The God Gene

  “As I said: I don’t possess the means to do that.” She gave him a long look. “Do I have anything to fear from you, Mister Fife?”

  He shook his head. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m confined to a wheelchair.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “You mean, am I a member of the Brotherhood?”

  “Yes. If I lift your right sleeve will I see a 536 tattoo?”

  He raised his chin. “You would. I’ve been their abbot for many a year. But…” He sighed.

  “But?”

  “With Nelson’s death I relinquished the title. And that was all it was: a title. I took no part in the Brotherhood’s activities, and now I’m officially retired.”

  So … 536 was still out there. Not what she’d wanted to hear.

  “How many are you?”

  “Not your concern. But I will tell you this: They don’t know about you, and I won’t tell them. If what you say is true and you aren’t brewing the panacea, you have nothing to fear. But if you are…”

  Laura had no plans to make any, but if Clotilde held to her promise, she’d be dispensing a dose now and again.

  “If I am, they’ll what? Burn me at the stake?”

  “They’ll track you down and deal with you, and I won’t be able to help you.”

  “You?” That last surprised her. “Why would you want to?”

  His look softened. “Because you’re not an evil person. Nor are the panaceans. Just terribly misguided.”

  Laura disagreed with that, but saw no point in challenging him.

  He yawned. “Sorry. I usually nap after lunch.”

  “One more thing, then I’ll be out of your life.” This had been bothering her ever since she’d returned to the States. “Have you ever wondered how the woman your nephew chased all over Europe turned out to be the same person who hit you with her car all those years ago?”

  That half smile again. “You’re calling it a coincidence, I suppose.”

  “Well, yeah. An amazing coincidence, don’t you think?”

  He shook his head. “There are no coincidences, young lady. What you call ‘coincidence’ is the hand of a provident God, writing the story of your life.”

  “If you say so.”

  “You’re not a believer, I take it.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t believe. I’ve never been able to believe.”

  She’d been raised a Mormon but had merely gone through the motions as a child. None of it had made any sense to her. No religion did.

  “Then you will not be saved,” he told her.

  A thought occurred to her. “Some people are born unable to believe. If you believe in a provident God, that means he created them that way. How can God expect them to believe when he made them incapable of belief?”

  Fife blinked, then said, “Even Saint Thomas the Doubter came to believe in the Resurrection.”

  “But only after sticking his fingers in the wounds.”

  “For some, faith takes effort. For me it is like breathing.” He extended his hand. “Go with God.”

  Laura shook it, but Fife didn’t let go. He was frowning.

  “Something wrong?”

  “Redemption,” he said, staring at her. “Redemption in your future.”

  What now? A vision?

  She broke contact. “Well, that’s good, I guess.”

  “Oh, it is. And remember: There are no coincidences.”

  She smiled, waved, and headed for the parking lot.

  No coincidences … James Fife might find that comforting. Laura found it deeply disturbing.

  When she’d made the decision to visit Fife, she’d planned on making him the beneficiary should she ever come into possession of another dose of the panacea. But he’d just made it quite clear that he wouldn’t consider it a benefit.

  Fortunately she had another candidate.

  2

  SHIRLEY, NEW YORK

  Laura pulled into her driveway but didn’t bother opening the garage door. She’d never been good about disposing of belongings and the car had been crowded out long ago. She stared through the windshield without focusing on anything as she thought about her strange encounter with Fife. She hadn’t known quite what to expect, but she hadn’t expected that.

  So accepting of his nephew’s death, of his own awful fate. Let go, let God … she wished she could.

  Sighing, she picked up her phone from its usual spot in the center-console cup holder and checked her email for any new messages since leaving East Meadow. She nodded with satisfaction as she saw confirmation that the Stritch School of Medicine had sent her transcript to the residency-match folks. She could cross that off the checklist of items she needed in order to apply for the neurology residency she wanted. So different from when she’d registered for pathology over a decade ago. Now everything was online or through email.

  After her daughter Marissa’s ordeal and miraculous cure last month, she’d decided she’d spent enough time with the dead and was ready to deal with the living. She’d handed in her notice to the Suffolk County Medical Examiner’s Office; they needed time to find a replacement, so she’d stayed on, limiting herself to half days. Good thing, those half days. She still enjoyed the challenges of being an assistant medical examiner—sussing out causes of death and all that—but more important, the job gave structure to her life. All this free time … she couldn’t remember when she’d had so much of it and had yet to figure out how to fill all the open hours.

  She pocketed her phone and grabbed the Barnes & Noble shopping bag from the passenger side. She’d done some book browsing on her way home. Marissa’s science class was covering evolution and Laura had thought it couldn’t hurt to have a couple of relevant coffee-table books lying around the family room.

  She stopped halfway along the walk when she spotted a cardboard cube, barely big enough to hold a softball, sitting on her colonial’s front stoop. She approached and squatted next to it for a closer look. L. Fanning was block printed on the label with no return address. Her mouth went dry when she saw the Crymych, Wales, postmark. Only one possible sender: Clotilde.

