Authors: Eva García Sáenz
Where were they taking me?
I woke up in a cell with freezing walls. It was an old chamber, like in a prison. The furniture was sparse, with just a bed and a sink. The rickety old cot was narrow, but the sheets and quilt were of extremely good quality. They were ironed and I would say that they were brand new. I examined the large rocks that made up the four walls that held me. Judging by the state of the mortar and the construction, I calculated that it must have been about a thousand years old.
And that's where I spent the first night, freezing cold and scared to death.
The next day I didn't wake up on my own, I was woken up. Once again I could feel the raffia sack on my head and the rope tying my hands behind my back. Someone took me by the elbow and I was dragged like a dead weight, blind and tied up. During the awful move I was taken up some stairs with little care. I was then dragged across a smoother surface, finally noting the warm and soft feel of a rug under my feet.
We're nearly there
, I thought.
I was close to discovering the truth.
My capturer threw me to the floor and I fell on my knees, disorientated, still without being able to see a thing. I felt them the torment of the rope around my wrists and the sack was finally taken off my head.
Before me, in a lounge with a huge fireplace, lined with noble, ostentatious wood, filled with the most solid, most luxurious furniture that I had ever seen, I watched someone who used to be Jairo del Castillo walk in, although he was no longer that man.
Nagorno limped over to me, like an old, decrepit man, dragging the oversized tail of a damascene and garnet man's robe. I had to look at him again to understand what had happened to that man I hated so much.
Because his face hadn't changed, he was still a glorious beauty without a single wrinkle. His hair was shorter, but the same shade of black. His body was still that of a young, eternal thirty-year-old man, but underneath that outer shell, from the way he moved, from his gestures, from the infinite weariness of his legs that barely held him up with the help of a walking stick, underneath that body, I could see that Nagorno had turned into an old man.
The old arguments
IAGO
I received Nagorno's call at midmorning. The unidentified-caller message on the screen announced that the game had begun.
"Hello brother," he whispered, in a creakier voice than I remembered.
"You know that I'm going to kill you, don't you?"
"On the contrary, you're going to save my life. Otherwise I'll return Adriana in numbered boxes."
Ok, I save your life and you give her back to me. In seventy years, when she's dead and you don't have anything to hurt me with, I'll get you just the same.
"Is she ok?"
"She's fine, she slept for twelve hours and is well rested. What do you think, I'm a sadist?"
I had to stop myself from throwing the phone into the sea.
Calm down, Urko, calm down.
"So tell me what you want."
"I'll catch you up with what's been going on in my life since you stuck that needle into me: two heart attacks, Iago, two myocardial infarctions. I've seen the best cardiologists on the planet. I've got the heart of a hundred-year-old man. They're pretty sure that in the next few months I'll have a third heart attack and won't survive."
I listened, stunned. I wasn't expecting such rapid, such dramatic results.
"Are you speechless for the first time in your life?" he asked, impatiently.
I forced myself back to the conversation, because my brain was getting lost in calculations and nothing was fitting together.
"Nagorno, those are not the results I was looking for."
"And what were, brother? What were they?"
I was quiet. How could I answer that question with Dana in his power?
"Tell me why you've called. What must I do to get you to release Adriana?"
"Reverse the effects of whatever you injected me with before my next heart attack. Only you can do it. You've got three weeks. Twenty-one days. If I die, Gunnarr will make sure she doesn't return. And believe me..., you don't want me to leave Adriana in the hands of your son."
"Speaking of Gunnarr, how could you hide the fact that he wasn't dead for four hundred years? How could you not tell me when I hit rock bottom?"
Nagorno was quiet, it seemed as though he was thinking of how to respond on the other end of the line.
"You know that he always preferred me, brother."
What a waste of time, going back to the old arguments.
"Do you really still think that Gunnarr is trustworthy? Every man is a slave to his choices," I warned. "But beware of the bear's claws."
"Don't worry, I've got reflexes. Or rather, had. Which brings us to the main topic of this conversation. Can you have the cure ready in time?"
What cure, Nagorno? What cure? I'm not even sure what I injected you with!
"I'm going to do everything humanly possible. But not for your sake, you know that, don't you? Not for your sake."
"Well you'd better get started. Let's get down to practical matters. The countdown has started for you and Adriana, so, do you need any organic samples?
"Yes, I'll need to know everything I can about the state of your heart. Send me the results of all the tests the doctors have done, and a blood sample. How can I contact you if I need anything else?"
"Don't push it, Urko. I'm not playing."
"Neither am I, I'm just trying to save the lives of my wife and my brother."
"I'll call you every few days."
"You'll have to give me something, Nagorno," I begged. "Let me speak to her, I need to hear from her that she's ok."
"None of that, brother, because you know that Adriana is with me and I'll keep her alive for as long as I need to in order to save my own life. I'm not negotiating. Find the damn cure and you'll get to see her again."
And with that he hung up.
So that was it: my experiment had failed, my calculations for Nagorno's heart to age like a normal person had been a tremendous failure.
I'd have to go back to researching against the clock. Where would I start?
I started up the car and went to my old apartment in the Paseo Pereda. On the fourth floor there were still some instruments that Flemming Peterson, my old Danish friend, had sent me. I went into my homemade laboratory and reluctantly walked around the soulless room, with the plastic covers hiding a research that I should never have begun, like ghost cloths, a research that had ruined so many people's lives.
