“Is she going to be okay?” I asked.
Melody nodded once. “I think so. I was just at the hospital, and they say she’s going to pull through.”
“Good news,” I said.
Melody shook her head and didn’t answer.
“You should get some sleep,” I said.
I made it home before eight o’clock—the earliest that week—and joined my dad and Paul for a game of Scrabble. Halfway through the game, my dad fell asleep in his chair, and Paul and I finished up without him. As usual since his return from Brazil, Paul trounced me. I would have said I was losing my touch, but the truth was, I thought I was playing as well as I ever had. It didn’t stop Paul from beating me every time.
“You wouldn’t believe the breakthroughs I’m making at the lab,” Paul said. “We’re talking Nobel Prize–level discoveries.”
I laughed, not sure how seriously to take him. “Has there ever been a Nobel Prize awarded for fungus?”
“Sure. 1945. Sir Alexander Fleming. For penicillin.”
“Penicillin is a fungus?”
“Of course. It’s a mold. Molds are fungi.”
“I see. So you’re working on the next penicillin.”
He grinned, and his eyes sparkled. “That would be telling.”
“Come on! I’m your brother.”
He shook his head. “Nope.”
“Have you told anyone?”
“Not yet. Not until I publish.”
“When will that be?”
“These things take time. A year, maybe.”
“Fine,” I said. “I’m not telling you what I’m working on either. It’s Top Secret. So there.”
He did tell me about Destiny, at greater length than I really wanted to know. I told him about my coworkers, relating stories about their personal quirks or funny things that had been said. I also told him about Melody’s granddaughter and the Neuritol she had overdosed on.
“I actually think those drugs should be legalized,” Paul said. “If a drug can make you think more clearly or remember things better, then why not? It just makes sense. If she was taking it with her parents’ knowledge, and with a doctor’s prescription, she’d be much less likely to overdose.”
“There’s a reason it’s illegal,” I said. “Any drug that can seriously alter your brain chemistry is pretty scary stuff. It’s not the same as blocking pain or lowering blood pressure. Drugs like that can change your personality, your state of mind, your sense of ethics. I wouldn’t want my daughter using it.”
“What if there was a drug that could cure Alzheimer’s? Would you want Dad to take it?”
I rolled my eyes, annoyed. “Of course.”
“That would be brain altering. So why not a drug to make you smarter?”
“It’s not the same thing. Dad has nothing to lose, for one thing. Brain drugs can have serious side effects. As Emily found out.”
Paul shrugged. “All drugs have potential side effects. It’s a matter of weighing the risk against the potential gain.”
“And Emily doesn’t need to be smarter. She’s a bright kid, top of her class. She shouldn’t be pressured into altering herself chemically to reach some idealized standard.”
“Alter herself chemically? You make it sound like a science experiment gone wrong. Every time you drink a Coke, you alter yourself chemically.”
I folded my arms. “Taking Neuritol is not like drinking a Coke.”
“Nope. It’s a whole lot more helpful, and for a lot longer. Don’t be so timid. It’s a survival-of-the-fittest kind of world out there, and it’s not like humanity has reached the apex of possible evolution. If we can improve ourselves, we should do it.”
CHAPTER 11
The next morning, Katherine Wyatt landed at Baltimore/Washington International airport and rode in an NSA security SUV the two miles to FANX III, where we met her in a secure conference room. She was seventy-five years old, a bit stooped, with thinning white hair and a mottled face that sagged with loose skin. Her eyes, however, regarded me with a bright intelligence.
From my research, I knew that she had spent thirty years among the Johurá with her husband and three children. Her husband had died ten years earlier, and, of her children, two were now foreign missionaries themselves and one was a pastor somewhere in New England. Mrs. Wyatt agreed to keep confidential anything she might learn from the messages she helped us translate and signed a document to that effect. I’m not sure what we would have done if she had refused.
“Mrs. Wyatt,” Melody said. “Thank you for coming to help us.”
“Please, call me Katherine.”
“Katherine, then. Welcome.”
“Never seen the inside of the NSA,” Katherine said. “It’s a bit of an adventure.”
It still seemed like an adventure to me, too, though I was surprised to hear that opinion from a woman who had spent decades living in the Amazon without the most basic of modern amenities.
Melody and I sat across the table from her. “We have some messages that we intercepted from the Johurá,” Melody said. “Naturally, we’ve had some difficulty in translating them. Are you ready to start? Do you need a drink of water, or some coffee?”
“I’m fine,” she said. “But I haven’t decided yet if I will be translating any messages for you.”
Melody’s eyebrows rose.
I gaped. “We flew you all the way down here!” I said. “What did you think that was for, to give you a tour? This is a matter of national security!”
I stopped my rant when Melody put a hand on my arm. “You are under no obligation,” she said. “But can I ask, what makes you hesitate?”
And why did you agree to come if you weren’t going to help? I wanted to say, but didn’t.
“The Johurá are a complex people, in their own way,” Katherine said. “But they have no understanding of the world outside their villages. They are no threat to the United States. They can barely conceive of it as a place. It’s about as real to them as heaven, and considerably less real than the spirit world. I can only assume that the NSA’s interest in them is misplaced, or else exploitative.” She smiled apologetically.
“I gave the best part of my life to the Johurá. Though I only visit them once a year now, they are probably the closest friends I have. I doubt the language you are intercepting is Johurá at all, since they don’t transmit messages or use phones or computers of any kind, and if they did, they would have no one to talk to. And even then, I wouldn’t translate them for you, since I can see no value in making the private messages of my friends—messages that could have nothing to do with you—available for scrutiny by Americans who would have no context by which to understand them.”
Her diction was precise, her speech carefully structured. Melody smiled warmly. “The language is Johurá,” she said. “There’s little doubt of that. And I agree that the Johurá are unlikely to transmit any messages of their own free will.”
She let the implications of that hang in the quiet room. Katherine’s expression grew fierce. “So you think…”
Melody nodded. “The most likely explanation is that several Johurá are being coerced into using their unique language to pass messages for another group, probably a drug cartel.”
“It’s not so easy as that,” Katherine said. “Their language isn’t easy to translate, and the Johurá don’t know or care about things outside of their experience. Ask a Johurá to pass a message for you, and you might not recognize what came out the other side.”