  And Laura knew what it contained.

  Ikhar.

  The panacea. The panacea. The universal cure-all. The real deal.

  The irony … While she’d been assuring James Fife that she possessed no sample of the “diabolical potion,” it had been sitting on her doorstep.

  Clotilde had promised her a dose every few months. She’d kept that promise. Here was the first. And now the promise felt like a threat.

  As she carried the package inside, the empty house greeted her with silence. Until two weeks ago, when Marissa had gone back to school, someone had always been home. Marissa for sure—her human contacts had been strictly limited after her stem-cell transplant and so she never left the property—and usually Natasha, her homebound instructor.

  Marissa’s leukemia, her failed trials of chemotherapy, followed by her successful stem-cell transplant had dominated the past two years of Laura’s life. And then last month she’d almost lost her to a CMV infection.

  But now she was cured. She’d gone from knocking on heaven’s door to completely cured overnight—literally overnight. Not one of all the specialists and subspecialists who’d attended her in the Stony Brook PICU could explain the miracle then. To this day they remained baffled.

  But Laura knew: Half an ounce of a foul fluid had saved her.

  Ikhar.

  Now Marissa was back in William Floyd Grammar School. She’d returned too late for softball tryouts, but the coach was letting her practice with the team.

  Laura placed the box from Wales on the counter and stared at it.

  Well, it’s not going to open itself.

  She continued to stare.

  It’s still not going to open itself.

  Finally she took a breath and slid out the shit drawer—her private name for it, not used in front of Marissa—and extricated the box cutter from the Gordian kno
t of charger wires and key rings and such. She popped out the blade and slit the tough fiber packing tape along the seams.

  Inside, swaddled in bubble wrap, a small, crimson ceramic jar embossed with a Chinese character.

  A Chinese snuff bottle? It felt cool as it settled in her palm. She shook it. Liquid inside. A handwritten sticky note clung to the back.

  Let the All-Mother guide you.

  C

  C for Clotilde …

  The promised ikhar.

  Or as Rick called it, “worm juice.”

  She’d felt torn since Clotilde had made her promise. Would the old woman follow through? Laura couldn’t be sure, but had been setting the stage for its advent, if it ever happened. Today’s visit to James Fife had been part of that.

  Now it had arrived, but the responsibility it carried tied her in knots. A dose could cure one person—just one—of any illness, but that meant denying it to everyone else who so desperately needed a cure.

  Choosing life for one and leaving thousands of others to their fate, which too often meant death. How could she—?

  A knock on the front door.

  Who on Earth…?

  Quickly she closed the box and placed it on a high shelf among the decorative bowls she rarely used. She hurried to the door. A peek through the sidelight revealed a familiar face.

  Rick.

  “You’re early,” she said, feeling a tingle of delight as she pulled the door open. She’d invited him over for dinner.

  Tall, with lean muscles and a wedge-shaped upper body that owed more to genetics than weight training, he looked fit and trim in a dark blue polo shirt and tan slacks. A brown paper bag dangled from his hand. With his thick brown hair, dark gray eyes, and a perpetually sardonic twist to his lips, he looked the proverbial hunk. At least on the outside. Inside she knew he was something quite other.

  “I know. If that’s a problem…”

  “No problem at all.”

  True. Not only was she glad to see him—she’d been looking forward to his arrival all day—but she needed a distraction from the ikhar.

  After a fleetingly awkward pause, he wrapped his arms around her and gave her a quick kiss on the top of her head—he was that much taller—and then broke away. The hug felt good and Laura wished it had lasted longer, but even after all they’d been through, he still acted so hesitant around her.

  She wondered about that. He seemed supremely confident in all other areas of life, but she hadn’t seen him around other women. Was he skittish with all women, or just her? She hoped it was just her.

  She pointed to the bag in his hand. Obviously a bottle. “Bubbles?”

  “Veuve Clicquot.”

  “Ah. The good stuff.”

  According to Rick, he’d been mostly a beer drinker until their trip through France where he discovered how much he liked Champagne.

  “What are we celebrating?”

  “How about … it’s Tuesday?”

  “Good enough for me.” She took it from him. “I’ll stick it in the fridge till dinner.”

  After a rocky start, she’d come to like having him around. Parts of him scared her. He’d done terrible things in his life, but only to terrible people—or so he said. And in Israel she’d witnessed firsthand his ruthless efficiency in dispatching a deadly threat. But she harbored not the slightest doubt about his unswerving loyalty to her.

  And Marissa adored him—always a good sign.

  In the weeks since their return to the States, he’d become a frequent visitor. After her divorce she hadn’t wanted a relationship, but then Rick had been forced upon her, and she found it good to have a man in her life again, even if this one confined himself to the periphery.

  Was this a relationship? She wasn’t sure what to call it. They’d teetered on the edge of intimacy in that hotel in the Orkneys—the end of their mission, too much to drink—and might have taken the leap had they not been interrupted. Rick had never followed up on that, never once made a pass at her. She wasn’t yet sure how she’d respond if he did, but she would at least like the opportunity to find out.

