Breeders (17 page)

“I was wondering if you have any information on Dr. Thak Wattana. I believe he is a fellow at the University.”

The lady chuckled. “Oh, yes, yes. He’s a bit of a celebrity, really. He gets all kinds of fan mail.”

“Have you chatted with him recently?”

“As a matter of fact I have, about your call and the strange message. He found it quite interesting, especially when I mentioned that it was all the way from South Africa.”

Alexa disconnected the call. “She told Wattana about the message.”

“What does that mean?”

“A message in Thai, something that he probably understood the meaning of. He must have figured that someone knows about what was going on up at the mountains. So he sent people to find her.”

“So he’s somehow involved in all of this?”

Alexa shrugged. “I guess so.”

Eben de Vos shuffled the papers on his desk, trying to get some work done but not managing to at all. His life had changed in so many ways. Mitsu said that he didn’t have any ambition left, that he was not the man he was all those years ago.

In his previous life he had been commander of the naval base at Slander's Bay. He started the diving school, the first in South Africa. He visited France to purchase scuba equipment, rubbed shoulders with Jacques Cousteau. They went hunting for the selecant, a fish thought to have been extinct for millions of years, all along the west coast of South Africa. They found it, but not in the water; a fisherman snagged one in his net.
 

When word spread of his prowess as a deep-sea diver and his discovery, he became an overnight celebrity. Renowned scientists from all over the world lined up at his doorstep. He hosted them all at his home, never at a hotel.
 

When South Africa regained its democracy and the apartheid government was ousted, all naval commanders became the new mayors, which was a logical thing to do. Small towns—which naval bases usually were—didn’t have the infrastructure to elect a new mayor immediately. That would only happen after the government elections. So since 1994 he had been mayor, and he had been reelected every year since then, probably because no one else wanted the job.

Ah, the good old days. He stood up and sauntered to the window. The view over the ocean was terrific. The sun was out, and the waves crashed onto the large boulders on the shore. Petrels were pecking at pieces of flotsam that had washed ashore. He loved it here. Alida used to love it here as well.

They’d had a memorial service for Alida earlier, and he was still hurting. He missed her so much. He thought Mitsu took it worse than he did. She didn’t shed a single tear; she was bottling up her emotions, which couldn’t be good. Lately she was leaving town for longer stretches and more often. She was never home. He was certain she was having an affair. Not that he blamed her. She was alone. Their daughter had hardly spoken to her. Alida had spent most of her time here at the base, with him. She would sit at the desk in the corner, doing homework or reading, listening to that racket she called music on her phone. He smiled. His naughty, pretty, clever baby girl.

In the past, when he had finished his official duties for the day, they would go out kayaking or fishing or hiking in the mountains. It was an advantage to live in a town where the sun only set at 9:00 p.m.; there was lots of time for extracurricular activities. He swallowed. Not anymore. He didn’t feel like doing anything these days.
 

He didn’t blame Mitsu for having an affair. She only had the company of the two boys. She was beautiful. She just seemed so distant. Ever since Alida became a teenager, Mitsu had changed. They hadn’t made love in years. That was probably his own fault; a woman needed the attention. It didn’t bother him that much. He wasn’t a young man anymore.
 

Well, he gave most of his attention to Alida. He missed her dearly. They would talk for hours. She had such a diverse range of interests, and Eben loved telling her everything he knew about the ocean and the bush and his maritime experience.
 

One day she asked him a strange question. “Why don’t you leave mom and let’s leave this town, go live somewhere else?” He was shocked. “I love your mom with all my heart, Alida. I would rather die than leave her,” he answered.

She smiled her lovely smile, exactly like her mom’s, then said. “Just checking.”

He chuckled as the memories flooded back. Like that one time they went swimming with the newly-recruited divers. There were long-distance swimming champs, underwater-polo players, fit and strong guys, macho, all there because they wanted to become navy divers.
 

