“Jenny, what did you do?” Laura whispered.
But Jenny paid no attention. “Just as well,” she sang out. “We were just getting ready for our nap, weren’t we?”
Her voice had the musical lilt of a woman at ease with her life.
Laura looked for signs that she was playacting for the child’s sake, that beneath the conditioned facade of a mother’s loving patience lay some awareness. That Jenny knew what she had done to her daughter.
There were none.
“Can’t I stay up, Mommy? Please?”
Nothing was as it seemed. Jenny was out of her mind. Her daughter was a sixteen-year-old in a toddler’s body. Roger was frozen at a half his age.
For a moment Laura felt as if her own mind would go, that without warning she would hear a sickening snap and all the freakshow horrors would be perfectly normal.
“It’s already past your bedtime, Little Miss.”
“But I want to stay up. I never get company.”
“You have lots of company.” Jenny waved at all the stuffed animals.
“I mean
real
company.”
Abigail looked at the wall clock. “Oh, Mommy, it’s time for my medicine.”
The clock was a big plastic pocketwatch like what the White Rabbit toted to Wonderland. Except the numbers were reversed and the second hand was running backward.
Good God!
The child had memorized positions of the hands without a clue.
“Now give Auntie Wendy a big kiss good night.” Adoringly Jenny watched the child climb off her lap.
Abigail’s body was tiny, like an anemic dwarf, with newborn skin and hair, but with older movements. She looked like some alien replica of a human child. She opened her arms, but Laura didn’t want to touch her.
“How old are you?” Laura asked, her voice rasping.
Jenny tried to cut her off. “No more chit-chat, please. Time for bed.”
“Six.”
“Six?”
“Almost seven. Then I can go outside.”
“Why can’t you go out now?”
“Enough, enough, you two,” Jenny sang out. “Time for good little girls to go bed.”
“Because I’m sick,” Abigail answered.
“What’s wrong with you? How are you sick?”
“I’m sick, that’s all. But Mommy says the medicine will make me better. And then I can go to Boston. Do they speak French in Boston?”
Jenny got up. “Now I’m getting cross.” She picked Abigail up and lay her on the bed to change her diaper. “If you don’t mind,” Jenny said and shooed Laura out of the room.
The door closed, and Laura leaned up against it with her eyes pressed shut. All her instincts were keyed to be as far from here as she could possibly get.
“You fucking bitch!”
Laura’s eyes snapped opened.
A man stood before her with a gun at her face.
“What the hell did you do to my daughter?”
“Ted?” She barely recognize him.
“You made her into a freak.” He jammed the gun under her chin.
“I didn’t know,” she gasped.
“She’s the same age she was ten years ago. The same fucking age. She never grew up.” His expression shifted as he studied her face. “She gave her your shit then kept her locked up in here for ten years. And nobody knew. Nobody. The neighbors thought she was a widow living alone. She never let her out of the house. Never.”
All Laura could do was shake her head.
“She’s never seen another kid.” His voice cracked and tears began rolling down his face. “How did she get it?”
“She took them.”
She explained how Jenny must have stolen some ampules years ago when they were at the cottage in the Adirondacks.
Ted listened and lowered the gun. “It took me a year to find her. I didn’t know where they’d moved. She once said she liked the name Phoenix, so I checked the listing. For a whole year.” His body slumped. “She still remembers me. Just like before I went away. She should be sixteen years old.”
From inside Abigail was protesting something.
Ted put his gun inside his jacket as Jenny stepped out. She looked at him, and the grin slid off her face and her eyes instantly hardened. “I told you her next visiting hours were tomorrow, not today. Doctor’s orders.”
Ted looked at Laura. “She’s out of her mind.”
“Mommy, is that Daddy?”
“Now she heard you,” Jenny snapped. “It’s time to take her medicine.” Then she turned to Laura. “The refills, please.”
“Mommy, I want Daddy to give me my medicine. I’ll show him how to do it,” she shouted.
Laura fumbled in her shoulder bag for the packet of ampules.
“Please, Mommy? Daddy hasn’t seen me since I was five.”
“Just this once,” Jenny said and opened the door. She made a face at Ted. “Make it brief,” she snapped.
Abigail was propped up on her bed with her dolls and holding a hypodermic needle. “Then Daddy can tell me about the army.”
Jenny led the way, and through the closed door Laura heard Abigail. “Don’t cry, Daddy. It doesn’t hurt at all.”
Laura was trying to decide what to do when her cell phone rang.
It was Roger. The police were coming. He didn’t know how they got tipped off, but his scanner had picked up a dispatch call for number 247 Farmington Road. She had to get out immediately. He’d pick her up in a minute.
