"Even though you're sometimes the one who causes that pain and suffering..." I hugged my knees, I'd pulled him out of the shiny side of his life.
"You know that I didn't want to get you involved in this," he defended himself, straightening up his back.
"Don't lie, you've been playing with us for months."
"Why do you say months? We've had to improvise, I didn't want to get any more involved in your life, but Gunnarr got really scared when he witnessed my second heart attack. He insisted. I already told you that I had decided to wait until you were dead and not ever both you again. It's the least that I could have done after the suffering I caused you by..."
By killing my mother. Don't say it, Nagorno. Don't say it.
"Nagorno," I interrupted, losing my patience, "Gunnarr took on the identity of an archeologist specializing in the Middle Ages months before we contacted him for an interview. He played cat and mouse with us until we found him."
"Is that true?" He looked at me with a strange expression. There was something new in his face. A shadow, a slightly sinister veil.
"What's the matter, are you alright?" I asked, rather alarmed.
"Yes, I'm alright. No," his voice was high pitched and he held his throat, as if he wanted to protect it. "I'm not. I've got a strange, cold sensation in my throat."
"In your throat, are you sure?"
"I feel very tired," he whispered, lying down.
His voice had gone dull, the old man was back.
A heart attack, this time for real. There were options: run away, save him, tell Gunnarr...
There were options, and that was more than I had had the day before.
A whirlwind formed around us, like a small hurricane, as if the wind was furious with what it had heard.
I searched in his jacket pocket and found the gold iPhone. It had an endless list of contacts, but I found Gunnarr's number and dialed it.
He answered in another language that I couldn't make out.
"Gunnarr, it's Adriana. Something bad is happening to Nagorno, he's taken a turn for the worse in just seconds, I think that his heart's failing again. I'm going to get him back on the horse and take him back to the castle, call your doctors, send a helicopter to the island with help because I don't think he'll survive." I glanced at Nagorno, he was already unconscious.
"Tell him to hang in there," he said, before hanging up. "Tell him that I'm not going to let him die. That's he's not alone, that I'll be with him. Tell him, even though you think that he can't hear you."
I hauled his limp body onto Altai's back and got on, holding onto his body. I rode back to the castle, and a few minutes later a helicopter landed on the clearing in front of the grand entrance.
They took Nagorno inside and Gunnarr, with a worried look on his face, grabbed my wrist and pulled me inside the castle.
"What do you think you're doing, Gunnarr?" I asked, alarmed, as he pulled me down the stairs.
"I have to go with him, but you can't come. I don't expect you to understand, and I don't expect you to ever forgive me. But I am sorry. I'm sorry, stedmor. I'm sorry," he muttered, with his deep voice, that sounder harsher than ever.
He threw me in the cell and locked the door and I could hear him running down the corridor until his footsteps faded out.
I was left in the dark, with just the company of my fury and the remains of food from previous days to live on.
My brain was on fire, but all I could feel was cold.
35
We're on our own
IAGO
The next few days after sending the cure were spent trying to get back into my routine. I went back to the museum, where everything had gone to pot in my absence. My father had prioritized the search for Dana's whereabouts and barely went to his office, as my secretary told me with a worried look.
I called an emergency meeting in the boardroom with all the departments, but all I found were stressed out people with too much too deal with.
"Boss, we're seriously behind on all the sites we were going to send people to this summer," Salva told me, standing up and pushing a into the middle of the table. "It just needs a signature. If you don't want us to lose the campaign this year, you need to authorize it now."
I picked up the stack of papers and glanced over them.
"I'll take a look this weekend and give them back to you on Monday. Meanwhile, do as much as you can."
"I've already done everything I can, Iago," Salva replied, sitting back down. He gave Chisca a worried glance.
"The interns haven't been paid," put in Cifuentes, from Accounting. "I'm waiting for your order."
"I'll talk to the bank today," I said, checking my watch. "Elisa, you don't really seem with it. Catch me up on what's been happening in your department."
"My department's fine, but I've heard that since Adriana Alameda left Prehistory unattended to visit that site, there's going to be problems if the pieces aren't returned in time from the last temporary exhibition of the Paleolithic on the Cantabrian coast. It seems as though the deadline has already passed. I've heard rumors, not from the museum, but from a colleague who works at the Bibat. He says that the management wants to sue you."
"Didn't I give the order to return them? I could swear that I did," I thought out loud, scratching the back of my neck.
Did I?
Dana was taking care of that the day she was kidnapped.
They all stared at me open-mouthed. They weren't used to seeing me doubt myself. I saw some nudges and most of those present exchanged disapproving looks.
"Ok, ok," I said, standing up and ordering calm with my hand. "Let's do something more productive: this morning I want the head of each department to send me an email with all outstanding matters in order of importance, not urgency. If they are urgent, but not important, sort them out yourselves. I only want you to send me issues that require my authorization. Tomorrow morning I have to go away for a few days, but when I come back everything will go back to normal and we'll deal with all the outstanding matters."
