The Immortalist (27 page)

“Sixty,” said Boothe to the operator.

Niedermann was trying to focus on the showdown ahead, but Boothe couldn't stand silence. “Did you hear Charles Gifford's idea for the big event?” the PR man prattled. “He wants all the winners onstage at once, to be injected at the exact same time. That's a hundred people, Jack. A hundred chairs. A hundred infusion pumps and a hundred nurses. All in white uniforms, with caps, for Christ's sake. I at least talked him down to twenty nurses. They can go in between the rows and turn on the pumps with a button. But the guy's a megalomaniac.”

The door opened.

“Sixtieth floor,” said the operator.

The Export Office had double mahogany doors with raised brass letters:
EDEN PHARMACEUTICALS
. They stepped noiselessly over a plush-carpeted waiting area and past a half dozen small rooms, till they came to the corner office.

“Mr. Niedermann's here to see Mr. Eden,” said Boothe to the secretary.

“Mr. Niedermann may go in.” As Boothe followed, the secretary caught his sleeve. “Just Mr. Niedermann.”

Niedermann closed his eyes, took a deep, anxious breath, and opened the door. Eden was almost invisible in his high-backed leather chair, upstaged by a breathtaking backdrop of midtown Manhattan. Niedermann could see Broadway, the Empire State Building, and in the distance the hive of towers that was the Financial District.

“Welcome to New York. Did you have a nice trip?” Eden stood up to give Niedermann a vigorous two-handed handshake. Eden, a small man, had a stiff, almost military, bearing. As if to hide his encroaching baldness, he had trimmed what little hair remained around his temples to an eighth of an inch—barely a light dusting of gray. His small, pale eyes, with an ever-so-slightly drooping left upper lid, seemed quick but cold.

“I came straight from LaGuardia.”

“Good, good. Can I offer you a drink? Anything to make you comfortable? Suck your dick, perhaps?”

“Excuse me?” Niedermann was sure he had misheard.

But Eden underlined his question with an unsettling smirk that bared two rows of tiny, pearly-white teeth, like the razor-sharp incisors of a mongoose. “That's what you want, isn't it? To be number one around here? Alpha dog? I might as well get in practice.”

“Look, Mr. Eden—”

“Would you like my chair, perhaps?” Eden stepped to one side and kicked the base of the chair, sending it spinning halfway around. “Break in this nice, top-grain leather with your ass? No need to wait for Saturday.”

“No, thank you,” said Niedermann in a businesslike voice. “This chair will be fine.”

He sat down on the small, cloth-covered chair in front of the desk. But he took it as if he owned it. Eden's petulance he treated with silent contempt. After a minute or two of smirking and staring and scowling, Eden gave up the theatrics and plopped into the leather chair. Parking his gray ostrich-skin shoes on the desk, he began to fan his lips with his fingers, as if he were about to speak.

Niedermann took the initiative. “Now, as to Saturday. The stockholders' meeting—”

“Which you instigated!” Eden shouted. “You think you have the balls to take this company away from me? You weaselly shitass! My father built this company up from a corner drugstore. We survived the Great Depression, half a dozen wars, class-action suits, government takeovers . . . and now we're going to be taken down by the likes of
you
? Mr. John Niedermann—an empty suit from Nowheresville, with an MBA from Hack State U and hardly a fuckin' dime to your name?”

The shrill sound of Eden's voice alone was enough to send a shiver down Niedermann's spine. But this was no time to cave in. “Investors don't like the direction the company is going,” he replied icily.

“Investors? I'm the only investor that counts around here.”

“Not anymore.” Niedermann swallowed hard—a dry, spittleless swallow. “You used to own an outright majority of the common shares. But you diluted those shares when you issued stock to cover the buyout of Charles Gifford's start-up, Aeterna Enterprises. You're down to about forty-five percent now.”

