The Sanctuary (38 page)

He realized what was happening, his hand instinctively diving into the side table’s drawer for his handgun, but just as his fingers felt its grip, the door to his bedroom burst open and three men whose features he couldn’t make out in the darkness bolted in. The lead man kicked the drawer shut, slamming it hard against Corben’s wrist. Corben reeled with pain, turning back in time to glimpse the man’s raised arm arcing down at him like a lightning bolt from above.

He thought he spotted a gun in its grasp a split second before the strike connected with his skull and sent him crashing into a sudden and absolute blackout.

T
he roof terrace of the Albergo Hotel was soothingly mellow, a pleasant change from the chaotic bustle of the bar at Mia’s previous hotel.

She hadn’t been here before. Lost among jasmine and dwarf fig trees, a handful of people were scattered in the dark recesses of this suspended oasis that overlooked the city’s rooftops and the sea beyond. She found a quiet corner and was soon in the comforting embrace of a martini. E. B. White had dubbed the drink his “elixir of quietude,” and right now that was working just fine for her.

She was too lost in her own thoughts to notice that she was the only solo person here. A lot had happened in the previous forty-eight hours, and her mind had a lot to work through.

She was looking for a waiter to order a refill when
Kirkwood
appeared and joined her. They shared a round and dabbled in some awkward chitchat, briefly commenting on the hotel’s charms and the city’s contradictions. Mia could see that his mind was elsewhere. His eyes radiated a deep unease, and something was obviously haunting him.

He was the first to veer them back to the grim tide they were swimming against.

“I saw the broadcast. You did great. It’ll do the trick. This hakeem will definitely get the message. They’ll call.”

“But then what?”
Mia asked. “We don’t have anything to offer them, and trying to pull off some kind of bluff…” She let the words drift.

“The guys at the embassy know their stuff,”
Kirkwood
assured her. “They’ll figure it out. They managed to get to Farouk before the hakeem’s men, right?”

She could see that he wasn’t thrilled by the prospect either, but she appreciated the effort. “Yeah, and look how well that turned out.”

Kirkwood
found a half-smile. “I’ve got my contacts in
Iraq
working on it. I’m pretty confident they’ll come up with something.”

“What? What could they possibly find that could make a difference?”

He didn’t really have an answer he could give her. A waiter glided over and discreetly replenished their carrot sticks and pistachios,
then
Kirkwood
said, in a surprising change of tack, “I never knew Evelyn had a daughter.”

“I wasn’t around,” Mia said. “I lived with my aunt.
In
Boston
.
Well, near
Boston
.”

“What about your father?”

“He died before I was born.”

A shadow crossed his face. “I’m sorry.”

She shrugged. “They were together.
In
Iraq
.
In that chamber.
One month later, he dies in a car crash.” She raised her glance to
Kirkwood
. All light had abandoned her voice.
“This tail-eater.
It’s one hell of a good-luck charm, isn’t it?”

Kirkwood
stayed silent, and nodded somberly.

“I mean, what the hell is this nut job thinking?” she blurted out angrily. “Is he looking to revive some biblical plague, or does he really expect to find a magic potion that’ll let him live forever? I mean, how can you even begin to reason with someone like that?”

Kirkwood
raised an eyebrow. “You think the hakeem’s after some kind of fountain of youth? Where’d that come from? I’ve seen his file. It doesn’t mention anything about that.”

Mia brushed it off and, almost self-mockingly, mentioned her conversation with Boustany about elixirs.

Kirkwood
took a sip from his cocktail, as if weighing his next words. He put the glass down and looked at her. “Well, you’re the geneticist. You tell me. Is it really that insane?”

“Please,” Mia scoffed.

He wasn’t scoffing back. He was serious.

“You’re really asking me if it’s possible?” she said.

“I’m just saying, face transplants were considered impossible a few years ago. They’re doing them now. If you think about the medical advances that have been achieved in the last few years…it’s staggering. And the hits just keep on coming. We’ve mapped out the human genome. We’ve cloned a sheep. Heart tissue has just been successfully created from stem cells. So, I don’t know. Maybe this is possible.”

“Of course it isn’t,” Mia replied dismissively.

