“To humans,” she whispered.
“Yes, of course. I didn’t want to draw any attention. I’m not boasting, but if I were a conventional scientist, there’d be a Nobel Prize for my work. I console myself in the knowledge that what I want to achieve is far more important than a trip to Stockholm. The chance of ever getting scientific and ethical review boards to agree to human experiments is zero. It will never happen in our lifetimes.”
“What are the risks?” she asked.
“I think they’re small, but people will worry about unintended consequences like cancers. Proving the negative would be impossible. My research would be blocked. The only way to do human studies is to do them myself. Here. With you and Ferruccio.”
“But who would volunteer to be your guinea pigs? Are you going to entice people by paying them a lot?”
“Here is the dilemma, Celeste. You can measure the length of telomeres, but that’s only a surrogate observation for the true measures of anti-aging. The best, of course, is the extension of lifespan. That’s impractical. It takes too long in humans. The second-best measure is to see if a person stops aging. This is more practical than looking to lifespan, but determining if, say a forty-year-old man has stopped aging, might take a decade or more to be sure. No, the only realistic way of knowing if my techniques work within a reasonable length of time is to do the experiments on young children. In a few years, one can know.”
“Children,” she gasped. “Holy mother of Christ. You can’t be serious?”
“I’m very serious.”
“How will you get children?”
“We’ll talk about that later.” His voice rose like a Shakespearean actor. “First, let’s talk about what it will mean for mankind to defeat that which all of us fear—decrepitude, degenerative diseases, and death. Let’s talk about that.”
Ferrol asked Gressani to tutor Celeste on the experimental techniques. One day when Ferrol was in Madrid, they took a walk through the orchards and fields, and the young man explained how the work was done.
“Everything begins with blood,” he said. “We draw blood and in the lab, I isolate the immune cells, the T cells. Using a cocktail of growth factors and chemicals that Dr. G perfected, I turn the T cells into cells called pluripotent stem cells. These are immature cells that can mature into all the cell types in our bodies. Then I insert a gene into them that Dr. G discovered, that prevents telomeres from getting shorter. It’s actually better than that. It makes telomeres get longer. Dr. G calls it his Methuselah gene. So, now we’ve got the stem cells with the Methuselah genes and we’re ready to use it as a therapy. You can’t just inject it back into the animal or a patient or whatever. You’ve got to wipe out the bone marrow first, so all the old stem cells don’t counteract what the new ones are supposed to do. We pre-treat with chemotherapy to destroy the old stem cells, then infuse the new ones. Then, all the stem cells and eventually, most of the cells in the body will have the Methuselah gene and super-long telomeres. And there you have it—maybe not immortality, but maybe you’ll live for two hundred, three hundred years if you don’t get hit by a car.”
Celeste kicked at some rusting iron sticking out of the plowed field. It was an old horseshoe. Who knew how long it had been there?
“Have you wrapped your head around what we’re going to be doing, Ferruccio?”
“You mean using children?”
“Yes, children.”
“Dr. G has done all the animal experiments. This is ready for humans. He’s explained it to you. Children are the only fast way to see if it works. I mean, it stinks and I’ll probably have nightmares, but maybe in the future we’ll be seen as pioneers. Maybe even heroes. In the meantime, he’s paying us a lot of money. I wonder, is he paying you more than me? I mean, you have to sleep with him. I don’t.”
“Go fuck yourself, Ferruccio,” she said, and she headed back to the castle on her own.
34
Ferrol was in his basement office, reviewing validation data from the laboratory instruments that Gressani would soon use to process the girls’ blood cells. Celeste was next to him, mapping out menus and recreation schedules to keep the girls healthy and active. One video monitor was trained on the girls who were sitting on their beds, drawing with colored pens. A small TV on mute was tuned to Antena 3, but when Ferrol saw a chyron announcing a press conference regarding the kidnapping in Italy, he reached for the remote and turned on the sound.
Celeste looked up and both of them watched a tall, distinguished man in a tan suit standing in front of the iron gates of a villa, addressing the media.
“My name is Mikkel Andreason. This will be in English. I’m sorry I don’t speak Italian. I am the father of Jesper Andreason, the father-in-law of Elena Andreason, and the grandfather of Elizabeth and Victoria Andreason. My beloved family was taken from their holiday home here in Reggio Calabria. All of them they are missing. We don’t know who took them or why. What I do know is that I want them back immediately.”
“My God,” Celeste cried, “What have we done? You said the parents were left alone. You lied!”
Ferrol didn’t reply. He watched until Mickey turned back toward the villa without taking any questions, then muted the TV.
“I didn’t lie. I didn’t know until later,” Ferrol said, frowning deeply. “We have to keep our eyes on the bigger picture. All of mankind suffers from the tyranny of sickness and death. Every single day, millions of people suffer from the loss of family and friends. What we will do here can change everything. If we are successful—and I believe