“Which you talked me into, you conniving little fucker. The Methuselah Vector was gonna be so big it would be worth it to go out on a limb, just to keep the big players like Pfizer and Novartis from getting ahold of it. You were setting me up all along.” Eden spat into the wastebasket. “But even so—what have you got, you horse's ass? A few hundred grand in options? That's like a thousandth of a percent.”

“Not if the stockholders vote with me.”

“Who? Who's gonna vote with you? That prick Armbruster? Rod fucking Baer? Hollywood?”

“We'll find out on Saturday.”

“Oh, sure—Charles Gifford.” Eden laughed derisively. “You think because you gave him a blow job or two you own him. Well, you don't know Gifford very well. He won't put his name to shit like this. I've treated him pretty well, kiddo. He won't fuck me over.”

Niedermann crossed his legs and pulled in his shoulders. He wished to God he had Gifford's signature on the proxies. Eden seemed to smell blood. Anxiously, Niedermann tried to change the subject. “Shall we talk about the Lottery?”

Eden guffawed. “Hell, no. You're history, Niedermann. Did you really think I would let you walk out of here with your job intact? See how much charisma you have with the stockholders when they find out I canned your ass.”

“I'm afraid not.”

“Not what, you little fuck?”

“Not getting canned. Not by you. Not now.”

“Oh, yeah?” Eden jolted forward in his seat and snatched up the phone. “Put a pinch of reality in your crack pipe and smoke
that
.” He punched a single number. “Get me Security,” he barked into the handset.

Slowly, deliberately, fighting to cover up the trembling of his hand, Niedermann reached into his pants pocket, pulled out a black memory stick, and slid it across the desk.

“What's this?”

“It's a dictation of an autopsy on my secretary, Yolanda Carlson.”

Eden yanked his feet off the desk and sat bolt upright. “Yolanda? Jesus, Jack!”

“She got sick all of a sudden and died.”

Eden hung up the phone. “What of?”

“Well now—that's the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.” Niedermann delighted in the worry he saw in Eden's eyes. “I don't understand all the medical mumbo jumbo, but this molecular biology genius on Dr. Gifford's payroll ran some tests. So did the virus lab at USAMRIID. Both of them exonerated the Methuselah Vector. It looks like some kind of weird herpes infection.”

“We're off the hook, then.”

“Not so fast. There's this woman, Dr. Rensselaer-Wright. She's an investigator with the CDC, and she just happened to be at Acadia Springs at the worst possible time. That's her voice on the autopsy recording. She doesn't believe the tests. She thinks it's the Methuselah Vector. And I suspect she's not above going public with that.”

“Could she be right?”

“No. She's actually a nutcase. And
I
”—Niedermann drew out the first-person singular for maximum effect—“have the proof.”

“You'd better be pretty fucking sure of it. Do you remember a company named Dow Corning? They made silicone for breast implants. Some women got sick. Not killed, just sick—and to this day nobody knows whether the silicone was really at fault. But Dow settled for over two billion dollars anyway, and one of the largest companies in the world went bankrupt. What do you think would happen to us if we started injecting people with the Methuselah Vector and a few weeks later they dropped dead? We'd have an army of lawyers swarming over us. You can't hide a thing like that. Not people dying. There wouldn't be a bone left for an ant to feed on.”

“So cancel the Lottery.”

“Are you nuts? Not without proof. Our stock would vanish quicker than piss down a drain. There'd be full-scale investigations. Not just the FDA but the SEC. We'd be ruined.”

“
You'd
be ruined. I don't work here anymore. Remember?”

“Don't be a prick. What does Dr. Gifford say?”

“He says it's all bullshit. A medical impossibility. The Methuselah Vector is clean.”

Eden eased backward in his chair. “Thank God. Him I believe.”

“Don't pop any champagne corks yet. You still have this Rensselaer-Wright problem. I don't know how Yolanda got herpes, but she got it living on campus. There weren't any red flags on her physical when we hired her. It's something very weird, very scary—and made for the six o'clock news. If it turned out to be a virus that escaped from one of the labs, that could put the whole institute in a bad light. The institute and the Methuselah Vector with it. To say nothing of Eden Pharmaceuticals.”

