Panacea

  “My word of the day. Call me when you’ve done what you have to do in Israel. And be careful.”

  “Will do.”

  “He gave you an out?” Rick said as she handed the phone back.

  “He did.”

  “And you didn’t take it?”

  “As I’m sure you heard.”

  “Yeah.”

  He looked at her, gave her a quick, silent nod, then resumed his thousand-mile stare.

  Laura flipped though her People and she realized she recognized only one out of ten celebrities in the whole magazine.

  Finally she broke down and tried for conversation again.

  “So … here we are, embarking on the next leg of our wild-goose chase.”

  He snapped out of his reverie and came back from wherever he’d been drifting.

  “You still think this is all futile, then? Even after what Ix’chel told you about Chaim being cured?”

  She shrugged. “Chaim got sick unto death, Chaim got better—I don’t dispute that. The mystery is what happened between. I promised Stahlman two weeks and I’ll give him twelve more days of my best to unravel that mystery. And then I’ll have to tell a very sick man that I couldn’t find his cure.”

  “But if you do find it, what will you tell yourself?”

  The question took her by surprise—not only for its perceptiveness, but because she had no answer.

  She looked at Rick and saw he’d already resumed his deep-space stare.

  “Thinking about your ‘vast, cool and unsympathetic’ intelligences?”

  He pulled back to the airport again. “Guess you could say so. But only indirectly.”

  “Spend much time thinking about them?”

  Now I’m dropping pronouns. Is it catching?

  “Try not to. But yeah, sometimes.”

  She had to say something: “Tell me, do you have something against starting a sentence with a pronoun?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “‘Guess you could say so’ … ‘Try not to’ … That sort of thing.”

  He frowned. “Never thought about it. Never realized—”

  She laughed. “See? There you go again. And verbs and articles as well?”

  “No kidding?” His voice went robotic. “I. Will. Try. To. Speak. Your. Brand. Of. English.”

  “Now you’re being silly. I shouldn’t have mentioned it. It just popped out. Back to these intelligences. Have they got names?”

  “Maybe. Probably not. They’re too rare and too vast and unknowable to have names. Naming is a human thing. When we name something we’ve classified it, pigeonholed it, circumscribed it—made it safe. Or relatively so. I like to put myself in their place and imagine how they view us.”

  “Like bugs?”

  His mouth twisted. “More like microbes—but thinking microbes. Imagine how entertaining we must be as they toy with our beliefs and emotions on a mass scale to see how we react.”

  Okay. She could temporarily buy into this crazy mind-set—but only as an intellectual exercise. Better than silence.

  “But if they’re that powerful, they could simply wipe us out if we don’t respond as they wish.”

  He shook his head. “You’re getting Old Testamenty there, in the cranky Yahweh mode. If sapience is a rare aberration, they’re gonna want to preserve us. If they wipe us out, the toys are gone, and where’s the fun in that?”

  “Okay, so assume you’re one of these intelligences … what do you do?”

  “Well, the key word is ‘unsympathetic.’ By that I don’t mean they have ill will toward us, just that they don’t feel for us. They’ve no compunction about hurting us just to see how we react and recover. As for me, as an unsympathetic intelligence, I’d want to set some rules. Every game has to have rules.”

  “Like?”

  “Okay, you can’t simply insert an idea into the heads of a population. That’s too crude. Lacks style, no élan. You have to manipulate events in a way that sparks the idea. Once that idea is fixed, then you watch where it goes.”

  “Sounds complicated.”

  He shrugged. “It is, and it isn’t. Maybe they’re playing with chaos theory.”

  “That’s the second time you’ve mentioned chaos.”

  “Is it? Oh, yeah. About Chaim leaving Israel. Just a toss-off about how a seemingly unrelated event in Israel—the failure of a kibbutz in the nineties—triggered enormous changes in your life decades later.”

  He was right, wasn’t he. A long chain of causes and effects leading directly to her … She found it disturbing.

