Looked like the only way she was going to get answers was to go inside and talk to this Clayton Stahlman.
She took a breath. “All right. But you go in first.”
She wasn’t the suspicious type as a rule, but she didn’t want this big man pushing her inside from behind and driving off with her. Yes, he’d come to her rescue last night but that could have been a setup.
Paranoid? Maybe. But something weird was going on here.
His smile was almost mocking but he preceded her through the doorway. Then he turned and extended his hand to help her step up from the ground.
“I can handle it,” she said.
She found a railing and pulled herself up onto the bottom step where she stopped and looked around. The interior looked like the lounge area of a luxury airliner.
“Hello,” said a weak voice from her right. An older man sat smiling at her from a wheelchair. A green oxygen cannula circled under his nose. “Doctor Fanning, I presume.”
Okay. This looked on the level. And he looked anything but threatening.
“That’s me,” she said, climbing the rest of the way in. “And you are…?”
“Clayton Stahlman.” He handed her a card embossed with his name and a telephone number, then indicated one of the sofas set against the walls. “Please, have a seat.”
Laura complied, slipping the card into a side pocket on her shoulder bag. She made a quick assessment of Stahlman: continuous oxygen, moon face, no barrel chest. Probably pulmonary fibrosis. Hard to tell his age. A knitted cap covered his scalp and the tops of his ears; puffiness from long-term steroid treatment had flattened whatever facial wrinkles he might normally have.
“Would you like some coffee?” He cocked his head toward the driver behind the steering wheel at the front of the van. “I’ll have James pour—”
“No, thanks. What I would like are some answers, starting with what this is all about.”
He nodded. “Fully understandable. Where would you like me to begin?”
She pointed to Hayden who stood in a stoop, too tall for the interior of the van.
“Call me paranoid, but I never found ‘Someone to Watch over Me’ a particularly engaging song. Why was he?”
Hayden dropped into a seat toward the rear of the van and looked bored.
“The simplest, most direct answer to that is ‘because I paid him to do so.’ He’s an ex–Navy SEAL and very capable. But as to why I assigned him to you, that takes a little background.”
Laura leaned back and crossed her legs. “I’m off this weekend. Plenty of time. I’m listening.”
“First, about me: born at the end of World War Two, a hippy in the sixties, earned an MBA in the seventies, retired with a gazillion dollars in the nineties before the dot-com bubble burst, and discovered a few years ago that the breathing trouble I was having was due to something called pulmonary fibrosis.”
Laura nodded, pleased with the accuracy of her on-the-fly diagnosis.
“You’re on high doses of prednisone, I take it.”
“Plus immunosuppressive drugs. I’m almost as susceptible to infection as your daughter, Doctor Fanning.”
Laura stiffened. “I’m not comfortable with you knowing about—”
“Please,” he said, raising a bony hand. “You seem like a rational woman, grounded in reality. Certainly you don’t still cling to the delusion that such a thing as privacy exists.”
Laura sighed. “I guess not.”
“I have money, Doctor Fanning. Tons of money. I’ll never be able to spend it all. I can’t even spend the interest and dividends I collect every quarter, so my principal keeps growing. In short, I can buy anything I want. And one of the easiest things to buy is information.”
He spoke without bravado, appeared comfortable with his wealth. Used to it. Wore it like a favorite old sweater.
He smiled. “I know what you’re thinking: Money can’t buy health.”
“Something like that. But at least you’ve got one fewer worry than most chronically ill folks.”
“You said ‘fewer’ instead of ‘less.’ Thank you. Hardly anyone cares about grammar anymore. But that aside, I have children and I have grandchildren. With an average lifespan I should be able to look forward to ten or fifteen more years with them. But as things stand now, I’ve got two or three—if I’m lucky. So that’s why I intend to buy—or rather, try to buy back my health.”
Laura leaned forward. “I hope no one has told you they can cure pulmonary fibrosis.”
“I know it’s terminal. I’ve given millions to research but I’ve been told that if there’s ever going to be a cure, it won’t happen in my lifetime. Only something outside the mainstream can cure me.”
Uh-oh.
“Have you been offered some sort of alternative-medicine cure?”
“I don’t believe in alternative medicine. When you stick ‘alternative’ in front of ‘medicine,’ you mean it hasn’t been proven to work. Once you can prove it works, it’s no longer ‘alternative’ and joins the mainstream. Right?”
Laura nodded. “That pretty well sums it up. But if what you’re after is outside the mainstream and yet not alternative, what are we talking about?”
His gaze bored into her. “You’ve heard of the legendary panacea, I assume?”
Laura shook her head. Had she heard right? Panacea? Long-term high-dose steroids could induce psychosis. Had his prednisone made him delusional?
He began to laugh. “Oh, I wish I had a picture of your face. It’s precious. Just what I—”
His laugh broke up into a wheezing cough and his face reddened as he fought for air. Finally he controlled it and sat breathing deeply through his nose, sucking in the oxygen flowing through the cannula.
“I shouldn’t laugh,” he said after a while. “But I knew what your reaction would be: You think I’ve lost my mind, correct?”
