Forty-Eight X Page 11

  I had six honest serving men. They taught me all I knew: Their names were Where and What and When—and Why and How and Who.

  —Rudyard Kipling

  CHAPTER

  FIFTEEN

  Nate Stumpf lived in pretty nice digs considering that most years his salary fell below the poverty line. But that was his declared salary. He made most of his money off the books. His was a cash business. He didn’t take checks. And that’s what made his living arrangement sweet. Some people were bicoastal. Stumpf was intrastate-al. He spent half his time in Northern California, and the rest in Southern California, splitting his business between spying on the peccadilloes of the nouveau riche in Silicon Valley and the Hollywood elite in LA. He had his place in the Haight and, in the summer, he lived in a rent-controlled apartment in Santa Monica, right on the beach. Summers at the seashore was a prize he was given by an old television producer he’d done some shady favors for in the past, shady meaning illegal, like wiretapping. His neighbors at the beach made millions, and yet he had the same view as they—the Pacific, a broad white sandy beach, and lots of buxom bikini-clad babes on roller skates.

  Most of his jobs involved the sorry chore of tailing and photographing some harlot of a wife or playboy husband. He’d sit in his car and stare at a house for hours waiting for someone to come in or go out. Then, if they left, he’d sit some more, following behind in his car. Sometimes his libido would get stirred by one of his “vics” dry humping behind some restaurant or getting a blow job. But most of the time his gigs were simply ass callusing. Now, he thought, he finally had a job worthy of his talents. If he could catch the murderer of a Nobel Prize winner, he would not only have lots of bucks but the fame he deserved as well. He fantasized how he might get the girl, too.

  He had to narrow down the suspects first. What was the big deal about what Professor Wagner did that earned him a Nobel Prize? And what was it about that research that would make anyone go through the machinations of faking a bizarre murder-suicide? Julius Wagner had worked in a field that could boost products worth billions for high-tech pharmaceutical companies. Stumpf suspected the obvious—money. It was the most common of motives in his experience. Stumpf first had to convince his client, the victim’s daughter, about his theory, and she didn’t look like anybody’s fool. He wouldn’t get paid unless he was right and proved himself right. Stumpf knew he would have to work for any reward, and so he read. He went to the UCLA libraries to bone up on Dr. Julius Wagner and his life’s work. It was a tedious process for a fellow who was twelve units short of his AA degree but, after two days, he fancied himself an expert on genetics.

  Dr. Wagner, he learned, chose his academic major, genetics, in 1955, the same year that another geneticist working in a lab in Bar Harbor, Maine, discovered that one of his experimental mice was limping in its cage. Examining it, he discovered a Ping-Pong ball–sized tumor in its scrotum. It was a testicular tumor, a cancer, a teratoma to be exact, and in it were an assortment of mouse parts, muscle, bone, teeth, and skin. He then transplanted pieces of the tumor into other mice. In some of the mice, the tumor tissue grew bone, in others muscle, or skin, or other specialized cells. These were embryonic or stem cells, the same kind of cells that were part of a primitive embryo and that eventually turned into the specialized cells of the body. The Bar Harbor geneticist had merely encountered them at the most propitious moment when some unknown stimulus was ready to turn them into a particular cell. Other scientists then worked for decades to learn what variety of stimuli would turn these primordial or stem cells into different functioning cells, such as nerve cells, which transmitted chemical and electrical stimuli, or heart cells, which beat. At first, the cells they used were from cancerous tissue. But the cancers, with abnormal chromosomes, could be expected to react abnormally. To grow normal tissue, they needed normal embryos. For another decade, stem cell research involved normal mouse embryos. But research on mice couldn’t be transposed to human research. Existing human stem cell lines were aging. Using the leftover embryos from fertility clinics or therapeutic abortions posed ethical quandaries. Even when human embryonic research was not constrained by politics and moral debates, applying that research to human disease and using human volunteers continued to be a thorny issue. Dr. Wagner had taken a different approach. As had other researchers, he worked with primates. But while most had chosen the smaller rhesus monkeys, Wagner elected to work with chimpanzees, a larger animal but more genetically similar to humans. He had not only helped map the genetic code, or genome sequence, for chimpanzees, he’d developed methods to grow chimp stem cells, and had discovered several essential triggers that caused them to develop into particular tissue types.

