The Immortalist (53 page)

He knew there would be nothing more ahead but the wrinkled, gray sea, so he advanced the throttle and headed up into the clouds. As all his memories disappeared into a haze of white, he found himself thinking with unprecedented clarity.

Where did I go wrong?

I was conscientious. Obsessively so. Experts the world over cajoled me for moving too cautiously. I could have released the Methuselah Vector two years earlier if I had cut corners.

It worked—without question.

It was a momentous advance for mankind.

But Cricket was right. When a thing is that important, it tempts you to think that failure is impossible. You lose the capacity to question your own assumptions. You start to play God.

Then any voice that opposes you becomes the devil.

He turned and was surprised to see Doreen looking at him and not at the distant sea. A silvery tear ran down her cheek.

Suddenly it was all sun and blue sky about him, as the droning plane broke through the clouds at fourteen thousand feet. The brilliant white light seemed to chase away his pain. Instead, his entire body began to feel cold—not shivery, but cold with the extinction of suffering and desire.

Doreen was still looking at him. Only she was a young woman now, in a red sundress, with blue eyes, impossibly dark eyelashes, and straight auburn hair down to her shoulder blades. It wrenched his heart to see how beautiful she was.

“Come home, Charles,” she said. Or sang.

“Home? Where is home?”

She pointed to the sun.

Gifford smiled. Gunning the throttle, he put the wing flaps down, forcing the nose sharply upward. Within seconds the plane reached the critical angle of attack—fifteen degrees—and the stall warning began to go off. Still he veered higher, closer and closer to the vertical, flying straight for the sun.

The cockpit shimmied and rumbled. He was lying on his back, with the nose of the plane pointing straight upward. Without the lift of the airfoil, he knew that the propeller would be too feeble to keep him from plummeting into the sea.

Not Prometheus. Icarus.

So be it.

The light—!

SATURDAY

Two Weeks after Lottery Day

CRICKET LAY ON
THE COT IN
Bay 8 of the BSL-4 laboratory, her home for the past two weeks, and listened to the Bach Chaconne in D Minor. The solitary violin wove a line alternately rising and falling, laughing and crying, shrill and softly reassuring. Four bars endlessly repeating, yet never alike, with a pulse that ebbed and flowed like the primal rhythm of nature herself.

For many years the haunting loneliness of the piece had captivated her. One performer, one bow gliding over one string at a time, creating a three-dimensional world of harmonies out of a slender arabesque of single notes in succession. To her it proved the possibilities of One. The power of Self, unaided and alone. But now something had changed. She ached to hear another voice wrap itself around the lone violin—a piano, a harp, a guitar—anything to relieve the burden of solitude.

A gust of air whooshed past her as the rubber seal of the laboratory door broke and the outside atmosphere rushed into the negative pressure of the room. Cricket yanked out her earbuds and sat up on the edge of the cot. Through a gap in the folding screens that gave her privacy, she saw Erich Freiberg, the new acting director of Acadia Springs, standing by the doorway, with Wig Waggoner peering from behind him. Neither was wearing the mask and white paper jumpsuit in which she had gotten used to seeing them.

“Good morning, my dear Cricket,” announced Freiberg. “Dr. Waggoner has some marvelous news for you.”

Waggoner looked as if he had slept in his Coldplay T-shirt and corduroy pants. “All of your tests have come out negative. PCR, ELISA, antibody titers—there's not a trace of Nemesis in your system.”

Freiberg grinned as he pushed one of the screens back against a counter to make room beside the cot. “Fifteen days have passed. According to the protocol you yourself worked out with the CDC, I now have the pleasure of declaring you officially infection-free. Your quarantine is lifted. You may reenter the world of the living.”

Waggoner wrinkled his brow. “You don't know how lucky you are,” he said in his typical mumbling monotone. “It turns out the Nemesis virus particles were just a little too heavy to spread by the airborne route. It took direct contact. Yolanda Carlson caught it from doing the nasty with the G-man. The dog got it from saliva from shared food. The chef, too—he and the G-man tasted food together all the time. Your daughter, of course, got it from that dog bite, which is why the disease took hold so fast in her. Direct entry into the bloodstream. The other three that died—Senator Libby, General Goddard, and that movie star—all ate tofu contaminated by blood when the chef cut his finger. The two houseboys ate that, too, except they didn't die. You saved them with the antiserum from the G-man's dog.”

“Dr. Waggoner is being too modest,” said Freiberg. “There was not enough antiserum for both the houseboys. The second was saved when Wig injected him with the soluble form of the MHC-1 molecule. It was a triumph of his viral receptor-decoy project.”

Wig looked at his shoes. “It was lucky that I had purified a bunch of it months ago, when I was running X-ray crystallography to map out the kyttaropylin binding site. After we tried it on the houseboy, there was just enough left to divide between you and Hank Wright.”

“The most pitiable case was Mr. Loscalzo,” added Freiberg. “When he awoke in Bellevue from the concussion Hank gave him, no one even suspected he'd been infected until it was too late.”

“I know. His mother told me.” Cricket twisted the cord of her earbuds around her finger. “What about Officer Dayton, the policeman who was shot?”

“He's going home next week,” said Freiberg. “They had to take out a foot of his intestine, but apart from that he should recover completely.” Freiberg smiled and kissed the top of Cricket's head as she gazed pensively at the floor. “Why don't you pack your things, my dear?”

“I don't have to. I've never really unpacked since I left Africa.”

“Unfortunately, I can't offer you Weiszacker House as a place to stay,” said Freiberg. “We've had to seal it. We have no idea at this point how long Nemesis can live outside the body, and anything Charles touched could be infectious. However, I could offer you a guest room at my house—”

“No need.”

