Golokhov stuck out his jaw and looked down at the water.
“You experimented with your wife, then you abandoned her!”
“Yes. Irina.” He rubbed his nose, then his forehead, leaving a streak of slime on the pale, wrinkled skin. “I made her into a new kind of woman. I watched her for ten years. She was full of hatred and guile, uncaring, a cruel and unrepentant thief. I tried to fix my mistakes, and in time I reversed her ill effects . . . but I should have stopped there and destroyed my records. Too late. I had attracted the attention of beasts who were already hatred and greed made flesh. What will you do, Mr. Faust, who still wants to know so much? What beasts will you unleash when you cut all the strings?”
“You still want me dead, don’t you?” I asked. “Why not just tell them to shoot me?”
“Ah,” he said, and lifted his hands to the air, shaking them as if invoking a higher power.
My anger flashed over. “You’re a coward,” I shouted. “You’d never just grab a gun and pull the trigger. You’re too fastidious.” I lifted my hand, targeting the back of his frail old neck. I didn’t care about the men on the beach.
Golokhov looked up. A line of spit hung from the corner of his mouth. “I was a coward. I feared torture and death. I watched blood flow in rivers and corpses stack like cordwood. To save myself, I gave the monsters even more power . . . and the rivers became oceans. I set myself to bringing them down, and when they were defeated, I made it my duty to watch and guard, with the few resources left to me, to spare the world even more slaughter. How do you think this painfully cruel and inept species survived to see a new millennium? But I was a fool to think I could stop so many curious and immoral children.” He wiped his mouth and washed his hands in the sea. “I hope your generation will do better.”
“No, you don’t,” I said.
He knelt in the lapping waves and returned his attention to the stromatolite. “You’re no better than Stalin or Beria,” I added. “You try to kill our brightest dreams. I want to enhance human life. But you gave us the City of the Dog Mothers.”
He shuddered. For a moment I thought he was having a fit, but he flung aside his canvas bag, spun about in the blue water, and glared at me, the fiercest and most hate-filled look I ever hope to see.
The face of a wrathful God as Blake might have drawn him before he tore up the paper and burned the pieces.
“Yes, and there will be punishment!” he said. “Do you know what the message is? What little I have intercepted and translated over seven decades, the sum of all my good work on this Earth, in this forsaken century?” He reached down and patted the stromatolite between his knees. “All the Little Mothers whispering in our bowels and in the forests and jungles and in the oceans we are working so hard to destroy. They are not happy. They are not happy with us at all. We are a bitter disappointment to them. They wage all-out war against us now. It is a judgment none of us can withstand. Not those on the ship, not those on the shore. None. None. “
He faced the gray wall of storm across the water.
“How long do you think we have, young monster?” he asked, still trembling. “How long?”
EPILOG
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA (NO ADDRESSES, PLEASE)
It’s been a little more than four months, and I’m still alive. Still sane—I think. Ben is alive. They must have gotten him off the ship. I wonder how he felt about not seeing Janie again.
He sent me a copy of Life magazine; it came in the mail last Friday. From 1949, photos of the Waldorf Conference in New York. Communists for world peace. (How did he get my address? Once a spook.)
I read the magazine wearing plastic gloves. There’s another picture of Rudy Banning. He’s standing next to Arthur Miller, and Miller is chuckling at something Rudy has just finished saying. It’s definitely Rudy.
On a little Post-it, stuck next to the picture, Ben wrote, “No way they can fake this. Rethink everything. What Banning was doing, what Rob was doing. Who did I shoot?”
And I am rethinking. I’ve tried to assemble a sequence of events and figure out who was running whom, and when.
Here’s what I’ve got so far:
YEAR BEFORE LAST
June: Rob has treated himself to block bacterial connections, but I am ahead in my research at this point.
August: Desperate, Rob takes a long shot, goes to Siberia.
October: Rob contacts Banning, or does Banning go to him?
December: Begins to be harassed (by Stuart Garvey and Irina, or Maxim?). Tagging effects only partly successful because of his self-treatment and altered gut bacteria. He appears to be getting more and more eccentric.
LAST YEAR
Late January: Rob on the outs with Lissa. (Lissa sent to stop Rob—or to convert him, recruit him?)
Who is trying to tag Rob? Is it Lissa, working for Maxim Golokhov, or is it Irina Golokhova? Banning tries to get Rob to go to Callas and be trained. Rob refuses.
February: Rob begins concerted research program to block Silk. At his lowest point . . . (Opens lab in office building in San Jose?)
April: Tammy flees to Marquez. Marquez contacts Banning about Tammy’s story. Banning puts Rob in touch with Marquez and Tammy in Los Angeles. Rob builds lab in Marquez’s basement. Marquez likes the longevity angle, but is paranoid about government mind control—and Tammy’s story only makes his fears worse.
May 28: Rob calls me in San Diego Airport. Gives me a warning.
May 30: I visit Montoya, make my pitch, get approval for sub dive.
June 6: Rob visits Ben Bridger.
June 7: Bridger is arrested and taken to Metropolitan.
June 8: Dr. Mauritz kills his wife.
June 10: Bridger released.
June 11: Bridger, Rob, and Banning go to Los Angeles.
June 12: Marquez house is attacked. (Newspapers with story appear while I am at sea. Lissa shows me the story later, crashed Marine Corps helicopters—why? Is she asking me if I know, or does she know?)
