The Immortality Factor (55 page)

Simmonds clasped and unclasped his hands for several long moments. His eyes shifted away from Faber, looked down at his clenching fingers.

At last he said, “God's will be done.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A
rthur's message about Max came while I was desperately trying to convince Bill he should stay in Querétaro. I had stopped checking my e-mail and hadn't even looked at my fax machine for days, just let the messages pile up. They weren't important. Nothing was important except to keep Bill from leaving me.

But he did leave. They all do. They break down your defenses and make you fall in love with them and then they go off and leave you alone, betrayed and sick and lonely and miserable.

I thought I couldn't feel any worse than I did the day Bill piled his stuff into his old MG and drove away. I couldn't work, couldn't sleep, couldn't eat. For days I just went through the motions. There were no more inoculations to be done, just follow-up examinations to see how the volunteers were doing, and the medical staff was taking care of that. I should have been spending my time analyzing their findings and writing a final report.

I should have been reading my e-mail and answering the messages on my phone machine and sorting through the faxes that had piled up.

I forced myself to start. I dragged myself to my office in the clinic after two sleepless nights and a whole day of doing nothing more than crying until I didn't have any more tears left in me.

I started reading through the mail while I listened to the phone messages. Mostly junk in the mail, bills forwarded from Connecticut, some of them several months old. A birthday card from Darrell, also several months old. The phone calls were routine, some of them in Spanish spoken so swiftly that I couldn't get a glimmer of it. I'd have to ask one of the Mexican medical staff to translate for me.

Arthur's secretary, Phyllis, called several times. And Darrell. No messages, just asking me to call back.

Then Arthur's own voice. It made me look up from the mail I was reading.

“Cassie, I'm sending you an e-mail and fax today. It's very important that you read it and get back to me as soon as you possibly can.”

His voice sounded strained, urgent. The answering machine gave the date and time. Two days ago. I got up and riffled through the sheets that had piled up on the fax machine. There was a one-page message from Arthur:

Cassie:

We have been forced into a decision that you may object to. Since we can't obtain any other chimps, and our regeneration work desperately needs at least one chimpanzee experiment before we can go on to human trials, we have no alternative except to use Max. Please call me as soon as you have read this. We have to talk about it.

Arthur

They wanted to experiment on Max! After all Arthur's promises, they were going to cut Max open and use him just like he was some lab animal. Even Arthur was betraying me, cutting me open. Why do people have to be so vicious? I wanted to scream. I wanted to tear the paper to shreds. I wanted to burn it.

But instead I just picked up the phone, cold as a glacier inside, and called the airline. It was like I was somebody else and the real me was someplace else and watching this woman calmly making a reservation for herself to fly to New York and rent a car to drive up to Connecticut and get to the murdering sons of bitches who were going to mutilate my Max.

 

I
was too late, of course.

I should have phoned Arthur as soon as I read his fax, but what good would that have done? He had made his decision and nothing I could say on the telephone would change his mind. I knew that.

But his message didn't say how soon they were going to cut Max up. Maybe if I could get there fast enough I could rush in and stop them. How, I don't know. Maybe I could throw myself in front of Max and not let them take him or maybe I could get there before they were ready and sneak Max out of the lab and go live up in the woods or something or someplace. I didn't know what. All I knew was that I had to get there as fast as I could.

It wasn't fast enough.

I could tell from the startled look on Phyllis's face that I was too late. I came into the lab unannounced. Irene, the receptionist, recognized me, of course, but she wouldn't let me past the lobby until she wrote my name on a list and handed me an identification badge to clip onto my blouse.

“I'm sorry to hold you up,” Irene said. “It's the new rules. You know, because of all the publicity.”

I didn't know. “What publicity?”

“Oh, that's right. You've been away,” said Irene. “You'll have to get your photo taken and get a permanent badge as soon as you can.”

By the time she finished that sentence I was pushing through the doors into the lab's main corridor. I didn't go to my own office or stop at Arthur's. I just stuck my head through the open doorway of his outer office. One look at Phyllis's face told me that the worst had already happened. I practically ran to the back of the building, shoulder bag banging against my hip, out to the animal pens and the exercise area, without stopping to say hello to any of the people I saw in the corridors.

Max was nowhere in sight. Not out in the yard or in his cage. I thought, My god, they've killed him! My heart was hammering so loud I thought it was going to burst.

One of the kids who takes care of the animals came in with a bucket and mop in his hands.

“Hey, Cassie!” he said, surprised. “Long time—”

“Where is he? Where's Max?”

He got the same guilty look on his face that Phyllis did. “In the recoup pen,” he muttered.

“Recoup?”

“We built him a special facility, just for him while he's recuperating—”

“Where is it?”

He pointed with a lanky arm, still holding the bucket. “Out behind the pharmaceutical storage area, y'know, down the hall from Dr. O'Neill's lab.”

I ran. There were several small rooms back there, used for storage or temporary lab space, depending on what we needed at the moment. I opened one unmarked door. Nothing. Another. And another. Then the last one.

It was a prison cell. Max sat huddled in a corner. The room was brightly
lit. Divided into two sections by a thick Plexiglas wall. Piles of straw on the floor. Toys and blocks scattered about. No windows. No fresh air.

And Max. His left arm ended in a stump just above where his elbow should have been. There was a soiled bandage over his right eye. A scream filled my throat but I forced it back, forced myself to stand on my two feet and not collapse, not scream, not do anything that would hurt poor Max more than the devils had already hurt him. I just stood there in the doorway and stared at Max, my legs rubbery, my insides burning like acid.

Max looked up at me with his one brown eye. He was torpid, drugged. I thought for a moment that he didn't recognize me.

“Max,” I said, going to the Plexiglas wall and sinking to my knees. “Can you hear me, Max? It's me, Cassie.”