“I saw this documentary once. About this Russian scientist, back in the fifties—I think his name was Demikhov—he was researching head transplants. To prove it was doable, he grafted the head and upper body of a puppy onto a bigger mastiff and created a two-headed dog. The thing ran around happily and survived for six days.” He shrugged. “And that’s just one we know about.”

Mia leaned forward, her eyes bristling with conviction. “Transplants are about reconnecting nerves and veins and, yes, maybe even spinal cords one day. But this is different. This is about stopping the damage that happens to our cells, to our DNA, to our tissues and organs, with every breath we take. It’s about errors in DNA replication, it’s about molecules inside our body getting bombarded by free radicals and mutating wrongly and just degrading over time. It’s about wear and tear.”

“But that’s my point. It’s not the years, it’s the mileage,” he said pointedly. “You’re talking about cells getting damaged and breaking down, which is very different from saying they’re programmed to live a certain length of time, and then die. It’s like, if you buy a new pair of trainers. You wear them, you jog in them, the soles wear out and the shoes fall apart. If you don’t wear them, they don’t just disintegrate after a few years in their box.
Wear and tear.
It’s why we die, right? There’s no ticking clock that tells our body its time is up. We’re not programmed to die, are we?”

Mia shifted in her seat. “That’s one line of thought.”

“But it’s the one that’s carrying the day right now, isn’t it?”

Mia knew it was. It was a specialization she had flirted with, but she’d ultimately veered off into another direction, knowing that antiaging research was the embarrassing relative no one wanted to talk about. Biogerontology—the science of aging—had been having a tough time since, well, the Jurassic era.

In official circles, it wasn’t far removed from the quackery of alchemists and the charlatanry of the snake-oil salesmen of yesteryear. Serious scientists, clinging to the traditional belief that growing old is inevitable, were wary of pursuing something that was doomed to failure, and even warier of being ridiculed if they attempted to explore it. Governmental bodies wouldn’t fund it: They dismissed it as an unachievable pipe dream and were loath to be seen funding something that their electorate didn’t really believe—because of what they’d been told and taught—was achievable. Even when presented with compelling arguments and breakthroughs, the holders of the purse strings still wouldn’t go near it because of deeply held religious beliefs: Humans age and die. It’s the way of the world. It’s what God intended. It’s pointless and immoral to try to overcome that. Death is a blessing, whether we realize it or not. The good will become immortal, of course—but only in heaven. And don’t even think about arguing it with the President’s Council on Bioethics. The prevention of aging is, even more than Al Qaeda, an evil threat to our dignified human future.

Case closed.

And yet, in a broader context, scientists had been spectacularly successful in prolonging human life so far. Average life expectancy—the average number of
years
humans are expected to live—hovered between twenty and thirty years for most of human history. This average was skewed downwards due to one main cause: infant mortality. Three or four infants died for every person who managed to evade the plague, dodge the blade of a sword, and reach eighty.
Hence the low average.
Medical and hygienic advances—clean water, antibiotics, and vaccines—allowed babies to survive to adulthood, allowing this average to increase dramatically over the last hundred years in what is referred to as the first longevity revolution. It hit forty in the nineteenth century, fifty in 1900, and it was now around eighty in developed countries. Whereas early man had a one-in-twenty-million chance of living to a hundred, that’s now one in fifty. In fact, since 1840, average life expectancy had been growing at a quarter of a year every year. Demographers predicting an upper limit to our expected life spans had consistently been proven wrong.

The crucial difference was that life extension had been achieved by developing vaccines and antibiotics that weren’t conceived with the aim of prolonging life, but rather, to help combat illnesses, an unarguably noble goal. The nuance was critical. And only recently had a paradigm shift occurred in the medical-research community’s attitude towards aging, from perceiving it as something inevitable and predestined, to considering it something far less draconian:

A disease.

A simple analogy was that, until recently, the term
Alzheimer’s
was only used when referring to sufferers of that form of dementia who were under a certain age—around sixty-five or so. Any older than that, and they didn’t have a disease—they were just
senile
, and there was no point in doing anything about it. It was part of growing old. This changed in the 1970s, when a demented ninety-year-old was treated no differently from a forty-year-old with Alzheimer’s—both were now equally considered to be suffering from a disease that medical researchers were working hard to understand and cure.

