“Just one voice in the wind. I doubt it.”
“But a big voice.”
“Then you might consider reevaluating the rush to market, because the drug is badly flawed.”
“Bullshit, it’s not flawed.”
“Gavin, the only thing worse than Alzheimer’s is experiencing the same horrible trauma over and over again. And that’s what this compound has done to many victims: It keeps sending them back to relive terrible events. And that’s worse than Alzheimer’s. That’s worse than death.”
Moy made a hissing sound and batted the air with his hand. “I heard your arguments. I just wish I could talk you around to our view. A letter from you could derail the train.”
“Sorry, Gavin, but I can’t.”
They sat in silence for a long moment sipping their drinks. Moy flagged the waiter for a refill and another bowl of nuts. Then out of his jacket pocket he removed a sheet of paper and handed it to Nick. It was a photocopy of the story of Jack Koryan emerging from his coma.
“What about it?”
“It’s our jellyfish,” Moy said. “You know who he is?”
Nick felt himself tighten. Jordan Carr had requisitioned a blood assay on the guy. He had also asked for a frozen sample of his blood to check how much toxin was still in his system. “Yes.”
“I understand he’s been complaining about bad dreams.”
The son of a bitch is baiting me. “Yes. He’s been having flashbacks.”
“Flashbacks,” Moy repeated. “Something about nightmares of violent confrontations of some sort.”
“That’s my understanding.” Nick kept his voice neutral.
Moy nodded, not taking his flat eyes off Nick’s face, and picked out a couple almonds and crunched them in his molars. “I’m just wondering if you think there’s anything to it.”
He’s playing tricks with me, Nick thought. Some kind of twisted blackmail thing. “It could be recollection; it could just be bad dreams. I’m not really certain. There’s no way to know.”
“It doesn’t bother you? You don’t see a problem here?”
“We’re talking about stuff in the subconscious mind—nothing one can substantiate.”
“Well, it seems we’ve both been wondering about this guy and what he remembers, and if that’s a problem.”
“I don’t believe it is. Besides, our interest in him was strictly scientific.”
“Of course,” Moy said, and he clinked Nick’s glass where it sat on the table. “And, frankly, I’m getting tired of this fucking ghost dance.”
Nick took a deep breath. “Me, too.” He checked his watch. “I’ve got to get up early tomorrow.”
“Oh, yeah, your sunrise safari.”
Nick had mentioned that he would be heading off to Bryce Canyon.
“You know that the forecast is for freezing rain in the mountains.”
“Cuts down on the crowd.”
Moy chuckled. “A crowd of one.”
Nick’s plan was to get up around four-thirty A.M. and make it to the canyon before sunrise. “You’re welcome to join me.”
Moy made a humpf. “The option of getting up in the cold and dark to drive twenty miles to watch the sun rise, or stay in bed. What we call your basic no-brainer.”
“How often does one get the chance to catch a sunrise on Bryce Canyon?”
“Almost as often as sleeping in. You can show me your pictures.”
Nick left thinking that maybe he was wrong. Maybe they were dancing with ghosts.
76
“MY GOD,” NICK WHISPERED TO HIMSELF as he looked down.
He was standing a few feet from the four-hundred-foot drop-off ledge that made up Inspiration Point at the southern rim of the canyon. The only sound was the rustling of chilled winds through the ponderosa pines and jagged sandstone promontories—a sound unchanged for a hundred million years.
Bryce Canyon gaped at Nick’s feet—a deep series of amphitheaters filled with thousands of limestone and sandstone spires, fins, and towers carved by wind and rain into whimsical shapes, creating a maze of ancient hoodoos. Overhead, the indigo vault was rapidly fading to an orange fire as the rising sun spread from the eastern horizon, bleaching out the last few stars. A crystalline quarter moon rocked in the northwest sky.
Nick inched closer to the drop-off for another shot.
He had gotten up as planned, and made it out here in his rental in about half an hour, stopping for coffee and donuts at a gas station mini-mart. Of course, the roads were wide open with no one else on them. He had checked out of the hotel at four-thirty A.M., his rental packed to take him back to Salt Lake City for his afternoon flight back home—after this glorious pit stop, of course. The last couple days had been stormy, but today the clouds were breaking. And because of the nearly nine-thousand-foot elevation, the air was still chilled and the trails dusted with snow.
The most amazing thing was that nothing moved. He could see for over a hundred miles, and there was no motion but for the junipers and pines. Not even a falling stone. Given the hour and the frigid, windy conditions, not another hiker or tourist appeared to be within miles of the place. Nick’s rental was the only car in the parking lot. From his perch, not a road or car or building or urban light violated the primitive panorama. Not a single sign that this was the twenty-first century and not a sunrise during the Mesozoic age. In fact, this could very well be another planetscape—a vista on Mars, given the reddish stones. Yet the stunning lack of sound was a gratifying relief from the noisy, crowded conference rooms and dining halls.
Nick mounted the Nikon with the three-hundred-millimeter gun-barrel lens onto the tripod, attached a shutter release cable, and began taking shots of the predawn light glazing the towering fins rising from the canyon floor.
He would take maybe four or five shots, then move along the rim as the light changed. When the sunlight began slanting into the canyon, he switched to the two-and-a-quarter Mamiya 7 with the wide angle and headed for the very edge to shoot vistas. One must sustain a near-religious trust in the integrity of limestone, for he was at the very edge of a sheer drop-off, the sight of which sent electrical eddies up his legs.
He aimed at the sunrays gilding a row of rock blades.
Click click click.
Then back to the eighteen-millimeter wide angle.
Click click click.
The light was changing by the second. He shot off the rest of the roll and put in another, then moved up the rim. There he crouched down at the edge and shot down at the sunlight glancing off a clutch of sun-enameled fans of limestone. It was amazing how they resembled a colony of fire coral, but in monstrous proportions. Of course, despite the calcium carbonate structures and the fragile flamelike shapes, so-called fire corals are not true corals but rather a hydrozoa whose stinging cells are equipped with needlelike projections containing burning neurotoxins closely related to those of jellyfish.
Jellyfish.
Amazing how lines converge. Of all the people on the planet to meet up with Solakandji jellyfish, Jack Koryan. And what had brought them together was a confluence of seemingly random geophysical events—cool Pacific seas, warm Atlantic highs, errant Gulf Stream waters, a man on a swim in the right place at the right time.
The jellyfish effect.
Statisticians would put the odds at one in a million-except that this was not a statistically random convergence of the twain. Far from it. Nick didn’t know to what extent things connected, but when he got back to Boston he’d check. But it was amazing how the closer you looked at life, the fewer accidents there were. In fact, maybe there were no real accidents.