  “Is this where you tell me it was arranged?”

  He laughed. “You think I know? I’m just juggling ideas. And that brings me back to chaos theory, which is most easily appreciated in predicting weather.”

  “You mean like the butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil causing a tornado in Kansas?”

  “That’s the famous example everyone gives. It’s exaggerated but it sets up the paradigm that in a complex system like weather, small variations in initial conditions can have huge effects down the line. Look how El Niño, created by the temperature of a relatively small area of the Pacific off the west coast of South America, influences droughts and tornadoes and hurricanes in and around the U.S.”

  “So chaos theory would apply to the complex system of a globe-spanning race of sapient beings. Namely us.”

  “You got it. Maybe these unsympathetic intelligences like to introduce an anomaly here and there to see where the ripples go.”

  Now she saw where he was heading. A crazy, almost psychotic conversation, but she couldn’t deny she was enjoying it. How many men—how many people of either sex—could spark a conversation like this? She couldn’t remember ever meeting anyone like him.

  “An anomaly like a panacea?”

  “Exactly. Maybe they introduced it to a pagan cult and waited to see how its spread would affect human civilization. But the cult kept it to itself and doled it out to only a lucky few. That’s got to piss off the U-I’s.”

  U-I’s? she thought. Oh, unsympathetic intelligences.

  “Why?”

  “No chaos effect or ripple effect into the larger system because their panacea was kept under wraps, leaving the system unaware of its existence. The experiment was a failure.”

  “Fine. No fun for them. But I’m still not sure I get this whole event-manipulation thing.”

  “They wait a couple of millennia—an eye blink to them—and no chaos effect. So they start manipulating events to get this thing out in the open. The result is Doctor Laura Fanning on her way to Mesoamerica, and then to Israel.”

  A chill ran through her. “You think they want me to find it?”

  “Of course they do. And it works even better to have it revealed now rather than back in the Iron Age or whatever. Because now the sapient microbes have science and we’re gonna be faced with something that breaks all our carefully constructed theories of biology and physics. The ripple effects through all of science and eventually human civilization will be enormous.”

  Yes, Laura thought, nodding. Widespread availability of a panacea would cause … she could barely comprehend it. Agree with him or not, he was a thinker, this guy.

  “‘Enormous’ doesn’t touch it,” she said. “The effect of no disease, and no premature death from disease, will change everything. Old religions will fall before the panacea, new religions will spring up around it, the social order will convulse with all these extra old folks around, the course of history will be corkscrewed.”

  “Or just plain screwed.”

  She remembered something he’d said yesterday. “Is that what you meant by ‘Did you ever think that the panacea might exist because we’re able to have the opinion that it can’t exist?’”

  “Uh-huh. Science has worked for centuries to make sense of the world around us. We’ve had theories which we’ve confirmed enough to call knowledge. We can say that this is the way things work, and then along comes the panacea a
nd it breaks all those rules. The Garmin GPS of human knowledge says ‘Recalculating route,’ and that starts an intellectual chain reaction leading who knows where?”

  Laura sat back and shook her head. “This sounds suspiciously like intelligent design.”

  “No-no. Just the opposite. More like intelligent disarray or intelligent disorder. It’s like seeing something as orderly and productive as a beehive and saying, ‘I wonder what would happen if we stole the queen?’ And then you do just that. Or on a human scale, it’s, say, 1963 and you’ve got a cold war between two factions of your microbes, the commies and the capitalists. Let’s take a guy connected to the commies and nudge him to kill the leader of the capitalists and see what happens. That sort of thing.”

  “I see why you want to keep the word ‘unsympathetic’ in there. And I see where this is going. Endow this hate-filled little Austrian with an enormously seductive and persuasive speaking voice and see where it takes him.”

  “Now you’ve got it. But that pales in comparison with introducing a true panacea to humanity.” He was staring at her. “Which brings us to the big question.”

