The Devil's Elixir

47

Tess was looking me like I’d just strangled her pet cat. Not just strangled it, but chopped it up and tossed it in a blender. It’s a look I’ll never forget.

She was quiet for a torturously long moment. I didn’t say anything more either. I just waited for her to digest it in her own time.

After a while, I couldn’t deal with the silence anymore.

“Say something,” I told her, softly.

She let out a weary sigh and did, her voice subdued.

“I just . . . I don’t . . . It’s the second time in a week you’ve hit me with stuff from your past, and this . . . I can’t believe you never told me about it.” There was hurt in her eyes, and I hated seeing it there, knowing I’d caused it.

“It’s not something I’m proud of.”

“Still . . .”

“I . . . I was disgusted with myself. I could barely live with what I’d done. And I didn’t want to lose you because of it either.” Looking at her now, I wasn’t sure we’d ever recover from this.

It didn’t help that she didn’t say anything to contradict my feeling. She just looked away, nodding to herself with a hint of resolve in her expression, like she was looking for something, anything, to limit the fallout.

“Why was it so important to stop him?” she finally asked. “What was this drug he was working on?”

I frowned. It was something that made the whole feeling even worse. “We never found out,” I told her. “The secret died with him. And with Navarro, I guess. But someone out there wants it, and they want it real bad.”

I told Tess everything I read about McKinnon after we got back from there. I had wanted to know everything about him. He’d become an obsession. So I’d got hold of the file the DEA had put together on him and followed it up with a few inquiries of my own.

McKinnon was a quiet, unassuming, and well-respected anthropologist and ethnopharmacologist from northern Virginia. He held a PhD from Princeton, and after teaching there and at the University of Hawaii at Manoa for a number of years, he obtained a grant from the National Geographic Society to explore the medicinal plant usage of indigenous peoples in remote corners of Central and South America. He went there seeking out traditional cures that were typically passed down orally from one healer to another, and the fascination blossomed. He’d turned into a medicine hunter and ended up dedicating his life to living with isolated tribes in the Amazon and the Andes, researching and cataloguing their use of plants and funding his ongoing bioprospecting from lecture fees and by selling articles and photographic essays to newspapers and magazines.

His life was his work, and he’d never married or had kids.

Tess asked, “So how’d he end up coming up with a superdrug?”

I reminded Tess that in many cultures, particularly in the Far East, the mind and the body were considered to be one entity, unlike in Western medicine. Curing a problem in either one of them invariably meant dealing with an underlying cause in the other. Amazonian shamans, I had discovered, pushed this approach to another level. They believed that true healing involved healing the body, the mind, and the spirit. Some of them believed that bodily disease, as well as mental illness, were caused by noxious spirits that needed to be expunged in religious rituals that often involved psychoactive substances—hallucinogens such as ayahuasca, which has been documented to cure both depression and metastasized cancers. This meant that for someone like McKinnon, studying the cures that healers and shamans administered involved learning and understanding the properties of the complicated brews the healers had perfected over centuries of usage and of the psychoactive plants they put in them.

“His medicinal work involved participating in religious rituals and taking all kinds of hallucinogens,” I told her. “And somewhere on that path, he came across this drug.”

“You don’t know where he discovered it, with what tribe?”

“No. And, obviously, Navarro didn’t either, nor does whoever is after it now, whether it’s Navarro or someone else.”

“But clearly, it’s something really powerful—otherwise they wouldn’t be doing all this now, five years later, and still be this desperate to get their hands on it, would they?” She looked at me with an expression that somehow injected a touch of hope in me that maybe we weren’t completely toast. “Maybe you did the right thing. Maybe . . . maybe if he’d lived, things would be much worse.”

Michelle had said that, too. I’d tried to convince myself of that for years, and hearing her say it as well, thinking about what was happening now—maybe there was some truth in it. Right now, I was just pleased Tess was still in the same room as me.

“But what the hell is it?” she asked. “There are plenty of hallucinogens out there and they’re not as bad as something like meth, right?”

I’d asked the same question, back then. “Three reasons. One, he said it was something that could be hugely popular, that it had such a kick in it that people wouldn’t be able to resist, that it would make meth look like aspirin—his words, not mine. Two, he’d managed to turn it into a pill. Which means it’s easy to take. And the right drug at the right time can spread like the plague. Three, since Navarro would be the only one supplying it, he could make it as addictive as he wants. Which would be a disaster since we’re talking about a heavy-duty hallucinogen.”

“Why?”

