Elixir. Part 6

"What happened to him?"

"I don't know." Chris had seen his mice die before, but never like this. Never.

"What do you mean, you don't know?" Quentin squealed. "What the h.e.l.l were you pumping into him? What is that stuff?"

"The toxogen."

Quentin didn't believe him for a moment. "We animal-tested Veratox for a year and nothing like this ever happened."

Quentin's eyes raked Chris for an answer. "I guess the pathology somehow accelerated."

"Accelerated? There's nothing left of him. It's like he died on fast forward."

"I'll do a postmortem," Chris mumbled. "Maybe he had a prior condition, or maybe it's some unknown virus." He didn't know if Quentin would buy that or not, but he played it out and put on rubber gloves, put the remains of Methuselah into a plastic bag, and deposited it in the refrigerator for a necropsy when he was alone.

"I don't know what you're doing in here, but let me suggest you put your efforts into synthesizing Veratox-which is what the h.e.l.l we're paying you for, and not saving a few G.o.dd.a.m.n mice."

Then he turned on his heal and stomped out, leaving Chris standing there frozen, the words echoing and reechoing in his head: It's like he died on fast forward.

5.

Chris arrived home around nine, still badly shaken. Methuselah's death was like nothing he had seen before. Other animals had experienced accelerated senescence before dying, but over a period of days or weeks-not minutes, and never so extreme. Held in submission for six years, cancer had apparently invaded healthy cells and replicated with explosive vengeance. To make things worse, Quentin was surely questioning Chris's dedication to Veratox.

As Chris stretched out on their big double bed, he knew his days at Darby Pharmaceuticals were numbered. Quentin had all but said he'd replace him, no doubt with some younger talent with hot new strategies on creating synthetic pathways. Now he'd been caught red-handed in his own private project, using company materials, time, and funds. How the h.e.l.l at forty-two was he going to find a new job when the industry was hiring fresh grad students? How the h.e.l.l were they going to live on an English teacher's salary?

Chris tried to compose his mind to rest. His eyes fell on the framed plaque on the opposite wall of their bedroom. It was an old Armenian wedding toast etched in beautiful calligraphy in the original language and English-a gift from a college friend on their marriage day.

"May both your heads grow old on one pillow."

For a long moment he stared at the words, then he closed his eyes.

Wendy was taking a shower, and the hush of the water filled his mind like whispered conversations. On the inside of his forehead he watched a closed-loop video of Methuselah erupting in cancerous growths, then shriveling up to a burnt-out pelt.

Who'd want to dip a needle into that?

Just ten wee minutes was all it took.

Like he died on fast forward.

It could take years to work out that limitation-first on mice, then rabbits and dogs, then primates. And that was a.s.suming he could determine the genetic mechanism. Sadly, he had neither the expertise nor the equipment to do what was required. No way to do it alone and undercover.

No way.

No time...

Chris didn't know how long he had dozed-probably just a few minutes, but in that time his brain had dropped a few levels to dream mode. He was at the door of the nursing home, and Sam was sitting in his wheelchair, but everything had an Alice in Wonderland absurdity to it. The wheelchair was too big for Sam, who was the size of a child, sitting in diapers and grinning but still an old man in wispy hair and sad loose flesh. A little boy and old man at once. And he was waving. "Bye Bye, Sailor."

"Hey, sailor, wanna party?"

Chris's eyes snapped open.

Wendy was standing by the bed, naked but for a flimsy negligee.

The room was dimmed and from the tape deck Frank Sinatra filled the room with "Young at Heart."

"I said, you want to party?" She was grinning foolishly.

Suddenly Chris was fully awake. Wendy climbed onto the bed and straddled his thighs.

"My G.o.d!" he whispered. "It's the Wh.o.r.e of Babylon."

She laughed happily and kissed him.

"What's the occasion? Fancy meal, expensive French wine, now Playboy After Dark." He had bought the negligee as a Valentine's gift several years ago but had all but forgotten it.

The light from the bathroom gilded her features. "How about I'm in love with you."

"Even though I'm a mada.s.s Frankenstein trying to fool Mother Nature?"

"Love is blind."

"Thank G.o.d."

