The Immortalist (37 page)

“I ain't stirrin' a foot until I hear from Doc G.”

Cricket felt like screaming at his pigheadedness. “Listen, Adam. Dr. Gifford . . . he's not . . . he's, uh . . . he's not the person you want to listen to. He's sick himself.”

There were voices outside, surrounding the bungalow. Then footsteps on the porch. Without a knock, the door flew open and four uniformed guards rushed in. Wiser than at Cheville House, they charged Cricket en masse, knocking her to her knees and quickly cuffing her hands behind her. As she bucked against them, she saw Niedermann gloating overhead.

“Aha, Dr. Rensselaer-Wright! Caught you like a chicken in a barnyard.” With Adam, who looked on with a bewildered and rather frightened expression, Niedermann used a more dignified tone. “You did the right thing to set off the alarm, Adam. We've been searching all over campus for this woman.”

Cricket strained to get to her feet and lunge at Niedermann, but with the equivalent of four linebackers on her shoulders she couldn't budge. “You son of a bitch!” she screamed.

Niedermann twisted his lips as if to retort, but suddenly jerked his eyes toward the front door. Slow, heavy footsteps approached, amplified drumlike by the planking of the porch. Every head turned.

Gifford stood in the open doorway, his silhouette nearly blotting out the light of the morning sun. He was jacketless and tieless, his white dress shirt and trousers rumpled, his hair in wild disarray. His face had the pallor of a corpse.

The room fell silent. Even Cricket gave up her struggle.

Adam was the first to speak. “Dr. G, she's telling me some kooky story about the Methuselah Vector.”

Gifford's voice was eerily quiet. “Nothing to it.”

“No? You're sure?”

Cricket tried again to rise to her feet. “Don't believe him, Adam,” she cried. “Look at his face. Does he look well to you?”

“She says she's shutting down the Lottery,” said Adam.

Gifford shook his head. “She can't do that.”

“Is she from the government like she says?”

“Relax . . .”

Adam was anything but relaxed. “Doc! She's talkin' about locking me in quarantine.”

Gifford peered into the bedroom. “Why don't you finish your packing, Adam? Let me talk to Dr. Rensselaer-Wright for a moment.”

Adam went into the bedroom and closed the door. Gifford strode to the center of the cabin and peered into Cricket's face. He was calm—unnaturally so. It made her think of a bent twig about to snap.

“Where the hell have you been, Charles?” asked Niedermann. “She dug up Hannibal and was about to cut him up.”

“I know. I've just seen him, Jack.”

Gifford turned back toward the doorway. He seemed lost in thought. With his hands in his pockets, he gazed out onto the track field, where, not seventy-two hours before, he and Subject Adam had made history.

“Help her to her feet,” he commanded.

Two guards lifted Cricket by her underarms.

“You've got to cancel the Lottery, Charles,” pleaded Cricket. “At least postpone it for a few days. Give me time—”

Gifford wheeled around. His pale face was expressionless, like a Noh mask. Only his bloodshot eyes burned with intensity.

“Will you stop at nothing to destroy me?”
he screamed.

“It's n-n-not about you, Charles,” Cricket stammered.

Gifford paced back and forth, with footsteps so ponderous that they threatened to split the pine planks. “How did we become enemies, Cricket? I gave you complete trust. I offered you the institute, for God's sake. Is this about money? Take it! Take everything! The patents, the royalties, the shares in Eden Pharm . . . I withhold nothing from you. If you think it's yours by right, take it. I ask . . . I ask . . . I ask . . . only one thing of you—your loyalty. But not to me. You're correct. It's not about me. It's about the future of mankind. It's about victory over death itself.”

Cricket was in tears. “Please, Charles—you're infected, and you need help.
You
are the source of the Nemesis virus. Somehow, inside one of your cells, the Methuselah Vector accidentally recombined with herpes.”

“Then why am I not sick? Or dead?”

“The Methuselah Vector boosts your immune system. It gives you superhuman vitality. Maybe you can fight off Nemesis in a way that others can't. But it wouldn't be quite true to say you're not sick, would it?”

Gifford sneered, “I've never felt better.”

“Have you looked in a mirror? You're pale as a clamshell—your skin, your lips, your tongue. Your eyes are bloodshot. And what's that splotch on the back of your hand?”

Gifford looked at his hand and reflexively covered an irregular purple discoloration near his wrist. “It's a bruise, damn you. A simple bruise. I got it . . . while I was out in the woods.”

“It's not a normal bruise and you know it. It's an ecchymosis. You're bleeding into your skin. I saw it in Yolanda and Emmy and Mr. Thieu. You need to be in quarantine.”

“My mental powers are greater than they've ever been. I can think ten thoughts at once. My physical condition is nothing short of astounding.” Stopping in the doorway, he took hold of the screen door with both hands, jamming his fingers into the crack between it and the doorframe. “Can a sick man do
this
?”

With a loud snap he ripped the door from its hinges. Hefting it like a piece of cardboard, he stepped forward and flung it, end over end, into the air. It landed with a crack at the edge of the track field, over a hundred feet away.

In the cabin it was so quiet Cricket could hear the hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen.
He's not just sick. He's dangerous
.

“So,” said Gifford, his voice distant, “we are irreconcilable.”

“What about Emmy, Charles?” she begged. “We need Hannibal's blood. We might be able to make an antiserum.”

“I'm sorry, Cricket. I don't trust you anymore.” Gifford's face was as lifeless as marble. Turning back toward the sunlight, he said, “She's all yours, Jack.”

Niedermann snapped his fingers, summoning the guards to action. The two holding Cricket by her underarms dragged her, twisting and kicking, over the threshold.

“Please, Charles!” Cricket shouted. “You don't know what you're doing. You're sick! I can help you. Let me . . . Let me help.”

