Well, he would deal with that tomorrow afternoon when Tomás got back to Vegas and handed over the USB drive.
He walked to the living room and pulled out his cell phone.
It was still before office hours, but he put the call through to the person who was coordinating the project. All of their communication so far had been through encrypted files or electronically masked phone conversations, so Derek still didn’t even know if it was a woman or a man, let alone the person’s identity.
Derek was good at what he did, so he was impressed that so far he’d been unable to figure out the name of the person. Not even Mr. Takahashi, the CEO of Plyotech, had any idea who was pulling the strings and working in the background to mastermind the project.
But Derek wanted to find out.
After all, as they say, knowledge is power. While that might not always be true, knowledge was at least leverage. And when you have enough leverage, you can tilt even the most difficult situations to your advantage.
So, he was doing his own private research to find out who this person was, but for the time being he simply needed to find out if everything was still on track for Sunday night.
The person orchestrating the deal answered after one ring, and as always, Derek was the first to speak. “Emilio is dead.”
“I saw the news. And the Filipino police?”
“Don’t worry, they won’t be looking any further into his death.”
A pause. “Are we all set for Sunday?”
“I was just about to ask you the same thing. From my end, yes. I have a young woman here who’s going to take care of everything.”
“She can be trusted?”
“She can be trusted.”
“And the engineer from Groom Lake?”
“Turnisen.”
“Yes.”
“We’ll get what we need from him.”
“You’ll take care of that part yourself?”
“Absolutely.”
And then a surprise. “I’d like you to meet with my associate in Phoenix tomorrow.”
“I’ll need to be back by five. I have a meeting scheduled with Tomás.”
“That won’t be a problem. I’ve already taken the initiative of booking you a ticket. You leave at 9:51 in the morning and will return on the 2:20 flight.”
“And what will we be covering at the meeting?”
“The delivery of the merchandise. It’s not something I wish to discuss over the phone.”
That was certainly understandable. Considering what was at stake.
“Keep me informed if the schedule changes,” Derek said.
“I will.”
After the call, Derek took his morning regimen of forty vitamins and supplements, then brewed some coffee, mixed in the gray powder that he took every day, and worked out for an hour — core, mainly, since research showed that that was the most important muscle group for longevity.
He was taking all the steps he knew to treat his condition: reprogramming his body’s biochemistry through supplements, diet, and gene therapy, exercising vigorously, eating only natural foods, pursuing the latest advancements in robotics, biogenetic engineering, and nanotechnology.
Because Derek, the avenging hero Colonel Derek Byrne, knew his time on this earth was limited.
He was dying.
Unless he had something to say about it.
Whether you believe we evolved from lower primates or were shaped uniquely by the hand of God himself, this much was undeniable: from the very beginning, ever since we first emerged on this planet, we, as a species, have been searching for the fountain of youth, for the secrets to living forever.
All across the globe, in every culture ever studied, Homo sapiens have sought eternal life.
In China alone there are at least a thousand different names for the elixir of life. Tales of the search for this “pool of nectar” or “dancing water” fill volumes of world history — from Gilgamesh’s search for the answer to eternal life, to the legendary quest of Qin Shi Huangdi, the first emperor of China, to do the same, to the search for that elusive fountain of youth.
And where we fail to find physical immortality, religions spring up to offer us the next best thing — spiritual immortality, reincarnation, heaven, Nirvana, a paradise with seventy virgins at our beck and call. And on and on and on.
But now, in the twenty-first century, for the first time ever, our species was on the verge of conquering the grave.
Technology offered what biology never could: a chance to cheat death once and for all.
Derek returned to the bedroom, walked past Calista, who was still fast asleep, and entered the bathroom to take a shower.
He was an agnostic. He didn’t believe in God, but he did believe in the possibility of God.
Yes, there were times when he even believed in the likelihood of God.
Because you had to give up an awful lot to be an atheist.
The idea of justice, for one thing, because some people really do spend their lives sexually abusing little girls in their basements and get away with it, and if there’s no afterlife, they would just die like everyone else and be no better or worse off. In fact, looking at the world as it is, there’s no legitimate reason to believe in justice. Why would you even delude yourself to think that it exists when there’s no evidence of it at all in the natural world and, if there’s no God, no one to institute it in the afterlife?
And you have to give up on the idea that your life has meaning — or at least any purpose beyond reproducing and hoping that eventually your genes will be good for the betterment of the race or the planet. And if they would not be, you’d have an obligation not to reproduce at all.
After all, there is no purpose inherent in naturalistic evolution. No goal. No intention. No design.
Without eternity, without God, hope is simply a sedative. It doesn’t even rate as a helpful illusion because it isn’t really helpful for anything other than numbing you, distracting you from the truth that, since the universe is winding down and dying, nothing you do ultimately matters, and your life, in the grand scheme of things, is nothing, contributes nothing, and will soon be forgotten and your name erased from the evanescent chronicles of time and space.
But, on the other hand, life would be so much easier, so much more carefree, if God wasn’t there, if there was no higher moral authority to answer to. No ultimate accountability.
For Derek, that was perhaps the greatest attraction to being an atheist — the inevitable conclusion that morality is utilitarian, determined only by the biological imperatives of reproduction and survival.
What an enticing worldview.
Because, as philosophers have pointed out over the ages, if God doesn’t exist then all is permissible.
Yes, very enticing.
Derek finished his shower, toweled off, and walked down the hall to his home office, where he kept the bionic arm to practice with when he wasn’t at Plyotech.
Taking it with him, he returned to the bedroom and set it beside the bed.
He’d let Calista work last night and she hadn’t gotten back to his condo until nearly four o’clock. But even then, she’d joined him for drinks. While preparing them, he’d slipped a couple pills into her margarita, and based on her body size and the amount of drugs and alcohol she’d consumed, Derek was confident she would be out until ten or eleven.
Which gave him plenty of time.
He had no idea how she would respond if she knew that he so often drugged her and then had his way with her like this in the mornings, but she did not know and he was not planning to ever reveal it to her.
“I love you, my little courtesan.” His spoke the words softly and tenderly as he pulled the remaining sheet away.