“Let me guess—you're the one that's gonna keep the barbarians from our gates.”

“Hell, what for?” Niedermann smiled. “I thought I'd just leave this dictation with you and let you figure out how to keep it out of the
New York
Times
. Then again, you could stop trying to bust my balls and leave me in peace to go back to Acadia Springs and use all the resources I have on the ground—including people like Red Armbruster and Rod fucking Baer—to contain this problem. Your call, Phillip. I have other ways to win against you. You may own forty-five percent of this company today, but if this scandal gets out, I'll be able to buy it lock, stock, and barrel tomorrow with the change from a two-dollar bill.”

“Are you blackmailing me with this? Seriously?”

Niedermann spread out his hands melodramatically. “Still wanna call Security?”

“Fuck you.”

Niedermann laughed. “I'll take that as a vote of confidence.”

Eden gave him a hard, unblinking stare. But sweat was on his forehead. “You're playing a dangerous game, Niedermann.”

“I've already crossed the Rubicon, haven't I?”

“You sure as hell have.”

Five

CRICKET HUNG UP
THE WALL PHONE
as she watched Hank toss a skilletful of shrimp scampi into the air. “Well, that's that. It's now officially too late to catch the four o'clock from Boston to Atlanta. No seats left on anything else until tomorrow morning.” She had made up her mind not to leave without at least seeing Emmy one more time. Maybe taking Emmy to Atlanta was out of the question, but she couldn't leave things as they were. There might never be another chance to make peace.

Hank shrugged. “You'll be staying for lunch, then. You still go for garlic?”

“Sure. Lay it on.”

Hank sprinkled some diced cloves into the skillet, then stooped to fetch a bottle of white wine from under the counter. “Don't worry,” he said with a wink. “It's just for cooking.”

With the wine sizzling in the skillet, Hank threw in some angel-hair pasta, flipped the mixture in the air a few times, then poured two servings onto plates. Carrying a plate in each hand, he sat down across from Cricket at the breakfast island. Cricket wasted no time in jabbing a fork into the steaming mound of pasta and winding it around the tines. The first mouthful made her moan with delight.

“I really don't think I should be here.” She sucked loose strands of pasta through her lips. “Maybe I should wait in town. Get a hotel room in Bar Harbor.”

“Uncomfortable with me?”

“No, no, it's not that. It's . . . it's Charles. He seems to have it in for me. You could get hurt in the cross fire.”

Hank shrugged. “What will be will be. Right now, you and Emmy come first. I'll worry about Charles.”

He went on eating, as though his loyalty was something she should have taken for granted. Cricket wondered if he had always been like that. “Thanks,” she said, spearing a piece of shrimp.

The phone rang. As Hank got up to answer it, he nodded toward the bottle of wine by the stove. “There's enough of that chardonnay left to make a glass. You want it?”

Cricket shook her head.

Hank picked up. “Hello, Hank Wright speaking.” Cricket saw his look go from casual to anxious in a microsecond. “Princess, is that you?” he exclaimed.

Cricket dropped her fork onto the plate.

“Where are you?” Hank pressed a hand against his free ear as he strained to listen. “I'm sorry, you'll have to speak up, Emmy. I can't hear you.”

Cricket hurried around the island to the phone. “It's really Emmy?” she whispered.

Hank nodded. “Okay, okay, honey. I'll put her on.” Hank covered the mouthpiece as he looked toward Cricket. “She wants to talk to you.”

“Me?” Cricket was astonished. It had barely been two hours since they had come to blows. Cricket reached for the phone skeptically, even suspiciously. “Emmy? Emmy, hon? Look, I'm sorry. I know I've been an ass—”

A thin, faltering, frayed thread of a voice came through the receiver. A voice from a million miles away. “Mom, I think I'm sick.”