  Stumpf was convinced that Dr. Wagner’s murder had something to do with big business. Maybe Professor Wagner had discovered a cure for something, maybe AIDS, maybe cancer. There was big money to be made in providing new treatments, and big money to be lost if old treatments went by the wayside. Pharmaceutical companies stood to make or lose billions and—well, people were killed for a lot less.

  Nate Stumpf’s second meeting with Maggie was at Denny’s on Wilshire Boulevard. He thought about taking her someplace nicer, but he wasn’t on any expense account and Denny’s had a twofer. He was meeting to lay out his plan of attack and impress her with his research on her father and his scientific smarts. It wasn’t long after he opened his mouth that he knew he had stepped in it—deep shit. He had made one grave mistake. He had failed to learn anything about his client.

  “You see, Maggie,” Stumpf began, “your father was this world-famous geneticist who worked with chimp genes. You know, chimps are a lot like humans, and he could manipulate chimp genes. I think he probably knew how to do the same with human genes. And with pharmaceutical companies in the game to make billions on human genetic research, well…”

  “You don’t think I know what my father did?”

  “Well,” Stumpf replied, trying hard to maintain his credibility, “he worked in a very esoteric field and I thought you might like some background—”

  “Mr. Stumpf,” she interrupted, and rapidly began to peel away his ego. “We are all members of the animal kingdom. We are of the metazoan subkingdom, chordata phylum, vertebrata subphylum, class mammalian, subclass theria, infraclass eutheria, primate order, suborder anthropoidea, superfamily hominoidea. This group includes modern and extinct humans and arthropod apes. Arthropod apes are tailless and include the gibbon, the chimpanzee, the gorilla, and the orangutan. And as humans, we share up to 98.6 percent of our genetic makeup with our closest relatives, and certainly yours, the chimpanzee. Don’t tell me about my father’s work, Mr. Stumpf. I know what he did. I have a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry from Stanford, a master’s in genetics from Cal Tech, and I’m working on my PhD at Princeton. Just tell me why he was killed.”

  Stumpf dropped his head, crossed his arms, and looked like he was trying to curl in a fetal position. “I don’t know yet,” he said, embarrassed. “Maybe it had something to do with his work.”

  “Of course it had something to do with his work!” she slammed him again.

  The waitress returned to refill their coffee. He needed more of a stimulant than that to get his juices flowing. Maggie watched her sleuth pull a small silver flask from his jacket pocket to spike his brew.

  “It’s nine o’clock in the morning.”

  “I’m working on your case. Sometimes I need a little boost.” And Stumpf quickly downed the Irish coffee. “Know what I think? It’s right-wing nuts. You know those same people who think they’ve got God on their side, who bomb abortion clinics, who don’t approve of manipulating genes and bettering humanity with genetic engineering. We need to look into whether he ever got death threats from those kinds of people.”

  “Think again. Those kinds of people liked my father. He worked with chimps. Not humans.”

  God, Nate Stumpf thought, getting this fame and fortune ain’t gonna be easy.

  “My father emptied
out his office just days before he died. And in the weeks and months before, he was busy interviewing people for something called the Lemuria Project. But no one in his department at Stanford knows anything about it. Why is it that many of the best researchers in his field, people that he interviewed recently, are no longer at their old jobs and their universities and have no forwarding address? There’s only one guy, tops in his field, who’s still around, and I can’t get him to take my calls. So, I don’t know, but maybe my father’s death has something to do with that.”

  “What was the name of this project he was working on again?”

  “The Lemuria Project?”

  Maggie watched as Stumpf straightened up like an inflatable toy. Either his morning cocktail was kicking in, she thought, or blood was finally getting to his brain.

  “Do you know what Lemuria is?” he asked her. This time he wasn’t going to step in it.

