
“No, baby. Nothing specific.”
“Can you keep trying?” I say, recognizing that hope, rather than science, is guiding my words.
“I guess,” Toni says tentatively. “Hard to make any promises about remembering dreams.”
My mind shifts up a gear in the quiet moment following her words. Could Heller have sensed danger and somehow planted a seed of something in the depths of Toni’s mind? Is that what the dream fragments might represent? I can’t know, but the possibility that Toni could be carrying some kind of secret in her brain that someone is willing to kill for shakes me to my core. “Just don’t go anywhere. Don’t leave the house. Stay away from the windows.”
“What’s going on?” Toni demands. “What aren’t you telling me, Rich?”
“I don’t know. It looks like Heller was keeping a secret someone wanted. Your house got blown up for a reason and one possibility is that people may think he somehow transferred that secret to you.”
“Well, that would kind of suck.”
“This is serious, baby,” I say soberly. “Just please stay away from the windows.”
I’m still thinking of Toni as I race into KCPD headquarters.
“We’ve confirmed the cyberhack on the gas and power lines,” Maurice declares as I enter his office. The pervasive fake dark wood paneling absorbs the light from the one small window on this already cloudy day. I pull the door closed behind me and begin my update.
“What have you heard from the FBI and NIH?” I ask impatiently.
“FBI says they’ll send someone in the next couple of days.” He pauses, then says derisively, “They say right now this looks local.”
“What the hell!” I explode. “Local? You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“Calm down, Rich.” Maurice is unruffled by my theatrics. “They said the three people who’ve been killed, Heller and my two men, are from Missouri, killed in Missouri.”
“That makes no sense. Every death happens somewhere. What about everything we told you about the dog’s cells, Heller’s science, Scientists Beyond Nations, Adam Shelton?”
“I told them that,” Maurice says. “They said it sounded like an interesting theory they would discuss with NIH.”
“Which they probably won’t do until they send someone here?”
“I don’t know.”
“That is
bullshit. So the only ones looking into this are KCPD and the Star?”
“For now, yes.”
My heart sinks. The lineup seems pathetic given the magnitude of the stakes. “So what are you guys doing?”
Maurice hears the criticism in my tone. “I’ve lost two men. There’s nothing I take more seriously. We’ve got a dedicated team working on this. But we are a police department. We have procedures, methods, limitations, and our first priority is the local incidents.”
The mention of methods and procedures only makes me feel, even more depressingly, that KCPD doesn’t have the imagination to put the pieces together and that I and our little team are all alone. “Let me tell you more,” I add quietly.
Maurice listens intently as I describe my experience with Shelton in Cuba and what we just learned from the data file.
“It’s an unbelievable story. I get it. I’ll reach out to the FBI again. We’re doing what we can. You have to trust me,” Maurice says.
I look into his eyes a few moments before speaking. “I do trust you, Maurice,” I say earnestly. “It’s just not nearly enough.”
39
I rush home from KCPD to check on Toni. We excuse ourselves from her parents, go up to my room, close the door to keep Dreyfus out, and lie in each other’s arms as I tell her about Cuba and Heller’s files.
“You look frazzled,” she says. “I’m starting to really worry about you.”
“I probably am more than a bit frazzled,” I reply, squeezing her closer.
“I know this is a dirty trick to make you feel better, but …”
Before I object, she taps her u.D and the box opens on my digital wall. A few seconds later, Maya and Nayiri’s faces appear in my bedroom.
“Well, hello to you,” Maya calls cheekily. “Sure we’re not finding you, um, in the middle of something?”
I can’t help but smile nervously.
“Auntie Toni, Uncle Dikran,” Nayiri cries.
“She’s growing so fast,” I say.
“She sure is,” Maya responds proudly, turning her loving eyes toward the baby. “Aren’t you, my little amazing?”
The four of us talk warmly but my mind is still elsewhere. “Just let us know what we can do,” I say a bit absent-mindedly before we tap off the call a few minutes later.
“Okay,” Toni says, reading the undiminished tension on my face. “Don’t say I didn’t try.”
My half smile feels forced.
Toni doesn’t give up. “But you have to admit Nayiri is just incredible, a miracle, really. I’m not sure I understand everything Gillespie and his team did, but …” My eyes lift, but Toni articulates the thought before I get there. “You don’t think …”
“He was at the center of the US government’s work at the intersection of intelligence operations and radical science,” I say. “You’d have to think he might know something.”
“And he kind of owes us one, you know,” Toni adds.
Anderson Gillespie had been, to me, the menacing face of government threats two years ago until I’d realized there was a lot more to him than met the eye. He’d sent a message a while back letting us know he’d been discharged from the Department of National Competitiveness and sent us his contact information for a cabin he’d moved to, somewhere in the Ozarks. And there it rested.
Until now.
My hands tremble slightly as I tap my u.D. His face appears on the wall of my media room. His skin is as gaunt as ever but now seems even more sallow. His hair is as short-cropped as it was, black giving in to the first hints of gray. But his penetrating harshness remains unabated.
“Dikran Azadian,” he says, eyeing me guardedly, his voice betraying not a small bit of surprise.
The sight of him still unnerves me, resuscitating the memory of what it felt like to be on the wrong side of his aggression.
