The Methuselah Gene Read online

  Darryl pulled a huge ham and cheese sandwich from his brown bag like a magic trick, then a smaller baggie of bite-sized carrots. “Okay, Methuselah. Who besides you knew the access codes to the documentation?”

  I shrugged. “Hell, I don’t know. Half a dozen people, at least. They weren’t sure the computer was even protected by access code that night. It wasn’t always done, and the thing was just on screen saver most of the time. Touch any key and you’re in. It wasn’t like we expected espionage. I know the office was locked, though. And the internal computer wasn’t connected to any server.”

  Darryl unwrapped his sandwich, and bit a half moon. His words were slurred, as he talked with his mouth full. “Is that why none of the files were on the mainframe, either?”

  I speared a chunk of dripping meatloaf with my fork. “Huh? I thought some of them were. What’s this all about?”

  Darryl shushed me. “Whoever did this wiped everything, including their fingerprints. I found that out right away. Meanwhile, Tactar needed another star performer. Their stock is still going down, while Genetech just got approval for a competing product to our Disomene.”

  “You’re kidding. I never heard that.”

  “You’ve been up to your ass in aspirin substitutes, go figure. By the way, you haven’t told me how you like your new office.”

  “There’s no view,” I confessed. “And Hepker is a pain that won’t go away.”

  “So you can’t see yourself working for him another twenty years?”

  I munched, waiting for the dry meatloaf in my mouth to mingle with the moisture of the ketchup. “Don’t even joke about that,” I managed.

  Darryl nodded, then polished his fingernails on his lapel, and admired them. “My theory still holds, then. True to form, Tactar buries the incident along with burying your colleague. Then, sooner or later, you quit and move on. End of story.”

  “How do you know it’s the end, Sherlock?” I asked. “You know, for someone else, it could really just be the—”

  “Beginning?” Darryl interrupted, and then he grinned unexpectedly. “If I’m feeling a kinda smug condescension to you it’s because I’m working on an even better theory.” He did another magic trick and with a flourish produced a folded note, which he handed over. “Presto, change-o, buddy. After some deep soul searching, I’ve decided you owe me four hundred bucks, as well.”

  I opened the piece of paper and read: Walter Mills, 621 Broadway Blvd., Cincinnati OHIO.

  “Who’s Walter Mills?”

  Darryl’s smile thinned a bit. “That’s the question, isn’t it? The bad news is, your Cindyboo has moved. The good news is, I have his new address.”

  He now produced a postcard.

  “What’s that?”

  “I sent this to his old address four days ago, and wrote ‘return service requested’ on it. The post office doesn’t forward it then, just returns it to you with the new address.”

  I stared at the little yellow sticker on the postcard in Darryl’s palm, which read: PO Box 16, Zion, IOWA. “Zion, Iowa?”

  Darryl shrugged. “Maybe he sold your research materials and retired there.”

  “He who? And sold it to who?”

  “And for how much?” Darryl held out one hand, wriggling together his thumb and index finger. “More than the four hundred bucks you owe me, I’m sure.”

  I pushed aside my lunch tray and studied Darryl’s face like I’d once studied the face of a carnival fortune teller, when asked for money. “That’s all you’ve got—a post office box in some piss ant Midwestern town?”

  “Hey, it wasn’t easy to come by. I had to get help.”

  “Who?”

  “Never mind who. Just fork over the green, Mister Clean.”

  “But who’s Walter Mills? Is this guy on Tactar’s payroll?”

  “Nope.”

  “Has he got a record?”

  “You mean with the police? Again, you’re outta luck, if you ever had any to begin with. He’s not in the phone book either. Not here, and not in the Creston area phonebook there.”

  “Then who the hell is he? And what’s your other theory?”

  “You haven’t paid me yet.”

  This was getting old faster than I was. “Come on, Darryl,” I pleaded, “I know we haven’t gone the barbecue and bowling alley route together, but we’ve shared opinions on everything from politics to women to . . .” I paused, floundering and exasperated that I couldn’t resurrect memories of us doing much of anything other than arguing in the car. “Anyway, I haven’t got that much on me. You want me to give you fifty bucks in plain view of Jeffers’ secretary, over there? They been watching me close enough, as it is.”

