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Authors: Gary Braver

BOOK: ELIXIR
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Maybe Dexter’s death is a dark little godsend, 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.”
“I’m not talking about Veratox, silly.” Wendy’s eyes were wide and intense, and she wore a huge grin, the kind that was just this side of erupting into giggles.
“What are you telling me?”
“Dada, mama, goo-goo.”
Chris bolted upright. “What?”
“We are with child, my love—preggers, knocked up, all of the above.” She was beaming happily.
“Yahooooooo!” And he pulled her to him.
“When’s it due?”
“November third.”
She wrapped her arms around him.
“I don’t believe it,” he said, and rocked her in his arms.
In a few moments the lights were out and they were naked under the covers, arms embraced. Chris let himself dissolve into the warm joy of the moment, as he made love to his wife and reveled in the thoughts of being a father again.
And through the window, a crescent moon smiled down on them through a bank of fast-moving clouds.
The same crescent moon smiled down on Antoine Ducharme, fifteen hundred miles to the south.
He woke with a start. Everything was still, including Lisa asleep in the
big round bed beside him. The ceiling fan hummed, the only sound that of the Roman shades swaying gently in the breeze. If there had been an intruder, the security guards would have heard, and the dogs would be barking their brains out.
At forty-six years of age, Antoine had become a light sleeper; the slightest disturbance aroused him. But that was all right, since he would take a catch-up nap tomorrow. Besides, he loved the night from the balcony. It gave him a chance to reflect on his fortunes. And if he was still alert he would open a good book. Antoine was an avid reader of mystery novels, particularly women writers, both the classics—Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers—and American contemporaries. He liked how women treated crime with such delicate sensibilities, driven by a greater urgency for order than male writers.
Antoine padded through the French doors onto the veranda off the master bedroom—a balustrade marble structure that overhung the northern peak of the island. His villa—named La Dolce Vita after the movie—was a palatial structure nestled high on a hilltop with a three-quarter view of the sea. The daytime vista was particularly splendid: voluptuous green slopes sweeping down to turquoise water edged by a white sand beach to the left and the small protected harbor to the right where night lights illuminated the flanks of
Reef Madness
. It was a view that could make the hardest man ache.
His watch said 3:12. On a chaise lounge he stretched out under an outrageously starry sky. As usual the midnight air was comfortably cool and laced with spices and apricot perfume. He poured himself some brandy and let the sweet miasma fill his head.
He knew the realities. Once Veratox was synthesized, Darby would have no need for his apricots. But he also knew the synthesis was very difficult and could take years. Meanwhile, Antoine had Darby Pharms over the barrel, as the Americans liked to say. It had cost Quentin a finger, but he paid up. That was the nice part of being on top. You got others to do the enforcement. Not that Antoine had lost his stomach for it. He had killed eighteen people in his days, most when he was an upstart. He had even taken pleasure in killing. But he was in his middle years now and could afford others to do that, leaving him more time for more genteel pleasures. Life was good.
Out at sea a freighter blinked along the horizon. A few shooting stars streaked across the Pleides in the constellation of Taurus, which was unusual for this time of year. A portent, he thought. As he stared at the heavens,
he thought about Lisa asleep inside, about waking her and making love. She had a goddesslike body which was a source of great physical pleasure for him—the key reason he had spared her life. After discovering her infidelity with Marcel, he had hired a homosexual guard who did not let her out of sight. She had begged Antoine to forgive and forget what had happened. He agreed to half her request. The day would come when she would get fat and he would tire of her—and retribution would need be redressed. But, now, things were in place. The center held.
At about 30 degrees northeast he could just make out Kingston airport. A few degrees further east the freighter’s lights rippled in the air. Behind it, flashes of heat lightning. There would be rain tomorrow, but it would be short, then the sun would come out and dry things up—a pattern of nourishment and splendor, the natural rhythms of paradise. And he was part of them. In fact, he owned some of them.
He closed his eyes and thought about how rich life was. He thought how wonderful it would be to freeze his life at such moments to live them out forever. A pity man could not stop the clock. With all his millions, he was just as mortal as a pauper.
Antoine’s eyes snapped open.
A strange sound. Beyond the crash of the waves against the shore. Beyond the chirping of tree frogs. Beyond the whispers of the Antilles trade winds through the bougainvillea. For a moment he thought it was the brandy playing tricks on him.
Engines. But not a security vehicle. Nor a boat. A persistent rumbling drone. From inside he returned with a powerful pair of binoculars. The sound grew louder.
