Elixir (29 page)

Distrustful, Sean analyzes his face. “What if I don’t do it?”

“Then I don’t see a very bright future for you. My chemist is in the hallway, along with my new friend Dante. Both of them ready to do whatever I tell them.”

Sean drags his hand through his hair, some windshield bits from the Explorer still sprinkling off. “Dante isn’t as good of a friend as you think. I’m sure he didn’t relay this to you yet, but he got us arrested down in Suddsfield. Killed two cops after our information was already in the computer system. Shot a witness too. If you did your research on me like you said, you would’ve learned I died in a car accident four years ago. You know who came up with that little story? The FBI.”

Sean nods at Phlace’s watch and says, “Right about now I’d say the report from Suddsfield is hitting the desks of the agents who put my identity-protection profile together. If I wind up dead every field operative on the West Coast is gonna be scouring surveillance footage for black Lincoln sedans with dented grilles within a few-hours driving radius of Suddsfield. It’s only a matter of time before they find out one was cruising through Redwood City. And it’s only a matter of time from then until they go through today’s camera records from the dozens of buildings surrounding this one, and see the car pull right into the Colzyne garage.”

Wagging his finger at the CEO, he says, “If I end up dead, and they know he took me here, your picture will be all over the
Wall Street Journal
. It’ll be the business story of the year. Whether they could prove you were personally involved or not, you’ll be finished in the court of public opinion. With just the two dead cops and one dead witness it’ll be easy for the authorities to dismiss...Dante...as some random psycho who hid out in your parking lot while he was fleeing. But me too? Now that raises some questions, especially for a company that works with the same sort of math I dabbled in myself.” A pause. “I realize you want to have me shot once I write it down. But you can’t. The FBI will piss all over you.”

Phlace spends around a half-minute absorbing this, trying to keep a straight face. He puts his hands in his pockets and starts roaming the small space, his athletic frame slicing the reading-light beam as he goes back and forth. “As I mentioned, I’m a businessman. I want to make money off you, not kill you. If you were a businessman too, and I hope you are, sharing the formula is a risk you’d have to be willing to take.”

Silence for a while. “Here’s my counteroffer.”

Phlace chuckles. “Counteroffer?”

A spark of life surges through Sean’s drained body. “I give your chemist what you want. But I don’t write it down. I’ll tell him the ingredients and the portions as he mixes them in front of me. He makes me two doses, with your materials, in your lab. Right now. That I keep.”

“If I give you an actual sample you can send it to a buyer in a heartbeat. It would be out in the world much faster than if you just gave them a diagram on a piece of paper.” Keeping his left hand in his pocket, Phlace rubs his chin with his right.

“Like I said, I’m not selling it to anyone.”

He carries a pensive expression. “Then what do you need two doses for right now?”

“Does it matter? That’s my offer.”

“How do I know you’re not going to hand the final product off today for a boatload of cash?”

“Well, I suppose you don’t.” Sean smirks. “But, if you were a businessman, and I hope you are, it’s a risk you’d have to be willing to take.”

Phlace’s pacing slows, then stops. He stares at Sean. The kid has a fearless determination on him. The CEO stands in silence for around half a minute with a pained demeanor, realizing he doesn’t have any more tricks to play. Head down, he opens the door and walks out.

Sean’s heart pounds with excitement. Phlace has no choice but to get him what he wants. In Sean’s opinion however, a drug as powerful as this should never be in the hands of a firm as bad as Colzyne. He doesn’t want to give them the actual mixture. He thinks of ways he can alter the proportions so it wouldn’t work, while still leaving himself room to modify it on his own so his version would.

He goes through the possibilities in his mind for a while, then has an idea. A certain balance of the chemicals wouldn’t be effective on its own, however, if combined with cupric sulfate, a substance common in over-the-counter baby formula, it would be potent for about twenty-four hours, enough time for him to get to Switzerland. He sits up in his seat, a subtle grin on his face.

A trim man in his forties, wearing a white lab coat and rubber gloves, inserts a plastic pipette into a test tube, sucks out some liquid, and releases it into a mixing flask. His blue eyes, between his surgical mask and hair cover, are intense and focused. Sean watches him in a connected office behind a thick sheet of glass, the kid’s reflection on the surface.

