The Last Enemy - Parts 1,2 & 3 - 1934-2054

  Chapter 10

  “Louis, the team was ready by the late nineties of the last century. What were your plans? What was your primary goal at the time?”

  “I held the first meeting with Tarek, Valerio, Helena, and George in the summer of 1999. Some of the members already knew each other, like Helena and George, but no one was aware they all had access to Telomerax. The agenda was always focused around two main points; if and how to take Telomerax public, and if anyone had spotted any threats to our group, how to address it.

  During the first meetings, we determined that in order to go public we first needed a better understanding of all the possible consequences, and a detailed plan to address them in the most effective way. After this was settled, I asked for each member to vote unanimously on certain subjects.

  I had no special voting rights. My vote would be counted like the others. Our first poll’s results stated there would be no fixed dates for the meetings. We would meet at least once a year, possibly in different locations, or anytime one of us had something relevant to share with the group. Another point of agreement was that the best time to go public had to be one when economic and political tensions were low, as everybody was conscious that dropping a bomb like Telomerax in a geopolitically-tense environment could have horrible consequences. It was clear that this opportunity window would be very short, a few years at most, and it would pop up once every few decades. This led the team to split between the pessimists and the optimists, and it was a good thing.”

  “Who were the pessimists?”

  “You should have guessed by now! Tarek and Valerio made it clear they had no hope in the world. They believed that the right time would never come. They thought that the affairs of mankind were in such a dire state that we would have to wait centuries for a revelation, unless we wanted to create a catastrophe.

  On the other side, Helena and George, driven maybe by their New World optimism, saw the possibility coming in the near future. They presumed in less than twenty years. This left Dora and me on the needles to make a final decision.”

  “How did the poll on taking Telomerax public, go?”

  “We held it in 2000, as both the economic and political situations seemed to be going steady, with a wave of optimism that reminded me of the beginning of the nineties. The big pusher was Helena, but she realized she needed to do some research on it so she asked George to work with her. Remember that, at the time, George was getting started in the biotech sector so he went through Helena to get introduced at Lehman and leverage their macroeconomic and political intelligence.

  He pretended to have a lead on a product that would increase the average lifespan by thirty years. However, he wanted to have a detailed report of all the consequences, such as: extension of retirement age, ethical debate, and so on, before seeking further capital funding.

  That’s why he knocked at Lehman’s doors. Of course, if interested, Lehman could take part in the venture.”

  “What was the outcome? Did Lehman end up investing in your idea?”

  “Believe it or not, the vice president told Helena that they had more interesting projects on their hands and could not invest in yet another startup, so they would reconsider it in a few months. A few months later, as soon as Helena and George were considering to reapproach Lehman, September 11th occurred.”

  “And this made everything more difficult…”

  “Indeed. In the meeting we held in May 2002, we all thought we had missed the opportunity presented at the start of the new millennium. We held the meeting in New York, and when Tarek told us about all the new security measures that were being enforced just to get his visa approved, we understood we had to wait for a major political change before reconsidering the decision.

  This meant going dormant until a new President was chosen in the US. We also felt we had to be more cautious and be prepared to change our identities within the next decade. George and Helena were known at Lehman, so they would be the first to make the move.

  Helena left Lehman in 2004 and joined a hedge fund stationed in Singapore, which specialized in emerging markets. She did not join as Helena Rodrigo Fatima, though, but as a newly graduated twenty-six-year-old named Rosa Montero Gutierrez, with a PhD in Economics. Let me continue calling her Helena, otherwise the rest of the interview will get very confusing.”

  “Were you the one that provided her with the new identity?”

  “No, this was an advantage from Helena’s powerful connections in the drug cartels. Rosa Gutierrez really had existed. She had died of overdose in the aftermath of a rave party in Acapulco, in 2002. The narcos had stolen her identity just in case it would be needed. And as Helena was still supervising the cartel’s investments, they did her the favor. Our own organization of identity change came fully into play for the first time, when we organized the simultaneous death and divorce of George.”

