Elixir.

"Maybe you should think about moving to people, because I wouldn"t give you a dime till I was certain."

"But suppose it worked? What do you think such a compound would be worth to the company manufacturing it?"

"Sky"s the limit, I guess. Why, you people making this stuff?"

Quentin felt a rush of relief. He had captured Lucas"s interest. "Yes." Quentin did not mention the accelerated senescence. "We"ve still got some testing left and FDA approval, then we"re rolling."

Suddenly Betsy Watkins"s pointy little self-righteous face rose up in his mind. He pushed it down when another face shot up. Ross Darby"s. "I need not remind you, that this is supremely confidential." But they didn"t get it. None of them did. His back was against the wall with a professional killer glowering at him point-blank. He had no choice, so he told Vince Lucas about the mice and rhesus monkeys in detail. And Lucas listened intently.

"You"re talking months if not years to get this marketed. Antoine wants his money today."

"Vince, you"re a successful businessman-"

Vince reached across the table and grabbed Quentin"s index finger. "Get to your point or I"m going to snap these off one by one."

"M-my point is I am offering you a percentage of Elixir. We can work out the details later, but I am offering you a piece of Darby stock in return for a capital investment that would cover our debt to Mr. Ducharme."

Vince Lucas stared at him incredulously. "You want me to lend you a million dollars to pay off Antoine?"

"No, not a loan. An investment in Elixir."

Lucas smiled. "That"s a new one."

"We"re talking about the ultimate miracle drug, a little pill that would prolong life indefinitely. And I"m offering you an opportunity to be part of it-part of untold fortunes. It"s a chance of a lifetime, literally."

Quentin continued in his smoothest entrepreneurial manner. He produced the capital-raising literature Ross had presented to the small coterie of investors, a video of the lab animals, and legal financial doc.u.ments should Lucas agree to come aboard. All the stuff he had intended to unload on Antoine Ducharme.

Lucas studied the material, fingering through the figures and graphs. "Looks interesting."

"Interesting! Mr. Lucas, these are road maps to the Garden of Eden!"

"No, Mr. Cross, these are pieces of paper. You could have made up all this stuff and had it printed."

"Then what can I do to convince you?"

"Show me your hundred-year-old monkeys."

"You mean you want to visit the labs?"

"Unless you brought them with you."

Quentin hadn"t expected this. He said he could bring him in on Monday after hours. But Vince insisted on today.

"There"re too many people around today."

"What time do they go home?"

Of course, he could bring him in after the place closed up. "Tonight at nine."

"You still haven"t said anything about money."

"For forgiving my debt, I guarantee you that your million dollars will turn into two and a half million dollars in two years. An increase of 150 percent."

"What if your Elixir doesn"t work on people?"

"Then I"ll pay you out of my own pocket, even if it means selling my home. That"s how much I believe in this." Lucas studied him in more opaque silence. "So, what do you think?

"I think you"re going to need this Elixir yourself, the way you"re packing in the nuts and booze."

Quentin made a nervous chuckle. "I"d like to add, that this deal must be held in the utmost confidence."

Lucas reached into an inner pocket of his jacket and pulled out a portable phone. He tapped some numbers. "It"s me. Something"s come up. Yeah, everything"s fine. Stay low. Yeah. Catch you later." Then he clicked off. He handed the phone to Quentin. "Tell your wife you won"t be coming home for supper."

"But she"s not home."

"She"s home, and so is your daughter."

Jesus! People were watching his family while they were here. "Did you think I"d bring the police?"

"It"s your track record on payment." He pushed the phone into his hand. "Call your wife."

Shaking, Quentin called his wife to say he"d not be home until late. Then Vince slung the bag of money on his shoulder and led Quentin to the elevator in the lobby. They rode to the top floor alone. "Tell me this," Vince said halfway up. "Can your Elixir keep you from dying? Say, if somebody put a bullet through your head?"

Quentin flinched. "Well, n-no, not really."

"Then here"s how this works. I want 300 percent, not 150."

"That"s four million dollars!"

"Correct."

"That"s an awful lot of money...."

"How much is your daughter"s life worth to you?"

"Okay, okay. Four million."