  “Which is?”

  “If you find the panacea, what will you do?”

  For an instant she seriously considered her answer, then shook herself.

  “A moot point, Rick. It doesn’t exist.”

  “Imagine it does, and you find its secret, and it’s up to you to reveal it to the world or keep it hidden. What do you do?”

  What was he doing … asking out of curiosity? Or probing her ethics, taking her measure? It made her a little uncomfortable. But she’d engaged in the topic, so she figured she owed him an answer.

  She thought of the turmoil the panacea would cause in every facet of human civilization. And yet …

  “Okay, assuming it exists, I think I’d give it to the world.”

  “Despite the consequences?”

  “I don’t think it would be my right to withhold it. And if I did, every time I heard of a child dying from a supposedly incurable illness, I’d feel responsible. I couldn’t live like that.”

  “So it’s all about you?”

  “That’s not fair.” She was getting a new, unsettling perspective on Rick. “Let me turn this around. Let’s say the panacea exists and I found it. Would you stop me from giving it to the world?”

  “What kind of question is that?”

  “What kind of answer is that? You’re starting to worry me. If I lift up your sleeve, will I see a 536 there?”

  He laughed but his head shake was emphatic. “You’ve seen my arms. But it comes down to this: I was hired to watch your back during your travels and return you safely to Mister Stahlman. And that is what I will do.”

  She still hadn’t learned where he stood on this admittedly moot question.

  She said, “Let me rephrase: If you found the panacea, would you give it to the world?”

  “I probably wouldn’t be able to answer that until I had it in my hand.”

  “You’re really doing your damnedest to avoid an answer.”

  “Okay, that scenario would put me in a position to frustrate the U-I’s, and I’ve got to tell you, I’d be sorely tempted not to play the game. I might even destroy it.”

  “And condemn untold millions to premature death?”

  “I wouldn’t be condemning anyone to anything. The operative word there is ‘tempted.’ The jury’s still out on what I’d finally decide.”

  “But the very fact that you’d even be tempted…”

  “You’re operating under the assumption that a panacea would be a good thing for the human race.”

  She couldn’t help making it personal … thinking of Marissa if her stem-cell transplant hadn’t worked.

  “Ultimately, yes. Lots of turmoil in the beginning, but in the long run—”

  “Nothing from outside can be good in the long run. And in the long run you’d only be rewarding the U-I’s. Enabling them. And encouraging them.” He shook his head. “Don’t you want to thumb your nose and raise a middle digit?”

  “I might … if I believed in these vast intelligences. But I don’t. Just as I don’t believe in the panacea. This is a fun intellectual exercise, Rick, but no more than that. Right?”

  “A guy named Charles Fort spent much of his life documenting weird, inexplicable occurrences. His conclusion: ‘We’re property.’”

  “Oh, I can’t buy into that,” Laura said.

  “Maybe by the time we finish this you will.”

  Not likely, but she remembered something else he’d said.

  “You started to say something yesterday. You said, ‘I’ve seen…’ but you never finished. What did you see?”

  He stood. “I think I’ll hit the bar for a drink. What can I get you?”

  “Conversation over?”

  “The topic’s run out of steam, don’t you think? What can I get you?”

  She sighed. After the last twenty-four hours, she could use a drink—a stiff one. But she didn’t do well with hard liquor, and since she was operating on next to no sleep, she’d be snockered.

  “A Pinot Noir if they have it, otherwise a glass of Cab. I’m not particular.”

  He nodded and strolled away.

  What had he seen—or thought he’d seen—that he wouldn’t talk about? Was that why he’d dropped everything in California and moved across country?

  She pulled out her smartphone—no need for a sat phone here—and dialed her voice mail. One message. Now what?

