The Sanctuary

Chapter 47

Cocooned inside her hotel room, Mia watched herself on TV with subdued detachment. She stared through the screen as her own face loomed bizarrely back at her, reciting the carefully worded plea that Corben had given her before handing her over to the embassy’s press attaché. The image on the screen wasn’t registering. It felt like an alternate reality, a surreal parallel universe that she was watching through a tear in some Matrix-like continuum, except that it wasn’t. It was real. Starkly, unquestionably real.

With a heavy heart, she’d called her aunt’s house back in Nahant just before the news conference. Her aunt had picked up, her sunny voice indicating that she hadn’t yet read anything about the kidnapping. Mia built up some courage with a brief exchange of banter, then, with great care, she told her aunt what had happened. It was a hard conversation to have, but her aunt was a strong woman who, though hugely concerned, took it stoically. Mia alerted her to the press conference while assuring her that every effort was being expended to find Evelyn and get her back safely, adding that, yes, she would be careful too. She’d hung up, feeling a constricting ache in her chest.

She turned the volume down and brooded over Corben’s grim update. With Farouk dead and his stash missing, there was nothing to trade for Evelyn. Which was really bad news. She’d thought about going back to Evelyn’s apartment, looking through her stuff, seeing if she could find another book, something with the tail-eater symbol on it that they could use, something to entice the kidnappers into a barter, but Corben had shot that idea down pretty quickly. He’d been there, done that. He’d found nothing in her apartment that they could substitute for the book.

Besides, it was all moot right now. The bastards hadn’t made contact.

She silently hoped — prayed — they would. They had to. What was the point of taking her, if it wasn’t to trade her for something?

The news moved on to some other uplifting event. She clicked the TV off and looked around the room. She hated the utter loneliness of it and thought back to the previous night, to being at Corben’s apartment. Even though she barely knew him, his presence was comforting. She realized she’d been through more with him, in the brief hours she’d known him, than she had with most men she’d dated. She wondered whether to call him, to see if there was anything new, but she buried the thought, certain that it would be a bad idea.

She glanced at her bed and knew that sleep, if it was to come, needed to be coerced, bribed, enticed.

She picked up her key card and her cell phone and headed for the door.

In his darkened living room, Corben switched off his TV and made his way to his bedroom. It had been a ferocious day — probably his most challenging, ever. He’d been fueled through it by a torrent of adrenaline, but that well was now bone-dry. He felt the weariness of battle in every pore of his body, which was crying out for a respite. He wasn’t about to argue with that.

He climbed into bed and killed the lights. The blackout blinds blotted out the outside world, and he let his mind drift. It resisted for a while, stubbornly churning over the tasks ahead.

His thoughts settled on Evelyn Bishop’s call to Tom Webster. Corben had asked a data-mining analyst at Langley to feed the name into the system. There were too many hits — the name was surprisingly common. Corben had given the analyst an estimated age and some target backgrounds to narrow the field, but pinning the name to an identity, if it happened at all, would take time.

He moved on to the more pressing matter at hand. The last update from Olshansky showed the Iraqi dealer to have settled in for the night in Diyarbakir, a small town in southeast Turkey, around fifty miles from the Syrian border. Corben had thought the man would go for Mardin, which was a couple of hours closer to the Iraqi border. Both had airports, but Diyarbakir’s was larger, the town bigger, and visitors didn’t risk drawing as much attention. Using triangulation, Olshansky had the dealer pinned down within a radius of fifty yards, which, in a remote place such as Diyarbakir, was as good as it got.

Corben needed to figure out how to get there without alerting his colleagues to what he might find there. The Agency had people in the general area, but he didn’t want to delegate this. He wanted to be there himself and didn’t want Hayflick or anyone else, for that matter, to know the real reason. He thought he would use Olshansky’s phone tracking to justify the trip. Say it was someone Farouk had called from the café. A person of interest. Diyarbakir was only three hundred miles away. It wouldn’t take more than a couple of hours to fly there in a small plane. He’d need to arrange it first thing in the morning if he wanted to get there in time for when his mystery buyer showed up.

The thought of that encounter pleased him and lulled him into a desperately needed sleep.

Two floors up from Mia’s room, Kirkwood glanced up from his laptop and half-watched her statement on his TV. He’d already seen it on one of the other local channels. The embassy’s press handlers had done a good job, as had Mia; her mom’s kidnappers would definitely get the message.

His attention was mired elsewhere, and his eyes dropped back to the screen of his laptop and to the baleful file that his contact inside the UN had e-mailed him. He’d read it once already, and he was about to read it again.

It was the hakeem’s file.

The file shed light on Corben, as the agent assigned to track him down. Corben himself was solid. His assignments had been bread-and-butter Agency fieldwork in the Middle East, nothing too vicious or too wet. It was the information relating to the hakeem that had shaken Kirkwood.

His contacts in Iraq had mentioned someone asking about the Ouroboros on a few occasions in recent years, but he was never able to find out who was behind the inquiries. People were scared to talk under Saddam.

Even more so, in this case.

He went through the dossier again, his chest constricting with revulsion. The findings in Iraq were beyond heinous. Autopsies that had been carried out on some of the bodies found after the raid on the hakeem’s compound confirmed, with appalling detail, what the man had been working on. There was little doubt as to what he was after.

Many of the techniques he was attempting had been tried out on lab animals, mostly mice, and had varying degrees of success in rejuvenating the animals or prolonging their lives. The thing was, the hakeem wasn’t using mice. He was performing the same experiments on humans.