Much in the same way, “old age” was now, more and more, being viewed as an illness.
A highly complex, multifaceted, perplexing illness.
But an illness nevertheless.

And illnesses can be cured.

The key realization that triggered this new approach was a deceptively simple answer to the fundamental question “Why do we age?” The answer was, simply put, that we age because, in nature, nothing else did.

Or, more accurately, almost nothing ever did.

For thousands of years—throughout virtually all of human evolution—in the wild and away from the cosseting care and advances of the civilized world, humans and animals hardly ever reached old age. They were ravaged by predators, disease, starvation, and weather.

They didn’t get a chance to grow old.

And nature’s preoccupation has always been to make sure its organisms reproduce, to perpetuate the species—nothing more. All it asked of our bodies, all we were designed to do from an evolutionary point of view, was to reach reproductive age, have babies, and nurture them until they were old enough to survive in the wild on their own.

That’s it.

That was all nature cared about.

Beyond that, we were redundant—man and beast alike. All of the cells that made us up had no reason to keep us alive beyond that.

And since we didn’t stand a chance of surviving much beyond the age of reproduction, then nature’s efforts were—rightly—concentrated on stacking the odds for us to reach that age and replicate. Natural selection only cared about our reaching reproductive age, and—rightly, and again unfortunately for those of us who wanted to stick around a little longer—it chose a short life span for us to reproduce in because that was more efficient: It made for shorter time between generations, more mixing of genes, which gave greater adaptability to threatening environments. All of which meant that a process—aging—that never actually manifested itself in nature, in the wild, couldn’t have evolved genetically.

Nature, while it was evolving us, didn’t know what aging was.

In other words, aging wasn’t genetically programmed into us.

This had led to a radical new outlook on aging.

If we weren’t programmed to die, if we were killed by wear and tear—so the argument now went—then maybe, just maybe, we could be fixed.

A
burning twinge of smelling salts assaulted Corben’s senses and shook him back to life.

He was immediately aware of a sharp pain that throbbed at the back of his head, and he felt oddly uncomfortable. He realized that his hands and feet were all tied to each other behind his
back,
his legs bent all the way backwards in a reverse-fetal position. He was also still in his boxers. His mouth and cheek were pressed against something hard and prickly that felt like sandpaper, and his throat felt parched. Instinctively, he tried to lick his lips, but found dry soil instead. He spat the grit off and coughed.

His eyes darted around, rushing to process his surroundings, and he saw that he was lying on the ground, on his side, out in some kind of field.
Somewhere quiet.
The headlights of a parked car were beating down on him; beyond them, he could see that it was still night, although the faint glimmer of a morning sun was hinting from behind a mountain range to his right.

A mountain range.
To the east.
He archived the thought, guessing that he must be somewhere in the
Bekáa
Valley
. And if it was almost dawn, it meant he’d been out for at least a couple of hours.
Which tallied with how long it would take to drive there from
Beirut
, especially at that time of night when the roads were deserted.

As his nerves endings flickered awake, more pains and bruises announced themselves across his body. He tried to shift to a position that was less awkward, but his effort was rewarded with a sharp kick from a booted foot to his ribs that sent a searing pain through his side.

He coiled forward, straining against the nylon cuffs on his limbs, still on his side, his face and side digging into the rough soil. He turned upwards and saw the pockmarked man leering down at him.

“Khalas,”
he heard a voice snap.
Enough.

He sensed movement from the corner of his eye. The man who owned the voice was approaching through the glare of the headlights. From his low vantage point, Corben could only make out the shoes—leather moccasins, expensive-looking—and the dark slacks. The face towered far out of reach.

The man stepped right up to him until his feet were inches from Corben’s face. Corben tried to roll slowly, awkwardly, slightly more onto his back, but his bent legs blocked the move. The man just stood there, staring down at him as if he were an insect. Corben couldn’t really make out his features, but he could see that the man was slim, clean-shaven, and had longish silvery hair.

The feeling of vulnerability and helplessness was disconcerting. As if to confirm it, the man raised his foot and brought it over Corben’s face, then casually pressed down, slowly, resting the sole of his shoe on his nose, not really putting his weight into it at first, then gradually leaning down harder, crushing his nose and cheeks, sending an excruciating pain shooting across his face as his head was mashed into the ground.

