Forty-Eight X Page 8
He looked about the room and found a plastic cup. Taking a penknife from his pocket, he cut out the bottom of the cup, and handed the creation to his Pakistani guide.
Suleiman put the cup to the patient’s skull and repeated the question in Farsi. Still no response.
“Tell him,” Krantz said, “that we will take care of his family.”
Speaking into the “amplifying” cup, Suleiman made the offer. A moment later the survivor spoke a single muffled word, “Maimun.” He repeated it, but they didn’t understand. With a single bloodied finger, the dying man wrote the word on his sheet: MAIMUN.
Back in their Islamabad hotel room, Fala and Joshua showered for a long time to wash away the dirt of the road and the horror of what they’d seen. They were staying at the Islamabad Serena Hotel. Surrounded by exotic gardens and a serene lake, the hotel was the most luxurious and most secure in the country because it hosted officials from governments around the world. Sitting outside on their balcony, they cuddled together, naked, on a cushioned chaise lounge, cradled in privacy by stone walls and a latticework of bougainvillea. It was a dark, moonless night with the murmur of distant traffic and the scent of warm jasmine breezes. There were no neighboring high-rises with curious eyes. Only the stars peered down upon them as they caressed each other. Neither had yet discussed the one-word clue they were left with and where it would lead them.
“Maimun,” Fala was first to speak and break their idyll. “That is my sister’s name.”
Krantz sat up in some surprise.
“It’s a popular girl’s name among Muslims because it also means ‘auspicious and good luck.’”
“Not such good luck for our Taliban in Shangri-la,” Krantz added. “And I doubt your sister has anything to do with this?”
“Maimun? It is also the root of the word for ‘right hand.’”
Krantz took his right hand and gently cupped her breast.
“Right hand,” he said. And after cupping her left breast with his left hand, “Left hand.” He circled her nipples with his index finger until they stood erect.
Fala pulled his hands away and sat up abruptly. “Stop! I’m making a point. I think I know what Maimun means.”
“What’s that?” Krantz asked loudly, quieting his libido.
This was exactly Fala al-Shohada’s field of expertise—the military history and archaeology of the Islamic world.
“In the eleventh century,” she began to explain, “the elite troops of Salah al-Din were called the ‘Maimun al-Allah’—the ‘Right Hand of God.’”
“Don’t tell me they butchered the crusaders using Alexander’s battle scythe.”
“No. The Maimun did not butcher the crusaders. That’s another distortion of history. The early Muslims were not butchers. When the Christian crusaders took Jerusalem in 1099, they were the ones who butchered virtually everyone there and boasted that the city was knee-high in blood. But when Salah al-Din retook the city a hundred years later, he told his Maimun al-Allah to spare those who surrendered and give them safe passage home. The knights of the crusades became famous for their chivalry, but it was the Maimun, not the early crusaders, who were chivalrous warriors. Chivalry, you see, was a custom that the crusaders adopted from their Muslim foes.”
How could a woman so beautiful be so brilliant? Krantz thought. And how could it be that a poor Jewish boy bred in kibbutz in the Galilee could have her?
“And so all we need to do now,” Krantz said, as he rolled atop her, “is find out who the new Right Hand of God is.”
And then he snaked his right hand along her inner thigh until it was finally inside her. She sighed as he massaged her and whispered wetly into her ear, “This is the right hand of God.” And then just as quickly, she rolled atop him. He was already erect and she took control, taking his member in hand and putting it inside her. Their lovemaking was fierce, almost vicious—just as you would imagine it would be between Arab and Jew, both relishing the battle, both exhausted from the feat.
Fire that is closest kept burns most of all.
—Shakespeare
CHAPTER
TEN
Secrets are difficult to keep. If a fool knows a secret, he tells it. But even a wise man may tell—for love, for vanity, for money. Professor Julius Wagner had a secret he feared to tell and feared he would tell. Who could guarantee that in the banter of cocktail parties and salons, among the intelligencia and nouveau riche of Palo Alto, Atherton, and Menlo Park, that the mix of bravado and wine wouldn’t loose the secret that would change the method of war forever and, like the A-bomb, the balance of power for generations? Also, the time he was spending away from his offices at Stanford was creating a buzz in the university community and the scientific world. What was this Nobel Laureate now pondering? It was as if Einstein had disappeared from Princeton for weeks at a time without a hint of his activies. What rumors would abound?
It was on his last visit to the high-tech military research facility, obstensibly built just for him halfway around the world, that he agreed to return and stay for the “duration.”
General Shell didn’t believe in creating from scratch a plan that had already been proven. He read about and adapted all the security and scientific essentials that had been the hallmark of the development of the first A-bomb during World War II. That effort was code-named the Manhattan Project, with research being performed at “Site Y,” a secret center built in the hills of Los Alamos, New Mexico. Shell gave his new top-secret project a code name as well. He called it the “Lemuria Project,” with research conducted at another secret site he called “BIOT.” Besides the scientists directly involved in the project, and the military who would secure it and help carry out his vision, no one was privy to the Lemuria Project except the highest officials of the government and military. Just as former General Leslie Groves had set up the resources for the Manhattan Project, General Maximillian Shell had set up the infrastructure for Lemuria. And just as Robert Oppenheimer was the guiding force in bringing the scientists and resources together for the A-bomb project in Los Alamos, Dr. Wagner was the guiding force bringing talent together at BIOT.