“And Antonia,” he adds, looking at her, in a far warmer voice.
“How’s the fishing?” I say.
“That’s what you’re calling me to ask?” Gillespie says. He appears to be sitting in front of a large blue shower curtain, as if trying to eliminate any clues about his surroundings.
Toni redirects my bumbling approach. “We’re happy to see you, Anderson,” she says tenderly. “We think of you often.”
Gillespie closes his eyes for a brief moment.
Toni reads the small gesture. “What’s past is past, but there is always the future,” she says.
Gillespie’s face softens, and I jump into the breach. “We need your help with something.”
I feel Toni digging her fingernails into my leg.
The familiar scowl returns to his face.
“We’d like to ask you for your help, Anderson,” Toni repeats in a gentler tone. “It may be very important.”
“Go on,” he says warily.
“It’s a long story.”
“I can assure you I’ve got nothing but time.”
I hesitate a moment, unsure how much I should say, but this is not a time for caution. “Last Tuesday—”
“Stop,” Gillespie orders.
I look at him expectantly.
“I’m sending you an SSL file through your u.D,” he continues.
“I already have Silent Circle encryption on it,” I explain.
He looks at me like I’m an idiot. “Activate the SSL and we’ll be secure.”
I follow his instructions.
Gillespie confirms our security level. “Go on,” he instructs.
Gillespie’s eyes have been continually narrowing, fraction by fraction, for nearly an hour as he’s taken in every word I’ve said, asking penetrating questions along the way. “And those idiots know this and are doing nothing about it?” He shakes his head.
“Looks like it.”
“Morons,” he adds.
I get the impression his own betrayal is folded into the word.
“So what do you need from me? You know I’m retired.” Gillespie raises his hand. “Let me rephrase. I’ve been discharged and am living on disability.”
I don’t answer immediately. Gillespie is lucky he’s not in jail.
”What do you need, Azadian?”
“Adam Shelton and Scientists Beyond Nations.”
“I’m listening.”
“I’d imagine US intelligence services track people and organizations like these.”
“I’d imagine so.”
“And you are part of that community.”
“I was. I could have sworn I spoke ten seconds ago about being discharged.”
“You’re not discharged from your brain, from your relationships.”
“Want to bet?”
“I wouldn’t be calling you if I weren’t desperate, if we weren’t desperate. This story has huge implications.”
“Story?” he asks.
“I misspoke. It’s not about the story. You know how much havoc the idea of immortality has wrought in human history, how many people have died in search of it.”
Gillespie does not look convinced. “What is this, a history lesson?”
“Match that with revolutionary genetics and it has the potential to be a pretty toxic mix,” I point out.
“Anderson, we need you,” Toni interjects as it becomes clear my arguments are failing to hit their mark. “Rich may be in danger. I may be in danger. And if we’re in danger, Maya and the baby could even be in danger.”
Gillespie tilts his head back and widens his eyes.
“Whoever killed Heller clearly understands the stakes here,” I add, following Toni’s lead. “I have no idea what they know, whom they are after, when they will stop. I’ve got to figure out what’s happening before—”
“There were rumors about Shelton.”
The sharpness of Gillespie’s words startles me. “What kinds of rumors?”
“Unsubstantiated ones. He was a boy genius who chose to leave the United States to start his company.”
“Yes. He moved to Israel,” I say.
&nb
sp; “Why?” Gillespie asks. “Silicon Valley is here. A lot of capital is here. Israel is a mess. The whole country is in danger of being wiped out, especially if the security dome gets taken away, the jihadis rush in, and the crazies start lobbing tactical nukes.”
“But they have an amazing technology sector.”
“There were rumors that IntelliData Systems was launched secretly under the auspices of the ISS.”
“What’s that?”
“The Israeli Scientific Service.”
I straighten in my chair, surprise smeared across my face. “Who are they?”
Gillespie looks at me like I’m a fool. He blows a burst of air through his nose then shakes his head. “A top secret branch of Israeli intelligence, the Mossad.”
40
There must be some limit to the absorptive capacity of the human mind.
If we time traveled an average Homo sapien from twenty thousand years ago to today, his brain would be exactly like ours, but he would probably go temporarily insane as he struggled to take in all twenty thousand years of progress all at once. Our minds are not designed for massive leaps.
As the startling revelations have come fast and furious over the past week, I’ve felt my overtaxed neurons struggling to keep up.
“Why would …” My brain doesn’t let me finish the sentence.
“I’m just a guy in a cabin in the Ozarks,” Gillespie says. “Don’t you follow the news?”
I look at Gillespie, unsure if he’s even capable of telling a joke. “But why would the ISS be involved in this?”
“Why exactly? Only they can know.”
“How about not exactly?” I’m grasping for any thread of logic. “Why possibly?”
“Think, Azadian. Why would Israeli intelligence want to build a global data systems behemoth that provides the underlying code for the complex systems underpinning global communications and commerce? Is that your question?”
Gillespie’s formulation makes me feel slow. “So Shelton founded IntelliData Systems and he also funds Scientists Beyond Nations. Does this mean Israel controls Shelton’s company and SBN is a front for Israeli intelligence?”