  “Was George’s wife aware of Telomerax?”

  “George had given her Telomerax without telling her all the details. He knew he could not completely trust her, so as the relationship soured over time, he set up the perfect death. By 2003, he declared to have a rare form of cancer, and he started losing weight. From time to time he would visit ‘Le Jardin’ where he underwent a light, controlled chemotherapy. I was dead afraid that it might interfere with Telomerax, so for one year I suspended the treatment.

  In 2005, he started attending less and less public events, with photos of him looking frailer and frailer appearing in magazines. In the meantime, Tarek procured a brand new identity from the CIA thanks to the French secret service. George McKilroy would become Sean Ewals, a twenty-five year old graduate from Boston University, who had inherited a small fortune from his deceased parents.”

  “How come the identity was obtained from the CIA via the French secret service?”

  “Tarek had done a favor for both agencies. In 2004, the Americans were involved with Iraq and the CIA needed air support for their secret operations. Due to secrecy, they refused to ask the US Air Force for help because this meant that their archrivals, the NSA, would know. So they looked for external support. At the same time, although France was publicly portrayed as being against the Iraq war, their air force could not bear the fact that their UK and US cousins had plenty of room to test their latest weapons. To close the triangle, Jordan had just made a deal with France to supply a dozen brand new Mirage 2000 fighter jets for their armed services. Do you see how it is coming together now?”

  “You mean that the French were hired by the CIA to bomb targets in Iraq? This must be where Tarek enters the picture.”

  “You got it. Tarek was the mediator. He was going back and forth from Jordan, since that was where major effects of the war were taking place; with refugees, spies, and soldiers on leave, contractors searching for new assignments, and all the rest you can imagine. One day, at a restaurant, he spotted a French Air Force officer and began a conversation. The officer stayed silent and pointed to an article on a training mission having to do with the recent Mirage contract, that was already public news.

  Tarek then called his contacts at the Jordan secret service and found out that the French were not happy, as Jordanians would never let them fly into Iraq by their own initiative. US approval was needed for that. Jordanians would not ask for it directly, as it would sound like an attack on their troubled neighbor, nor would the French ask the US and risk exposing themselves to diplomatic blackmail.

  The US had to make the first move, but how would they do it? After all, they were already set with what they had. Tarek knew very well, though, that there could be something they were missing. Once he was back in Dubai, he immediately contacted the CIA station manager, who he had known since the beginning of the Iran-Iraq war. Would the CIA be interested in getting free air support from Jordan, on jets flown by French pilots under cover?

  The French pilots would get all the real life training they wanted. In case anything bad happened, the occasional French instructor would be blamed fo
r accidentally trespassing into the Iraq airspace.

  Organizing this deal brought him huge credit, and all he asked for in exchange was free access to the pool of secret identities. Initially he asked for unlimited access, but eventually he settled for two identities a year, for ten years. This was the news of the year at the 2005 meeting, that was otherwise quite gloomy and uneventful.”

  “When did the final act take place?

  “In September 2005, we invited Sheila, George’s wife, to ‘Le Jardin’. I behaved as if I knew George was about to die and tested her feelings. She was obviously sad, but she also made it clear the marriage had not been working for some time, even before the illness. She basically had not left him, out of kindness.

  That was all we needed to know. I called Helena, who in turn called her friends on the West Coast to organize his “death”.

  A white van arrived at George’s villa in Sunnyvale, California, and after entering the garage, it unloaded the body of a man about the same age and with the same complexion, who had died from overdose the night before in Los Angeles. George boarded the van and sped away to the private terminal of San José International Airport, where he received his new set of papers. He then boarded a Gulfstream jet that took off and headed to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

  Once in Rio, George/Sean spent a couple of weeks relaxing and washing away the effects of the chemotherapy, then he visited a beauty clinic specialized in plastic surgery. It was not a dramatic change, but as George wanted to continue to work in the Silicon Valley startup business, he had to undergo some minor face-lifting. We had nothing to worry about, though, considering more than six months had passed since he had met anyone face-to-face and his last images did not resemble him at all.