So Eben would take them all out to sea, including Alida, and drop them two nautical miles off the coast. They would laugh and jeer and crack jokes and say that they weren’t going to babysit a twelve-year-old girl in the middle of the ocean. If she drowned it was Eben’s fault. And then they would start swimming, battling their way against the riptide that he knew was there. And Alida would lie on her back and go with the flow, so to speak. One by one the macho men lifted their hands and were picked up by the boats, too exhausted to continue. And Alida would float with the riptide and be washed out fourteen kilometers down the coast, at True Point, and hit a sandbank and walk out. Eben made sure there was a driver waiting to take her back to base.

He always laughed at the look on the men’s faces when they arrived back at base and Alida was already there, waiting for them.
 

Come to think of it, most of the sneakers had washed up at True Point as well.

He swallowed. He missed his daughter. He packed some documents that needed signing into his satchel and made up his mind. It was time to patch things up with Mitsu. Affair or no affair.

Dr. Thak Wattana increased the volume on his iPod as he jogged. His private jet had landed an hour ago on the airstrip at the PEP plant, and he was still feeling slightly jet-lagged. A lot needed to be done, and he needed a clear head.

“The sun may rise in the east, but at least it settles in its final location . . .”

“Yeah, right,” he thought. “The East
owns
the West.” And soon it would own not only the bonds and the markets but the biotech as well. Bush and Clinton were idiots, banning embryonic stem cell research. The USA was a decade behind, if not more, and he, Dr. Thak Wattana, was at the forefront, a pioneer in his field.

The fine dust puffed around his feet and drifted away. He checked his heart-rate monitor. Slightly over one fifty. Perfect. His father used to say that he wished he could have lived another twenty years, then he would have been able to repair his own dying body. Not that the man gave himself a chance. He was an alcoholic and had a sweet tooth. But himself? He was going to live forever. He simply needed to finalize his research in pluripotent cells and refine the process of growing organs in the lab. Ten years, twenty, max.

He had already grown a kidney and an earlobe. Now he was decoding the process of injecting stem cells directly into affected areas to rebuild the entire organ. Why do an organ transplant when you could simply treat the affected organ with an injection?

And it was working on the lab subjects. Five One Three’s immune system had developed antibodies against the HIV virus he had injected her with. Six Two Six took a while, but the leukemia was gone. It was a bit hit-and-miss, because Three Five Nine didn’t survive the breast cancer, so he didn’t have enough confidence to inject himself with anything yet, but the prognosis on the lab subjects looked promising.

He breathed deeply and wiped the sweat from his brow. The sun was rising over the desolate Karoo landscape. He hated it here. The place was too warm in the day, and at night it dropped to below zero. The air was dry and smelled like dust, and the food was shit. South Africans wanted to burn everything on a fire, even his favorite dish, fish. What an unhealthy way to eat.
 

But the location was the best he could have hoped for. Their cover was that they were a fracking operation, exploring mining possibilities in the Karoo. He had a couple of ministers in his pocket, which didn’t come cheap, but it was all worth it. He could perform his tests without being bothered by the law and regulatory agencies.
 

South Africa didn’t have any legislation banning research on embryonic stem cells, so technically he wasn’t breaking any laws. The government knew about his research, but they were going to benefit from it as well. As AIDS proliferated and desecrated the country, he had promised them a cure. And he was working on a tight deadline. He needed to see results soon.

He jogged over the airstrip and onto the blacktop of the admin parking lot. Hannes Petzer’s Porsche was already parked in front of the lab. Good. Wattana sprinted the last three hundred meters and stopped in front of the automatic sliding door that led to the lab.
 

Andre`, the security officer, looked up and greeted him with a smile. He stood up and swiped a card over the access control scanner, and the double doors to the lab swung open then sucked closed behind him.

It was cold inside, regulated at eighteen degrees Celsius. Petzer looked up from a microscope when he heard Wattana come in, and he waved a greeting. “Dr. Wattana, I wasn’t expecting you this early.”