Laura slung the strap of her bag over her shoulder and rose. Unlike Hayden, she could stand up straight inside the van. This had just run off the rails for her. But she’d give the sick old man the benefit of an explanation before she walked out.
“Mister Stahlman, the ‘legendary panacea’ is just that: a legend. Such a cure-all is impossible. No single concoction can cure everything. Disease processes are too varied, their causes are … are myriad, and their courses are different with every individual. What stops the out-of-control cell divisions of a cancer can’t stop the progressive scarring and shutdown of the alveoli in your lungs. You see that, don’t you?”
Stahlman sat watching her, a bemused smile undulating across his lips.
“Can I also suppose it couldn’t reverse the effects of juvenile rheumatoid arthritis either?”
Laura could only stare at him. “What…?”
“Young Thomas Cochran received a dose of the panacea on Wednesday morning.”
“Tommy?”
“You speak as if you knew him.”
“I did. I—”
“Wait.” Hayden had straightened from his slump and was staring at her. “You knew the boy?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“My Marissa was misdiagnosed at first and—”
“So you’d actually met the boy before he showed up on your autopsy table?”
“I believe I’ve already said that. Why is that important?”
Hayden’s gaze shifted to Stahlman. “One degree of separation.”
Laura looked back and forth between them. “I don’t understand.”
“Mister Hayden has some unorthodox ideas about life, liberty, and the pursuit of coincidence. The two of us have had some lively discussions since he came to work for me, but his ideas need not concern us here. I was saying that young Thomas Cochran received a dose of the panacea on Wednesday … brought to him by Chaim Brody.”
“That’s not possible. There’s no such thing.”
“Explain the Cochran boy then.”
“I can’t.”
“There’s a ga
p in your knowledge, but you refuse to fill it with the idea of a panacea.”
“I prefer to be honest and say I don’t know rather than fall back on myth.”
Stahlman was looking past her and nodding to Hayden. “Didn’t I tell you?”
“Tell him what?” Laura said.
Stahlman said, “I’ve said I had a feeling about you. From your bioprospecting past I assumed you had a scientific mind and intellectual honesty—two indispensables for the job.”
“Just what does a bioprospector do?” Hayden asked.
She gave him a quick glance. “Mostly we watch people’s eyes glaze over when we answer that question.” Back to Stahlman: “Job? What job?”
“I’m hiring you to find the panacea.”
“Find a panacea?” She shook her head. “Why don’t you simply go out and buy some sort of homeopathic cure?”
“I don’t understand.”
“They’re both equally bogus.”
“My, my. Your bedside skills could use some honing.”
“My patients don’t seem to mind.”
“That’s because they’re all dead,” Hayden said.
“Just the way I like them. Which brings me to an important point, Mister Stahlman: I already have a job.”
“Does it pay you five million dollars just for trying? And an equal amount as a bonus for success?”
Laura felt her jaw drop.
3
“We’ve identified the girl in the picture with Brody,” Bradsher said, placing a sheet of paper on Nelson’s desk.
Nelson read it through squinted lids. He’d barely slept last night. He’d twisted and turned thinking about the black spot clinging to his neck and masses expanding in his lungs and spreading from there.
And then, this morning’s headache—a killer. Virtually blinding … to the point where he wasn’t sure he was seeing correctly.
Was that Ix’chel Coboh printed on the sheet?
“What kind of name is that?”
“Mayan, sir.”
“How on Earth do you say that first one?”
“I was wondering that myself so I checked. Apparently you pronounce it like ‘Michelle’ but without the M.”
Good old Bradsher … always anticipating.
“How did we find her?”
“We lucked out. She works as a translator in Chetumal.”
“Pardon my ignorance, but where is that?”
“It’s the capital of Quintana Roo … one of the Mexican states … on the Yucatán Peninsula.”
“Yucatán … got it. But how…?”
“Facial recognition software to the rescue. Mexican photo records aren’t state-of-the-art, but they’re getting better. I had a couple of Company people in Mexico City run through the criminal databases on the off chance that she’d been picked up for something. They came up empty so they tried government employees and bingo.”
“Do we think she’s a panacean?”
Bradsher shrugged. “She doesn’t fit the pattern. She helps the local Maya deal with the government—a fair number of them still live in the jungle and don’t speak Spanish. No connection to the health system that we know of.”
“Phone-text monitoring no help?”
“Sorry. If she was in Mexico City, no prob. But Chetumal is in the sticks. Well, the relative sticks. Nothing happening there of interest to NSA and the Company.”
Nelson drummed his fingers on the desk. “Assign someone to tail her for a day or two. See if anything pops.”
“I know just the man.”
“And what about last night?”
“The staged mugging nearly went south when a Good Samaritan stepped in, but Brother Simon managed to complete his tasks and get away.”
He had to ask. “How bad are her injuries?”
“Negligible due to the interruption.”
He hid his disappointment. An eye for an eye was too much to ask for, but he’d hoped at the very least that she’d be hospitalized.
“And the ME’s office?”
“Mission accomplished: Our man wiped the SD cards on the three cameras they keep there, and placed two audio pickups.”