  “I have no idea.” Maggie shrugged. The more she talked to this man, the more pleased she was that she hadn’t agreed to pay him by the hour.

  With the waitress pouring another refill, Stumpf drank his coffee—straight this time. He smiled broadly. He wanted to be clearheaded when he impressed her. There were some things he did know. He knew he could hold his liquor. He knew he was great in bed. He knew he had a knack for this investigation business. And he knew mythology.

  “I know Lemuria,” he said emphatically.

  Maggie flinched as if she had been slapped in the face. Maybe the little man would surprise her after all.

  “You do?”

  “Yes. Lemuria is from mythology. And I know all about myths. I know Greek mythology, Indian mythology, Celtic and Chinese mythology, and, of course, I know about the more modern mythologies like Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings and C.S. Lewis’s Narnia.” Stumpf paused. He didn’t want to her to think he was some crazy cultist. “And,” he said, plying his finger in the air to make the point, “I knew all about them before the movies came out. I’m not one of these fad mythologists. I know about Oceanic and Pacific Island mythology. That’s how I know about Lemuria.

  “Lemuria”—Stumpf went on to explain while preening himself a bit—“was an ancient civilization that existed ten thousand years ago, some say fifty thousand years ago, long before the Egyptian pharaohs and their pyramids. It was a continent somewhere in the South Pacific Ocean, between North America and Asia and Australia. It was supposedly a very advanced and spiritual civilization until it disappeared at the same time as Atlantis, when the Great Flood came.”

  “Lemuria is like Atlantis?” she asked.

  “Yeah, like Atlantis.”

  “The Great Flood? The one in the Bible?”

  “Yeah, that one. Do you think maybe your father discovered Lemuria?”

  This man’s an idiot, Maggie thought.

  How can I fuck her? Stumpf contemplated, quite impressed with himself.

  Whatever it is that lives, a man, a tree, or a bird, should be touched gently, because the time is short. Civilization is another word for respect for life.

  —Elizabeth Goudge

  CHAPTER

  SIXTEEN

  Nate Stumpf wasn’t the only expert on mythology. General Mack Shell surpassed him in every way. He was not only familiar with ancient myths but with ancient civilizations and ancient warfare, as well. As the military director of the Lemuria Project, he had named it. He had also adopted Alexander’s battle scythe, albeit upon Colonel McGraw’s recommendation. Apparently, the weapon, as McGraw would have him believe, was favored by Ptolemy, Alexander’s general, who also studied under Aristotle. In recent months, Shell had also gained a fairly expansive knowledge of genetic engineering. He liked to think of himself as a Renaissance man and he likely was.

  In the course of recruiting specialists for Lemuria, many people whose talents and expertise couldn’t simply be bought by money were given great insight into the nature of the top-secret project to entice their participation. Most accepted the extraordinary opportunity to become a part of history. A few—very few—did not. Although they had agreed to keep secrets, General Shell felt that they needed an extra incentive to remain silent. He had flown back to the States from his Pacific headquarters to inspect and approve of two young men, FBI agents in Los Angeles, who had been assigned the mission to provide that “incentive” and protect the secret of Lemuria. He wasn’t interested in personally meeting them. He’d know when he saw them if they were right for the job.

  He had another reason for returning. The job of bringing Lemuria to fruition was a stressful one. He wanted to refill his spiritual tank. That’s why, after his visit to LA, he planned to head to Sedona, Arizona—to relax, meditate, and reflect on his mission. Sedona, which of late had become a tourist mecca, had always been a spiritual place. Shell had been there many times before.

  From Los Angeles, he flew into Luke Air Force Base, where a car and driver waited. He was driven two hours to Sedona—to a modern but rustic house set into red rock cliffs overlooking Boynton Canyon. The house was owned by the Pentagon, who offered it to its generals as a retreat.

  Standing on a redwood deck overlooking the canyon below, he watched small groups of tourists hiking into the hills with local guides. He couldn’t hear what they were saying, but he knew they would be speaking about the spirits and legends in this holy place. Shell learned the stories many years before from his own personal guide, Quilty.