I spent the morning in my office putting out fires and finally decided to take a break. I thought about going down to BACus and grabbing a bite to eat, but I remembered the worried looks my staff had given me and preferred not to expose myself to that uncomfortable scrutiny again.
I left the building and, almost without realizing, ended up in front of the lavender plant that Dana and I had replanted after Nagorno had destroyed the last one with the Big Bastard a year earlier.
I plucked several twigs and rubbed the flowers between the palms of my hand, but nothing relaxed me that day.
I had just climbed down the rock when I got a call on my cell from Nagorno's untraceable number.
I looked at it, puzzled, and answered.
"Is something wrong, brother?"
"Yes, something's wrong, father," replied the conservative voice of Gunnarr.
"Has something happened to Nagorno?" I asked, alarmed.
"I should say so, you almost killed him."
"What do you mean I almost killed him? That's impossible, what I sent you was meant to reverse the effect of the..."
"Everything was fine at first," he interrupted. “Nagorno felt better and the cardiologists' preliminary tests were optimistic. The doctors couldn't explain his improvement, but they do understand his deterioration."
"Define deterioration."
"His heart's very unstable right now. He had an episode of arrhythmia that almost took him to another world. Then he got better on his own. Once more, the doctors don't dare to treat him, they're afraid of killing him if they give him any drugs. Right now he's as strong as he was before, but he's got a time bomb sitting in his chest and they have no doubt that sooner or later it was explode. It's unpredictable, right now my uncle looks fine, but his heart's going to fail at any time. Father, Uncle Nagorno is dying. Nagorno's dying!" he boomed. "Are you going to steal him from me as well, are you going to take away the only member of my family who has looked a
fter me for a thousand years?"
"If I had have known that you were still alive, I assure you that I would have respected Nagorno. And I would have done it for, believe me, just for you."
"Is that true?"
"Of course it is."
He took a moment to take it in.
"Well, it's too late for tears and regrets," he finally replied. "You need to keep doing whatever you can to make sure he doesn't die."
Think fast, I ordered myself.
"Listen, son," I decided, not very convinced. "There was another option, a second cure."
"Another option? Have you been working on two lines of work? Do you have two separate researches underway?"
I could sense a strange interest by his tone of voice, but I wasn't sure why.
"Do you trust yourself to administer it to him?"
I don't know.
"Do you? he shouted. "Do you think that an ancient heart will resist a new remedy."
"Ancient?"
"Yes, that's what this is all about. You aged his heart, now you have to rejuvenate it."
"No, Gunnarr, you don't understand. What you said about rejuvenating it... Right now that's impossible, science hasn't evolved that far yet, and I certainly haven't. But that's not what I was trying to do..."
And then I finally understood everything. I gulped and was held to the spot. A wave came in closer than the others and soaked my shoes. I didn't even realize until a few minutes later.
Nagorno's heart was already aged, and was behaving as such, despite having the new active telomerase in the cure I sent with the manipulated HeLa cells.
I suddenly realized that the plan to clean the telomerase inhibitor with the virus we had manipulated wouldn't work either. His heart was already that of a hundred year old man. We could clean it but we couldn't rejuvenate those cells. There was no remedy.
My son understood my silence, sniffing out my fears and capturing my doubts.
"You don't know how to do it, you don't know how to cure him, do you?"
"No," I replied.
"Is there anything that you can still do for him?"
I pinched the bridge of my nose. I closed my eyes. I didn't answer.
"Is there anything that you can still do for him?" he repeated, screaming. "Because if not, I'm going to execute her. Tomorrow, at midnight. If you don't send us a miracle, your wife will die."
"My wife," I absently repeated. That word, and what it stood for, sounded so good. "How is Adriana? At least tell me how she's taking it."
"I'm not going to alleviate even one gram of weight from your concern. I'm not going to give you the relief of talking to her."
Then he hung up and I was just left with the silence and the crashing of the waves in front of me.
So it's true, everything's over for her.
I staggered, slightly dazed, as if waking from a long and disastrous binge session. I sat on the rock floor, hugging my knees into a ball.
How could I come to terms with that? How could I come to terms with the fact that Dana would be dead in twenty-four hours. That she wouldn't live to see the next sunrise and much less the next year, which was something that was so simple for me.
I don't know how long I sat there for, ignoring a rising tide that was soaking my pants.
I was brought back by the song playing from my cell, the violin from Fisherman's blues by the Waterboys. A song that Dana used to whisper to me every time that someone called me and I rushed to answer. You in my arms.
I looked at the screen and was surprised to read a name that had traveled centuries to reach me.
"Bring me up to date," said Marion. "Do you know anything about your brother's health?"
