The Devil's Elixir

down the lab, and before I knew it I was separated from Munro and pinned down by the two gunmen.

Then I heard McKinnon curse and groan, and noticed his thigh.

He’d taken a slug there, right through the middle of it halfway up from his knee. I couldn’t see if it had gone through, and while it didn’t look good, at least blood wasn’t gushing out, which meant maybe his femoral arteries had been spared. His face was taut with pain, his eyes bristling with fury, his hands covered with blood, and I immediately knew there was no way he was going to make it back to the chopper. I wasn’t sure I was either—not with the two shooters doing a pincer move on me.

Munro was in a bind of his own, cornered by more shooters, and I heard him growl through my earpiece that he was pulling out and heading for cover.

I was left alone with McKinnon, pinned down, with the scientist cowering next to me and two half-crazed Mexicans closing in.

Outside, the battle was raging. Life was cheap down here, and Navarro had a small army based in the compound, a small army that was now coming out of the woodwork, full force, guns blazing. Our guys were racking up the kills, but the sheer number facing them meant that we were taking losses, too. I heard one, then two of them get hit—and knew I had to pull out, too, and fast.

I wasn’t sure I could get out of there in one piece, but if I managed it, I sure as hell couldn’t do it with McKinnon in tow. Even if I cut down the pistoleros, I couldn’t take him with me, not in the shape he was in.

But I couldn’t leave him there either.

Not with what he knew.

Munro was in my ear, haranguing me, pushing me to do what needed doing.

I can still hear his words, crackling in my head. “Just cap the sonofabitch, Reilly. Do it. You heard what he’s done. ‘It’ll make meth seem as boring as aspirin,’ remember? That’s the scumbag you’re worried about wasting? You happy to let him loose, is that gonna be your contribution to making this world a better place? I don’t think so. You don’t want that on your conscience, and I don’t either. We came here to do a job. We have our orders. We’re at war, and he’s the enemy. So stop with the righteous bullshit, pop the bastard, and get your ass out here. I ain’t waiting any longer.”

I was running out of time. Fast.

And maybe it was a horrible mistake, maybe it was an inexcusable murder of an innocent civilian, or maybe it was the only thing to do—I really don’t know which one it was anymore—but, either way, I turned my gun on McKinnon and put a bullet through his brain. Then I lobbed a couple of incendiary grenades at the banditos and got out of there just as the whole place went up in flames.

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