No freighter. Too many lights and getting larger. Antoine felt his heart kick up. Airplanes were heading directly toward the island from the northeast. But no flights were scheduled tonight. And no planes ever approached from that direction. Nor so low. They couldn’t be flying more than a hundred feet above the water. And so many. There must have been half a dozen in tight formation bearing down on Apricot Cay. Small planes, and moving fast.
Somewhere the dogs began barking. Then guards were shouting. The security phone rang inside, but before he could get it, eight jet planes rocketed up from the water’s surface about a mile off shore and fanned out over the island.
Suddenly there was volley of explosions that shook the villa and lit up the heavens. The planes were bombing his island with napalm. In a matter
of minutes the forests were ablaze with jellied fire and filling the sky with thick black smoke.
He could barely hear Lisa scream for the noise. Security alarms wailed and guards fired automatic weapons helplessly as bombs continued to rain across the island, filling the night with choking fumes from incendiaries and burning orchards of apricots and marijuana.
To the south two direct hits destroyed the marina and the processing plant as drums of ether sent flaming mushrooms into the sky. Another sweep took out the airstrip where three of his own planes were blown to shrapnel. When a bomb hit the road behind the villa, Antoine dashed inside. Lisa was on the floor crying hysterically, but no rockets had hit them. Antoine Ducharme’s death was not the object of the raid. Just his operation—to destroy it now and forever.
It took less than thirty minutes for eight F-14 fighters to set ablaze half the island and every processing building and storage shed, including, Antoine would later learn, a small barge containing a load of apricot pits destined to leave tomorrow for Boston Harbor. And what the napalm didn’t kill, a solitary B-52 bomber did in three passes over the southern slopes, spewing Agent Orange.
When it was all over one fighter jet peeled off from formation and sent two rockets into
Reef Madness.
Crouched behind a window, Antoine Ducharme watched the boat explode. As his rainforests raged with fire, all Antoine Ducharme could think was that this was not supposed to happen. That his man had a friend in the White House. That his man’s father-in-law was “bosom buddies” with Ronald Reagan.
That weasely little bastard, Quentin Cross. He would pay for this with all he had.
THE WHITE HOUSE
R
onald Reagan sat in his bathrobe in the private quarters of the west wing breakfasting on scrambled eggs and stewed apricots when his secretary called to say that Ross Darby was on the line with an urgent call. It was 6:55 A.M.
The President punched the lighted button. “I’ve got a seven-thirty meeting with Cap Weinberger, what’s your excuse?”
“Sorry to call at this hour, Mr. President, but I have something of a problem.”
Even though they had known each other for nearly half a century, Ross Darby just could not address his old pal by first name, because this was official business.
“I just got a call from an associate that U.S. naval jets bombed Apricot Cay in the Caribbean. I’m sure you’re aware of that fact since you no doubt gave the orders.”
There was a long pause as Darby waited for the president’s response. Then Reagan cleared his throat and said, “Well, you put me in kind of a funny position, Ross. Frankly, these are matters of national security.”
“National security?”
“Yes. What’s the problem?”
“Mr. President, I don’t know if you were aware that Apricot Cay was the sole habitat of the very species of apricot which our new cancer drug comes from. We just got FDA approval the other day, as you well know.”
“The same island?”
“Yes, and from what I understand the entire crop and orchards have
been incinerated. They were napalmed, every last tree, and it appears they finished off the place with some kind of defoliant.”
More gaping silence as the president measured his words. “And you’re calling to ask why.”
“Ron, I invested millions in that island and staked the future of the company on that harvest, not to mention that we had a cure for many cancers in those trees.”
“Hell, I’m sorry, Ross,” Reagan’s voice was low and scratchy. “But why in God’s name did you pick the same island?”
“Same as what?”
“Ross, it’s seven in the morning and I’ve got a long day ahead of me, so let’s please stop playing games.”
“I don’t know what you are driving at.”
“That Apricot Cay was trafficking ten to twenty billion dollars of cocaine and marijuana each year, and all of it heading for the American streets.”
“What?”
“Ross, they had shipments moving in and out of there every day, by land and air, like it was New York Harbor. What I want to know is how you could have risked investing in such a place, especially given our antidrug campaign. I don’t know how to say it without saying it, but frankly I feel personally betrayed, as will Nancy.”
“Ron, I didn’t know.”
“How in hell could you not know, for God’s sake? You must have visited the place before you invested. You did, didn’t you?”