"It didn't work. His heart now has arrhythmia and will probably stop beating soon. They're going to kill my wife in twenty-four hours.”
I heard a sigh from the noisy Parisian street.
"I was afraid of that. I was afraid that the cure would fail, so I've been doing my own research. I know where your wife is, Iago. I found her, I found her for you."
"What did you say?" I asked, trying to let it sink in.
"Meet me at the airport, I'll catch a flight to Santander and we'll go on from there. We can rescue her."
It took me a few seconds to react.
"Are you sure you know where she is?" I managed to ask.
"Pretty sure, but we're running out of time. I'm going to book the tickets from here, your father should also come with us. If we have to come up against two... longevos, it's best if there's three of us."
"I agree, I'm going to talk to him. What time does the first flight get in from Paris?"
Several hours later my father and I were impatiently waiting for Marion in the café at Santander airport.
My father didn't beat about the bush, he pulled out his tablet and showed Marion the screen that was open to Google Earth.
"Tell me exactly where you think Adriana is."
Marion punched in the coordinates and gave us back a map of an area that her and I knew all too well.
"I think she's on Belle island. It's a small island in the archipelago of the Thousand Islands along the St. Lawrence river, between the province of Ontario, Canada, and the north of New York state, in the U.S. The island's for sale for 1.5 million dollars, so no one officially lives there, and it has a mansion that's large enough to very discreetly house several people. It's also close to several private clinics that I think your brother's been going to. It all fits in with the clue your son left you: They won't be large, will they be beautiful, will there be thousands."
"That doesn't resolve the bit about the massacres and the cathedrals," I reminded her,
"That was the easiest bit to work out. The area is actually full of historic religious buildings. The Anglican church of St. Mark, built in 1845, is just one of them. There are many and it would take a long time to list them all. I also found his massacres. In the war of 1812 there was a raid down the St. Lawrence river which ended in a bloody battle, it seems that both sides massacred each other, English and Canadian militants against the American army. There are more massacres that stand out, one that had to do with the Native Indians in the area... but what can I tell you that you don't already know, right Iago?"
"It's more than a ten hour flight to New York," I said, worried. "We're going to take up half the deadline and if we're wrong about the location there won't be time to make up for it."
My father held up his hand, after casting an uneasy glance at the clock.
"Marion's theory seems feasible. After my failed search along the Galician coast, I had focused on more exotic islands, although I've only found one cave called Massacre in New Zealand. I have to agree that all this fits in much better. But we don't have much time. Marion, can you go and check the flight on the screen at the gate? Iago and I will go and pay the bill.
Marion nodded, not too happy, and my father grabbed my arm and led me into the men's bathroom.
"Iago, I'm not going. I've just had a call from MAC, the Bibat management has just filed a criminal complaint for misappropriation of historical heritage. This is serious, son, I have to sort it out right now, they could shut down the museum and investigate both of us."
"What do you mean you're not coming?"
"As soon as it's sorted, I'll take the next flight to New York. I have to appear in court now, it's for the good of the museum."
"To hell with the museum, we can open a hundred like it tomorrow! We're talking about Adriana's life, father, what's happened to your priorities?"
"Believe me, I never lose sight of them."
"But you're leaving me to face Gunnarr and Nagorno on my own!" I shouted at him.
"Don't shout, son, and act as though you don't know. The walls have ears. And you're not going alone, you've got Marion. You were right, she's helped you and I apologize for my cold behavior, I guess that the millennia have left me as rather distrusting. I really am fond of Adriana and let's be honest, your situation doesn't seem to be
right, given the circumstances."
He looked once more at his watch.
"Go now, I should go and take care of my business. Now, I want you to activate the Bluetooth on your cell," he said, taking his from his pocket. "I'm going to send you an audio file. I recorded a message for you that lasts for several hours. I've been preparing it over the last few days, as a contingency in case something like this happened. Listen to it on the plane, but just you. Nobody else must access it's content. It's the only thing I can do to keep protecting you.
So the time had finally come to learn about the secrets.
Finally.
"Protecting me, from what? From who?"
"Just listen to it, you'll understand everything," he insisted.
"How long have you been hiding a greater threat from me, father? I have a right to know."
"10,311 years, since the day your mother gave birth to you in the creak in Arnia. From that day I put you both in danger of death. But there's no time now for explications, I must go right now. Come on."
We held our phones close to each other and I received an audio file named TSOA.
"Lür," I said, "I know that I'm walking into some sort of a battle here. I've known ever since you and Marion met in the lab at my house. But I'm going in blind, you need to guide me, as you have so many times before. I trust your firm pulse. If we never see each other again, father, I want you to know that it was an honor being at your side."
We put our foreheads together, and I prayed that it wouldn't be the last time that we did.
I was a different man when I left that bathroom. More enlightened, more conscious of the danger I was going in to.