The chemist brings the liquid to the corner of the lab, sliding it inside a slot on a block-shaped silver machine about the size of a bathtub, clicking three buttons. A blue light starts radiating from the opening.

Staring at the shine, Sean notices his translucent reflection enclosing it on the window, shirt spattered in blood, three separate slices in his bottom lip, black half-circle bruise on his swollen right cheek. He ponders the abduction that brought him here, the cause for the battered face he’s looking at in the glass. He fixates on something Dante mentioned in the car earlier. He said there’s a sense of deviation about the people he’s paid to target, none of them fitting into the world’s definition of normal.

Sean wonders if he could be considered normal. He assesses all the moments in the past, even before the abduction, that led him here. He goes through them from the most recent to the most distant. He thinks about finishing the formula in Zurich a few days ago, and being in Zurich because Natasha was sick, and caring Natasha was sick because he loved her, and loving her because he met her, and meeting her because he was in Italy, and being in Italy because he had to flee the United States, and fleeing the United States because he solved a problem nobody else could solve, and being able to solve that problem because of the way his mind was wired, and his mind being wired that way because of a mutation in his head when he was littler than a little baby making him different than the six billion others on the planet.

No, he doesn’t believe he’s normal. He’s far from it. But if he were normal he wouldn’t have been brought to this lab because there would be nothing to bring him here for. And without him here there would be no blue light shining because there would be nothing for it to shine on. And with nothing for it to shine on his girlfriend wouldn’t get the medicine she needs. And without the medicine she needs she’d die. And that makes everything un-normal about his life, all eighteen years of it and the ones to come, okay by him.

The chemist turns off the block-shaped device and extracts the dish of fluid with care, placing it on a stainless steel table. He funnels the orange liquid into a test tube, sealing it with a rubber stopper. He exits, leaving Sean’s view for a bit, then enters the attached office he’s in.

Pulling down his surgical mask, the chemist hands him the test tube. Cradling it in his palm, the kid gazes at the elixir, Sean Malone’s creation. Not James Crates’s. Sean Malone’s.

The chemist has respect for the person in front of him. He wants to say something, tell Sean how revolutionary his discovery was, but knows his boss is observing from a camera and wouldn’t approve of friendliness with the enemy. Admiration in his eyes, he tries to express his feelings with a single nod. Sean can interpret the gratitude, nods back, then advances to the door.

About twenty minutes later Sean’s cab is idling in front of a CVS. He dashes out of the store holding a bag filled with a pack of Similac liquid baby formula, a plastic measuring cup, and an eyedropper. “Okay,” he says with urgency to the driver, climbing back in. As the vehicle continues toward San Francisco Airport Sean inserts a few drops of the baby formula into the medication’s test tube.

A short while later he’s settling into a seat on a Swiss Airlines plane, a toiletry kit he purchased in the airport held tight to his stomach, his only possession other than his wallet and passport, both remaining on him since leaving the Merzberg house. To disguise the mysterious orange fluid from the security screeners, he went in a terminal bathroom just before and poured it into one of the toiletry set’s travel-sized plastic bottles, the one labeled “Face Soap.” The little cylinder is nestled in the see-through vinyl case in his lap among empty ones marked “Conditioner,” “Shampoo,” and “Body Wash.”

While in the men’s room he also cleaned up his bloody lips and chin, got rid of his crimson-stained shirt, and put on a fresh one, something he bought at the same shop he got the kit, a touristy blue T-shirt with a graphic of a California license plate, “CALIBOY” the inscription.

“Welcome to your eleven-hour-and-fifteen-minute flight from San Francisco to Zurich,” a female voice says over the PA system. The words sound fake to him, like a dream. A little earlier he thought all was lost. He shakes his head a few times making sure he’s not imagining this, the elderly Swiss lady next to him throwing him an odd look.

In a few hours he’s somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, observing the scenery in the cabin, tapping his foot. He glances at the other passengers in his area, a couple chatting, a handful eating, a few reading. For some reason his parents have stayed out of his thoughts all flight, something that’s never happened on any other plane ride he’s taken.

The jet lands on the other side of the world some time later, Sean staring out the window, gray Zurich sky filled with heavy snow, the next afternoon already in Switzerland with the time change.