She smiled and brought his hands to her breast. He undid her negligee and dropped it on the floor. At least they could joke about it, he thought.

In a moment, he pushed away all the muck in his mind. And while Wendy fondled him, Chris lost himself in loving her. In the amber light, he studied the beautiful fine features of her face and large liquid eyes, her long arms and swanlike neck outlined in a fine phosph.o.r.escent arc.

Wendy guided his hands across her body from her b.r.e.a.s.t.s to her stomach and pubis. Gently he caressed her as she lowered her face to his, moving her hips in slow deliberate cadence to the music. She hadn't been this romantically aggressive in years.

The scent of her perfume filled his head. He kissed her and felt himself flood with sensations that rose up from a distant time. Suddenly he was back in their cramped little apartment in Cambridge where they had settled after marriage. She had just gotten her masters in English at Tufts, and he had finished his postdoc at Harvard. Greener days, when their pa.s.sion seemed endless, and the sun sat idle in the sky.

"You're not wearing a diaphragm."

"That's right."

"Is it safe?"

"No."

"Isn't that taking a big chance?"

"Yes." She took his face in her hands. "Let's have a baby."

"What?"

"You heard me."

"Wendy, a-are you sure, I mean...?"

She put a finger to his mouth. "Yes, I'm sure. Very."

"But we should maybe think about it, talk it over. I mean, we're forty-two. Aren't we a little long in the tooth?"

"But young at heart."

She was smiling and her eyes were radiant-as if a light had gone on inside of them, one long-extinguished. He wanted to ask what had brought on the change of heart, what magical snap of the fingers had ended the dark spell. Maybe it was four days of Abigail in the house.

"I want another baby. I do. Really."

His mind raced to catch hold of any objections but found none. For years he had wanted another child, but two miscarriages and Ricky's death had the effect of a long-acting poison. Wendy had refused to take another chance; he had complied, and had fallen into the mindset of remaining childless the rest of their lives.

She kissed him warmly and grinned. "What do you say?"

"Yeah, sure," he whispered.

"I love you."

He slipped himself into her and pulled her face to his. "I love you. Oh, do I ever!"

A moment later, they were in tight embrace and moving in rhythm to an all-but-forgotten love song.

"Christ!"

Quentin sat in his office hunched over the computer. Everybody else had gone for the day.

Three weeks ago he had wired Antoine $2.5 million for a single ton of apricot pits, and another two hundred thousand to Vince. He felt sick. He had juggled the books to disguise profits from a neuropeptide and other products sold to a Swiss firm. But his problems weren't over. In six months he'd have to pay another $2.5 million unless Chris Bacon's lab had some kind of breakthrough, which didn't seem likely. The only good news was that Ross's press on Reagan had paid off with the FDA giving top priority to expediting Veratox.

For nearly an hour Quentin had been studying financial records on the toxogen, nearly sick at how they had spent millions of research-and-development dollars for a compound too expensive to manufacture.

But as he scrolled the figures, something caught his eye that made no sense.

Over a six-year period, they had purchased some nine hundred mice from Jackson Labs in Maine-most for Chris Bacon's group. What bothered Quentin were the dates and prices. According to the catalogue he found in the office library, Jackson raised hundreds of different hybrid mice bred with any number of genetic mutations or biomedical conditions-diabetes, leukemia, hepat.i.tis, etc.-including certain cancers.

There had to be some mistake. The average price for a mouse with malignant cancers was about four dollars-the price paid for some three hundred over the years. However, Darby's records showed that they had also ordered a breed listed as "special mutant" which at $170 each was the most expensive mouse in the catalogue by a factor of five. And over a six-year period they had purchased 582 of them, totaling nearly $99,000.

The signature on each was Christopher Bacon's.

But what held Quentin's attention was the catalogue notation: "Shortest-lived breed-Gerontology studies."

It was a quiet Friday morning a few weeks later when the envelope arrived. Chris had taken the day off because he was burned out. In seven months, sometimes working twelve hours a day, he had increased the yield of Veratox by a thousandth of a percent. The synthesis could not be done-not with the science he and his team knew. Wendy was seeing her doctor. She had missed her period, but she wanted to be sure because drugstore kits were not foolproof.

