Raymond Khoury - The Sanctuary

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.