"And I want half next year at this time-two million next July first. Another two the following July. And if you don"t deliver, you take a bullet in the head-end of story."

The elevator door opened onto an empty floor.

Vince nudged him out. "And you deliver it yourself in front of me." The door closed with a loud crack.

Vince Lucas led them down the hall to his suite. He unlocked the door and opened it. "So far, your Elixir seems to work."

Two days later Vince flew to Puerto Rico where in a villa on a bluff overlooking the ocean he delivered $2.5 million in cash to Antoine. He did not let on that a million was his own money. Nor did he mention Elixir or the video Quentin had given him or what he had seen in the Darby labs that night. This was his own private investment. If it didn"t work out, he could always recoup. Quentin had equity-a fancy house, a summer place, and ownership in the company which he"d take over in January.

But if it worked out, it could be one monster bonanza.

August came and, once again, Chris postponed their Caribbean trip. Things were just too crazy at the lab to get away, he told Wendy. Understandably, she was disappointed.

Then on August 5 Jenny called to say that Kelly had been readmitted to the hospital. She didn"t explain why. In fact, she purposely talked down the matter, saying simply that everybody thought it was best. But Jenny"s evasiveness bothered Wendy so much that she decided to go out there herself. Jenny protested that everything was fine, but she finally gave in since she was having a first-birthday party for Abigail the following week and Wendy could join them.

"It was so strange," Wendy said the night she returned from Kalamazoo. "Kelly had had another nervous breakdown, yet Jenny pretended she was at a retreat."

"Did you get to see her?" Chris asked as they drove back from the airport.

"Only after I insisted. Not only did she not want to take me to the hospital, she didn"t even want to go into the conference room with me. And when she did, she chattered away about the pictures on the walls and how superior the food was to the usual hospital fare."

"Talk about denial!" Chris said. "How was Kelly?"

Wendy shook her head woefully. "Like a zombie. Maybe it"s all the medication, but I couldn"t believe how she looked. You remember what a big and strong kid she used to be. Well, she was all skin and bones and stooped over. She looked elderly. It was frightening. When I asked how she felt, she looked at me with dead eyes and said, "Crazy."

"Jenny heard her and blurted out something about what lovely doctors she had, when Kelly cut her off. "I was in a coma for three days," she said. "I took forty tabs of her Lithium, but they found me and pumped it out."

"What struck me, Chris, was that she sounded disappointed they had gotten to her in time. All I could think was how she was sixteen years old with so much life ahead of her and she wanted to die. It"s so sad, at only sixteen," she said, thinking that Ricky had never made it to six.

"That must have shaken Jenny," Chris said.

"It was hard to tell. She sat there with a twisted grin on her face looking as if she was about to start laughing or screaming. Instead, she got up and left the ward. I made a move to stop her, but Kelly said, "Don"t bother. It"s how she deals with stuff she can"t handle."

"A few minutes later when we were alone, Kelly asked how I felt about having another baby. I told her I was happy. She asked if we planned to have any more. I said no. She nodded, then said, "Our baby"s an only child too." She meant her!"

"G.o.d, the poor kid," Chris said.

Wendy nodded. "When I left I hugged her goodbye and said "Take care of yourself," and she looked at me as if to ask why."

"Sounds like she"s going to be in there for a long time."

"I"m afraid so. I left the ward and found Jenny downstairs in the gift shop buying toys for Abigail and joking with the sales clerk. Then two days later, she had a big party for her. The place was full of parents and small kids, and they all put on hats and sang "Happy Birthday" and ate a huge yellow Big Bird cake and ice cream. The way Jenny carried on you"d never know that her other daughter was in a psychiatric ward for trying to kill herself for the second time just days before. I felt like Alice in Wonderland."

After a few minutes of silence, Wendy said, "And remember that missing photo of Kelly? Well, it"s sitting on Jenny"s vanity table in her bedroom among some baby pictures of her. She had taken it."

"Where was Ted in all this?" Chris asked.

"He wasn"t around much," Wendy said. "During the party he was at work, and at night he went out with friends. As for Kelly, he keeps his distance-she"s Jenny"s daughter."