Wattana shook his hand. “I brought back Eight One Three. A certain General Laiveaux from Interpol delivered her to my doorstep at Happy Sunshine.”

Petzer’s eyebrows shot up. “Problems?”

“No, I paid him. He’s got our backs. Your memo said we had some security issues?”

Petzer nodded. “Yes, but I handled it.”

Wattana studied him for a while. “Good. And our competition?”

“No spies. We’ve been lucky. One of our competitors, GlaxoCell, is filing for bankruptcy. After we caught their man, they gave up. They know they’re too far behind.”

Wattana smiled. That was good news. Maybe they wouldn’t be bothered again. “OK, change the patrols to twice a day.”

Petzer nodded.

“Any results on the chorionic grafts?”

“Excellent results.” He waved Wattana over to the microscope. “The cells are fully pluripotent and able to morph into any cells we want.”

“Good, good. And the delivery mechanism?”

“A virus.”

“OK, simple. Case studies?”

“Three subjects infected with multiple sclerosis, a one hundred percent success ratio in curing the disease.”

“HIV?”

Petzer sighed. “The thing keeps morphing so we can’t grow a culture to treat it. We’ll have to decode the DNA and maybe find a mechanism to halt the messenger RNA so that it doesn’t replicate.”

“But that could take years. Can’t you simply halt mitosis by radiating the mitochondria?”

 
“Tried that.” He turned around and leaned on the table. “We could do something else.”

“What?”

“I’ve managed to breed some antibodies that would show up positive if the subjects were tested.”

“So Five One Three wasn’t cured?”

Petzer shook his head.

“But it would look like they were cured?”

Petzer nodded. “Exactly.”

“Mortality ratio if they stopped taking the ARVs?”

Petzer chuckled and Wattana smiled as well. “One hundred percent after six months.”

“So how do we get them to continue taking the ARVs after they’re ‘cured’?”

“Well, I haven’t thought of that yet.”

“OK, leave that up to me, I’ll figure out something. Tell them it’s part of the study, placebos or something.”

“I know you will, Dr. Wattana, you always do.” Petzer remembered something. “Oh, Moolman and Dlamini are in your office.”

“This early?”

“Yes, they mentioned something about being paid.”

Mitsu studied herself in the full-length mirror. She looked good for a woman of forty. Her breasts were still perky. She turned around; she had no cellulite, and her bum was firm. Thak’s medicine was keeping her young, as he had said it would. She noticed the photo stuck to the edge of the mirror. She didn’t know who had taken it, probably someone at the base. Eben stood there hugging Alida’s shoulder, and they were both smiling like lunatics. Could anyone ever be that happy without pretending to be?

She pulled the photo from the mirror then tossed it on the bed. She yanked open a cupboard and moved her underwear to the side. She pushed the upper half of her body into the shelf as far as she could then rummaged around and found what she wanted. She hauled out several objects, dropping them all on the bed.

Mitsu picked up and unfolded a large, blue, handwoven cloth, then laid it on the bed. It was speckled with Alida’s blood and splotches of candle wax. She could still smell the smoke. She admired the intricately-embroidered golden raven for a moment. It had been a gift from her mom, a tablecloth, but now she used it to cover the altar during her ceremonies.

Next, she placed the silver dagger on the cloth. The handle was shaped like a question mark, and the pattern continued into the blade, forming a squiggly crucifix. She picked up the vial filled with Alida’s blood and placed it ceremoniously next to the knife.

She fetched a mortar and pestle and a cup of boiling water from the kitchen. She popped the vial into the water, measured five tablespoons of cannabis, poured it into the mortar, then ground it to a fine powder. The powder went into a gold chalice, followed by the blood. She could only get a drop or two out of the vial, so she filled it with warm water and shook it, then she emptied the bloody mixture into the chalice as well.