Hawker sat, guessing it would be a long story.
“She’s aging,” Sonia said. “Only far more rapidly than the rest of us are.”
“You mean it’s not just her appearance?”
“Nadia is only eleven,” she said. “Nineteen years younger than me. Yet she has advanced osteoporosis. Her eyes are filling with cataracts; her skin is so brittle that if you grab her, she’ll bruise or bleed. And soon, hopefully not too soon, she’ll need dialysis because her kidneys are failing.”
Hawker looked away, finding it hard to believe such a thing was even possible. If Ranga had done this …
“How did it happen?”
“It’s a genetic disease,” Sonia said. “They call it progeria, or Werner syndrome. It’s caused by a defect in the way her DNA repairs itself.”
“It’s naturally occurring?” he asked.
“If you call that natural,” she said.
Hawker took a deep breath. He was damn glad to hear that Ranga hadn’t caused it, at least not directly. “What I mean is, no one did this to her?”
She looked away. “Only God, if you believe in that sort of thing.”
Hawker believed in God. He’d seen enough horror in the world to make him angry at God and wonder where He was, but he’d also seen what he considered miracles.
“Is there any way to stop it?”
Sonia smiled a half smile as tears welled up in her eyes again. She seemed lost like him, looking for answers that were not there.
“We’re trying,” was all she could say, wiping away the tears.
“We,” Hawker noted. “You and your father?”
She nodded.
“Is this what you were working on in Africa? Is that what this has all been about?”
She took a deep breath. Hawker guessed he was right, but he wanted to hear it from Sonia, he wanted to understand finally what had been hidden all this time.
“My mother died giving birth to Nadia and a year later we detected the disease in her. Father tried to convince the company he was working for to fund some research, or to allow him to use their equipment to do his own research on his own time. But no one wanted to help.”
“He worked on it anyway,” Hawker said.
“He did it without their knowledge. Maybe that was foolish, but what else could he do? When they found out, they were furious. He took the data, the samples, and what money he could and he ran. I had just finished my sophomore year at Princeton. I wanted to help. I forced him to take me with him.”
She looked to the woman piloting the boat. “Nadia went with Savi. I went with Father, first to Costa Rica and then Africa. We thought that in the right place, a place with no restrictions, we might find the answer in a year or two.”
She laughed sadly. “Didn’t exactly turn out that way.”
“That’s why he stalled in the Congo,” Hawker guessed. “He thought you were close.”
“Father always thought we were close.”
Hawker was beginning to understand Ranga’s fanaticism. He’d always wondered how a man could seem kind and good and yet knowingly endanger his daughter the way he’d endangered Sonia. But he was trying to save the more helpless of his children.
He glanced toward the forward cabin where the young girl was sleeping. “So what causes it?”
“There are different types,” she said. “In Nadia’s case, structures in her DNA that we call telomeres are rapidly shortening. We all have them. Every time our cells divide, the telomeres shorten. It happens in all of us, but in her case, they shorten far too much with each regeneration.
“Some progeria patients are affected in a different way — they don’t get cataracts or all the signs of aging — but Nadia has a form in which virtually all her cells are affected. Her telomeres are all but used up.”
“Used up?”
“Without a breakthrough, she’ll die of old age before she turns twelve,” Sonia said.
The words hit Hawker like a ton of bricks. They reminded him of another child he’d met who never had the chance to live.
“So all this,” he said. “The money, the research, the lies to people who wanted other things from him: All of that was for her?”
Sonia nodded. “Would you do any less?”
Hawker grew silent, hoping he would do as much.
With a better understanding of Ranga’s obsession and even his odd dealings with those who’d acted as benefactors, Hawker considered the current situation. Ranga had been working on something in secret. His lab in Paris proved it. But if the data Danielle found was correct and the information in Ranga’s notes was true, it sure didn’t seem like he was headed in the right direction.
Sonia’s company, Paradox, seemed to be closer, although glossy ads and a slick sales presentation didn’t mean they’d discovered the fountain of youth. And then there was the matter of trial 951.
“What about Paradox?” Hawker asked. “Your father is listed as one of the founders. Is that why he started it?”
A look of disdain came across Sonia’s face. “Father started Paradox to move money about,” she said. “I was the one who realized we could do more.”
Sonia’s aunt joined the conversation. “And he never agreed with it,” Savi said. “He told you it was too public. He said something like this would happen.”
“To him,” Sonia clarified. “There were people looking for him, not me.”
He’d obviously stumbled on some long-simmering argument. Something he didn’t have time for. “Does your company have a solution for Nadia?”
She hesitated. “Not yet,” Sonia said. “But we’re working on it.”
“So the big shindig at the top of the hotel …”
“We need funding,” she said. “No one wants to cure progeria. At least not businesspeople.”
“I would have thought—”
“Progeria is extremely rare. It would cost ten thousand times more to develop a treatment than you could ever make selling it. Even if you sold it for a million dollars per dose.”
“Can’t you get grants?” Hawker asked.
“Not with my family name,” she said. “Besides, dribs and drabs of money won’t save Nadia.”
Hawker understood. As in many other things, economics drove the bus. “So you sell the idea of eternal youth to those who might spend ten million.”
Sonia nodded back toward Dubai. “There are people in this world with money to burn. People with millions and billions that are just sitting in the bank doing nothing — even in these times. If Father taught me anything, he taught me that.”
She shrugged. It was just a fact.
“With that kind of wealth the only downside to life is that it ends.”
“This was your idea.”
“Father kept looking for someone to take pity on him,” she said. “I chose to find people who would beg us to take their money. With Paradox we’d have unlimited funding and we wouldn’t have to run or hide or lie about what we’re working on like Father always did.”
There was a new sense of pride in Sonia’s voice as she spoke. Paradox was her creation, not just another step following in her father’s footsteps. Hawker had to admit it was a brilliant move. And by basing Paradox in a nation without stringent standards or an entrenched bureaucracy like the American FDA, she and her fellow researchers could do almost anything they wanted.
“Long life equals big money,” Savi noted with some disdain. “But if it’s just for the rich, how does it make this world a better place?”
“I don’t care about the world,” Sonia said. “I care about Nadia. And Father. Paradox was their way out. It would have worked, for both of them. But now …”
Her voice trailed off as if she realized that that particular dream was shattered beyond repair.
Savi shook her head. “Your father wanted to keep the research secret. That’s why he did the things he did. Why he went through all he went through.”