In a short while he bursts out of the airport toward the taxi line, at least twenty people deep. Consumed with desperation to get to the hospital, he can’t bear waiting. He rips a wad of cash from his wallet and extends it to the man at the front, a burly fellow in an overcoat with a blond moustache. “I need this next cab,” Sean says in German, antsy. “Please. Take this.” The man grips the money in his big hands and counts it. He nods.

The next taxi pulls up and Sean jumps in. “You know where the Luffen Clinic is?” he asks in the local language, sliding across the backseat.

“Yes sir,” the wavy-haired cabbie says in German. They start coasting through the snowstorm. They drive for about forty minutes and turn off the main road on a street near Lake Zurich. Car horns outside, the taxi slows, traffic condensing. The man spins to his passenger and says, “Looks like there was an accident. Damn ice.”

Sean angles his neck and peeks at the gridlock through the windshield. “I don’t have time to sit in this. Let me out here.” He unzips the toiletry set, taking out the “Face Soap” bottle, leaving the others on the cushion.

“It’s still a ways up. That’s a hell of a hike. Especially in this weather. You sure?”

Sean takes some bills from his wallet and hands them to him. “I’m sure.” He swings open the door and steps outside, snow dumping, wind moaning. Tightening his left fingers around the plastic soap bottle, he limps up the sidewalk. The gust hits him head-on, his leather jacket and T-shirt flapping up behind, skin of his lower back exposed.

Ignoring the agony in his left ankle, he starts jogging. He goes up a block. The wound is excruciating, but it doesn’t matter. Pain is nothing right now, not after all he’s been through. He begins sprinting across the icy concrete, arms pumping at his sides.

He covers one more block. Then another. People stare at him. His body aches, but his mind drifts somewhere else, to a place that feels not of this world. Even though he’s not the one about to die, his life starts flashing before his eyes as individual slices of space and time. He pictures winding around the furniture in his parents’ house with his bare feet when he was a baby, and the way the strands of bulbs wrapped the small plastic Christmas tree his mom used to put in his bedroom in December, and an aerobics video Aunt Mary used to watch in the den when he first moved in with her in her early thirties, and the texture of the pages of an Encyclopedia Britannica set he would read on a daily basis on the kitchen table when he was five, and the tin roof of a tree fort he helped build with some friends on his block in Shipville when he was seven, and the front of the menu at the fancy steakhouse his aunt treated him to the day they found out he was going to be on
Jeopardy!
, and the humming sound of the dining hall at SoCal Tech when it was full of students, and the smell of the grass in the Pasadena baseball park where he played left field next to Kyle in center, and the gem necklace his landlady wore the day he signed the lease for his apartment in Rome, and the scent of paint as it came out of the spray can during all the graffiti runs with Fabrizio, and the first moment he saw Natasha, and how the rug of his hotel room felt against his face when he was lying on it moments after he cured Ebola.

He rushes for twelve blocks, his hair and jacket blanketed in snow, his lungs hot, his skin freezing. Spotting the clinic’s black walls and bronze trim, he hooks a right. He bolts inside and across the lobby, his damp boot soles losing footing for a bit. A receptionist shouts something at him.

He advances to the stair shaft, shoving the door open. He ascends a flight. Then another. His injured ankle is numb now from the overload of strain, his left foot just a weight he’s dragging at this point. The whole area rings with his heavy footsteps, bottom floor to top. Reaching the fourth, he rams the entrance with his shoulder, a metallic pop filling the hallway.

He flies across the glass-covered bridge, the employee who punched him the other day noticing him and standing. “Security,” the man says in German. Grunting, Sean clocks him in the face, then continues through the passageway into the quarantine zone. He heads down the staircase and veers toward pod two.

He opens the “Interaction” door with the biohazard symbol on it, enters the shower room, dashes to the front, and slaps the black button to go into the next room. A green light and buzzer go off as the door frees. He slips into the following room. He spots two furious security guards stomping inside behind him in white shirts with sewn-on Swiss flags. He lunges for the black button in front of him, the next slab releasing. He twists through the entryway into Natasha’s chamber, the metal door sealing behind him, guards not making it through in time.