“I already told you what Joe said. It was more a feeling than anything else.”
“He didn’t say anything specific about what was wrong?”
“He just said he didn’t like being out there, he thought it was a bad idea, and that he loved us.”
“He didn’t tell you anything more-maybe something about who he was with or what exactly was troubling him?”
“Don’t you know who he was with?”
“I’m just wondering if he might have given you any details.”
“No.”
“Even so, I’d like to take a look. There might be something you missed.”
“I said no.”
“I could subpoena that fuckin’ thing,” said Bennett, eyes pulsing, his face flushed, seemingly a size larger.
“What did you say?”
Bennett eased back from the car. “I didn’t mean that. I’m upset about Joe’s death, too. I just want to do everything I can to find out what really happened.”
Mary jumped on the words. “Don’t you know what really happened? You said the informant shot him. Who was Joe meeting?”
“I can’t go into that. I’m sorry…” Bennett stood, shoulders slumped, hands upturned. “Sorry to trouble you. If there’s anything we can do-me, the office-anything…let us know.”
Mary watched Bennett walk away. He might have asked to see the phone tomorrow, or even in a few days. What kind of a man threatens a grieving woman with a subpoena?
It came to her that Bennett didn’t know what had happened to Joe. Or for that matter who Joe had been meeting. For some reason Don Bennett was frightened.
As Mary started the car and eased it out of the garage, she could think of no other reason that he wanted the message so badly.
Joe, she asked silently, whose business were you looking into?
7
Ian Prince stepped inside his race headquarters, a sixty-foot RV outfitted to his needs. Peter Briggs followed him inside, closing the door behind them.
“That Mick has it in for you.” Briggs was a blunt-faced South African with heavy pouches beneath his eyes and blond hair shaved to a stubble. “Think he’ll make trouble?”
“Gordon May is upset because his is the only company in Silicon Valley I never tried to buy.” Ian unzipped his flight suit, opened the fridge, and grabbed a plastic bottle filled with amber liquid. His recovery drink: water, glucose, guarana, and ginseng. “You see my pass?” he said after guzzling half the bottle. “Only thing I could do.”
“You were in the right, boss,” said Briggs. “The stewards will see things your way. May’s just a bad loser.”
“Maybe.” Ian never forgot a slight, and May’s words had come perilously close to slander.
He finished the bottle and chucked it in the trash. An office occupied a compartment behind the driver’s bay. Personal quarters were to the rear and included a bedroom, bathroom, and rejuvenation center. He hit a switch on the wall, activating the anti-eavesdropping measures. The RV was now a SCIF, a “sensitive compartmented information facility.” Whatever he said in Reno stayed in Reno. “Any news?”
“Problem resolved.”
“Too bad it had to end that way.”
“It had to end. Period.” Briggs had grown up deep in the veldt, and his English carried a thick Afrikaans accent.
“Agreed,” said Ian. “So it’s all tied off?”
“To the very top. Bank it.”
“Banked,” said Ian.
–
After his shower, Ian Prince sat naked in the salon chair as a tall, muscular woman clad in tight black pants and a T went about her business. Her name was Dr. Katarina Fischer, and she was his private longevity consultant.
“Can’t you hurry things, Kat?” Ian asked the Berlin-born physician. “Copter’s coming in an hour. Back to home base. The big test’s tomorrow. Titan. It’s what’s made me such a grump these last months.”
“You are like an impatient little boy. First your vitamins.” Katarina handed him a tray filled with thirty vitamins and other supplements. There were the usuaclass="underline" B12, D, E, Omega-3s, antioxidants. And there were more exotic ones: alpha-lipoic acid, chromium, selenium, CoQ10. Ian swallowed them five at a time.
“Now you will live forever,” said Katarina. She was more handsome than beautiful, her thick white-blond hair cut above the ears, blue eyes couched behind rimless glasses, a broad jaw and broader shoulders.
Ian extended his arm. “Do your worst.”
Katarina drew a vial of blood for analysis. He knew his good cholesterol and his bad, his lipids and his liver function. Recently he’d had his exome sequenced, the portion of his DNA that contained his protein coding. It showed markers for Parkinson’s disease and diabetes, meaning that he was at greater risk than others of contracting them. He had a lesser chance of cancer. And still less of heart disease. The results of today’s blood work would be uploaded to his mailbox in an hour.
“And now your magic potion,” she said, capping the vial.
“Not magic,” said Ian. “Science. Keeps the cells new. Key to aging is the telomere. My ‘magic potion’ stops the ends from chipping off. Like shoelaces. Keep the tips intact and you can live forever.”
“Quatsch,” said Katarina, who knew about these things. Nonsense.
Ian laughed. When Katarina was an eighty-year-old Hanseatic hag with boobs drooping to her buckled knees, he would be climbing mountains, flying his P-51D, and preparing for his next eighty years.
Katarina wheeled the IV stand closer. She swabbed rubbing alcohol on his arm, then slipped the needle into his forearm and slapped on surgical tape to keep it in place. “No moving,” she said. “I’ll be back in thirty minutes.”
“Zum Befehl.”
Ian looked at the clear solution seeping into his system. His “magic potion” was a substance called phosphatidylcholine and it was a primary ingredient found in human cells, more specifically cell walls. It took the human body one year to regenerate all its cells. Ian wanted each and every one as healthy and robust as an adolescent male’s. One liter of phosphatidylcholine twice a week did the trick. To that he added his daily regime of ninety supplements, four liters of alkaline water, and a Mediterranean diet high in fish oils, nuts, and fruit.
His thoughts turned to Gordon May and his public accusations of Ian’s having a hand in John Merriweather’s death. By all accounts Merriweather’s plane had gone down in bad weather over the Owens Valley near Lone Pine, California, an area notorious for wind shear and turbulence. No evidence of foul play or tampering was ever uncovered. Ian reviewed his actions in the affair from inception to closure. He had nothing to worry about. Everything was tied off. “Banked,” in Briggs’s word.
Ian combated his anxiety by turning his attention to business. Work: the universal healer.
“Pending,” he said, and a list of topics appeared in outline form superimposed on his vision: 1. Titan 2. Bluffdale 3. Clarus.
In his right eye he wore a prototype of an augmented-reality contact lens integrated with newly invented optoelectronic components, including LEDs, microlasers, and the smallest antenna ever created.
He focused on Titan. The font darkened and grew larger. He blinked. The file opened. There, hovering in the middle distance in crisp three-dimensional form, stood the design of John Merriweather’s creation: the Titan supercomputer.
Ian and his team had shrunk the machine as much as possible, yet it was still the size of a refrigerator. Size, however, wasn’t the problem. Heat was. After an hour of operation, temperatures inside the machine surpassed 200° Fahrenheit, wreaking havoc on the circuitry. To solve the problem, Ian had written a software patch to reprogram the cooling system. The first test of the Titan supercomputer under maximum operating conditions was set for the next morning at ten o’clock. By this time tomorrow he would know if the cooling system worked.