  Darryl glanced back at the cafeteria window, meeting Allison Chambers’ askance but inquisitive gaze. “Okay, I see your point.” He laughed, as if at a joke. “You can get me all the money tomorrow. And by the way, did you know you have some vacation time you haven’t used? Better use it before the next quarter, or you’re gonna lose it. I suggest you skip Disney World and the Bahamas in favor of a nice drive out from the Des Moines airport to see what an ocean of wheat and corn looks like. That is, unless you think you’d enjoy Hepker sticking a pitchfork in your ass for the next two decades.”

  I stared across the table numbly, considering it. “What if they follow me?”

  Darryl raised his eyebrows. “You are paranoid. Just keep your eyes open. Anyway, I’ve used all my vacation time, but they can’t stop you. You’ve earned it, despite your many fumbles.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  What remained of Darryl’s smile spread quickly but evenly, like dawn on the desert. “Hey, pal, I’m God when I wanna be. You wanna know what Allison made last year, or the scoop on that new research assistant, what’s-her-name?”

  I experienced a flash memory of long shapely legs. A name found its neural path through my brain maze. “Donna Crossman?”

  “Yeah, that perked you up. Listen, I know other passcodes, too. Except for the ones you used.”

  I sighed. “So then you can tell me, has anyone retired from Tactar recently?”

  “Nope, checked that weeks ago.”

  “But you suggested—”

  “It was just a suggestion. You haven’t paid me for Mills yet. My theory is worth two cents without knowing who Walter is.”

  “Okay, then,” I said, fishing in my pocket for change. I dropped two pennies on the table next to Darryl’s bag of carrots. One of them rolled off into Darryl’s lap. “Spill it,” I demanded.

  That afternoon I visited Mary in Personnel, who informed Hepker of my request for time off. Hepker complained to Jeffers, but Jeffers called me with the go ahead. Thankfully, I didn’t pay for it this time by enduring a long comparison speech about those Caribbean cruise lines Jeffers preferred, like Royal, NCL, or Celebrity. Although I waited for him to ask me where I was going, the question never came. With my request approved at last, I then called American Airlines. A round trip ticket from Washington to Des Moines cost me four hundred and thirteen dollars on standby, and as I read my Visa card number over the phone I made a mental note to ask Darryl for a thirteen dollar refund if his second theory didn’t pan out and I was forced to watch Dancing With The Stars on in-flight television.

  4

  On Friday morning American’s Flight 162 stopped for an hour in Indianapolis. While waiting, I considered what Darryl had told me, and almost decided right then and there to join a line of passengers at the ticket counter to purchase passage back to Washington on another Boeing 757. But then I thought about the virus that ‘Cindyboo’ had sent Trojan-horse style to infect my sexy MacBook, and I felt a renewed pressure in my solar plexus, which might be labeled stress from suppressed anger. The act may have been Oscar worthy, but it was horseshit, as Darryl would put it. Who the hell was this Walter Mills, anyway? And did he work for—or get hired by—some rival drug company like Raxco-Bessel in Cincinnati, as Darryl suggested? Or was it Merck or Pfizer? The names
were changing all the time as mergers went down. Of course Darryl’s theory meant the big brass balls rolling around up on mahogany row at Tactar were only guilty of putting M-Telomerease behind them, and covering up its side effects. This meant the real thieves still might not suspect what they were getting into. Or worse, maybe they did. Given Darryl’s alternate scenario, it led me to the one nagging question that intrigued most, and would answer all the others: why would a man involved in industrial espionage move to some tiny town in Iowa?

  At the Des Moines airport, I rented a blue Taurus, and drove twenty miles down I-35 south of the city to Bevington, then west fifteen miles to a quaint and popular point of interest called Covered Bridges on State Road 92. A site where they’d filmed the movie Bridges of Madison County, and where the local bridge restoration society painted and maintained five of the six historic bridges. The sixth had burned, I learned when I stopped for coffee. Fifteen more miles took me past Stanzel, where I turned south again toward what was called the Thompson River. Zion, I knew from a dot on the map, was six miles beyond the river, square in the middle of the southwest corner of the state.

  The middle of nowhere.