  Boynton Canyon was a sacred place for the local Yavapai-Apache Indians. The Apache legends paralleled biblical stories. Indian prophets foretold of a great flood and of a wise father who set his daughter adrift in a hollowed log boat. She was the only one of her tribe to survive when the boat came to rest on the sacred grounds of Boynton Canyon. The tribe was renewed when this last woman immaculately conceived with the help of the sun god. Although the U.S. Army had exiled the Apaches from their homes here in 1875, their descendants still returned each year to perform ceremonies to honor their First Mother and their creation. This place was their Garden of Eden.

  The mountain air was cool and fresh. His only company was silence. Shell stood on the wood deck and raised his palms to the sky. “I am open,” he whispered to no one. With the coming of dusk, he gazed up at the mist-shrouded red rock cliffs. It was easy to anthropomorphize the mountain, to imagine faces in the rocks—a screaming face, a pensive face, an Egyptian sphinx, reptiles, dogs, monkeys, lovers, whole families. Walt Disney had lived in Sedona from 1958 to 1969 and brought his artists there for inspiration. It was in Sedona where they created Fantasia. It was for that same inspiration that the general came time and again. And then Shell felt him. He didn’t hear the door open, nor anyone call a greeting, not a footstep, nor a disturbing breeze. But Quilty had come.

  Mack Shell had met Robert Quilty nearly two decades earlier on a tour of the U.S. Army Hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, where the most serious battle injuries were air-evac’d. Quilty was a patient. He was a lowly private, perhaps ten years Shell’s junior, who had forsaken his job as a high-school English teacher to enlist. The young man with red hair and a ruddy, freckled complexion had been wounded in a friendly fire accident during the first Persian Gulf War. His company had moved more rapidly to a forward position than anyone had anticipated, and an F-14 mistakenly dropped its bomb load on them. He had sustained severe burns and had lost his left arm, but he would survive. With half his body still wrapped in burn dressings, Quilty meandered about the ward visiting other patients. He had a wonderful smile, an infectious laugh, and though it seemed absurd, Shell believed his touch could heal.

  When Shell finally caught sight of Quilty approaching him from across the room, he smiled in pleased anticipation. His skin became warm and his body seemed to tingle as if being touched by a gentle hand.

  Shell recalled their first meeting. He had sat next to the young man on a park bench at the hospital, and the conversation turned to how Quilty came to have such apparent inner strength and compassion. Shell listened as Quilty explained the l
egend of Lemuria.

  “There was once a beautiful tropical paradise, a Garden of Eden if you will,” he began. “This paradise was called Lemuria. Millions of people lived there tens of thousands of years ago, before any of the written history with which we are now familiar. Their civilization lived in peace, and harmony, and prosperity. There were no nations then, no borders, no language barriers, no religions.”

  Mack Shell listened politely at first but indifferently. Quilty, recognizing Shell’s apathy, became quiet. He gently took Shell’s hand and turned it palm up. He ran his fingers above Shell’s hand. Startled, Shell pulled his hand away. He had felt Quilty’s touchless touch and seemed to hear his unspoken words. I know you will find it hard to believe, but do you want to believe?

  Shell heard himself answer aloud, “Yes.” He was now prepared to listen.

  “The Lemurians,” Quilty continued his tale, “had no disease and lived to be hundreds of years old. They believed in the oneness of man and nature, and after centuries of evolution, they developed the ability to commune with each other and with nature by telepathy. They also had the ability of astral travel, that is, they could move beyond their bodies. They had no need for vehicles.

  “The Lemurians sensed that a great cataclysm was coming—a great flood. While they hoped that some of them would survive to preserve their culture, they took precautions to preserve their knowledge and talents by burying sacred crystals throughout the world that could emanate the power of their knowledge to those prepared to receive it. Believers, like myself, describe these places as having a unique energy, a power from Mother Earth that enhances one’s inner spirit. The Lemurians placed this extraordinary energy in special places—Stonehenge in England, Ayers Rock in Australia, Nazca in Peru, the Great Pyramid at Giza, and among these sacred red rocks in Sedona.