“No? Hank, then?” Freiberg raised an eyebrow. “I should warn you. You'll be going out into a hailstorm. There's a battalion of paparazzi camped out around the town house. They've literally been sleeping in tents and trailers, awaiting your release.”

“Why?”

Freiberg looked astonished. “My dear Cricket! At this moment, you are the most famous woman in the world.”

Cricket was sure he was joking.

Waggoner snickered. “There were reporters all over the place at Rockefeller Center. CNN had a camera crew on the roof of the Maison Française. They got pictures of everything you did.”

“You saved the world, my dear,” said Freiberg.

“I . . . I haven't . . . saved anything. I don't want to be famous.”

“Some have fame thrust upon 'em.” Freiberg chuckled, circling a finger in the air. “On a related subject, I've taken the liberty of scheduling a brief news conference in the Rensselaer auditorium.”

“No.”

Freiberg seemed surprised, perhaps even hurt. “It's only half an hour. Throw them a little red meat and they'll leave you alone.”

“No. I won't do it.”

Freiberg continued to look perplexed. A long pause underscored the finality of Cricket's answer. “As you wish,” said Freiberg at last.

“What are they saying . . . about Charles?”

“Ah, Charles. Well, for every hero there must be a villain, you know.”

“They haven't been tough enough on him, to my mind,” said Waggoner.

Cricket was torn up inside about Charles. He had nearly killed her. He had buried Hannibal, her only hope to save Emmy's life. That bleeding cadaver's face of his still haunted her—not even Bach could drive the image from her mind. Yet even in his worst moments, she knew, Gifford had been motivated not by greed or vainglory, but by a desire to alleviate the suffering of mankind. If he was a monster, he was the noblest of all monsters.

“Erich, can you deliver a message from me at the news conference? It's about Charles.” Cricket stood up from the cot. “Point out that those qualities that brought about his downfall—his obsessiveness, his self-certainty, his inability to accept defeat—were the same ones that made him a brilliant researcher. Had his life ended on that Monday afternoon on the track field behind Weiszacker House, the world would have idolized him as one of the great geniuses of history.” Cricket looked Freiberg in the eye. “Tell them that for me—will you, Erich?”

“As you wish. It may even play well on the six o'clock news. The public has had two full weeks of hating Charles Gifford. They are eager for something new. Maybe even sympathy.” Freiberg chuckled, then cleared his throat. “Oh, by the way—I had another call from Phillip Eden. He's willing to fund continued work on the Methuselah Vector—provided that you head it up.”

“Me?”

“You're the only one he trusts at this point.”

“He ought not to.”

“What shall I tell him?”

“Don't tell him anything.”

“And what about my offer? My dear, directorship does not agree with me. Paperwork, phone calls, interminable meetings. The Governing Board and I would much rather see you filling your father's shoes. Acadia Springs ought to be yours.”

“I'm not ready to think about that.”

“When? When will you be ready?”

“After . . . I don't know.” She plucked a blouse and a pair of shorts from where they hung draped over the top of one of the screens and tossed them into a half-open suitcase on the counter. An amber bottle of the little, shield-shaped pills sat beside the suitcase, and she was about to throw it in with the clothes when she had second thoughts and pitched it into the trash instead.

She zipped her suitcase shut and dropped it on the floor. Dragging it behind her, she followed Freiberg and Waggoner out the Bay 8 door and through the decontamination room and air lock. When they had reached the main lobby, she stopped. “I'd like to say good-bye to my neighbors, if I might.”

At Freiberg's nod, Cricket walked down the observation corridor and knocked on the glass of Bay 7. After a moment, a folding screen moved aside, disclosing a mussy-haired Adam in pajama pants, with Maria Loscalzo, Dominick's mother, hugging him from behind.

Adam hit the intercom button. “Hey, Doc! You're outside.”

Cricket smiled. “They tell me I'm safe for the world now. I'm sorry you're going to have to lose a pinochle player.”

“There's always gin rummy. Only need two hands for that.”

Maria stepped forward and bumped Adam playfully with her hip. “Gin rummy, my ass! I wanna learn tennis.”

“You're looking good, Maria,” said Cricket. It was astonishing how quickly the Methuselah Vector was taking effect on her. You could see the difference from one day to the next. She was still a little flabby in her arms and thighs, but her skin had the same ruddy tint as Adam's, and her posture spoke of energy to spare.

Freiberg leaned into the intercom. “We've almost finished work on your old bungalow, Adam. Remodeled for two. There'll be a few new security features, I'm afraid. But it'll be much more homey.”

Cricket gave the two a sober look. “You do understand that you'll both have to live under observation indefinitely, until the day comes that we can figure out how to fix what went wrong with the Methuselah Vector? Although neither of you caught Nemesis, there's always the possibility of a new virus emerging inside you. It's critical that you not be exposed to any infections—even the most common.”

“Yes, ma'am,” said Adam.

“I promise I'll do what I can to help you,” added Cricket.

Adam shrugged. “I don't mind it so much anymore. At least I'm not alone.”

Freiberg sighed and smiled. “Yes. Adam has his Eve.”

“Send me a postcard from Cancún,” said Adam.

Freiberg raised both eyebrows. “Cancún? What's this?”

“I'm leaving . . . on the next boat,” said Cricket.

“When can we expect you back?”

“Who knows? Three months, a year. I'm overjoyed with the idea of not having to decide.”

Cricket pressed her palm against the glass in farewell and then started for the door, followed by Freiberg and Waggoner.

“Is it safe to go out?” she asked Freiberg. “The reporters?”

Freiberg chuckled. “They're all down at Rensselaer and Wabanaki Cove, waiting for your press conference. Not a soul outside this door . . . well,
almost
none.”