Dead and Gone

“My buddy has a Ford Excursion. We use it to tow mine to the races. Big enough?”

“Plenty. With clean papers all the way through, son. You’re going to be crossing a lot of state lines.”

“Just tell me where to meet you.”

“Sonnyboy!” the Prof greeted him with a hug, then stepped back to look him over. “The wheelman’s a real man now!”

The kid whose mother had named him Randy blushed.

We loaded the truck in the back alley behind Mama’s. The guy she brought over to do the heavy lifting was so big he should have given off a beeping sound when he backed up.

“It’s about fifteen hundred miles,” I told Sonny.

“This one’s got the V-10 in it. I can make fifteen hundred miles in—”

“You can make it in about thirty hours, kid. No tickets, understand? Max might be able to stop a rhino, but he drives like one, too. So you’ll have to break up the run. Just grab a motel anywhere along the—”

“I am an excellent driver,” Gem announced.

“You ever drive anything this big?” I asked her, pointing at the red Excursion’s huge bulk.

“Bigger,” she said. “And over much worse roads than we will be traveling.”

Sonny and I exchanged shrugs. When I didn’t argue with her, he decided he wouldn’t, either.

When the Excursion pulled out, it carried a silent Mongolian who could take a life with either hand; a pasty-faced, pudgy guy with thick glasses and a satchel full of stuff they don’t allow on airplanes; and a cargo hold full of equipment. And Gem.

Right behind them was a dark-blue BMW 7 riding caravan, Clarence and the Prof inside. And me.

I jumped off in D.C., grabbed a flight to Tampa. Met Michelle at the airport. She had a man-and-wife rental at the Hyatt Regency, where we spent the night going over it, again. The next morning, we took off for Key West.

When the rest of the crew arrived—a couple of hours ahead of schedule—we went over it one more time. I finally thought we were all finished, but Michelle had one more thing.

“That nurse’s outfit does look cute on you, but are you sure you can handle the needle?” she asked Gem. “The Mole will get the dosages perfect, but you’ve got to slip it in like you’ve been doing it for years.”

“Shall I show you?” Gem asked, reaching for the syringe.

It took hours to get the old man into the back of the Excursion.

Not to load him, to convince him. Michelle had greased the skids, all right, but the man was old … not dumb.

I was the businessman, in my alpaca suit. Michelle was the working girl who was going to get a cut of the profits—that part actually calmed the old man down, as we expected. Max was the bodyguard, Gem the nurse.

The Mole’s role was mad scientist. Fortunately, that wasn’t much of a stretch. By the time he got done explaining how individual cells could be extracted from first-trimester aborted fetuses, tested for a unique DNA combo-string with a producer-multiplier effect on testosterone, and, once isolated, IV-dripped into a man kept in a quasi-comatose state—“The body must be regulated in all respects during the transfer. Any sudden acceleration of heartbeat, for example, would negate the bonding process. We are not adding to blood. We are making new blood, which will then self-replenish. The goal is a compound, not a mixture”—he had me wanting to try it myself.

“I apologize for what may seem an excessive need for secrecy,” I told the old man. “But this work is illegal on too many levels to describe.”

“You mean the FDA?” he asked, slyly.

I knew where he was going. I gave Michelle the high-sign and she ushered the Mole out of the room, chattering away about whether injected collagen really collapsed after only a few months. The old man’s sulfur eyes followed the whole thing. As soon as the room was empty, I moved my chair closer to him, lowered my voice:

“That’s not the problem,” I said. “Well, certainly, FDA approval would take, perhaps, decades in America. And that would be only if there was a drug company willing to spend the lobbying money. But doing it in Switzerland, or any country that allows revolutionary medical procedures, just wouldn’t work. In order for the procedure to be effective, we need to screen more than just the fetuses.”

“I don’t understand.”

I glanced over my shoulder, as if to assure myself that the Mole wasn’t within earshot. “Dr. Klexter is a brilliant scientist. But he’s a Jew.…”

The old man’s eyes reflected the truth of what Michelle had told us about him, but he didn’t say a word.

“And you know how those people are,” I continued. “Fantastic minds. But they’re not of our race. An intelligent man uses them, but never takes them fully into his confidence. The truth is, sir, that we’ve run the doctor’s calculations ourselves. And the most effective method is with late-term fetuses … if you follow what I’m saying.”

“I believe I do,” is all he said.

“And the early-aborted fetuses which theoretically could be available for scientific purposes are not screened as you would want, either.”

“As I would …?”

“What the doctor was describing—and, look, I don’t pretend to be a scientist, but our consortium has invested so much money in this that I’ve had to learn some things—is a permanent alteration of your blood. This isn’t some ‘injection’ that you get periodically, or some pill you take. It changes your chemistry, the way your blood works. That’s what he meant by a compound, not a mixture. The new blood, those little drops you get day by day until you’re done, will be indivisible. It will be your blood. Do you follow me, sir?”

“Yes. And I would only want Aryan—”