For a while, watching others die, even though he knew he could stop the process, had been like a thorn in his thoughts, an uncomfortable irritation that made his daily work less enjoyable, but you have to move on, have to come to terms with your role in life. And Dr. Cyrus Arlington had done just that.
He’d begun to look at the big picture and had initiated the most expensive research program in the history of his company to find the cure for aging, which would, in many ways, be the cure for everything.
Telomeres, protective caps on the ends of chromosomes, erode as cells reproduce, and so the cells eventually degrade and enter a state referred to as “senescence” when they no longer reproduce. This causes the effects we associate with aging — dementia, increased risk of stroke, muscle atrophy, and decreased organ function, sight, hearing, and so on. Put simply, the enzyme telomerase protects the telomeres from degrading and thus slows aging.
If it were possible to use telomerase on humans to stop telomeres from shortening when cells reproduce, there would be no reason for those cells to begin breaking down. Would it add years to your life? Yes. And undoubtably, it would also dramatically increase your quality of life during the decades up until then.
Stopping senescence halts the negative effects of aging and, at least in the 2010 Harvard studies on rats, reverses those effects by increasing neural function, regenerating nerves, and rebuilding muscle tissue.
But there was a problem. Cancer cells initiate telomerase, which is one reason cancer cells don’t degrade with time, so increasing telomerase in the body of a person who has no cancer would cause him to become more immune to it, but someone with cancer would become more riddled with it.
All of this means that if you could create a drug that releases telomerase, you would either need to administer the drug to people who don’t have any cancer cells growing in them, or give the enzyme to people in short doses so that it decreases the risk that the cancer cells they already have would spread.
Unless the drug increased the level of telomerase only in cells that were not cancerous.
And that’s exactly what RixoTray was on the verge of producing.
It would be the one drug that everyone on the planet would want to take, and it would make thousands of other drugs obsolete.
The pharmaceutical company that could create the first-generation telomeres protector would be positioned to become one of the most financially lucrative firms on the planet. Perhaps one of the most profitable companies of all time.
And that company was going to be RixoTray Pharmaceuticals.
They needed a little more funding, yes, and a little more time. The funding would come from the Pentagon, and the time would come from — well, it certainly wouldn’t come from the added restrictions the president was going to propose in his speech tomorrow at eleven at Independence Park just outside of the Liberty Bell building.
Cyrus threaded his Jaguar down the narrow streets of South Philly. Groups of gangbangers huddled on the street corners; abandoned buildings littered the block. The row houses in this primarily African American neighborhood were all in disrepair. And it was not the kind of place someone of Cyrus’s stature would normally venture.
He was heading to the house with the dumpster in the cramped alley behind it. The dumpster that accepted the remains of what happened in the basement of that building during the night.
Despite the low-income demographic of the neighborhood, Cyrus wasn’t afraid to leave the Jag on the street. He was known as a friend of Mambo Atabei, and no one around here would dare cause any trouble for one of her friends.
He parked in one of the four spots in front of her house left vacant for her visitors. Walked to the porch, knocked on the door.
Waited for her to answer.
There were generations of African Santería practitioners in Philadelphia who have been around since colonial times. And although Mambo Atabei was not from Africa, the ceremonies she performed had been originally exported from there to Haiti, adapted, and then imported from Haiti to North America.
The cloth doll in Cyrus’s office was, of course, a gimmick. No one who was a serious voodoo worshiper would use a doll like that. It was for the tourists in places like New Orleans and some of the neighborhoods in Miami. Real voodoo has much deeper roots and much different methods.
When the door opened, Cyrus could smell incense. It was meant to mask the other smells that emanated from the house, or peristyle, as it was known in Mambo Atabei’s religion.
She stood in front of him, fiftyish, slim, black — she hated being called African American because, as she said proudly, she was Haitian, not from Africa, not from America. “You don’t hear Caucasians preface their identity by naming their ancestors’ continent of birth: ‘European-American’ or ‘North American — American.’ All of this political correctness is only thinly veiled bigotry used to create divisions between people groups that need to be drawn closer together, not separated by hyphenating their identities.”
“Dr. Arlington.” Her voice was soft and congenial but had a raspy edge to it. The result of a throat injury sometime in her past.
“Mambo Atabei.”
“It’s been, what? Two months? Three?”
“Something like that.”
Without another word she invited him into the living room.
The brown and white doves that she would use in the basement were caged in the corner of the room, out of reach of the gray cat that stalked across the footstool in front of her couch. The doves squabbled with each other, oblivious to what awaited them. The cat eyed them with calculated interest.
Cyrus wondered about the cat. He hadn’t known Mambo Atabei to use cats, but he wasn’t really sure what all went on in her basement. He’d only witnessed her using doves and chickens — although he did know that larger animals were part of some of the ceremonies she performed.
A wide variety of liqueurs and rums were collected on an end table in the corner of the room. An HDTV, two chairs, a lamp, a crucifix on the wall, a shelf of DVDs, and knickknacks rounded out the room. A typical living room.
At the far end of the room, a curtain was drawn across an open doorway. He knew that the curtain concealed the steps that led to the basement.
A basement that was not quite so typical.
He’d been down there on numerous occasions, just as an observer. But he’d seen what went on around the pole, the poteau-mitan, in the middle of the main room, had seen what caused the dark stains on the dirt floor beneath it.
There is, of course, a dark side to voodoo, a strand that’s not about dancing and drinking or trying to find out some insights about life from a Loa. There’s a side that has nothing to do with blessings or celebration.
It was the side Mambo Atabei counted herself a part of, the highly secretive Bizango Society.
Cyrus was not easily rattled, but Atabei had a certain unnerving quality about her and studied him with a quiet intensity that made him slightly nervous. “And what exactly can I offer you tonight, Dr. Arlington?”
“I’d like to put something into play.”
“Regarding?”
“A man who is in a coma.”
“A coma.”
“Yes.”
He knew that in Atabei’s tradition, a donation for services was expected. The nature of the request determined the size of the donation. “I’m willing to make a donation to the peristyle.” For now he held back from telling Mambo Atabei exactly what he wanted from her. “A sizable one.”
She tapped the thumb of her right hand against her forefinger, evaluated what he’d said.
He heard bleating from the stairwell to the basement. A goat.