"And you wonder why she tried to kill herself. He wants nothing to do with her and Jenny can"t forgive her for growing up."

The month of August pa.s.sed, and 7.2 million people had died.

Included among the dead were Jack Lescoulie, 75, former Today show host; Richard Egan, 65, actor; John Houston, 81, world-cla.s.s movie director; Vincent Persichetti, 72, American composer and educator; Lee Marvin, 63, actor; Bayard Ruston, 85, political philosopher and civil rights activist; Pola Negri, silent film star; Jesse Unruh, 64, politically powerful California a.s.semblyman; David Martin, 50, rock singer and ba.s.sist for Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs; Joseph E. Levine, 81, movie mogul; Jim Bishop, 79, author of bestsellers The Day Lincoln Was Shot and The Day Christ Died; and Rudolf Hess, 93, the last survivor of Hitler"s inner circle.

Except for Hess who hanged himself in Spandau Prison, all the other deaths had all been listed as "natural causes."

Natural causes: A handy medical phrase which to Chris"s mind meant that attending physicians didn"t have a clue. Almost n.o.body over 75 was autopsied anymore, because most cases had revealed no clear cause-no specific disease. To satisfy the law, death certificates simply listed "natural causes" which translated as the loss of physiological function attributed to aging.

What those death certificates didn"t say was that the cells of the victims had ceased to replicate and, thus, had deteriorated to the point that the vital organs failed.

The process was universal. They had gone to their ends, the rich, the famous, the powerful, unprotected-unprotected, as every other human being who ever lived.

Except Iwati.

September came and went, and once again Chris put off their trip. Maybe they"d go after the baby was born.

On September 18, Sam Bacon was permanently confined to his nursing home bed because he could no longer remember how to sit up.

On the tenth of October, Vince Lucas called Quentin to check on Elixir"s progress. Quentin had nothing new to report because these things took time. But the lab team was giving its all to perfecting the serum and winning federal approval by early next year. Lucas seemed satisfied, then asked for the names of the head scientist and his wife. Quentin gladly told him.

During the month of November, 10 million people were born in the world. One of them was Baby Boy Bacon. They named him Adam.

11.

Adam Samuel Bacon was born on November 4, 1987 at 8:10 A.M. at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston. He weighed seven pounds, nine ounces.

Because his head was so large, the doctors performed an episiotomy. Throughout the delivery, Chris held Wendy"s hand, whispering words of encouragement and how he loved her. While the doctors st.i.tched her up, the nurses brought Adam to her. She and Chris cried and laughed at the same time.

For several minutes, Chris curled his finger around the tiny pink miniature of his son"s, thinking that just a few months ago that hand had been a flat webbed thing inside its uterine sac, but through some ingenious mechanism just the right cells at just the right time had died so that these fragile little fingers could take form. And, yet, as Betsy had insisted, beyond the embryo living cells were not part of the same mechanism. That beyond the womb, our cells weren"t programmed to die-just age. No death clock ticked within this little bundle of life.

He closed his eyes to clear his mind of all that. He had become too bound up with seeing people in terms of their cells and DNA. Bound up with thoughts he should not consider.

When he opened his eyes again, he beheld his newborn son at Wendy"s breast. It was the most beautiful moment in his life.

Later that evening, after Jenny had left and Wendy had gone to sleep, and all the hospital was quiet, Chris stood outside the nursery window and watched his son sleep, wondering what placental dreams went through his tender little brain. It crossed his mind that the last time he was in a hospital was eight years and three months ago when Ricky had died. He had held Wendy"s and his son"s hand then, too.

Then his mind was full of death.

Now it was aswirl with forever.

Because of the epidural Wendy had slept most of yesterday afternoon, so Jenny had managed to get in a couple hours shopping. Along with her luggage she had two large bags of stuff she"d bought for Abigail from FAO Schwartz. She had spent another fortune. It was bizarre the way Jenny had taken to her own new motherhood-a near-maniacal compensation. When Chris asked how Kelly was getting along, she offered a chirpy "Just fine" which ended the discussion. Yet she talked about Abigail all the way to the airport and showed him a stack of recent photographs. "I"m so much in love with her," she confessed, "it almost scares me."