James Tabor: The Deep Zone

“And your facility—BARDA—is trying to produce an entirely new family of antibiotics.”

“Among other projects. But yes, that is one main thrust of the work.”

Mr. Adelheid smoothed his ascot. How old was the man? The visitor could not say with any certainty. Forty or sixty. His skin was smooth, eyes bright, movements lithe. But there was something ancient about him, Sphinx-like, an inscrutable repose.

“Consider this. The new currency of power is information ,” Mr. Adelheid said.

“Really?” The Laphroaig and the wine were making him bolder. “So given the choice between a ton of gold and a terabyte of information, you’d take the terabyte?”

“On the surface, an easy choice. A ton of gold today is worth $45 million. No paltry sum. But: what if you have golden information ? Do you have any idea how much money has been made from Dr. Waksman’s antibiotics?”

“Billions, I would guess.”

“Trillions.”

“Don’t you have politicians who can help you?”

“Of course we have politicians. And others. But no one like you.”

“So what do you need, exactly?”

“Exactly? At this very moment? Nothing. But there will come a time. Very soon, we think.”

Keeping his eyes on the table, he said, “You want me to be a spy.”

Mr. Adelheid made a sound as if clearing something unpleasant from his throat. “Spies make death. Our wish is not to take lives but to save them.”

“For a profit.”

“Of course for a profit.” His tone suggested that any alternative would be irrational, like living without breathing. “What are millions of human lives worth?”

“Priceless.”

Mr. Adelheid regarded him in silence for a moment. “You know of Reinhold Messner? The great mountaineer?”

“I know he climbed Mount Everest solo.”

“And without oxygen. In Europe, a god. Messner said, ‘From such places you do not return unchanged.’ ”

“I don’t climb.”

“Mountains are not the only realms from which we may not return unchanged.”

Mr. Adelheid reached into his blazer, produced a slip of green paper the size of a playing card. He slid it to the middle of the table. A deposit ticket from Grand Cayman National Bank for Fifty thousand and 00/100 dollars , payable not to a name but to an eleven-digit alphanumeric sequence.

“An appreciation for the pleasure of your company this evening. You need only the PIN. Which I will give you.”

“For doing what?”

“For joining me tonight.”

“ Fifty thousand dollars for a few hours?”

“Of course.”

It was dizzying, but another question had to be asked. “How much for doing the… observing you mentioned?”

Mr. Adelheid named a figure that made his heart jump. For a moment the room blurred and sang like a plucked string. He put his hand on the table, a few inches away from the green slip. Thoughts skittered in his head.

So this is how it feels . He watched as his hand, possessed, slid toward the green paper.

“I urge you to think carefully.” Mr. Adelheid’s voice made a strange echo in the chamber. Or was it the whiskey and wine? “This threshold, like Messner’s realm, is one you cannot recross. Be certain.”

It came out, quick and harsh, as though he had been waiting most of his life to tell someone. “I have a doctorate from a good university. Nineteen years of government service. I make eighty-seven thousand, four hundred and seventy-six dollars a year. I have been passed over for promotion three times. I do not want to die having had only this life.”

Mr. Adelheid regarded him thoughtfully. “And there was that unfortunate business with your wife. Forgive me: former wife.”

So he knows. Of course. He would know everything . He bit off each word: “Yes. The ‘unfortunate incident.’ ”

It had been nine years, but like a gangrenous wound, this one would never heal; in fact, like such a wound, it seemed to grow deeper and more foul as time passed. Even Mr. Adelheid’s veiled reference made his rage flare. And not just rage. A hot and breathless shame for the losses—and for being one who’d lost the great things.

Mr. Adelheid said, “It was unfortunate. She strayed. And yet—”

“—and yet her lawyers took everything . The house, our savings, the antiques… our dogs .”

“The Airedales, yes. And it goes on.”

“Oh, yes. On and on . Do you know, after she left me, I had to move into a condominium ”—he said the word as though it were an obscenity—“in one of those subdivisions with hundreds of them, all identical, lined up. It could be Bulgaria. Every morning I drive from there to BARDA, walk the same two hundred and nineteen steps to the laboratory, and at the end of each day I walk the other way. Week after month after year. That does something to a man.” He paused for breath, aware that he had not spoken to anyone like this for longer than he could remember.

“I am so sorry.” There was something like sympathy in Mr. Adelheid’s voice.

The guest’s fingertips lifted, extended, dropped down on the edge of the deposit slip. His chest felt like thin blown glass. A red spot, wine he had spilled, stained the linen beside his hand.

He put the ticket into his shirt pocket.

Mr. Adelheid lifted his wine glass for a toast. “Welcome.”

“Thank you.” They drank.

As his latest swallow surged through him, he felt empowered. “You know who I work for. Am I permitted to ask who you work for? My guess would be BioChem.” The largest pharmaceutical, headquartered in Zurich, operating in every developed country and many undeveloped ones.

“No. Nor any other pharmaceutical concern. Are you familiar with the Dutch East India Company?”

“I know that it raped Asian countries for centuries.”

“No. It was the world’s first multinational corporation, and the first to issue stock. A government unto itself, with global reach.”

“The Dutch East India Company became corrupt and collapsed.”

“As do all empires.”

“What I meant was, you can’t be working for the Dutch East India Company.”

“A descendant.”

The waiter brought balloon snifters of cognac. Mr. Adelheid sniffed, drank, smiled with closed eyes, a bliss like lovemaking.

“I wasn’t aware it spawned any.”

“A little knowledge can be dangerous. Too much can be fatal. I can tell you that the object of our present discussion has no headquarters, no corporate papers, no employees. Only members and friends.”

“Are you talking about some kind of international cabal? Freemasons, Templars, that kind of thing?”

A barked laugh. “God, no.” Mr. Adelheid paused, considered. “Think of an enormous, invisible web. If you touch it even lightly the whole web shivers.”

“Can you give me an example?”

“I could give you many. Cancer is to our era as infectious disease was to the last. One in three persons alive will contract cancer of some kind.”

“Yes.”

“There is a cancer vaccine, though.”

“What?”

“Oh yes. Almost nine years now.”

“Can’t be. The government would not allow that.”

Mr. Adelheid laughed and the candle flames shivered.

“The government has nothing to do with it. The government houses the lowest common denominators of our species.”

“Why?” He already knew the answer, but the question asked itself. Mr. Adelheid frowned.

“Healthy people do not buy pharmaceuticals.”

A fellow worker, killed by brain cancer, had taken a medicine called Orbitrex. Thirteen hundred dollars for six small blue pills. Every week. For months.