One such experiment, famously undertaken by Italian and American neuroscientists in the early nineties, was to transplant tissue taken from the pineal glands of younger mice into older mice, and vice versa. Simply put, the older mice got younger, and the younger mice got older. The former looked healthier, were able to run around their cages and spin their wheels with startling vigor and outlived control animals of the same age; the latter’s fur lost its luster, they slowed down to a point where they could no longer perform basic tricks that they could easily manage before the transplants, and they died sooner. Autopsies on the animals also showed that some of the internal organs of the older mice that had received the transplants from the young mice displayed striking signs of rejuvenation. And given that the pineal gland is responsible for the production of the hormone melatonin, the rejuvenation was attributed to an increase in the recipients’ melatonin levels, which sparked the melatonin supplement craze.

The full picture, however, wasn’t as promising: Scientists who took a closer look at the results discovered that the mice that were used in the experiments had a genetic defect that actually prohibited them from producing melatonin. Attributing their improved physiology to melatonin was therefore patently absurd. But proving that melatonin wasn’t responsible for their healthier and longer lives didn’t negate that they did, in fact, look younger and live longer. Something was responsible for it. It just wasn’t the melatonin.

The autopsies indicated that some of the hakeem’s experiments were to find out if pineal-gland grafts and transplants had the same effect in humans. Running such experiments on humans wasn’t easy. The pineal gland, which is only the size of a pea in humans, is located at the core of the brain. It’s mostly active up to puberty, then gets calcified in adulthood and is thought to become obsolete. Which means that the only pineal glands worth harvesting had to come from children or teens, and the endoscopic microsurgery to reach the glands was complex, delicate, and carried high risks for the donor.

Which wasn’t a problem if you had an endless supply of expendable kids.

The other major problem was that life-extending experiments were mostly performed on species that had short life spans, to be able to actually observe and document the changes within a reasonable time frame. Mayflies were ideal, given their one-day life spans. Nematode worms, which live for two weeks or so, were also commonly used, as were lab mice, although their life spans of around two years made them less than ideal. Humans needed much longer periods of observation for any significant change to be noticeable. This meant that after undergoing the hakeem’s extreme treatments, his test subjects had to remain incarcerated for months, or years, before the results of his experiments were apparent.

The autopsies showed that the hakeem wasn’t just playing with pineal glands. Other glands such as the pituitary and thymus glands were also part of his repertoire, as were testicular glands in males and ovaries in women. In some victims, he had limited his experimentation to studying the effects of various hormones and enzymes on the test subjects’ bodies. His work was remarkably advanced, encompassing both prolongevity staples such as telomerase as well as more recent fixations such as the PARP-1 protein. The equipment at his disposal was state-of-the-art, and he was clearly a skilled surgeon and molecular biologist.

Invariably, his test subjects suffered horrible deaths. Some of the men, women, and children who were wheeled into his operating chamber were farmed for whatever parts were of use to him and simply discarded. Others, the recipients, endured long periods of living with the effects of his demented procedures, and when their bodies finally gave out, he clearly had no qualms about opening them up to have a look at what went wrong before chucking their remains into mass graves.

Kirkwood felt nauseous. A bile of anger burned the back of his throat. He knew of scientists who had decamped to less conscientious countries where they could carry out their grotesque experiments without worrying about activists and ethics committees. But this was different. This went far beyond anything he’d ever considered humanly possible.

This was true evil.

The most shocking part of it was that Corben, according to the file, had been tasked with finding the hakeem.

Not to take him down.

To harness his talents.

It wasn’t a first. Governments were always happy to forgive past trespasses, no matter how horrific, and dance with the devil if it meant getting their hands on innovative and valuable research. The U.S. government was one of the early adopters of that model. They did it with Nazi rocket scientists. They did it with Russian experts in nuclear, chemical, and biological warfare. And, it seemed, they were happy to do it with this hakeem.

Corben’s assignment was to find the hakeem and bring him into the fold. Evelyn’s kidnapping gave him a way to connect with him. But it had to mean that in their eyes, she was expendable. A means to an end. Nothing more.

He flashed back to Abu Barzan’s unexpected phone call. The surprise bidder. At the same time as Farouk had mortally been wounded.

While he’d been in Corben’s custody.

Before he’d died.

How far were they prepared to go?

He had to adjust his plans.

Kirkwood wondered who else was in the loop. Were they all in on it? Hayflick, the station chief — probably. The ambassador — maybe not. Kirkwood hadn’t gotten that vibe from him, but then again, these people did lie for a living.

He’d need to call the others, inform them of his discoveries. He knew they’d agree. He had to short-circuit Corben’s assignment, even if it meant jeopardizing the project. Evelyn’s life depended on it, as did the lives of countless innocents who could find themselves on the monster’s operating table.

Images of the hakeem’s victims ambushed his every thought. He knew he wouldn’t be falling asleep anytime soon.

A flurry of muffled thumps jolted Corben awake.

He sprang up, his eyes barely registering the ghostly 2:54 A.M. reading on the alarm clock on his side table, his foggy brain still booting up and struggling to process some noise at the very edge of his hearing threshold: rapid footfalls, rushing stealthily across the cold, tiled floor of his apartment, coming straight at him.

He realized what was happening, his hand instinctively diving into the side table’s drawer for his handgun, but just as his fingers felt its grip, the door to his bedroom burst open and three men whose features he couldn’t make out in the darkness bolted in. The lead man kicked the drawer shut, slamming it hard against Corben’s wrist. Corben reeled with pain, turning back in time to glimpse the man’s raised arm arcing down at him like a lightning bolt from above.

He thought he spotted a gun in its grasp a split second before the strike connected with his skull and sent him crashing into a sudden and absolute blackout.