The central facility for conducting this experimental work had to be in a secret and isolated area. There had to be a large pool of researchers who could conduct research according to standard scientific protocols with enough freedom of expression to allow for a vigorous exchange of ideas. Dr. Wagner accepted General Shell’s recommendation that the research be conducted at the British-U.S. military base on the Island of Diego Garcia. It already had sufficient infrastructure and was already one of the most secure and secret sites in the world, in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
Wagner had originally preferred being closer to home and suggested that research could take place at the military’s secret base in a remote area of the Nevada desert. But this base, Area 51, also sometimes called Dreamland, The Farm, The Box, Groom Lake, and Paradise Ranch, was never perfectly free of the prying eyes of the curious who would trek through the desert or overfly the site to try to catch a glimpse of the latest military aircraft or the aliens that some believed were kept there. In the twenty-first century, how could he keep his collection of young researchers imprisoned at such a site without their clamoring for visits to the nearby oasis, Las Vegas? No, Diego Garcia was the perfect site. The most difficult part of the project was convincing top scientists to join his team. In uprooting individuals and sometimes whole families to a remote area with no options for escape, Lemuria, for some, would seem like a scientific Devil’s Island. But Julius Wagner had impressive scientific credentials and great persuasive powers. Just as Oppenheimer had collected the greatest physicists of his time at Los Alamos—Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynman, Edward Teller, Hans Bethe, and many more—so, too, did Julius Wagner collect his superstars from major universities across the country, from the Universities of California, Chicago, Princeton, Stanford, and every ivory tower that had biotech research projects on genetics, gene manipulation, embyrology,
stem cells, neurophysiology, and neuropsychology. He had collected the most remarkable contingent of scientific talent on the remotest outpost in the world since the stars of the Manhattan Project resided in the middle of the New Mexico desert.
Now, just as he had demanded of his team, he would return to stay, for a year or five, whatever it took to achieve the result. He would just one day suddenly depart from his duties at Stanford. He left the details of how his departure would be revealed to General Shell.
General Shell set a “mythological” plan in motion and tapped Colonel McGraw to carry it out. A Nobel Prize winner would soon disappear from the world stage. The Lemuria Project was more important than one man.
“I want the world to see Dr. Wagner’s Achilles’ heel,” was how he explained his plan to McGraw, “and we’ll do it with a Trojan horse.”
The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave.
—Patrick Henry
CHAPTER
ELEVEN
Margaret Wagner was a student at Princeton working on her PhD in genetics. She was following in her father’s footsteps, studying the biochemical activators of cells. That gave her several burdens to bear. She had the impossible task of competing with her father’s reputation as a Nobel Laureate. She also had to overcome everyone’s perception that any success she had was due to nepotism. That’s why she had chosen to study at an institution far from her father’s sphere of influence. Unfortunately, the perceptions remained.
Maggie Wagner—she had always gone by Maggie—had puffy round cheeks that still looked like baby fat, deep set brown eyes, and big ears. She thought she looked more like her father than her mother. Maggie had considered her mother a stunningly beautiful woman. She considered herself plain. But she was young and knew how to make the most of her attributes. She wore makeup well and had an attractive figure. She would not have been called a beautiful woman, but nevertheless she could be eye-catching. She wasn’t in the business at this time in her life of luring a husband, but she was still a young woman who enjoyed attention now and then. So, she often showed off an attractive figure in tight jeans and cashmere sweaters and favored wearing sandals and open-toed shoes. She felt her feet were her best feature, with toes always perfectly pedicured and adorned with bright cherry red polish. Her dirty blond hair was cut in a short flip, and her glasses most often sat atop her head rather than on her nose, because she spent so much of her time peering into microscopes.
Maggie bent over her microscope and intently adjusted the illuminator to shine blue light upon the slide of brain tissue she was studying. She was looking for the illumination of scientific discovery. The twenty-five-year-old researcher was looking for fluorescence. She had tagged a virus that attacked the motor centers of the brain with a fluorescent gene culled from primitive jellyfish and had injected it into mice. Now and again, she retreated from the microscope to rest her eyes. Through a window of her laboratory, she glimpsed a group of fellow graduate students taking a break, sipping coffee, watching television in the lounge. She returned her gaze to her microscope, seeking out an object just a few microns long. Exactly where in this brain, where on the dendritic cell that carried messages across a chain of millions of cells, would this virus attach itself? Her eyes ached and her mind went elsewhere.
“Hold on tight,” her father yelled as he held onto her bicycle and ran frantically alongside her. She was afraid to be let go. Her father, in his late forties with a gut, was panting and just as afraid for his precious little girl.
Then the little girl yelled out, “Let go, Daddy!” Her voice said both “keep me safe” and “let me go” at the same moment. It was a life ritual repeated in some form at some time in every human life, when a child demands some independence and a parent first fearfully lets go.