Corben tried to wriggle free, but the man’s foot had
him
pinned down. He let out a tortured, half-muffled yell for him to stop.

The man didn’t, prolonging Corben’s agony a few more seconds before finally pulling his foot away. He glowered down at him, studying him. “You have something I want,” he said, his voice laced with a mocking disdain.

Corben spluttered the sand and grit out of his mouth. “And you’ve got something—someone—we want.”

The man raised his foot again, hovering it just above Corben’s face, threatening. Corben didn’t flinch. The man just held his foot there for a beat, as if he were about to squash a bug, before pulling it back. “I don’t think you’re in any position to play hardball,” he told him calmly. “I want the book. Where is it?”

“I don’t have it.” Through his daze, Corben registered the man’s accent.
Southern European, for sure.
Italian, possibly.
He stored the thought.

The man nodded to someone behind Corben. Before he could see who it was, another sharp kick plowed into his side.

Corben screamed out with pain. “I’m telling you I don’t have it, God damn it.”

The man seemed surprised. “Of course you do. You have the Iraqi.”

“I don’t have it yet, alright? I’ll have it tomorrow.” Corben’s voice bristled with rage. He tried to get a clearer look at the man’s face, but his vision was still warped from the pressure of the man’s shoe, and the car’s headlights were blinding the little eyesight he had. “He didn’t have it on him,” he added angrily.

The man studied him from above. “I don’t want any more games. Get me the book, or I’ll make your life a living hell.
Which, as you can see, is well within my ability.
”

Corben glared up at him with fierce resolve. “I’ll get you the book. I want you to have the book. But I want something else.”

A puzzled tone infected the man’s voice. “Oh?”

Corben could feel his pulse throbbing in his ears. “I know what you’re working on.”

The man’s lips pursed with doubt. “And what am I working on?”

“I saw your lab.
In Saddamiya.
The mass graves.
The body parts.
The blood bank.”
Corben studied him. His vision was clearing up, and the man’s features were coming into focus. He concentrated his gaze on him, then added, “I was there, hakeem,” and spotted the flinch,
the tell
of recognition.

And in that instant, he knew he’d found his man.

Up until that point, he’d suspected it, he’d assumed the doctor from
Baghdad
was also behind Evelyn’s abduction, but he wasn’t sure. He’d never seen a picture of the hakeem nor heard his voice, let alone met him in person. And although this wasn’t how he’d hoped to have his encounter with the beast—far from it—there he was, standing before—or rather, over—him.

A confusing rush of horror and elation surged through Corben. “We had some forensic experts take a look,” he went on. “They checked out the dead bodies, the traces of the surgery, the equipment you left behind. The body parts in the jars. Their conclusions were…startling.”

He paused, gauging the man’s reaction. The hakeem just looked down impassively, his mouth and eyes narrowed to thin slits. Corben gave him a moment to let his words sink in,
then
asked, “Do you have it figured out?”

“You want my research, is that it?” The hakeem mocked dismissively. “You’re here to offer me the blessing and patronage of the American government in exchange for sharing my work with you?”

“No.” Corben’s eyes hardened. “Not the American
government’s
.
Just mine.”

“F
rom what I’ve read,”
Kirkwood
told Mia, “identical twins have the exact same genes, but they don’t live as long as each other or die of the same causes—and I’m not talking about the ones that get hit by a bus. Studies have shown that the DNA of each twin develops its own harmful mutations. If aging was genetically coded into us, then they’d age the same way. But they don’t. The damage in their cells accumulates randomly, just like the rest of us.”

Mia took another sip from her glass, grinding over his questions. “You do realize what ‘fixing’ us entails? We’re talking about cells like brain and heart cells that don’t replace themselves when they die, chromosome mutation leading to cancer, protein accumulation inside and outside the cells…There are several distinct ways in which our body falls apart with time.”

“You mean, with wear and tear.”
Kirkwood
grinned.

“Yeah, well, life’s about wear and tear, isn’t it?” Mia shrugged. “I’m not about to move to some stress-free monastery in
Tibet
and spend my days humming show tunes and meditating in order to gain a couple of decades.”

