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“I’m sure she understood.”
“How could she?” He drank again and wiped his mouth. “The truth is, I think she was leaving me. Probably I deserved it.”
I felt my stomach drop. On the other hand, if he’d known it was me, he would have already said so. “Don’t be ridiculous. She was probably just going to see her mother.”
He gave a fatalistic shrug. “Yeah, well, last time I checked, you don’t need a passport to go to Connecticut.”
I had failed to consider this. There was nothing to say.
“That’s not the reason I asked you out here, though,” he went on. “I’m sure you’ve heard the stories about me.”
“A little.”
“Everybody thinks I’m a big joke. Well, they’re wrong.”
“Maybe this isn’t the day for this, Jonas.”
“Actually, it’s the perfect day. I’m close, Tim. Very, very close. There’s a site in Bolivia. A temple, at least a thousand years old. The legends say there’s a grave there, the body of a man infected with the virus I’ve been searching for. It’s nothing new—there are lots of stories like that. Too many for all this to be nothing, in my opinion, but that’s another argument. The thing is, I’ve got hard evidence now. A friend at the CDC came to me a few months back. He’d heard about my work, and he’d happened across something he thought would interest me. Five years ago, a group of four American tourists showed up at a hospital in La Paz. All of them had what looked like hantavirus. They’d been on some kind of ecotour in the jungle. But here’s the thing. They all had terminal cancer. The tour was one of those last-wish things. You know, do the stuff you always wanted to do before you check out.”
I had no idea where he was headed. “And?”
“Here’s where it gets interesting. All of them recovered, and not just from the hanta. From the cancer. Stage four ovarian, inoperable glioblastoma, leukemia with full lymphatic involvement—not a trace of it was left. And they weren’t just cured. They were better than cured. It was as if the aging process had been reversed. The youngest one was fifty-six, the oldest seventy. They looked like twenty-year-olds.”
“That’s quite a story.”
“Are you kidding? It’s the story. If this pans out, it will be the most important medical discovery in history.”
I was still skeptical. “So why haven’t I heard about it? It isn’t in any of the literature.”
“Good question. My friend at the CDC suspects the military got involved. The whole thing went over to USAMRIID.”
“Why would they want it?”
“Who knows? Maybe they just want the credit, though that’s the optimistic view. One day you have Einstein, puzzling over the theory of relativity, the next you’ve got the Manhattan Project and a big hole in the ground. It’s not like it hasn’t happened before.”
He had a point. “Have you examined them? The four patients.”
Jonas took another pull of the whiskey. “Well, that’s a bit of a wrinkle. They’re all dead.”
“But I thought you said—”
“Oh, it wasn’t the cancer. They all seemed to kind of…well, speed up, like their bodies couldn’t handle it. Somebody took a video. They were practically bouncing off the walls. The longest any of them lasted was eighty-six days.”
“That’s a mighty big wrinkle.”
He gave me a hard look. “Think about it, Tim. Something’s out there. I couldn’t find it in time to save Liz, and that’ll haunt me the rest of my days. But I can’t stop now. Not just in spite of her; because of her. A hundred and fifty-five thousand human beings die every day. How long have we been sitting here? Ten minutes? That’s over a thousand people just like Liz. People with lives, families who love them. I need you, Tim. And not just because you’re my oldest friend, and the smartest guy I know. I’ll be honest: I’m having a hard time with the money. Nobody wants to back this anymore. Maybe your credibility could, you know, grease the gears a bit.”
My credibility. If he only knew how little that was worth. “I don’t know, Jonas.”
“If you can’t do it for me, do it for Liz.”
I’ll admit, the scientist in me was intrigued. It was also true that I wanted nothing to do with this project, or with Jonas, ever again. In the slender ten minutes in which a thousand human beings had perished, I had come, very profoundly, to despise him. Perhaps I always had. I despised his obliviousness, his monstrous ego, his self-aggrandizing pomp. I despised his naked manipulation of my loyalties and his unwavering faith that the answer to everything lay within his grasp. I despised the fact that he didn’t know one goddamn thing about anything at all, but most of all, I despised him for letting Liz die alone.