The envelope, whose postmark said Canton, Ohio, contained a small card and a newspaper clipping dated last month.

Canton, Ohio. Medical authorities are baffled by the unexplainable death of a former Ohio man, Dexter Quinn, who died while eating at the Casa Loma restaurant.

According to eyewitnesses, Quinn, 62, a recent retiree from a pharmaceutical company in Ma.s.sachusetts, was just finis.h.i.+ng dinner when he apparently experienced convulsions. Patrons and staff tried to aid the man, but Quinn appeared to rapidly age. "When it was over, he looked ninety years old, all wrinkled and scrunched up," reported Virginia Lawrence, who had sat in a nearby booth. "It was horrible. He just shriveled up like that."

Even more bizarre, several witnesses say that before the strange affliction, Quinn looked considerably younger than his age. "I thought he was about forty," said waiter Nick Hoffman. Karen Kimball, proprietor of the Casa Loma, who had served Mr. Quinn was too distraught to take questions.

According to George Megrich, the medical examiner who performed the autopsy, "no unusual chemicals signatures" were found in Quinn's system. But he did say that his internal organs resembled those of the elderly. "His prostate gland was greatly enlarged, and his liver and kidneys had the color and density a.s.sociated with dysfunctions of older people."

Baffled, Megrich speculated that Quinn had died of some virulent form of Werner's syndrome, a rare genetic disorder that causes victims to age abnormally fast. "Fifty years of aging can be compressed into fifteen years," Megrich said, "but not fifteen minutes. Frankly, I have no idea what happened to this man. It's very very weird..."

"A medical card in his wallet had your name on the back." The card was signed: "Karen Kimball, an old friend of Dexter's."

Chris felt himself grow faint. He thought about flying out to consult with the doctor and medical examiner. But he knew what had happened.

No virus, no plague, no known diseases.

It was tabulone. Dexter Quinn had tried it on himself.

Veratox was the lead story on the eleven o'clock news. With Wendy beside him, Chris tried to lose himself in the report, but his mind was elsewhere-stuck in a booth in a restaurant in Canton, Ohio. He had told her how he had just learned of Dexter's death, but did not show her the news clipping. He simply said it was a heart attack.

You want to know when you're old? When all that's left is the countdown.

Chris tried to convince himself that he just wanted to spare Wendy the horror. But deep down he knew the real reason. Wendy was dead set against the tabulone project. The truth would only confirm her revulsion.

What bothered him even more was how he had let his life split into a kind of dual existence-one open, the other hidden. Like Jekyll and Hyde.

The Channel 5 anchor announced that the FDA had approved a new and highly successful treatment for cancer called Veratox to be marketed by Lexington's own Darby Pharmaceuticals. It went on to describe the unprecedented results with malignant tumors. The report jumped from supermarket shots of apricots to cancer patients at the Ma.s.sachusetts General Hospital to an interview with the head of oncology holding forth on what a miracle compound Veratox was.

But Chris could barely concentrate, and not just because all the TV hoopla was hollow-FDA approval notwithstanding, they still couldn't synthesize the toxogen to make it marketable. What clutched his mind was that Dexter had died like Methuselah. He had probably absconded with undetectable amounts of tabulone and saved it to administer to himself after retiring. But something had gone horribly wrong. Maybe he had run out of supply. Maybe he missed a treatment. Maybe he had miscalculated the dosage. Maybe none of the above.

While physicians on the TV screen recommended hospitals everywhere give Veratox usage top priority, something scratched at Chris's mind.

"I thought he was about forty." How was a sixty-two-year-old man mistaken for one two-thirds his age, especially since Dexter was not a young-looking s.e.xtarian? He had a bad heart, so he couldn't exercise much. At best he could pa.s.s for the late fifties. Not forty. It was as if he had somehow rejuvenated.

Ross Darby beamed at the camera from his office desk. "I have every confidence that Veratox could prove to be a turning point in the battle against what is surely the greatest threat to human health and longevity...."

Maybe Dexter's death is a dark little G.o.dsend, Chris told himself. Maybe this is a warning to keep in mind the next time you think about jabbing a needle in yourself.

"Congratulations." Wendy squeezed Chris's hand and snapped him back into the moment.

"You knew about this last week."