She hadn’t been here before. Lost among jasmine and dwarf fig trees, a handful of people were scattered in the dark recesses of this suspended oasis that overlooked the city’s rooftops and the sea beyond. She found a quiet corner and was soon in the comforting embrace of a martini. E. B. White had dubbed the drink his “elixir of quietude,” and right now that was working just fine for her.
She was too lost in her own thoughts to notice that she was the only solo person here. A lot had happened in the previous forty-eight hours, and her mind had a lot to work through.
She was looking for a waiter to order a refill when Kirkwood appeared and joined her. They shared a round and dabbled in some awkward chitchat, briefly commenting on the hotel’s charms and the city’s contradictions. Mia could see that his mind was elsewhere. His eyes radiated a deep unease, and something was obviously haunting him.
He was the first to veer them back to the grim tide they were swimming against.
“I saw the broadcast. You did great. It’ll do the trick. This hakeem will definitely get the message. They’ll call.”
“But then what?” Mia asked. “We don’t have anything to offer them, and trying to pull off some kind of bluff…” She let the words drift.
“The guys at the embassy know their stuff,” Kirkwood assured her. “They’ll figure it out. They managed to get to Farouk before the hakeem’s men, right?”
She could see that he wasn’t thrilled by the prospect either, but she appreciated the effort. “Yeah, and look how well that turned out.”
Kirkwood found a half-smile. “I’ve got my contacts in Iraq working on it. I’m pretty confident they’ll come up with something.”
“What? What could they possibly find that could make a difference?”
He didn’t really have an answer he could give her. A waiter glided over and discreetly replenished their carrot sticks and pistachios, then Kirkwood said, in a surprising change of tack, “I never knew Evelyn had a daughter.”
“I wasn’t around,” Mia said. “I lived with my aunt. In Boston. Well, near Boston.”
“What about your father?”
“He died before I was born.”
A shadow crossed his face. “I’m sorry.”
She shrugged. “They were together. In Iraq. In that chamber. One month later, he dies in a car crash.” She raised her glance to Kirkwood. All light had abandoned her voice. “This tail-eater. It’s one hell of a good-luck charm, isn’t it?”
Kirkwood stayed silent, and nodded somberly.
“I mean, what the hell is this nut job thinking?” she blurted out angrily. “Is he looking to revive some biblical plague, or does he really expect to find a magic potion that’ll let him live forever? I mean, how can you even begin to reason with someone like that?”
Kirkwood raised an eyebrow. “You think the hakeem’s after some kind of fountain of youth? Where’d that come from? I’ve seen his file. It doesn’t mention anything about that.”
Mia brushed it off and, almost self-mockingly, mentioned her conversation with Boustany about elixirs.
Kirkwood took a sip from his cocktail, as if weighing his next words. He put the glass down and looked at her. “Well, you’re the geneticist. You tell me. Is it really that insane?”
“Please,” Mia scoffed.
He wasn’t scoffing back. He was serious.
“You’re really asking me if it’s possible?” she said.
“I’m just saying, face transplants were considered impossible a few years ago. They’re doing them now. If you think about the medical advances that have been achieved in the last few years…it’s staggering. And the hits just keep on coming. We’ve mapped out the human genome. We’ve cloned a sheep. Heart tissue has just been successfully created from stem cells. So, I don’t know. Maybe this is possible.”
“Of course it isn’t,” Mia replied dismissively.
“I saw this documentary once. About this Russian scientist, back in the fifties — I think his name was Demikhov — he was researching head transplants. To prove it was doable, he grafted the head and upper body of a puppy onto a bigger mastiff and created a two-headed dog. The thing ran around happily and survived for six days.” He shrugged. “And that’s just one we know about.”
Mia leaned forward, her eyes bristling with conviction. “Transplants are about reconnecting nerves and veins and, yes, maybe even spinal cords one day. But this is different. This is about stopping the damage that happens to our cells, to our DNA, to our tissues and organs, with every breath we take. It’s about errors in DNA replication, it’s about molecules inside our body getting bombarded by free radicals and mutating wrongly and just degrading over time. It’s about wear and tear.”
“But that’s my point. It’s not the years, it’s the mileage,” he said pointedly. “You’re talking about cells getting damaged and breaking down, which is very different from saying they’re programmed to live a certain length of time, and then die. It’s like, if you buy a new pair of trainers. You wear them, you jog in them, the soles wear out and the shoes fall apart. If you don’t wear them, they don’t just disintegrate after a few years in their box. Wear and tear. It’s why we die, right? There’s no ticking clock that tells our body its time is up. We’re not programmed to die, are we?”
Mia shifted in her seat. “That’s one line of thought.”
“But it’s the one that’s carrying the day right now, isn’t it?”
Mia knew it was. It was a specialization she had flirted with, but she’d ultimately veered off into another direction, knowing that antiaging research was the embarrassing relative no one wanted to talk about. Biogerontology — the science of aging — had been having a tough time since, well, the Jurassic era.
In official circles, it wasn’t far removed from the quackery of alchemists and the charlatanry of the snake-oil salesmen of yesteryear. Serious scientists, clinging to the traditional belief that growing old is inevitable, were wary of pursuing something that was doomed to failure, and even warier of being ridiculed if they attempted to explore it. Governmental bodies wouldn’t fund it: They dismissed it as an unachievable pipe dream and were loath to be seen funding something that their electorate didn’t really believe — because of what they’d been told and taught — was achievable. Even when presented with compelling arguments and breakthroughs, the holders of the purse strings still wouldn’t go near it because of deeply held religious beliefs: Humans age and die. It’s the way of the world. It’s what God intended. It’s pointless and immoral to try to overcome that. Death is a blessing, whether we realize it or not. The good will become immortal, of course — but only in heaven. And don’t even think about arguing it with the President’s Council on Bioethics. The prevention of aging is, even more than Al Qaeda, an evil threat to our dignified human future.
Case closed.
And yet, in a broader context, scientists had been spectacularly successful in prolonging human life so far. Average life expectancy — the average number of years humans are expected to live — hovered between twenty and thirty years for most of human history. This average was skewed downwards due to one main cause: infant mortality. Three or four infants died for every person who managed to evade the plague, dodge the blade of a sword, and reach eighty. Hence the low average. Medical and hygienic advances — clean water, antibiotics, and vaccines — allowed babies to survive to adulthood, allowing this average to increase dramatically over the last hundred years in what is referred to as the first longevity revolution. It hit forty in the nineteenth century, fifty in 1900, and it was now around eighty in developed countries. Whereas early man had a one-in-twenty-million chance of living to a hundred, that’s now one in fifty. In fact, since 1840, average life expectancy had been growing at a quarter of a year every year. Demographers predicting an upper limit to our expected life spans had consistently been proven wrong.