Ted had called, she told herself. Yes, he had called the police to get help for Abigail.
Laura shot down the stairs and ran outside just as Roger pulled up. Roger flung open the passenger door. “Whose car is that?”
“Ted’s. Roger, we have to give her the real stuff,” Laura cried. It was packed in the trunks buried in the back of the van.
“Hurry up,” Brett shouted. “They’re right behind us.”
“No. She gave it to Abigail.”
Roger looked at her not knowing what she meant.
“Get
in!”
“She gave Elixir to Abigail. We have to give her more.”
But Roger disregarded her and pulled her into the passenger seat.
They could send her a supply, she told herself as she closed the door. Yes, they’d mail some ampules from the road. Laura locked the door. The only problem was that she didn’t know when her last injection had been.
They were just pulling away when from inside the house three sharp sounds rang out.
“Omigod!” Laura screamed. “Nooooo!” She started to open the door
but Roger pulled her back and screeched out the drive and onto the main road. “Go back. For God’s sake go back!”
Laura was still screaming as the police in several vehicles turned into Jenny’s driveway and poured into her house.
“He killed them. He killed them.”
Antoine lay the book on his lap and looked out the window of his Lear jet.
He was two chapters from the end, and he still could not figure out how the protagonist was going to slip the peril. That bothered him because he had always prided himself in second-guessing authors. Only Agatha Christie could throw him. This one was a close second. So far.
“Finished yet?” Vince asked.
“Another twenty pages.”
“You can knock it off while they refuel.”
Vince double-checked the sheets of specs downloaded from the various databases they had penetrated. He passed a copy to Antoine and the other men in the cabin.
Antoine studied the material. They had narrowed it down, but it was still not enough to pinpoint them. There was a missing element, and timing was critical.
The aircraft descended into the Atlanta airport where they would refuel for the trip to Indianapolis. The unseasonable cold front had left a blanket of snow in the northeast but, gratefully, they would not be heading that far north.
Such bizarre weather for this time of year, Antoine thought. While meteorologists pointed to La Niña, El Niño’s cool sister, one religious quack went so far to proclaim that it was “the wrath of God”—the same man who claimed that Roger Glover was the “hand servant of Satan” and Elixir “the Devil’s brew.”
While the authorities were hot after the Glovers, they did not have the data that sat in Antoine’s lap. Data that but for one detail would point to where they were heading.
He checked his watch though he knew it was about four-fifteen.
4:09. He was losing his touch. Age, he told himself. It was mucking up his internal clockwork.
The plane landed.
While the ground crews filled the tanks, Antoine sipped his wine and finished his book.
He reread the last few pages in keen delight. A very interesting twist, he thought. Ingenious, in fact. He had not seen it coming at all. Not at all, even though, of course, there were enough clues—but nothing trite like planted buttons or pipe cleaners. It was in the character of the protagonist herself. So obvious, in retrospect: The yearning for the past. Like Dorothy in
The Wizard of Oz
. Three clicks of her heels.
Character, he told himself. And what is that, but the illustration of incident? And what is incident but the dramatization of character? Henry James, that one.
Antoine licked his lips the way he did when he got excited and picked up the phone to explain to the pilot that there was a change in plans. They would be heading northeast after all. And prepare for a descent in the snow.
T
he Glovers were about three hours into Ohio when the story came over the airwaves: a double murder and suicide that shocked the small farming town of Prairie, Indiana. Information was still scanty, and authorities were not disclosing the names of victims until notification of next of kin.
Laura snapped if off. “Next of kin,” she repeated, her voice ragged from crying. “We’re next of kin.”
Roger said nothing. Gratefully, the hysteria was gone.
Earlier she had been so frantic to turn around that getting caught meant nothing to her. Even if she couldn’t have saved them, Jenny was her sister, and Abigail was still her niece. She had to be there, she demanded. She had to be certain their bodies were cared for properly, that they would get decent funeral and burial arrangements—if for nothing else, to draw closure to the madness. Besides, they were responsible for their condition.
“Laura, if we go back, we’d be arrested.” Roger had said. “We could also be implicated in their deaths.”
“I should have known,” she said. “He had a gun. It’s why he came. I should never have left.”
“He might have killed you, too, Mom,” Brett added.
But Laura did not respond to him. “My family is dead,” she cried. “Look what we did to them.”
For miles she said nothing else but lay her head against a pillow and receded into a silent grief. Every so often she’d weep quietly.
Exhausted, Roger drove on.
More than anything else, what ate at him was what all this was doing
to Brett. First, the terror of his parents wanted by every law enforcement agency in the country. Then the horror of Jenny and Abigail’s murder. Adding to that was how spent Roger and Laura were. She had always been a brick and he, the voice of reason. Now they were tottering on the edge of defeat.
