The Devil's Elixir (33 page)

Between the weed, the
lechuguilla
bootleg tequila, and the coke, the
pistoleros
weren’t thinking straight, and it went manic. I was hustling McKinnon back through the lab, my left arm around his neck, the other leveling the snub-nosed UMP at the door way, when the first guards burst through, three of them. I cut one of them down and saw another get hit by Munro’s fire, but the third took cover behind a counter and started spraying gunfire recklessly from behind it.

I pulled McKinnon and we both dove for cover behind another cabinet, landing heavily under a shower of debris from the torrent of bullets blasting everything around us, while Munro slipped out of sight, his voice in my earpiece telling me he was going to secure McKinnon’s files, which were farther back, at the very back of the lab. Then another
pistolero
charged in, laying down more gunfire randomly, firing at everything that moved, tacking left, away from his
compadre
, snaking his way farther down the lab, and before I knew it I was separated from Munro and pinned down by the two gunmen.

I wasn’t sure I could get out of there in one piece, but if I managed it, I sure as hell couldn’t do it with McKinnon in tow. Even if I cut down the
pistoleros
, I couldn’t take him with me, not in the shape he was in.

And maybe it was a horrible mistake, maybe it was an inexcusable murder of an innocent civilian, or maybe it was the only thing to do—I really don’t know which one it was anymore—but, either way, I turned my gun on McKinnon and put a bullet through his brain. Then I lobbed a couple of incendiary grenades at the
banditos
and got out of there just as the whole place went up in flames.

T
ess was looking me like I’d just strangled her pet cat. Not just strangled it, but chopped it up and tossed it in a blender. It’s a look I’ll never forget.

She was quiet for a torturously long moment. I didn’t say anything more either. I just waited for her to digest it in her own time.

After a while, I couldn’t deal with the silence anymore.

“Say something,” I told her, softly.

She let out a weary sigh and did, her voice subdued.

“I just . . . I don’t . . . It’s the second time in a week you’ve hit me with stuff from your past, and this . . . I can’t believe you never told me about it.” There was hurt in her eyes, and I hated seeing it there, knowing I’d caused it.

“It’s not something I’m proud of.”

“Still . . .”

“I . . . I was disgusted with myself. I could barely live with what I’d done. And I didn’t want to lose you because of it either.” Looking at her now, I wasn’t sure we’d ever recover from this.

It didn’t help that she didn’t say anything to contradict my feeling. She just looked away, nodding to herself with a hint of resolve in her expression, like she was looking for something, anything, to limit the fallout.

“Why was it so important to stop him?” she finally asked. “What was this drug he was working on?”

I frowned. It was something that made the whole feeling even worse. “We never found out,” I told her. “The secret died with him. And with Navarro, I guess. But someone out there wants it, and they want it real bad.”

I told Tess everything I read about McKinnon after we got back from there. I had wanted to know everything about him. He’d become an obsession. So I’d got hold of the file the DEA had put together on him and followed it up with a few inquiries of my own.

McKinnon was a quiet, unassuming, and well-respected anthropologist and ethnopharmacologist from northern Virginia. He held a PhD from Princeton, and after teaching there and at the University of Hawaii at Manoa for a number of years, he obtained a grant from the National Geographic Society to explore the medicinal plant usage of indigenous peoples in remote corners of Central and South America. He went there seeking out traditional cures that were typically passed down orally from one healer to another, and the fascination blossomed. He’d turned into a medicine hunter and ended up dedicating his life to living with isolated tribes in the Amazon and the Andes, researching and cataloguing their use of plants and funding his ongoing bioprospecting from lecture fees and by selling articles and photographic essays to newspapers and magazines.

His life was his work, and he’d never married or had kids.

Tess asked, “So how’d he end up coming up with a superdrug?”

I reminded Tess that in many cultures, particularly in the Far East, the mind and the body were considered to be one entity, unlike in Western medicine. Curing a problem in either one of them invariably meant dealing with an underlying cause in the other. Amazonian shamans, I had discovered, pushed this approach to another level. They believed that true healing involved healing the body, the mind, and the spirit. Some of them believed that bodily disease, as well as mental illness, were caused by noxious spirits that needed to be expunged in religious rituals that often involved psychoactive substances—hallucinogens such as
ayahuasca
, which has been documented to cure both depression and metastasized cancers. This meant that for someone like McKinnon, studying the cures that healers and shamans administered involved learning and understanding the properties of the complicated brews the healers had perfected over centuries of usage and of the psychoactive plants they put in them.

“His medicinal work involved participating in religious rituals and taking all kinds of hallucinogens,” I told her. “And somewhere on that path, he came across this drug.”

“You don’t know where he discovered it, with what tribe?”

“No. And, obviously, Navarro didn’t either, nor does whoever is after it now, whether it’s Navarro or someone else.”

“But clearly, it’s something really powerful—otherwise they wouldn’t be doing all this now, five years later, and still be this desperate to get their hands on it, would they?” She looked at me with an expression that somehow injected a touch of hope in me that maybe we weren’t completely toast. “Maybe you did the right thing. Maybe . . . maybe if he’d lived, things would be much worse.”

Michelle had said that, too. I’d tried to convince myself of that for years, and hearing her say it as well, thinking about what was happening now—maybe there was some truth in it. Right now, I was just pleased Tess was still in the same room as me.

“But what the hell is it?” she asked. “There are plenty of hallucinogens out there and they’re not as bad as something like meth, right?”

I’d asked the same question, back then. “Three reasons. One, he said it was something that could be hugely popular, that it had such a kick in it that people wouldn’t be able to resist, that it would make meth look like aspirin—his words, not mine. Two, he’d managed to turn it into a pill. Which means it’s easy to take. And the right drug at the right time can spread like the plague. Three, since Navarro would be the only one supplying it, he could make it as addictive as he wants. Which would be a disaster since we’re talking about a heavy-duty hallucinogen.”

“Why?”

“Most human brains,” I explained, “are not wired to deal with the effects of a hard-core hallucinogen. They’re just not. The brain can deal with the effects of weed or coke or heroin, but a hard-core hallucinogen is very different. It runs a serious risk of destroying a big chunk of the psychological fabric of its users. That’s why these drugs have always been seen culturally, in pagan religions and such, as something that is by the few and for the few, meaning it’s meant to be taken only after a proper initiation. It’s part of a ritual, a ceremony, a rite of passage . . . you do it once in a lifetime, maybe when you come of age, when you enter adulthood, when you reach a certain milestone of maturity—or when you’re in bad shape and you need to be healed. The only people who are allowed to do it regularly are the shamans and the medicine men, and there’s a reason for that. They can take it on a regular basis because they’re trained to deal with its effects, their whole lives are devoted to coping with the ramifications of what you see and what you experience when you’re tripping. Biologically and, more importantly, psychologically, the average person is just not equipped and not trained to deal with something this intense, and from a social point of view there isn’t time for the average user to do that. There’s a real risk that if a drug like this were to become mainstream—based on what we know about it—it could cause a lot of problems. People using a pill like that wouldn’t be able to function. They could easily develop long-term depression and mental instability and suffer breakdowns. Psychiatric wards would have to deal with an onslaught of hundreds of thousands of patients. Look at how devastating and debilitating meth is, how it takes over lives and turns healthy, successful people who had everything going for them into zombies—and we’re only seeing the beginning of it.