“No.”
“Well, whoever set up the deal for you must have known. They had to. Intelligence says the place was a fortress.”
Darby listened in numbed silence as the president continued. Before he hung up, Reagan said, “Ross, I’m going to forget this call ever took place.”
“Thank you, Mr. President,” Ross said, and hung up.
For a long moment, Ross stared out the window into the gray light. He was shaking as if there were a brick of ice at the core of his body. Eighteen years ago he was Associate Professor of Pharmacology at Middlesex State University, and Darby Pharmaceuticals was a makeshift lab in his basement where he developed new compounds, selling the patents to companies such as Pfizer and Merck. Over the years he had turned Darby Pharms
into a $70 million business because of his knack for developing pharmaceuticals with prestige, profit, and universal application, such as synthetic estrogenic hormones, cholesterol lowering drugs, and—Veratox. Yet he suddenly saw himself as a foolish old man everybody goes about humoring but never letting on with the truth that the sky is beginning to fall.
Quentin sat across from him studying the carpet, his eye twitching uncontrollably. Sometime around 4:30 that morning he had telephoned Ross with the news of the bombing. When pressed to explain the military’s action, Quentin had no answer. That was when Ross dialed the White House.
“He said that the island was the major drug distribution center of the western hemisphere. Did you know that?”
Quentin could not raise his eyes to his. “You think I’d do business with a drug lord?”
“That’s what the hell I’m asking you.”
“I was there to buy apricots, period. I had no idea he was dealing in dope. None whatsoever.”
Darby nodded, thinking what a miserable goddamn liar his son-in-law was. “We’re ruined, I hope you know.”
Quentin studied his cuticles without a word. Then he got up and walked to the window.
It was late November, and most of the trees had lost their leaves. A fine rain fell and glazed his gray Mercedes coupe in the executive lot. Quentin could just make out the Nantucket sticker on the windshield. Last month workmen had finished constructing their summer home on an oceanside bluff in Siasconset—a big sprawling place, called NewDawn, that put him in enormous debt in anticipation of taking over the pharmaceutical company with a patent for the world’s first cancer cure.
“I didn’t know.”
“Turn around!” Darby’s voice was like a gunshot.
Quentin turned.
“Look me in the eyes and say that again.”
“I—I … ,” he trailed off, stuck on Darby’s stare.
“Just what I thought,” Ross said. He took a deep breath and hissed through his teeth. “According to your records we’re half a million dollars in the hole to your drug buddy. Half a million for all the charcoal we could ever ask for.” He slammed down his coffee cup. “He said the son-of-a-bitch was the Don Corleone of the Caribbean. He said he had a fortress down there with his own army, a fleet of planes, processing plants, and shipping
docks. And you didn’t know. The goddamn DEA’s been watching him for a year from spy satellites three hundred miles up, and you couldn’t tell from ground level. What the hell do you take me for?”
Quentin looked away. The real figure was $2.5 million, but Ross would never know. He would also not ask him to resign because there was nobody else in line. Besides, how would Ross explain that to Margaret and the kids?
“Not to mention another $2.8 million trying to synthesize the stuff for the last two years. That’s another dead end. You’ve ruined us, Quentin, and you made me look like a blue-ribbon ass to the president of United States. It’s probably out of pity I’m not facing federal prosecution.
“But I suppose there’s a silver lining in everything: I can spend my retirement in financial ruin instead of financial ruin
and
federal prison.” Darby flopped into his chair and closed his eyes and rubbed his temples.
A hush fell on the room, all but for the pattering of the rain against the windows.
“Maybe not,” Quentin said.
Darby looked up. “‘Maybe not’
what?”
While Ross glowered at him, Quentin picked up the phone and punched seven numbers.
Chris was in a deep sleep when the phone rang. He caught it, but not before Wendy woke up. It was Quentin Cross. His message was terse: Meet him and Ross in the office at eight-thirty.
“It’s Saturday, for God’s sake.” She craned her neck to see the clock. It was a little after seven. “What did he say?”
“Just that it was urgent.” He got up to get dressed. “Probably another hare-brained scheme to synthesize the toxogen.”
“You don’t believe that. They never call on Saturdays.” His face had that fistlike tightness it got when something was bothering him. “Honey, what’s going on?”
She could see that he didn’t want to upset her, but it was time to fess up. “I think they’re firing me.”
“Firing you for what?”
“For not getting a better yield.”