“Most human brains,” I explained, “are not wired to deal with the effects of a hard-core hallucinogen. They’re just not. The brain can deal with the effects of weed or coke or heroin, but a hard-core hallucinogen is very different. It runs a serious risk of destroying a big chunk of the psychological fabric of its users. That’s why these drugs have always been seen culturally, in pagan religions and such, as something that is by the few and for the few, meaning it’s meant to be taken only after a proper initiation. It’s part of a ritual, a ceremony, a rite of passage . . . you do it once in a lifetime, maybe when you come of age, when you enter adulthood, when you reach a certain milestone of maturity—or when you’re in bad shape and you need to be healed. The only people who are allowed to do it regularly are the shamans and the medicine men, and there’s a reason for that. They can take it on a regular basis because they’re trained to deal with its effects, their whole lives are devoted to coping with the ramifications of what you see and what you experience when you’re tripping. Biologically and, more importantly, psychologically, the average person is just not equipped and not trained to deal with something this intense, and from a social point of view there isn’t time for the average user to do that. There’s a real risk that if a drug like this were to become mainstream—based on what we know about it—it could cause a lot of problems. People using a pill like that wouldn’t be able to function. They could easily develop long-term depression and mental instability and suffer breakdowns. Psychiatric wards would have to deal with an onslaught of hundreds of thousands of patients. Look at how devastating and debilitating meth is, how it takes over lives and turns healthy, successful people who had everything going for them into zombies—and we’re only seeing the beginning of it.

“This could be much worse,” I added. “Meth and crack, as bad as they are for you—they don’t rewire your brain. They get you high, you’ll get addicted to them, and they’ll ruin your body, but when you’re not tripping, your brain’s essentially back to what it was even if everything around it is falling apart. Hard-core hallucinogens work differently. These drugs can—and will—rewire your brain. Someone who takes stuff like what McKinnon was talking about runs a real risk of coming out of it as a different person with potentially different moral views, a different psychological take on the world, a completely different perception of the world that you live in, how you relate to it . . .”

Tess looked confused. “What, like ayahuasca? ’Cause that’s a hard-core hallucinogen, right? But I remember reading about people who’d suffered from depression all their lives who went deep into the Amazon and spent, like, a week there with shamans taking it and coming out of it saying it had cured them.”

“Yes, but they did that within a ceremonial setting with an expert healer by their side. And they took it to get healed. The problem with stories like that is that you read them and you think these drugs are an easy cure to all our problems. You’d be thinking ayahuasca is a magic bullet for depression and iboga should be given to all heroin addicts to help get them off it. But the thing about these hallucinogens is that it’s as much about you as it is about the drug. It’s about what state of mind you’re in when you take it, what you’re hoping to get out of it, about having the right physiology—and the right guidance. That’s crucial. The guidance, the ritualized, sacred framework with others around you and shamans looking over you and guiding you through your trip. If this becomes a street drug, the average junkie or suburban teen tripping on this in some squat or in a basement den or in some loud, strobe-lit nightclub isn’t going to have any of that. Where’s the guidance going to come from? Where’s the highly experienced healer who’s going to help them interpret all the repressed stuff they might see as they see it and tell them they’re not going insane and help them understand what their psyche is telling them?”

“Okay, but if it’s going to give such a bad trip and be that dangerous, it’ll put people off taking it, won’t it? It doesn’t sound like something that’s going to be popular in nightclubs.”

I shook my head with a slight scoff. “Drug user psychology has very little to do with common sense. You know that. People seek out what’s dangerous. Like with heroin. Every once in a while, a new batch that causes a lot of overdoses hits the street. And guess what? That’s the brand everyone then wants. They pay more for it. They seek it out. Hearing that people died from it only makes it more popular. Same with AIDS and needles, or the krokodil heroin substitute that’s raging through in Moscow these days. People who have an appetite for this stuff don’t react rationally, by definition. They’re looking for the strongest thrill they can get their hands on. They’ll love the dark side of it—more intense than a 3-D horror movie. And if it’s as easy as popping a pill . . .”

Tess let out a weary, ponderous sigh. “Okay, so . . . what now?”

“You and Alex will need to stay here for a while. I’m sorry. I also think you ought to call your mom and Hazel and give them some idea of what’s going on so they can keep an eye out for anything suspicious.”

Her face tightened with alarm. “You don’t think—”

I cut her off, knowing she didn’t want to say it. “No, I doubt they’re in any danger. But I’d rather make sure we cover all the bases. I’ve got the local sheriff keeping an eye on the ranch already. Discreetly.”

“You sure?”

I reached out and put my hand on her arm. “They’re safe, Tess. I’ve made sure of that.”

Her expression sank into gloom. “Okay, I’ll . . . I’ll call them tomorrow. But . . . whoever’s after this . . . they think you’ve got it, right?”

Her look clearly telegraphed what she was worried about.

“It’s what I do, Tess. And I’ve had a lot of practice.” I gave her a half-smile. “We now know what they’re after. They want it, we have it. Which means we’re in the driver’s seat. And we can use that to try and force a mistake out of them.”

I needed to boost her confidence, though I wasn’t sure I bought it myself. We still didn’t know who we were dealing with. I found myself thinking again about McKinnon’s own words, the ones that had started it all.

It’ll make meth seem as boring as aspirin.

The words that sealed his fate.

And many others’, since.

One way or another, I needed to put an end to their poisonous sting.

And I knew that, to do that, I’d have to draw them out. Using the one thing I knew they wanted.

Me.