Gideon looked at him. The leader of EES did indeed look stricken.
Glinn raised his eyes again. “Gideon, I failed — but the project did not. This drug will change the world. We succeeded. It was messy and cruel. But it worked. And the fact is…we still need you.”
Gideon waited. He knew this was coming.
“The time has come. For our final project.”
“The meteorite.”
“Yes. The meteorite was a giant seed. I planted it. And now I must uproot it. It’s an alien life-form that threatens the earth. The time to act is now.”
Gideon turned to Garza. “And you? What’s your take on this?”
“I’m in,” Garza replied in his gruff voice. “Eli’s telling the truth: he’s a changed man. Otherwise I wouldn’t have signed back on. This seed is as dangerous as Eli says it is. I’ll be mission co-leader. No more secret orders, no more vetoes from on high, no more my-way-or-the-highway. This is to be a team effort.”
“What about the funding?” Gideon asked Glinn.
“You recall I told you EES was going to take a small percentage of profits from the drug in lieu of a royalty? We worked out another deal with the foundation. Instead, we accepted a single, onetime payment: just one percent of what the foundation estimates will be realized in the first year of the drug’s distribution. Financed by a generous benefactor who wishes to remain anonymous.”
“And how much is that?”
“A little over a billion dollars.”
Gideon shook his head.
“We have the money,” Garza said. “We have the knowledge and the technology. We’re the only ones who have a hope of defeating this thing. And we’ll be doing it as partners — you included.”
“Why me?”
“You know why,” Glinn said. “You’re the yin to my yang. You don’t know why you do what you do, you have no discipline, you don’t think things through, and you ignore logic. And yet you always seem to make the right choice. You’re an intuitional genius. Temperamentally and intellectually, you are my exact opposite — and that is precisely why we need you. Or we will fail. We have no time left. We need to move. I want you to come with us right now.”
A very long silence ensued. It stretched into a minute, two minutes. Finally, Gideon stood up, went to the stove, picked up the pan with the beautifully prepared goose, and dumped it in the garbage. Despite all he’d been through — despite the heartbreaks and danger and suffering and mortification he had tried so hard to put behind him — somehow he had known this would happen; that Glinn would be back…and that he would be ready.
He grabbed his coat. “Lead the way.”
Acknowledgments
We’d like to thank the following for their support and assistance: Mitch Hoffman, Sonya Cheuse, Eric Simonoff, Jamie Raab, Lindsey Rose, Claudia Rülke, Nadine Waddell, and Alicia Gordon.
Two of the central concepts in the novel, the nature of the vellum and what creature it came from, were proposed by Isaac J. Preston, for which we thank him most sincerely.