  Back in California, the doctor who was also on the narcos payroll, notified the public authorities of the death and contacted George’s recently appointed lawyer, Scott Drummond, for the execution of the will.

  He had been given the will by George himself a few weeks before, with the explicit order to open it as soon as he heard about his death and act according to the instructions.

  What Scott read was strange, but not unexpected, as he was used to eccentric millionaires. Basically, George left his villa and assets with a value of over five million dollars to Sheila, and asked to be buried immediately with only the coroner and the lawyer in attendance. Then, he asked to be cremated and his ashes left with Sheila. Only after the cremation, could the death be publicly announced and in the will there were also the coordinates to a half a million dollar account to fund any public ceremony Sheila and his friends might have deemed appropriate. All that was left over had to be distributed to charities.

  Scott thought a man like George should have had a much bigger fortune, but there was no trace of it in the will, and maybe - who knows - much of it had gone away to pay for the treatments.”

  “Did you attend the commemoration ceremony to make the death seem realistic?”

  “There was no ceremony organized. I just paid a public obituary in the “Mercury”, the local newspaper, and gave all the remaining money to a charity that helps children with leukemia. Dora and I flew to California with Sheila. She did not expect George to pass away so soon and she felt somewhat guilty during the flight. As soon as she learned the contents of the will, however, the guilt turned into resentment as George had decided to part ways from her before his last journey.

  She handed the box of ashes over to me, together with the will and the funeral party budget. If I wanted to set up a ceremony, it was up to me. As for the ashes, she thought George would be happier to be buried at the clinic, since he loved the place.

  A few days later, I called him in his new house in Connecticut and he told me that he did not like the Geneva lakeshore as his final resting place. Then he asked about the half a million dollars and when I told him it was gone to charity, he was a bit upset.

  I burst into laughter. “Boy,” I said, “dead men do not usually complain that their will has been followed through with, exactly as was written!”

  “When did Tarek and Valerio switch identities?”

  “Valerio jumped into his new life in 2008, soon after the death of his mother. He first sold his public relations business, took a plane to Brazil - like many retired Italians of his age did, even if he looked much younger - and reappeared a few months later after a short visit to the same clinic that had served George, back in 2005.

  He re-entered Italy under the name of Antonio Colonna, an Argentinean son of native Italians, who was repatriating like some soccer players with Italian ancestors do. The customs officer told him he looked just slightly older than the twenty-two years written on the passport, and Antonio was quick to blame the dire economic situation of Argentina for making him become a migrant.

  He immediately set up his new public relations and media company in London, and started shuttling across Europe to rebuild his network. He got in touch, this time, with the young public relation professionals who were replacing the old generation of Valerio’s former colleagues.

  As for Tarek, he did not really change his identity. Over time, he was able to set all of his family members’ birth dates back by fifteen years, pretending there was a mistake in the records. He relied on the fact that he had actually started a second life before, when he left Egypt in the eighties.

  As for his family, he put his sons on Telomerax between 2002 and 2008, as soon as they hit twenty five years of age. He just told them it was an age-delaying drug, and they would get about twenty to thirty years of life added on. He told me, the description he gave his sons bought him about thirty years to prepare a better explanation.”

  “And how about you, Louis? Who did you transform yourself into?”

  “Dora and I liked our professions and wanted to change as little as possible, but we could not continue to live in the closed neighborhood surrounding the Swiss clinic. So we pretended to retire, sold the whole clinic, morphed into a young couple - a biologist and a psychiatrist - and relocated to Lugano, in the Italian speaking canton of Switzerland.

  For a while I considered going to a fancier place, like Monte Carlo or Cannes, but we realized there were too many of the old customers from ‘Le Jardin’ there. As a young biologist, I founded a startup which allowed me to stay at the forefront of biological research - both contributing to new developments and watching out for the invention of drugs similar to Telomerax.”