When they passed signs for the Interstate to Pennsylvania, Brett asked, “Where’re we going?”
“Upstate New York,” Roger said.
“Who’s there?”
“Nobody, I hope. But there’s a safehouse we used to live in,” and he told Brett about the cottage on Black Eagle Lake. “Think you could handle living in the woods for a few weeks?”
“Sure. It’d be like going to camp.”
Brett was putting things in a good light, as if this were some backwoods adventure. And Roger drew some encouragement from that. Brett was at an age when he was expected to assume some responsibility for their fate. Likewise, his opinion and strength of purpose mattered.
Unconsciously Roger fingered the tube around his neck.
The religious loonies had called him the Antichrist. At first he had been humored by the absurd accusation, but as he drove on it struck him how those claims made some kind of sense. Rather than new life, every human and animal he had touched with Elixir had suffered afflictions that were almost biblical.
They passed through Ohio and the northwest corner of Pennsylvania and into the western end of New York state.
While Brett slept through the night, Laura dozed fitfully or just gazed numbly out the window. She said very little.
Roger had thought about stopping at a motel for the night, but that was too risky. Besides, he wouldn’t have slept, given the news.
According to the radio, anti-government protests were growing everywhere. People were demanding the White House come clean with the coverup. Others wanted Elixir released to the public. Meanwhile, a siege had taken place at the U.S. embassy in Cairo by fundamentalists. Some people were dead and hostages were being held by a group of men who had declared a holy war against the U.S. for “genetic imperialism.” And Roger was its evil leader.
But his demonization did not stop there. Jewish cabalists to Christian
millennialists saw Elixir as a sign that the Messiah would descend and wind things up. To some, Roger was simply a neutral harbinger. To others he was the devil incarnate.
There were other stories. One was a followup report about the murder/suicide tragedy in Prairie. Roger tried to turn it off, but Laura heard it and stopped him. She had been hoping against hope that it was somebody else’s tragedy.
“We now have confirmed reports that the victims were a middle-age divorced couple, Theodore Kaminsky, age sixty-three, and his wife, Jennifer, age fifty. Jennifer Kaminsky is the sister of Wendy Bacon, alias Laura Glover, wife of biologist Christopher Bacon who …” The announcer went on to explain the bizarre twist that linked the crime scene to them.
But what summoned a gasp from Laura was the end of the report.
“ … As reported, there was a third victim who had died later at County Memorial Hospital, but authorities have still not been able to determine the age or identity because of unusual condition of the victim’s body. According to Prairie police, it appeared to be a very elderly woman dressed in children’s clothing.”
“Oh, God!”
“What happened?” Brett asked, waking up.
Laura looked toward Roger, her face bloodless. She tried to talk but couldn’t.
“A news report about Jenny,” Roger explained. Then he took a deep breath. “What Mom didn’t tell you was that Jenny had given the stuff to her daughter to keep her a child.”
“What? How come?”
“I’m not sure, but I guess she felt like a failure with Kelly. Whatever, when Abigail died she must have aged.”
“You mean she turned really old?”
“Yes.”
“Is that right, Mom?”
But she didn’t answer him. “Pull over,” she said to Roger. “I want you to pull over.”
They were on a country road of farms. It was midmorning and traffic was sparse, and a cold rain fell. “Why?”
“I want you to take what you need, and dump the rest. Please.”
She had that wild, desperate look in her eye that for a moment made Roger think he was looking at Jenny.
“Mom, calm down.”
“Stop here.”
“Laura, I think we better talk this over first.”
“Roger, I beg you. Take what you need and destroy the rest.”
“And what will that do?”
“It will spare others.” Her voice was oddly flat, her manner controlled. But he knew she was at the edge, that if he refused her she would crack. “There’s a clearing there,” she pointed.
Roger pulled onto a soft shoulder by a field of corn.
“Let’s talk this over,” he said.
“There’s nothing to talk over.”
He knew what she was thinking: The substance had killed everything in her life. The world was threatening to explode. She wanted it eliminated. She didn’t care how he did it—dump it off the next bridge, smash the vials with a rock. She just wanted the stuff to be gone from existence.
At the moment, Roger cared nothing about the world or even going on indefinitely any more. What was certain was that he could not ask her to hole up for a few weeks in the cabin. Either she would go mad or take Brett to the police herself.
He stared through windshield, the only sound filling the car was that of the rain pattering dismally on the roof. He thought for a moment.
“Okay, but give me twenty-four hours. Then I’ll get rid of it. I promise, no matter what. You can do it yourself.”
She turned her head toward him. “Twenty-four hours? Who knows where we’ll be in twenty-four hours, or who might get hold of it?” She took his arm. “Roger, please do this for me.” Her eyes were pooled with tears again. “Please.”