“That’s ridiculous. They can’t fire you if it can’t be done.”
“I didn’t say it can’t be done. It’s just that
I
can’t do it. So they’ll find somebody who can.”
“They can’t do that,” Wendy said. Tears sprung to her eyes. Chris was
a decent man and brilliant scientist whose entire professional life had been dedicated to benefiting the human race. For two years he had labored tirelessly to synthesize the stuff. If they were terminating him, it was grossly unjust.
“It’s their company. They can do what they want.”
“Can’t you fight them? Get a lawyer?”
“It’s not against the law to get rid of somebody who’s not doing his job.”
“But you’ve been doing your job. It’s not your fault you can’t get the goddamn stuff to yield. Is there anybody you can call? Somebody who knows new techniques?”
“I’ve tried them all. If it can be done, it’s beyond me.” He got his clothes together.
“You’re the best they’ve got.”
“Maybe that’s the problem.” Chris wiped the tears from her face and kissed her. Then he took his insulin shot, got dressed, and left.
Darby Pharms was located in a small complex of buildings fashioned in a red brick Tudor motif. The original building was once a private residence that had since been expanded over the years as the company grew to sixty employees, creating a series of buildings handsomely landscaped to look like a small English village.
At 8:20 Chris pulled into his slot. In the Executive area sat two cars: Ross Darby’s big black Mercedes sedan and Quentin’s gray 450 SL Coupe. The colors of power and wannabe power.
Chris went inside. The interior was eerily quiet, as if holding its breath. He could sense the tension from the foyer. He cut through the maze of offices. Quentin was at the door of Ross’s office suite holding a coffee mug. He was dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt and looked as if he’d been up all night.
“Have a seat,” Darby said as Chris entered. He was also casually dressed—a blue shirt and black V-neck sweater. His face looked ashen and haggard. From their grim appearances, Chris was certain that this was his dismissal.
Quentin began. “Chris, we called you in because, quite frankly, we have something of a problem with your work here. You have been with us for fifteen years, and in those fifteen years we counted on you—”
Chris cut him off. “Quentin, if you’re firing me, please just say it and save us a lot of trouble.”
Quentin’s face filled with blood. “I don’t like your attitude.”
“And I don’t like you calling me at seven o’clock on Saturday morning without explanation.”
“It’s about your mice,” Quentin said.
“We’ve been through this already.”
“I want Ross to hear.”
Ross got up. It took him a moment to straighten up. He walked to the coffee machine, stretched a kink out of his lower lumbar, then poured himself another cup. In spite of chronic back problems, he looked good for a man over seventy. He was tall and still quite trim, and his face usually radiated with a rich, healthy luster—the product of regular games of tennis. It was easy to imagine the dashing young quarterback from Eureka. Today Ross Darby looked his age. They had probably been up for hours mulling over the terms of dismissal.
“Chris, I want to apologize for all the mystery, but I preferred to talk with you in person. Quentin told me what you said, but I’d like to hear it firsthand if you don’t mind.”
Chris liked Darby because he was classy at managing people. He always treated you with respect and patience, and never had to raise his voice. He made you feel that when you talked there was nothing else in the universe he wanted more to do than to listen. Unlike Quentin, he was never petty; if something bothered him, he never let on unless it was important. “As I explained, I tried to save us time by testing toxicity.”
“We moved beyond animal testing over a year ago.”
“I didn’t want to see the animals die.”
“So, for two years you played mouse doctor at our expense,” Quentin said.
It was just like him to jawbone Chris about costs to impress Ross before announcing he was canned. When little men cast long shadows, you knew the sun was setting. “Yeah,” Chris said.
“That’s horseshit.”
“Quentin, get on with it,” Darby said.
Quentin removed a packet of papers and handed it to Chris. “Look familiar?”
“An inventory of some sort?” Chris said.
“That’s right, and you know of what?”
Darby cut in again. “Quentin, this isn’t
Perry Mason.”
“It’s an inventory of requisitions from your lab,” Quentin continued. “And maybe you can explain a few items.”
“Like what?”
“Like how over a five-year period from 1980 you placed orders for 582 exotic mutant mice at $170 each—five times the next most expensive mouse, I should add—for a grand total of $98,940. I called Jackson Labs and they told me that
mus musculatus sextonis
stock number JR 004134 is an albino mutant Amazonian agouti—whatever the hell that is—with a lifespan of eleven months. What we’d like to know is what the hell you were doing with $100,000 worth of short-lived mutant mice.”

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