“Keep pedaling, Maggie. Keep pedaling,” her father hollered, and he let go.
She wobbled a moment and then the bike steadied. There are some moments, just seconds in a life, that last a lifetime. She turned her head to look back. Her eyes said it all: “Look, Dad, I can ride!”
Julius Wagner was beaming. Maggie was six years old, and he had just taught his daughter to ride a two-wheeler. With all their subsequent mutual scientific and academic achievements—father and daughter—if you could ask them to retrieve a memory of the best of times, this was perhaps it.
Maggie focused her mind again on her work. Where was the weak point in this brain, and where were its strengths? Then she was distracted again by the very loud babble among her friends in the lounge. Her peers were still on break, but now they had gathered at the window that overlooked the micro-research lab and were staring at her. She caught but a fleeting glimpse of an image on the television screen behind them before the screen returned to the newscaster. But she was sure. The news involved her father. Another award? She expected he was due to receive the Presidential National Medal of Science. She imagined he would ask her to accompany him to the ceremony. Her mother had stood at her father’s side in Stockholm when he accepted his Nobel Prize. She was ill then, and frail. But she put on a wig and summoned the last of her strength to be with her husband for his greatest achievement. Florence Wagner would die just two weeks later. Since her mother’s death, Maggie Wagner had been called upon to be her father’s feminine companion. It was another one of those burdens she bore for being the daughter of a famous father.
Reputation is an idle and most false imposition, oft got without merit, and lost without deserving.
—Shakespeare
CHAPTER
TWELVE
Maggie Wagner watched the television newscast replay over and over again. Another knife was slicing through her soul. Her mother had died of ovarian cancer just a few years before. She and her father had both suffered then, watching the malignancy and the poisonous chemotherapeutic agents slowly but persistently peel her mother’s strength away, one painful layer at a time, until death came. She knew her father was still mourning, and perhaps lonely, but she had always assumed it was his obsession with work that prevented him from taking any time out for a social life. His life, like his speech patterns, seemed monotone. He often spoke of “colleagues” but rarely of “friends,” and she had never heard him speak of female friends.
“My colleague, Dr. Adler, took a position in Nigeria, of all places. He got a great title but what does he expect to accomplish there?” Dr. Wagner would say. Or: “The Lubers invited me for dinner again. I’m just not up to being that social yet.”
But her father was also a relatively healthy man. She shivered to imagine it, but it was not unreasonable to think that her father still had a libido and that he might frequent prostitutes. But his death, this death, was an unimaginable scandal.
“Dr. Julius Wagner, Nobel Prize winner and founder and director of the Stanford Genetic Research Institute,” the network news anchor began, “was found dead in a hotel room this morning. The body of a woman, an alleged prostitute, was with him, shot and killed according to police ballistic experts, with the same weapon that Dr. Wagner then used to kill himself. The room had been set afire. The bodies severely burned. But police and forensic experts have pieced a timeline and evidence together and speculate that Dr. Wagner may have murdered the prostitute after some altercation, and then, after setting the room afire to destroy the evidence, became despondent and shot himself in an apparent murder-suicide.”
The story was headline news for two days and quickly subsided after the funeral. Except for the brief bio introduction of her father as a Nobel Prize winner, his scientific accomplishments were forgotten in the rush to glorify the tawdry details of his death. Scandal was entertaining and made news. Celebrity dishonor and murder trumped old war news and floods every time. But in less than one week, after the blindingly bright flame of public shame, Julius Wagner’s name had disappeared from public consciousness. More copy was written in a single day about prostitution, male depression, the sexual appetites of septuagenarians, the curr
ent generation of male libido stimulants, and other lurid hypotheses of her father’s sex life, than had been written in his entire lifetime about his scientific accomplishments. One misstep was all it took to destroy a reputation and the good works of a lifetime. It was for that that Maggie Wagner mourned as well.
“I have to admit I was skeptical that we could carry this off,” General Shell said over a private dinner at his home halfway around the world, in SOCOM, the Special Operations Center, Pacific Command, headquartered at Camp Butler in Okinawa.
Colonel McGraw and the general sat on a veranda, sipping on icy blended margaritas made by the tubful by the general’s Japanese houseboy. Together they listened to satellite radio as the story Shell had written and McGraw had directed unfolded around the world.
“Having the professor simply disappear would have set off a worldwide search. Having him killed, there’d be a lengthy search for his killer. But dying in flames with lurid contexts, the business was over in days. If this all comes to a good end, Link, I think one of these will be yours someday.” And the general tapped one of the stars on his shoulder.
McGraw never wallowed in successes or failures. His thoughts were analytical—what went well, what didn’t. He had accomplished the mission he was given but was most happy to be back in command of his troops and was ready to take the field again in a new action.
McGraw recalled a line from Shakespeare: “Some are born great; some achieve greatness; and some have greatness thrust upon them.” He was wise enough not to let a few successes go to his head, but deep inside he knew he was destined to achieve great things. He was just lagging. At his age, in his former life, he had already become the pharaoh of Egypt, Ptolemy I. What a difference a few millennia make.