  More lazy than bored, I turned on the car stereo, and flipped the digital selector past a gospel preacher to a faint rendition of the 80s song, “Blinded by Science,” by Thomas Dolby, which I couldn’t quite pull in from Omaha, and made me wish for XM over AM. Finally, I tuned into a country station playing Faith Hill fairly clearly, and settled into listening just as the corn fields Darryl had referenced appeared on the rolling horizon like rogue waves from some distant earthquake. Passing a faded and rusted old relic in a scrub field first, I identified an ancient Burma Shave sign. Then came the August corn. Tall, green, but still a bit too early in the season to be harvested. The quiet sea of gently undulating stalks grew thick on the hills, yearning toward a country sun that was slipping into mid afternoon over a dirt road break to the west.

  This surely beat listening to Hepker, I concluded, with some appreciation of the serenity. Maybe it even beat the monotonous view from the crowded deck of one of Jeffers’ favorite cruise ships. I would see.

  I was in the middle of singing along with humorous exaggeration to Faith Hill’s rendering of an old Merle Haggard tune when a cow suddenly came out into the twisting road from an open field hidden by corn. I swerved to miss the beast, and lost control. The Taurus angled toward the field, then suddenly flopped into a ditch that hadn’t been there only moments before. A crunching, snapping sound as the car’s underbelly met a convex hump of packed dirt . . . Then the car was pinned, and I found that I couldn’t muster enough traction even by gunning the engine first in forward, then reverse. Great. Now the right side wheels spun uselessly as dust billowed around the car in a fine patina of gray mist. I swallowed the dry lump in my throat and tried to recall when exactly the paved road had become a dirt road. Only a few minutes of inattention, and now I was stuck.

  I got out and spread a map on the car’s hood, mindful of the cow. But the hulking, bespeckled thing finally tramped off, satisfied with having pigeonholed another dumb city slicker. I focused on the map’s tiny lines, tracing them as though following the broken veins on an old man’s cheek. Still, I couldn’t remember if I’d passed the Thompson River or not. Surely I had, I decided. The river must have been at a low or possibly no flow level. Or maybe the bridge was disguised by vegetation, and I’d whistled over it while imagining first Faith Hill, then Martina McBride, and finally Heidi Klume in tight, threadbare jeans.

  I squinted back down the road, trying to resurrect images of what signs I’d seen. Then I moved my finger slowly back and forth among the tiny eclipsed and broken capillaries that attempted in vain to suck life from the blue artery coursing out from Des Moines. But the lines in Adair county, west of Madison county, were as white as Winsdon’s hair. Was I lost? If so, I couldn’t remember when I’d last been lost. Only hours ago I’d been within rifle range of the White House. Now there wasn’t even a farm house in view anywhere.

  “Hello!” I called.

  I felt my voice being absorbed by the distance and by the endless curtain of corn as a shadow suddenly passed overhead. I looked up to see a circling buzzard, its wizened meat head angled downward, its wide, looping wings pulling it concentrically into spirals. But it wasn’t circling me. No. Something out in the field. Something dying, perhaps. Not far away. A rabbit? A possum or skunk? I sniffed the air, but couldn’t smell anything except the hypnotic incense of the tasseled corn. And after only five minutes standing in the warm silence, I decided to leave the car and walk in the direction where I somehow felt I’d been traveling all my life.

  Although the hard packed dirt radiates less heat than blacktop might, I began to wonder how long I might walk before thirst took its toll on me. The thought was interrupted by a bee, which dive bombed into my chest and took a disorienting swipe from my open palm before flying off in a haphazard trajectory, but in the general direction of the cow. Approaching a bend in the road, I turned to look back one last time at my rental Taurus stuck in the ditch half a mile behind me. In doing so, I nearly walked right into a sign, half hidden in the corn.

  Zion, Iowa, pop. 166

  Well, I’ll be a—I stopped, wondering what I should call myself, now. A lucky S.O.B.? If I was truly lucky I wouldn’t be stuck, in more ways than one. And so I wouldn’t be out there in the middle of nowhere, walking toward what Jay Leno or Dennis Miller might have referred to as “Hayseed, Iowa.” Or worse. Of course, any small town between New York and L.A. would garner a Hollywood comedian’s appellation, I was sure. To them this was flyover country, something their celebrity colleagues flew above between various awards shows and acting gigs. Still, just being here didn’t make me an ignorant redneck hayseed yet. Although if Walter Mills turned out to be only a prankster, and if I then decided not to return to Hepker’s insufferability, my neck might turn some guilty shade of red, in time. In the meantime, I still had my graduate degree in biochemistry from Long Island State University. That should console me, at least. That should last for a while, surely. And so I shouldn’t feel personally insulted when some talk show host came up with such jokes between canapés at Spagos.