Gifford stepped aside and let them pass. Toward the east, Cricket saw the flat, gray roof of the BSL-4 lab. The guards were carrying her the other way, in the direction of the Security Cottage on the west edge of campus. Away from Emmy. Cricket's legs went weak as the realization hit her. She felt a crushing tightness in her chest. It felt like being led to her own execution.

Except that she wasn't the one who was going to die.

Five

NIEDERMANN GRIPPED HIS
STOMACH AND TOOK
a slow, deep breath as he waited for the ulcer pain to subside.
This is killing me
.
All I need now is to have this thing flare up
. Wig Waggoner's slow, shuffling steps seemed interminable as he came down the hall with the plastic ice bucket cradled against his chest.

“Mind our agreement,” Niedermann said. “You can take those things you absolutely need to keep working on that cold-virus decoy project. Nothing else.”

“I need the whole lab,” complained Waggoner in his customary nasal monotone. “Have you seen Mankiewicz's lab? They spoon out their reagents with spatulas, trying to save money by not pouring directly from the bottles. The same spatula going into every bottle. They might as well use their fingers. It contaminates everything.”

They went inside. Niedermann crossed his arms and looked on while Waggoner scooped up his notebooks and jabbed a few tubes and bottles into the crushed ice of his bucket. “You have to tell me what all this stuff is that you're taking,” he told Waggoner. “I'm not a scientist.”

Like a robot, Waggoner began reciting an inventory of everything he had managed to jam into the foot-wide ice bucket. It was all Greek and Latin, but none of it sounded like contraband. Niedermann didn't really care. Waggoner was such a blindered creature that he seemed incapable of subterfuge.

Incapable of suspicion, too. “You've got some stuff in here that Dr. Rensselaer-Wright gave you, don't you?” Niedermann asked nonchalantly. “Blood samples from Yolanda Carlson? Things like that?”

Waggoner looked indignant. “Not in this ice bucket, no,” he mumbled.

“I mean here in the lab.”

“Oh, sure. In the freezer.”

“Let me see. I need to make sure you're not taking any of it with you.”

Waggoner bought that. Setting the bucket down, the batty genius shuffled toward the back of the lab and unlocked the tall, stand-up stainless-steel freezer. The inner compartment doors inside the main one were all heavily frosted over. The second one from the top squeaked as Waggoner pried it open. Through some wisps of cold fog Niedermann could see stacks of white boxes with scrawled labels. In front of them was a yellow box covered with decals displaying the black shamrock that was the international symbol for “biohazard.” In a much clearer handwriting than Waggoner's, Niedermann made out Yolanda Carlson's name.

“That box is empty, actually,” said Waggoner, without explaining why it was still in the freezer. “After I ran the PCR tests and the electrophoresis, I took all of the blood that was left—seven and a half cc's—and precipitated the pure virus by density-gradient ultracentrifugation. You see that tube?” He pointed to a small plastic rack containing a single red test tube, no more than an inch long. “That's it now. Preserved in glycerol to keep the virus from drying out if you expose it to air. I was going to take it down to Hamstra's lab, where they have an electron microscope, and take a picture of the virus enlarged a hundred thousand times.”

Niedermann instinctively reached to get a better look.

“Don't touch it!” Waggoner shouted. “Didn't I warn you not to touch anything in this lab?”

“I was just going to—”

“Look from back there. That virus is virulent and extremely concentrated. By my calculations, there are 3.7 trillion particles in that vial, every one of them infectious. If a thousandth of a drop came into contact with a cut in your skin or the mucous membranes of your eyes or mouth, you'd be a walking corpse.”

“It could kill me?”

“What a dumb thing to ask. It only takes a single virus to impregnate one of your cells. An hour or two later—
boom!
Ten thousand baby viruses in your blood. Another hour, and each of those would have another ten thousand grandbabies. The process can be described by a straightforward log curve, N equals N
0
times
e10,000t
, where
t
is time elapsed, in hours. It's mathematics. You're dead when N reaches a couple hundred trillion or so.”

Niedermann gingerly pushed the compartment door shut. “I certainly don't want to touch it, then.”

“On second thought, go ahead and touch it. Let Charles Gifford and Cricket Rensselaer-Wright touch it, too. Spread it on some cheese and have a party. Then I'll be rid of you all and I can work in peace.”

Niedermann had seen enough. “Have you got what you came for?” he asked, shutting the outer freezer door—but not locking it.

“For now.”

“Okay, out.” Niedermann escorted Waggoner to the front of the lab and opened the door for him but didn't follow him into the hallway.

“Aren't you coming?”

“In a moment. I need to do a few security things.”

Waggoner took this as a matter of course. “Well, don't touch anything. Don't move anything and don't touch anything.”

“Wouldn't dream of it.” Niedermann kicked the door shut.

Alone, in the dusty, deserted laboratory, Niedermann took a deep breath. His thoughts ran immediately to Cricket. She was determined to kill the Lottery and the Methuselah Vector with it. Gifford should have booted her off campus when he had the chance. Now it was too late. Even though she was in lockup, he knew that wouldn't last. Hank would get a lawyer to spring her in no time.

A person has a moral obligation to be reasonable,
he thought.
Especially when millions of dollars and years of work are on the line. Careers, too. Reputations. To endanger all this out of sheer stubbornness is as bad as theft. And on top of that, Charles says that millions will die. Fifty million a year. That makes it tantamount to murder.

Casually, almost absentmindedly, Niedermann wandered about the lab, opening drawers and picking out a little collection of odds and ends. A black ballpoint pen. A razor blade. Tuberculin syringes in sealed plastic wrappers. A little tube of Krazy Glue. A package of surgical gloves, size 6½.