Panacea Read online

On the screen, Nelson asks Bradsher, “Anything?”

  Bradsher shakes his head. “Nada.”

  “Just what is it you’re looking for?” Hanrahan says.

  Nelson turns to him. “Answers. First question: Why have you returned?”

  Hanrahan frowns. “Returned? I didn’t know I’d gone anywhere.”

  Bradsher steps forward and makes to backhand him across the face, but Nelson raises a palm.

  “We don’t need that.” He looks at Hanrahan again. “Don’t be obtuse. Your cult has been quiet for decades. Why return now?”

  Nelson wanted to know this most of all. The last time the panaceans made their presence felt was post–World War II during the polio epidemic, before his time. The plants and the man in the video were proof positive of their return.

  “Why now?” Hanrahan’s tone is matter-of-fact. “Because the All-Mother says it is time.”

  The All-Mother … how can such pantheistic bullshit exist in this modern age? Anyone can ascribe anything to the so-called All-Mother.

  “Did this goddess of yours say why it was time?”

  He shakes his head. “She’s all-knowing. She doesn’t need to explain. If she says it’s time, then it’s time.”

  “Does she speak to you in dreams? Does she whisper in your ear?”

  “Word comes through channels.”

  “Channels?”

  “You know: the grapevine.”

  No, Nelson did not know. The cult is fragmented, cellular, acting as individual operatives with only the most tenuous interconnections.

  “How exactly did word reach you to begin dispensing your potion?”

  “The mail—a packet of seeds in my mailbox. That was all I needed.”

  “And of course you disposed of the envelope.”

  Hanrahan smiles. “Of course.”

  “And where do you store your potion?”

  The smile holds as he speaks without hesitation. “In the fridge.”

  Nelson glances at Bradsher, who shakes his head. “Nothing there.”

  “And no sign of any elsewhere?”

  “Sorry, no.”

  Hanrahan says, “You want some for yourself, is that it?”

  “I want it for many reasons, none of which involve me.”

  He shrugs. “Whatever the reason, Mister Pleeceman, you’re outta luck. The batch was small and I used it all.”

  “How many doses did you dispense?”

  “Four. But don’t ask who to. I’m not allowed to tell.”

  “I know all four—that’s how we found you. But I’m not interested in them. I’m interested in you … the brewer of the potion.”

  Nelson now turned to Pickens, a shadow in the darkened room. “Please listen carefully. Here is where he admits to making the panacea.”

  Hanrahan’s eyebrows lift. “Brew … so you know something about the process.”

  “I know everything about the process except the missing ingredient.”

  The eyebrows rise higher. “Missing ingredient? You got me there, pal.”

  “Don’t lie. We know that you boil the plants, roots and all, but you add something in the process. What?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about. Seriously. Like you said, we brew a tea from the plants, but that’s it.”

  Nelson knows there’s more to it. “You will tell us.”

  “Or what? I can’t tell you something I don’t know.”

  “Maybe you’ve just forgotten,” Bradsher says. “We’ll jog your memory.”

  “You can’t get away with this.”

  “But we can,” Nelson says. “And we will.”

  Hanrahan’s features grow bleak. “So that’s it, then? Torture, then what? Death?”

  Nelson tells him, “You’re familiar with Exodus 22:18?”

  “The Bible? I don’t read your Bible.”

  “You should. The passage leaves no wiggle room: ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.’”

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” Pickens said. “You’re quoting the Bible?”

  Maybe he should have cut that out, but Nelson hadn’t wanted the recording to appear edited in any way.

  “Just playing head games. He belongs to an ancient pagan cult, so I thought I’d take a shot at putting a little Inquisitional fear into him.”

  “Jesus!”

  Nelson winced as he turned back to the screen.

  “I’m no witch! I’m just a guy who cooks up plants and doles out the tea they produce. Where’d you guys come from? The Dark Ages? You’re crazy. Totally bug-fuck nuts! What’s it gonna be? Thumbscrews? Got an iron maiden waiting outside?”