“Give me a moment,” he said and from his jacket he pulled out the cell phone and a portable tape recorder from the glove compartment. When he was properly connected, he called Information in Washington, D.C. When he got that, he said, “The White House, please.”
“What are you doing?” Laura asked.
“Cutting a deal.”
“What kind of a deal? What are you talking about?”
“Trust me.”
Laura looked at him blankly.
“Dad, don’t do anything dumb.”
“I’ve already done that.”
Several transfers later and minutes of waiting for a live operator, he announced who he was and asked to speak to the president.
“I’m sorry, the president is busy. If you would like to leave a message, one of his aides will get back to you.” She said that as if common citizens called all the time to be put through to the Oval Office.
“Listen to me,” he growled. “This is Roger Glover, formerly Christopher Bacon, aka Jesus or Satan depending upon your spiritual persuasion. If you don’t recognize the name, turn on your goddamn television.”
There was a long pause. Then, “One moment, please.”
Two more transfers and he was switched to man who claimed to be the Deputy Chief of White House Security and who asked, “Why exactly do you want to speak to the president, Mr. Glover?”
Exasperated, Roger said: “Because he’s the biggest man in the world, and I have the biggest drug in the world. Now do you want to continue haggling, or should I call AARP?”
Two more clicks, and another long wait, then Roger heard the familiar voice. And his heart jogged in his chest.
“This is John Markarian.”
Roger nodded to say he got through.
While Laura just stared at him in numbed disbelief, Brett’s eyes saucered. “Friggin’ cool, Dad,” he whispered.
“Mr. President, this is Roger Glover.”
“How do I know you’re Roger Glover?”
“Because anybody else would have given up trying to get through.” To convince him, he outlined some details about Elixir that only the president had been made privy to, including Ross Darby’s friendship with Ronald Reagan.
“Okay, what can I do for you?”
“It’s what we can do for each other.”
Roger explained that he, his wife, and son were ready to turn themselves in and release to the proper authorities the entire supply of Elixir and the scientific notebooks on its manufacture.
The president listened then said he was pleased to hear that. Then Roger proclaimed his innocence in the murder of Betsy Watkins and the sabotage of Eastern flight 219.
“What I can do for you is help dispel all the mystical garbage that’s been flying. And beginning with the fact that I’m still mortal.
“But the important thing, Mr. President, is that Elixir stops cancer cells from growing. It turns off their genetic switches. And one of the side effects is prolongevity.” Briefly he explained that and the senescence limitations.
The president listened intently. “A chemical that prevents cancer while prolonging life indefinitely has astounding implications for health care and the economy I need not tell you.”
“I’m familiar with the hysteria,” Roger said. “That’s another reason why the compound must be monitored.” Then Roger listed his conditions for the surrender of themselves and the serum.
So far, it was their word against the authorities’ that they were innocent of the charges. But Roger did request a presidential pardon for fleeing prosecution and immunity for Laura and Brett. The president agreed. As for his defense against the charges of murder and sabotage, Roger requested the best legal representation. He also asked for witness protection for Laura and Brett. The president agreed again.
Finally, he asked that the entire supply of Elixir and scientific notebooks be turned over to the medical research arm of Public Citizen with the caveat that it be used exclusively in oncology studies, not human prolongevity. Roger did not personalize, but he warned that the potential dangers were unimaginable.
He glanced at Laura who nodded approval.
“But that’s what all the excitement is all about,” Markarian responded.
“Mr. President, the nightmare possibilities far exceed those for human cloning which, as you know, is also banned. I must have your consent to nongovernmental regulation, or I will destroy the substance.”
“Oh, don’t do that.”
“I need your word.”
“Well, I’ll do what I can to aid your requests.”
“Including a federal ban on prolongevity studies.” He had phrased that as a statement not a question.
Markarian sounded hesitant. He no doubt viewed Elixir as the centerpiece to the economic salvation of the republic.
“Mr. President, imagine your grandchildren growing older than you. Or a child six years old forever.”
There was a pause as the president pondered the scenarios. “I see. Well, it will have to meet with the approval of the House and Senate, of course, but I’ll do what I can. I give you my word.” Then he said that he would turn their surrender over to Kenneth Parrish, Director of the FBI. “So where are you?” the president asked.
“I’m as anxious to end this as you are, sir, but I can’t tell you that just yet.”
Roger said that he wanted another twenty-four hours before surrendering
themselves and Elixir. They did not want the authorities storming their quarters on their last night together for a while. Around 8 A.M. tomorrow, Roger would call to name the exact time and place. And he insisted that it take place in an orderly fashion.