“Excellent. Chaim Brody is in the ground, so she can’t reshoot his tattoo, and Hanrahan’s is deeply charred. It appears we have nipped that threat in the bud. Now we can concentrate on—”
The phone rang and he was informed that a Dr. Forman was calling.
“I have to take this,” he told Bradsher.
The agent nodded and ducked out, closing the door behind him. Nelson’s gut clenched as he punched the blinking button.
“Doctor!” he said as heartily as he could manage. “What news do you have for me?”
“Not good, I’m afraid, Agent Fife. That punch biopsy you sent me arrived first thing this morning. I put a rush on it as you requested. Good thing too—just got word that it’s a malignant melanoma.”
Nelson’s gut tightened further. Dr. Moreau had indicated as much, but still … “That doesn’t sound good.”
“That’s not the worst of it. Pathology here classes it as a grade four tumor.”
“And that’s bad?”
“The higher the grade, the more aggressive the tumor. Grade four is very aggressive. And that chest X-ray you sent indicates distant spread, which puts you at stage four.”
“Grade, stage … I don’t—”
“Grade four, stage four means an aggressive tumor that has already spread to distant organs. Get thee to an oncologist, Fife. Pronto. I’ll overnight the slides to you.”
“Tomorrow’s Sunday.”
“Oh, right. Well, then, I’ll courier them up to you today and bill it to your people. You’ll want them along when you see your oncologist. Sloan-Kettering is right there in the city. You can’t do better than that.”
“I don’t have time for that right now. I’m in the middle of something important.”
“You don’t have time not to get started. At least let them start scanning you to see where else it’s spread.”
“Where might that be?”
“Anywhere.”
Nelson rubbed his temple with his free hand. “Brain?”
“That’s always a possibility. It’s a frequent stop after the lungs.”
“Oh, Lord.”
“Why? You’ve been having headaches?”
“Daily.”
A long silence, then, “Look, you need Sloan—now.”
“I can’t. Soon, maybe, but not now. Can you send me a script for a brain scan … just so I’ll know?”
He supposed he could have asked Moreau, but she’d probably turn him down. No, not probably—he was sure she’d turn him down.
Forman said, “If it’s positive, will that get you off your ass?”
“If it’s spread to my brain, I’ll go straight to Sloan. Promise.”
A sigh. “All right. I’ll order a no-contrast CT. It’s not as detailed as an MRI but you can schedule it quickly without as much red tape, and if anything’s there, it’ll tell the story. I’ll stick it in with the slides.”
“Thank you.”
“You said you didn’t have any more of that miracle juice you brought me. Is that true?”
“Yes. As I told you, I’m working on tracking it down. That’s why I can’t start chemo or anything like that now.”
“Well, I hope to hell you find some. And if you do, reserve the first dose for yourself. You need it. Boy, do you need it!”
As he ended the call, Nelson wanted to cry at the irony. If he did track down the panacea, he was forbidden from partaking of that devil’s brew.
Uncle Jim’s words echoed in his head: Trust me: If something disables you, you’ll wish you’d taken a little time for fun.
He was beginning to fear that he might not have much time left for fun or anything else. If that was the case, so be it. Maybe he hadn’t lived a full life by common standards—most people would consider it downright dull, he supposed. But he’d found it meaningful, and that was al
l that mattered.
As for fun … he sensed he was homing in on the panaceans and close to wiping them off the face of the Earth. Doing the Lord’s work wasn’t supposed to be fun, but in this case …
4
Did he say five million?
It took some time for Laura to overcome her shock. Then she said, “You can’t be serious!”
“I am completely serious. Aren’t I, Mister Hayden?”
“Believe him,” Hayden said in a flat tone. “He’s not kidding.”
“But five million?”
“Chump change to him.”
She looked at Stahlman. “I can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because even if it’s … chump change to you, I can’t be involved in a sham.”
He looked offended. “What do you mean, ‘sham’? The offer is very real.”
“Not the offer—the search. The search would be a sham. It has no hope of success. I can’t be a party to that.”
He smiled. “I do like you, Doctor Fanning. I admire your integrity, I truly do.”
“Well, fine. You can also admire my back as I walk out. You’ll have to find someone else.”
He shook his head. “There is no one else with your unique qualifications.”
She was curious now. “Such as?”
“You’ve got a medical degree—”
“Plenty of those around.”
“—plus an expertise in exotic botany.”
He seemed to know an awful lot about her.
“So?”
“So, the panacea is plant based.”
“Do you know the plant?”
Stahlman gestured to Hayden. “Mister Hayden, would you be so kind?”
“Sure.” Hayden grabbed a small ceramic pot from a ledge and handed it to Laura. “Here you go.” When she hesitated, he added, “It won’t bite. Not like it’s a triffid or anything.”
Stahlman said, “It’s what your two dead growers were cultivating before their untimely deaths.”
The pot contained a single, pale green stalk topped with five smooth-bordered leaves surrounding a central bud.
Laura had never seen this species before, but hazarded a guess. “Buxaceae family?”
“It would appear so, but it is genetically distinct. No one knows where it belongs in the scheme of things.”