“It’s fine.” Farley copied down the names and some other information and then handed a card to Covey. “Just take that to your lawyer.”
The old man nodded. “His office is just a few miles from here. I could see him today.”
“Just bring us a copy of the will.” He didn’t add what Covey of course, a savvy businessman, knew. That if the will was not altered, or if he changed it later, the Foundation wouldn’t do the cloning. They had the final say.
“What about the…transition?”
Farley said, “That’s your choice. Entirely up to you. Tomorrow or next year. Whatever you’re comfortable with.”
At the door Covey paused and turned back, shook Farley’s hand. He gave a faint laugh. “Who would’ve thought? Forever.”
In Greek mythology Eos was the goddess of dawn and she was captivated with the idea of humans as lovers. She fell deeply in love with a mortal, Tithonos, the son of the king of Troy, and convinced Zeus to let him live forever.
The god of gods agreed. But he neglected one small detaiclass="underline" granting him youth as well as immortality. While Eos remained unchanged Tithonos grew older and more decrepit with each passing year until he was so old he was unable to move or speak. Horrified, Eos turned him into an insect and moved on to more suitable paramours.
Dr. William Farley thought of this myth now, sitting at his desk in the Lotus Foundation. The search for immortality’s always been tough on us poor humans, he reflected. But how doggedly we ignore the warning in Tithonos’s myth — and the logic of science — and continue to look for ways to cheat death.
Farley glanced at a picture on his desk. It showed a couple, arm in arm — younger versions of those in a second picture on his credenza. His parents. Who’d died in an auto accident when Farley was in medical school.
An only child, desperately close to them, he took months to recover from the shock. When he was able to resume his studies, he decided he’d specialize in emergency medicine — devoting his life to saving lives threatened by trauma.
But the young man was brilliant — too smart for the repetitious mechanics of ER work. Lying awake nights he would reflect about his parents’ deaths and he took some reassurance that they were, in a biochemical way, still alive within him. He developed an interest in genetics, and that was the subject he began to pursue in earnest.
Months, then years, of manic twelve-hour days doing research in the field resulted in many legitimate discoveries. But this also led to some ideas that were less conventional, even bizarre — consciousness cloning, for instance.
Not surprisingly, he was either ignored or ridiculed by his peers. His papers were rejected by professional journals, his grant requests turned down. The rejection didn’t discourage him, though he grew more and more desperate to find the millions of dollars needed to research his theory. One day a few years ago, nearly penniless and living in a walk-up beside one of Westbrook’s commuter train lines, he’d gotten a call from an old acquaintance. The man had heard about Farley’s plight and had an idea.
“You want to raise money for your research?” he’d asked the impoverished medico. “It’s easy. Find really sick, really wealthy patients and sell them immortality.”
“What?”
“No, no, no, listen,” the man had continued. “Find patients who’re about to die anyway. They’ll be desperate. You package it right, they’ll buy it.”
“I can’t sell them anything yet,” Farley had replied. “I believe I can make this work. But it could take years.”
“Well, sometimes sacrifices have to be made. You can pick up ten million overnight, twenty. That’d buy some pretty damn nice research facilities.”
Farley had been quiet, considering those words. Then he’d said, “I could keep tissue samples, I suppose, and then when we actually can do the cloning, I could bring them back then.”
“Hey, there you go,” said the doctor. Something in the tone suggested to Farley that he didn’t think the process would ever work. But the man’s disbelief was irrelevant if he could help Farley get the money he needed for research.
“Well, all right,” Farley said to his colleague — who was none other than Anthony Sheldon, of the Cardiology Department at Westbrook Hospital, a man who was as talented an entrepreneur as he was a cardiovascular surgeon.
Five years ago they’d set up the Lotus Foundation, an in vitro clinic and a network of bogus charities. Tony Sheldon, whose office was near the Cardiac Support Center, would finagle a look at the files of patients there and would find the richest and sickest. Then he’d arrange for them to be contacted by the Lotus Foundation and Farley would sell them the program.
Farley had truly doubted that anybody would buy the pitch but Sheldon had coached him well. The man had thought of everything. He found unique appeals for each potential client and gave Farley this information to snare them. In the case of the Bensons, for instance, Sheldon had learned how much they loved each other. His pitch to them was that this was the chance to be together forever, as they so poignantly noted in their suicide note. With Robert Covey, Sheldon had learned — by ransacking the CSC files — about his estranged son, so Farley added the tactical mention that a client could have a second chance to connect with children.
Sheldon had also come up with one vital part of the pitch. He made sure the patients got high doses of Luminux (even the coffee that Covey had just been drinking, for instance, was laced with the drug). Neither doctor believed that anyone would sign up for a far-fetched idea without the benefit of some mind-numbing Mickey Finn.
The final selling point was, of course, the desperate desire of people facing death to believe what Farley promised them.
And that turned out to be one hell of a selling point. The Lotus Foundation had earned almost $93 million in five years.
Everything had gone fine — until recently, when their greed got the better of them. Well, got the better of Sheldon. They’d decided that the cardiologist would never refer his own patients to the Foundation — and would wait six months or a year between clients. But Tony Sheldon apparently had a mistress with very expensive taste and had lost some serious money in the stock market recently. Just after the Bensons signed up, the Whitleys presented themselves. They were far too wealthy to pass up and so Farley reluctantly yielded to Sheldon’s pressure to go ahead with the plan.
But they learned that, though eager to proceed, Sam Whitley had wanted to reassure himself that this wasn’t pure quackery and he’d tracked down some technical literature about the computers used in the technique and genetics in general. After the patients had died, Farley had to find this information in his house, burn it and scour the place for any other evidence that might lead back to the Foundation.
The intrusion, though, must’ve alerted the police to the possibility that the families’ deaths were suspicious. Officers had actually interviewed Sheldon, sending a scream of panic through Farley. But then a scapegoat stumbled into the picture: Mac McCaffrey, a young nurse/counselor at the Cardiac Support Center. She was seeing their latest recent prospect — Robert Covey — as she’d been seeing the Bensons and the Whitleys. This made her suspect to start with. Even better was her reluctance to admit she’d seen the Bensons; after their suicide the nurse had apparently lied about seeing them and had stolen their files from the CSC. A perfect setup. Sheldon had used his ample resources to bribe a pharmacist at the CSC to doctor the logs and give him a couple of wholesale bottles containing a few Luminux tablets, to make it look like she’d been drugging patients for some time. Farley, obsessed with death and dying, had a vast library of articles on euthanasia and suicide. He copied several dozen of these. The drugs and the articles they planted in her garage — insurance in case they needed somebody to take the fall.