  “Don’t be melodramatic. We have injections now.”

  “Right,” Bradsher adds. “You’ll tell us everything. Even stuff you don’t know you know.”

  “And then you kill me?”

  “It doesn’t have to be that way.”

  “Now a death threat? Jesus, Fife. You’re heading off the reservation at ninety miles an hour.”

  “Just a little theater,” Nelson lied.

  Nelson speaks softly to Hanrahan. “Tell us the ingredient and I’ll let you go.”

  The sudden tears in the man’s eyes startle him.

  “I can’t do that. I’m pledged to the All-Mother.”

  “Stop that!” Nelson shouts, causing even Bradsher to jump. His face contorts. “There is no All-Mother! You are pledged to a fiction!”

  “No,” Hanrahan says, sobbing. “You are. And now … I’ve gotta go.”

  “You’re not going anywhere,” Bradsher says.

  “Good-bye.”

  So saying, Hanrahan closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. As he lets it out, his head drops forward and his body slumps to the floor.

  Bradsher looks from Nelson to Hanrahan, then back again. “What’s he doing?”

  “Passed out. But that’s not going to change anything. Wake him up.”

  Bradsher kneels by Hanrahan and lifts his head. Dull, lifeless blue eyes stare ceilingward.

  “What the—?”

  Jabbing two fingers against the side of the man’s throat, Bradsher waits, then says, “No pulse! He’s dead!”

  “He’s what?” Pickens said. “What did you do to him?”

  Nelson had intended the recording to capture every nuance of the interrogation. But now it exonerated him from doing any violence to the man—the main reason he wanted Pickens to see it.

  “Absolutely nothing. As you’ve seen, neither of us touched him. He simply keeled over dead.”

  “How?”

  Bradsher says, “He must have had some cyanide—”

  “No,” Nelson says. “Not cyanide, but check his mouth anyway.”

  He’s seen people die of cyanide poisoning and it’s anything but a peaceful death.

  Bradsher finishes his inspection and lets the head drop. “No sign of a hollow tooth or the like.” He shakes his head. “He said ‘good-bye’ and then…”

  Nelson turned back to Pickens. “Almost as if he willed himself to die.”

  “Is that possible?”

  “I’ve never heard of it, but I think we just witnessed it.”

  Nelson steps around the plant trays and checks for a pulse himself. Not that he doesn’t trust Bradsher, but this is too uncanny. He finds the carotid artery lying still beneath the already cooling flesh of the man’s throat.

  Damn him! They were so close!

  Nelson motions to Bradsher. “Bring the camera over here. I want this on record.”

  The image wobbles and blurs, and then refocuses on Hanrahan’s back, revealing a black-ink tattoo.

  Nelson owns photos and drawings of similar tattoos, but this is the first time he’s seen one on a human body. It looks much like all the others: the shooting star behind the staff and snake of Asclepius, all bisected by a straight line. The only variation has been the angle of the line. Nelson assumes that’s a way to individualize the tattoo.

  A foot comes into frame and turns the body o
ver onto its back. The chest area is unmarred and—

  Suddenly the image flares white and the screen goes dark.

  Nelson tugged the thumb drive from its slot as Pickens said, “What just happened? Where’s the rest of it?”

  “That’s all we have. The place burst into flame. We barely got out with our lives.”

  He walked to the window and twisted the wand on the blinds, angling the narrow slats to let in the day. He suppressed a groan as the light jabbed into his brain, intensifying his headache. Squinting, he saw Foley Square basking in the sun fifteen stories below. And beyond that, the roof of the hulking New York City Supreme Court building.

  “So, he had the place rigged to go up, taking him and everything else with him. And I’m supposed to believe that this is the guy with the secret to a cure-all?”

  Yes, you are, Nelson thought. And I’ll have you convinced before I leave here.

  Always be closing.