  She kept remembering what he’d said outside that dead kibbutz in Israel: Relationships are overrated. Did he mean that, or had he said it to blow her off because he felt her questions were getting too personal? And was he wrong?

  He was so hard to read. Sometimes he seemed almost afraid of her, or rather afraid she’d shatter at the slightest touch. She wasn’t a china doll. She’d done bioprospecting in jungles, been married, had a child, gone through a divorce, shepherded her child through leukemia. And just last month—as Rick knew all too well—she’d been chased across various continents by assorted psychos who wanted her dead, and had somehow managed to survive.

  Not that she was craving male companionship. She and Rick had their own spaces and lives, but they remained intersected to a certain degree. The scientist part of her brain couldn’t help visualizing a Venn diagram with their lives as circles, hers red, his blue. The overlap was a small area of purple. Sometimes she wished for more purple, but saw no need to rush it. What would happen would happen. In the meantime, she had her own agenda, so much of which did not involve Rick.

  And yet, for someone not craving male companionship, she found her thoughts straying often to this man.

  He followed her into the kitchen. “How’s the residency hunt?”

  “Still tracking down and collecting data for the application.”

  Her decision to change the focus of her medical career had come too late for this year’s residency match, so she was laying the groundwork to put her name in the neurology pool for next year.

  “And then what?”

  “And then next spring I hope they match me with a convenient hospital.”

  He smiled. “Oh. Sort of like a Sorting Hat.”

  “Never thought of it like that, but you’re not far off.”

  The National Resident Matching Program wasn’t exactly a lottery, but close. All medical school seniors—and occasionally a doctor already in practice, like her—looking for postgraduate residencies in specialty training had to join the match program. She wouldn’t be able to officially register for a neurology residency until September; then she’d apply for interviews with area medical centers like Columbia, Mount Sinai, Stony Brook, and NYU–North Shore. She’d take any of them, but really wanted one of the latter two because they were practically in her backyard.

  She stowed the bottle in the fridge and turned to him. Should she tell him about the ikhar? He knew about Clotilde’s promise, but seemed to have forgotten about it. Telling him the ikhar had arrived would ignite a discussion about who she’d dose with it and she didn’t feel like getting into that. At least not at the moment.

  So she kept the chatter neutral. “What brings you over so early?”

  “Stahlman’s idea.”

  “Oh? He’s scheduling your social life now?”

  “Why not? He’s already scheduling the rest of my life. Keeps me jumping on multiple projects. He’s got so many irons in so many fires … ever since we cured him he’s been a dynamo.”

  Clayton Stahlman had financed their trip last month. He was stupid rich and had been terminal with pulmonary fibrosis when he’d sent her out to find a cure. Rick at the time was already managing his security and backgrounding key employees, so Stahlman had sent him along.

  “You mean ever since you cured him,” she said.

  “We found the panacea together.”

  This was one of the things she liked about Rick. He never hesitated to share credit.

  “But you’re the one who delivered his dose.”

  Insisted on seeing that his boss received a dose, even when neither of them was sure it would work.

  The result had been another miraculous cure and, as Stahlman had promised, a multimillion-dollar windfall for Laura. Most of it was tagged for Marissa’s future, and Laura had hired money managers to figure out the best way to preserve it for her until she reached adulthoo
d.

  “Anyway,” he said, “told him I wouldn’t be available tonight because you’d asked me over for dinner. And he said something like, ‘Perfect! I want you to ask her something.’”

  “I’m afraid to hear.”

  “He’s picked up rumors of some miraculous cures right here on Long Island and wanted to know if that was you.”

  Laura tensed. “And you said…?”

  “Said no way. You used up all you had.”

  “You didn’t tell him about—?”

  “Clotilde sending you more?” He made a face. “Seriously?”

  “Sorry. I just want to keep all that under wraps.”

  No worry where Rick was concerned. His time in the CIA had left him silent as a clam. He never volunteered information.

  “Makes two of us. Anyway, people are saying there’s some doc somewhere on the North Shore with a healing touch. Stahlman wants us to track him down.”

  “Why does he think he needs me for that? Because I’m a doctor too? No thanks. Besides, whoever he is, he’s either a charlatan or a kook.”

  “And if he’s not?”

  “It’s a super–long shot that he’s the real deal.” A month ago she would have said “impossible,” but impossible had become an opinion. “But if he is, we should leave him alone.”

  “Amen to that.”

  She noticed a spoon in the sink. She rarely left utensils about, but she’d been distracted this morning by the prospect of meeting James Fife. She pulled open the dishwasher to put it away.

  “Whoa!” Rick said as she slid out the Miele’s utensil tray. “Serial-killer dishwasher!”

  “What?”

  “Take a look,” he said, pointing. “You’ve got all the long forks lined up next to each other, and all the short forks together, same with all the teaspoons and tablespoons.”

  “So?”

  “Serial killer,” he said with a sage nod. “No question. I know these things. Only serial killers go to that sort of trouble.”

  “You know nothing of the sort. And it’s no trouble at all.”