“After
Beirut
—might be a tad boring,” he joked.

“Actually, on second thought—I’d happily take boring right now.”

Kirkwood
nodded empathetically,
then
his expression went serious. “All I’m saying is
,
it’s possible. We just don’t know how yet. Cancer is believed to be curable, right? We’re working on it. We might not find that cure for another hundred years, but the odds are, one day, we will.
It’s
part of our MO. Not so long ago, infections ranging from simple viruses to flu pandemics were the main causes of death. The plague was considered a curse from God. We learned different. Now we’ve tamed those illnesses, we live long enough to experience heart disease and cancer. A hundred years ago, they were thought to be incurable, unlike infections. They were believed to come from within us. We now know that’s not the case. And once they’re tamed, who knows what the effects will be for the rest of the body.”

Mia studied him curiously. “You seem to know a hell of a lot about this.”

Kirkwood
smiled. “I kind of have a vested interest.”

She looked at him, unsure of how to take that.

He paused, as if encouraging her moment of uncertainty, before adding, “We all do, don’t we? I don’t think anyone wants to die any sooner than they have to.”

“So you’re really into this? Do you also starve yourself and pop a couple of hundred pills a day?”

Many leading biogerontologists followed a regular exercise regime—the single universally accepted way to a healthier and longer life. They also self-medicated themselves with vitamins and antioxidants and were careful with what they ate. The latter was occasionally and unwisely taken to extremes, as severe calorie restriction was known to extend life—in animals, not in humans—although most would agree it had serious shortcomings in the quality-versus-quantity department.

“I look after myself, sure,” he conceded. “What about you?”

She held up her glass sarcastically. “That, and bullets—kind of not ideal if you’re hoping to break that hundred-year barrier,” she scoffed. She put her glass down and scanned the man’s face. There was something unsaid in his expression, a guardedness that she couldn’t really penetrate. “Seriously, though,” she insisted. “You’re more keyed into this than someone who’s just looking after himself.”

“We’ve got this small division in the UN—the World Health Organization?”
Kirkwood
ribbed her. “I’ve sat on some committees. We have a whole range of initiatives dealing with aging, but it’s mostly to do with improving the lives of the old. But we also host debates and prepare some in-depth studies, which I take the time to read—having a vested interest and all.” He looked at her intently. “You know all about the advances in molecular biology that are taking place. Science and technology are experiencing exponential growth. This accelerating growth rate has the potential to shrink distant projections to a tangible near future. What we think might take hundreds of years to achieve could only take a few decades. Replacement organs could be grown from stem cells; stem cells themselves could be injected into the body to repair it. The possibilities are endless. And I’m not even talking about distant dreams like artificial intelligence and nanotechnology. I’m talking about what we know is doable. And if our bodies are fixable, if the cellular wear and tear can be stopped or repaired once, there’s no reason why the process can’t be repeated. It would be like having your car serviced every ten thousand miles. It could just make us live much longer, or, if you push that notion to its logical conclusion, we could even be—in fact, it seems to me that a lot of scientists now seem convinced that we are—on the threshold of achieving medical immortality. And if that’s what this hakeem is after…it would explain a hell of a lot, wouldn’t it?”

Mia’s face pinched together as she considered the possibility. “You really think some primitive alchemists working a thousand years ago could have figured out something that we’re only starting to realize might be possible?”

Kirkwood
shrugged. “Mold was used as an antibiotic in ancient
Greece
. Less than one hundred years ago, scientists perfected it and named it penicillin, but it’s been around for thousands of years.
Same for aspirin.
I’m sure you know your Phoenicians used it, as did Assyrians, Native Americans, and countless other peoples. After all, it’s not rocket science. It’s just a simple oxidation process of a powder taken from the bark of willow trees. We now think everyone should take a small daily dose to keep heart disease at bay. Just yesterday, I was reading about how the people of
Chile
are rediscovering the remedies of their indigenous Mapuche tribes for all kinds of diseases, and how well they work. There’s a lot out there we don’t know about. All it takes is one compound, maybe some powerful free-radical scavenger that can repair the oxidative damage to our cells.
One compound.
It’s not that impossible to imagine.”

“But still,” she countered, “with everything we know, with all our knowledge, we haven’t been able to work it out.”