  “Hey, Doc, Phil again. You’re not gonna believe this. Your not–ex-SEAL changed his name to Rick Hayden from—wait for it—Ramiz Haddad. Can you believe this? He’s some sort of Arab. I’ve never seen the guy. Does he look like an Arab? Anyway, now that I have his birth name, I can go deeper into his background. I’ll be back in touch as soon as I find something.”

  After ending the call, Laura sat and stared into space pretty much as Rick had done.

  An Arab? Rick didn’t look a bit like an Arab. And he spoke Hebrew.

  What the hell was going on?

  9

  “I found her,” Bradsher said.

  Nelson was seated in the Avianca area of Benito Juarez International Airport, awaiting their connecting flight to Miami. He knew Fanning was also in the airport and had sent Bradsher in search of her. For some reason he could not fully explain, he wanted to see her in the flesh.

  “Where?”

  “Near the Iberia gates. She’s with Hayden.”

  “You mean Ramiz Haddad.”

  Bradsher had backgrounded this so-called nobody ex-SEAL and learned he wasn’t a SEAL at all but an ex-cop from the sleepy town of Sausalito who had changed his name from Ramiz Haddad to Rick Hayden. It made some sort of sense because one could see why he’d think he’d have a better chance of advancement in a little town like Sausalito with an American rather than an Arab name.

  The reason didn’t matter. What mattered was that this Haddad, who wasn’t a SEAL at all, had somehow neutralized Miguel and Jorge. Nelson had informed the Company’s Mexico City office of the situation and they were sending someone into those jungles to find Miguel. His satellite phone’s battery had not yet run out and so they’d been able to ping it and triangulate on his signal for an approximate location. But that meant only that they’d be able to find Miguel’s phone. It didn’t mean he was with it.

  Nelson had a terrible sense of events spinning out of control—not that they’d been exactly under his thumb in the first place, but the tumors, Stahlman entering the picture, Simon gone, Miguel and his hireling in the picture and then out of it, Fanning heading to Israel …

  The Serpent’s work, or the Lord’s?

  Nelson sighed and rose from his seat. “Show me.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Bradsher didn’t know the connection between Fanning and Uncle Jim; Nelson was content to leave it that way.

  “We’ve sent three men against her and none has returned. She’s the target but he
r companion is frustrating our every move. So, yes, I’m quite sure I want to lay eyes on both of them.”

  Bradsher led him to the gate where passengers awaited their Iberia flight to Madrid. They stopped near a cell phone kiosk.

  “She’s over there, by the window.”

  Searching out of the corner of his eye, Nelson found her—jet-black hair, trim figure. A surge of rage flowed through him as he watched her blithely flipping through a magazine. Uncle Jim may have forgiven her, but he could not.

  “Where’s her guard dog?”

  Bradsher looked around. “He was seated next—here he comes.”

  A tall man, a drink in each hand, was winding through the other passengers. His face was turned away at first, but became visible when he sat.

  Nelson felt as if he’d been punched in the chest. He grabbed Bradsher’s arm.

  “No!”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I know him.”

  “How? Who is it?”

  “One of our own. Or at least he used to be.”

  His presence explained so many things.

  Why him, of all people?

  This was terrible. Worse than terrible. This was the absolute worst.

  Because Nelson knew all too well what this man was capable of.

  GAN YOSAIF

  1

  By the time they found Gan Yosaif—or what was left of it—the sun was resting on the horizon, readying to slip below.

  Just as well. They needed night to find Polaris.

  They’d chosen another Jeep, but Rick—or should she think of him as Ramiz now?—had driven this time while Laura navigated them south into the Negev Desert. He pulled to a stop before a broken gate that hung canted from a single hinge across the dirt road. A weathered sign dangled next to it. The word on the left had been obliterated, leaving …

  “That’s the word for garden,” Rick said. “This must be it.”

  Beyond the gate, on a rise, they could make out a few buildings.

  “Good thing I talked to that guy in Mexico City,” he said, getting out and stretching. “We’d have never found this place on our own.”