  Well, I’ll be . . .

  Damned? That had a truer ring to it. I’d go with that one.

  Hi there, I’m ‘Damned-If-I-Know.’

  Further around the bend, as if in answer to my quietly breathed prayer, the tiny town of Zion came into view. And as I imagined, there wasn’t much to it. Fronting the sun drenched corn fields, a Shell service station appeared first on the left. Beyond that was Main Street, which might just as well have been named Only Street or Lonely Street. What looked like a drug store and a country café could be discerned amid a cluster of old red brick buildings on either side of the dirt road. There were several farm houses dotting the distant rolling fields off to the east and west, too, with a scattering of trees rising from the clearings—elms, oaks and sycamores. But other than this, what was visible straight ahead was only more corn, and more bad road.

  I walked quickly toward the Shell station—toward its rusting sign and the big Coca Cola plate that hung on a nail above the entrance, next to two open service bays. As I passed one bay I saw a mechanic’s booted legs sticking out from under a battered Chevy pickup. I paused, lifting one hand to shield my eyes from the sun prisming through a high rear window.

  “Excuse me, can you help me?” I asked tentatively.

  The silence was commensurate with what might be heard in the city if one put on a pair of those really good hearing protectors. Something was out there, way off in the ether, but I couldn’t hear anything distinctly. And so I couldn’t decide if the only sound I could hear was a distant Weedeater or a closer bumblebee. It was certainly not the sound of tools being used under the pickup.

  I repeated myself. “Sir? Excuse me?”

  Not even a twitch. Was the man asleep? I stepped into the bay and tapped one boot with my foot. It had no e
ffect.

  “Hey,” I said, nudging harder this time.

  Still nothing.

  I finally bent over, and wiggled the boot with my hand. Then I pulled at the dolly.

  The man was not dead. It was not even a whole man. The legs were fake.

  I jumped back, startled, just as laughter bellowed from behind me, which momentarily stopped my heart. I whirled to see a mechanic. He was a fat man in his early forties with a round, pockmarked face, patchy blond hair, and a thick, unruly mustache. He carried half a sandwich in one pudgy hand. The name WALLY was embroidered on his dirty orange jumpsuit. He looked like Sgt. Schultz of the old Hogan’s Heroes TV series, if the actor’s cherubic face had been to hell and back. This Schultz needed Propecia, too. In his youth he could have used heavy doses of Cleocin or Minocin as well, because his cheeks were so scarred by acne that both of them deserved a Purple Heart.

  “Sorry, partner,” the mechanic said with effusive charm, trying to calm himself. Although he also laughed actual tears. “That’s my stand-in when I’m on break.” He wiped one hand across his chest and offered to shake my hand, but I just stared at it. “Name’s Wally.”

  “I can see that,” I told him. “Thanks for waking me up there, Wally. I’ve been sleep walking for the better part of a mile.”

  Wally lowered his hand slowly, his face registering confusion and mild disappointment. “You stranded?”

  “How’d you guess?” Thought you see nothing, know nothing.

  “I never seen you before. So are ya outta gas?”

  “No, I’m stuck in the ditch. About a mile north.”

  “How’d that happen?”

  I didn’t answer. Wally finished what looked like a chicken sandwich on rye with two large bites. He munched hard, now, working the final mouthful while he mumbled, “Anyway, no problem, partner. Got a tow truck. Won’t cost ya a dime.”

  “A what?” I asked.

  “Yup. Just a few dollars.” His laughter was not quite as big and booming this time. “Sorry, just kiddin’ ya . . . pullin’ yer leg, so ta speak.” He slid the fake feet back under the car with a nudge of his worn work shoe. Then he walked out to the tow truck parked behind the station. I followed reluctantly. In passing, he nodded at the BE BACK SOON sign in the window next to a symmetrical stack of oil cans, saying, “I’m still on break, see. And hey, did you know you look kinda like that actor guy?”