He didn't move for a long, long time. He just stared at me like a child who's been punished for something he hadn't done, like a person who's been betrayed by the one who was closest to him.

My eyes went misty and I felt the tears running down my cheeks. “Oh, Max, I'm so sorry. I didn't know they would do this to you. I never thought they'd do this.”

He struggled to his feet and knuckle-walked toward me, awkwardly, with only one hand to support him. He stopped in front of the transparent wall and reached out to me with his only hand. The Plexiglas wall stopped him.

I cried. For him. For me. For the cruelty that men can inflict on us so casually, without thinking, without caring.

“Oh, Max. Max,” I kept blubbering. “Max, I'm so sorry.”

He put his open hand to his face and moved it up and down several times. I saw that the stump of amputated arm was moving, too. The sign for sadness.

“Yes,” I said, making the sign with both my hands. “I'm sad. You must be, too.”

Then Max made a different sign. Only half of it, but I recognized the gesture. Hurts. He was in pain.

“Hi, Cassie!”

I jerked with surprise at the human voice. Turning my head, I saw it was Zack O'Neill. The butchering sonofabitch who had mutilated Max. Smiling at me. Smiling!

I scrambled to my feet. “You did this to him!”

His smile crumbled. “I didn't want to, Cass. Believe me—”

I'd believe him when hell froze over. I slipped my purse off my shoulder while he was blathering something about how he had no choice but to use Max and I swung it as hard as I could at his lying, deceiving, betraying face. He staggered back and I pounded him, kicked him, screamed at him until somebody was pinning my arms to my sides and Zack was staring at me, wide-eyed, a trickle of blood oozing from his nose.

One of the animal handlers and a security guard in a tan uniform dragged me away from Zack, took me screaming and cursing down to the security office and made me sit down and drink a glass of water. If I'd had a knife I would have sunk it in Zack's intestines and twisted it. Hard.

Another uniformed guard, an older man with a sergeant's stripes on his sleeves, eyed me carefully.

“You okay now?”

I wondered if he kept a gun in this cubbyhole of an office.

“Hey, Ms. Ianetta, can you hear me?”

I glared pure murder at him.

“I'll take care of her.” It was Arthur. In his shirtsleeves, tie loosened from his collar, as usual. He looked grim. Silver-haired, sleek and handsome, and the biggest lying bastard of them all.

“Come on, Cassie,” he said gently. “Come on back to my office. Phyllis will make you some tea.”

I let him take me by the arm and lead me back to his office. Darrell came hustling up the corridor from the other direction, looking worried and startled and guilty all at the same time. Arthur waved him away and escorted me past Phyllis and into one of the big chairs in front of his desk. He sat on the one next to it.

“Max will be all right,” he said.

I wanted to spit in his face.

“His system has accepted the regentide injections. His arm is already starting to form budding cells.”

It was all I could do to just sit there and not claw out his eyes.

“I tried to tell you,” he went on, just as smooth and soft as a lullaby. “I phoned and e-mailed and faxed you. You never answered. We couldn't sit here waiting.”

“You promised,” I said through gritted teeth.

“I said we wouldn't use Max unless there was no other alternative.”

“No. You promised me you wouldn't use him.”

Arthur sighed. “All right. If that's the way you remember it, then I promised. And now I've broken my promise. But Max will be all right. He'll come through this in fine shape.”

“Why should I believe you?”

“Because you're going to be with Max and see how he regrows his arm.”

“And his eye?”

Arthur looked slightly away from me. “His eye, too.”

He was lying, I knew.

“Max needs you, Cassie. He's been through a severe trauma and he needs the one person he can trust to help him through his recuperation.”

I heard myself say, “I want to take Max away.”

“That can't be done. You know that. We've got to monitor his progress, adjust the treatment as we go along.”

“I'll take care of all that. I want to move him to a different facility, away from here, away from all the frightening memories he has of this place.”

“I don't think so,” Arthur said slowly. “We do need to keep him under constant surveillance. Zack has to—”

“I don't want Zack to touch him!”

Arthur flinched visibly. He recovered immediately, though. “Cassie, I don't think you realize that Zack didn't want us to operate on Max.”

“Yeah, sure.”

“It's true. He grew almost as fond of the animal as you are. He couldn't even watch the procedure.”

“But you did, didn't you?”

“Yes, I did.”

I got to my feet. I felt strong, somehow, empowered. “I'll take care of Max,” I told Arthur. “I'll do all the tests and treatments. I don't want anyone else touching him.”

He gave me a patient, fatherly smile. “Are you going to sleep here, too?”

“Yes,” I snapped. “Why not?”

 

W
hat else on earth did I have? Why not stay close to Max day and night? Arthur was very conciliatory. He let me empty out the storage room next to Max's and bring in a cot, a microwave oven, a TV and DVD player, even a chest of drawers for a few of my clothes.

I took care of Max. It was his emotional pain that concerned me most. Just like me, he had been betrayed by someone he loved. I had to show him that I was at his side and I would protect him and I wouldn't allow anybody to hurt him ever again. I wished I could say the same about myself. It would be wonderful to have somebody who cared about me enough to shelter me from the rest of the world.

But I had something else now. I was going to get even with them. With Arthur, with Zack, with all of them. I didn't know how, not just then, but I knew someday, sometime, I'd pay them back for what they did to Max and me. I'd pay them back with interest.

After several weeks Max started to show a little of his old playfulness. The first time he hugged me I almost fainted with happiness. He was starting to trust me again!

That's why I insisted that my oncologist come to the lab to test me. I wasn't going to leave Max for an overnight trip to Boston. No way.

Her tests confirmed what I had known from my own self-testing. The enzyme was working inside me just the way it was working in the volunteer test subjects in Mexico.

“You're in remission,” she told me.