What good had it done, discovering the secret to our longevity? Now I was the piece that had to be taken down and Dana was a pawn to be sacrificed. No, it hadn't been a good time to try and end the life of Nagorno. My history with Dana made me weak, a piece that could be put under pressure. I would never beat Nagorno under those conditions. So I didn't have any choice but to give into his wishes, put things on pause for seventy years, and upon Dana's death, then yes, I would finally kill him.
What kind of limbo had he lived in for the past year? How could I not have anticipated that Nagorno would return? How could I not have guessed that he would use my son as the executioner's arm, brought back from the depths of God knows what hell?
I went down to the third floor, opened my laptop and pulled up the encrypted files with all the information from the Kronon Corporation. I should be up to speed in a few hours.
But I knew that Nagorno had just asked me to do something impossible. I didn't know how to reverse the effects of a defective injection that I had jabbed into him inhibiting his telomerase. What he was after was like trying to send a manned spaceship to Mars in just a few weeks. Maybe if he had have given me decades... Maybe then... But the fact was that the technology still didn't exist to achieve it.
And Dana's life depended on a fucking technological miracle. Turning a wavering, prematurely aged heart back into a longevo heart.
I spent quite a long time absorbed in my own ideas, sitting on a window sill in my apartment on the Paseo Pereda. The view of the Cantabrian sea beyond the bay made me feel I was back at home. In the last year I had barely been back. The home that Dana and I were building kept us busy with mundane tasks, everyday decisions like which couch to put next to the chimney or what crockery set was more solid and would last for more years.
More years, I smiled. How ironic. Would there be more years with Dana?
I decided to spend the night there. I didn't have the strength to go back to our house. I knew the power that absences had to torment me, and I needed to think clearly if I wanted to save her.
After making a list of priorities in my head, I made a decision and took my cell phone out of my jeans pocket. I punched in the phone number, begging some forgotten god that my father had a signal.
Lür had spent the last year lost in some remote part of the Amazon jungle, helping some healers from the Ashaninka tribe to record their ancestral knowledge of plants and roots with healing properties. Some European pharmaceutical companies had spent years taking advantage of their knowledge to patent the active ingredients of grains like the
sacha
inchi
or a vine known as "cat's claw". The healers thought that my father was an activist biologist with unlimited funds and a rare wisdom of the properties of their native flora.
But I knew him well. I knew that he was just running away, not forward, but rather back to the past.
Lür was too affected by the latest events, by the latest diaspora of the family, by Lyra's death, by my attacking Nagorno. Lür always hid out in virgin locations where nature was more powerful than man or civilization. Maybe because he was an expert on hostile environments, but an expert on man, an expert on his own family...? Not even his wisdom had helped his children to avoid disaster once again.
"Son, how are you?" he asked. In the background I could hear a bird, although I couldn't identify it.
"I wish I could tell you that everything's fine, but it's not. Gunnarr's back."
I could hear him mutter
not again
to himself, and he then said:
"Listen son, it's happened again. You've lost your memory and your memories are hazy. Your name is Urko and you were born in what we now call Prehistory..."
I rolled my eyes.
"Father..."
"No, listen, it's important," he interrupted. "Your son Gunnarr died four centuries ago. I want you to memorize the following information and wait until I go and..."
"Father, I haven't lost my memory. Gunnarr is back, he's alive."
"You're in 21st century Europe, your latest identity is..."
"My latest identity is that of an archeologist named Iago del Castillo, born in Santander in the 1976 C.E. I manage a private archeology museum and Gunnarr, the son I thought had died in the battle of Kinsale, has kidnapped Adriana in pursuance to Nagorno's order, who, a year ago, I injected in the heart with a telomerase inhibitor the side effects of which have caused him to have two heart attacks in the last few months. Who's got who up to date?" I said, in a rush.
My father didn't take long to make a decision.
"Give me twenty-four hours. Prepare all the paperwork to return my identity to that of Hector del Castillo. I'm going back to Santander."
Wait up for me
ADRIANA
I turned to see the face of my captor, even though I had guessed who it was hours ago. Gunnarr was behind me, watching my moves, in case I decided to run out of that luxurious lounge crammed with antiques, soft silk armchairs, harps, marble busts and bookshelves filled with old books that reached the five meter high ceiling of that luxurious room.
"Here you are again, destroying my life," I roared, staring at Nagorno.
I wanted to stand up, but Gunnarr put his strong hand on my shoulder and I remained on my knees.
"I didn't want to," answered Nagorno with a frown.
"You didn't want to? Well, let me go then, you fucking psychopath!"
"That's in your hands, all you have to do is tell me what my brother injected me with."
No, that's not all. If I tell you then you won't need me alive and Gunnarr will kill me all the same
, I thought.
"Nagorno, I have a father, a cousin, family, friends and colleagues who must be really worried about me right now."
Not to mention Iago, but best not to mention him and make him angry, right?
"You can't do this to me, I have a life," I continued. "You can't interrupt it, kidnap me, take the information that you want and... and then what, Nagorno?"
"Can't he?" bellowed Gunnarr behind me. "Can't he? Have you seen what my father did to Uncle Nagorno? What he's turned him into?"
He stood behind me with his hands on his hips. He was still wearing his biker uniform, the worn 50s leather jacket and the muddy boots. I had the protagonist of
Sons of Anarchy
there before me, furious and asking for answers.