  Nelson wandered the office. Brown industrial carpet, beige walls adorned with blah photos of Manhattan streets. The sign on the door said Asian Studies. The directory down in the Federal Building’s lobby didn’t list the room at all.

  “I don’t see an incongruity. We’re dealing with a member of a hyper-secretive cult. The incendiaries he had rigged destroyed all evidence, including his plants. From his end it makes perfect sense: His secrets are safe.”

  Pickens motioned to the chair before his desk. “Sit down, will you? We have to talk, and your wandering around gets on my nerves.”

  Pickens was a dozen years older—mid-fifties—red-faced and balding. He had his suit jacket off, revealing black suspenders. Most of the men Nelson knew who wore suspenders were fat, and Pickens was no exception. His suit was of only slightly better quality than Brother Bradsher’s, but at least he’d had the good sense to choose a jacket with side vents to accommodate his girth. He’d let himself go the past few years, developing a big gut that stretched his shirtfront.

  Nelson prided himself on not gaining an ounce in the past decade. He still had a thirty-two-inch waist and a healthy head of dark, gray-free hair. Clean, righteous living did it—no meat, lots of fruit and veggies.

  “Look,” Pickens said when Nelson had settled himself, “this panacea thing of yours was all fine and good when it was just some theory you were investigating on your own time. It’s been all speculation, all cloud-cuckoo-land stuff till now. But last night changes things. You ran an op—and an illegal one, at that—without clearing it. You should have come to me first.”

  Nelson repressed a smile. Pickens’s bald statements about things they both knew perfectly well made it obvious he was recording the meeting. Fine. Nelson understood and appreciated CYA. So why not help get Pickens off whatever future hooks might come his way via Nelson Fife?

  “The reason I didn’t clear it was I knew you’d quash it.”

  Pickens blinked at having been handed the proverbial Get Out of Jail Free card, then visibly relaxed.

  “Well, I … I think we could have found a legal path. By the way, is this place you were at the same as the fire I heard about on the news this morning?”

  Nelson nodded. “Unfortunately.”

  “Look, Nelson, it’s time we laid some ground rules. I know you caught this bug from your uncle who was, as I’ve said many times before, a fine, fine field agent. But Jim Fife had this obsession—”

  “It exists, sir. The panacea is real. My uncle saw the cures.”

  “I know he thinks he did, but…” He leaned back and took a deep breath. “Let’s just say for the sake of argument that a panacea exists. Why is this cult keeping it secret?”

  “That was what I was hoping to learn from Hanrahan. But it’s pretty much a truism, isn’t it, that cults don’t have to make sense, and it’s wrong to expect them to. People believe the strangest things. Look at Dormentalism’s core beliefs. You wonder how anyone can buy into that stuff about aliens, but it has thousands of devoted followers. I would guess offhand that these panaceans—”

  “Is that what they call themselves?”

  “Frankly, I don’t know what they call themselves. That’s my uncle Jim’s term for them and I think it’s a good one. From what I’ve gathered, they keep the panacea secret because they think their goddess—they call her the All-Mother—wants it that way.”

  “All right. They’ve got a religious reason. Fine. It doesn’t have to make sense. But how do they keep it secret? You’re talking about the legendary cure-all—as in cure-all. You can’t keep something like that secret for long.”

  “You can if the ones who are cured don’t know they’ve been dosed with anything.”

  “And what does it do? How does it work?”

  “Uncle Jim learned that one dose cures any illness you have—infection, cancer, autoimmune, everything.”

  Pickens laughed. “So we’re talking immortality here?”

  Was he being obtuse on purpose?

  “No, of course not. It cures whatever’s wrong with you at the moment. That doesn’t mean you can’t come down with the flu or have a tumor start in your prostate the next day.”

  “But if you took another dose, you’d be free of those as well?”

  “Correct.”

  “Well, then, if you had an endless supply, wouldn’t you be immortal?”

  “Aging isn’t a disease.”

  “You say your uncle told you all this? How did he learn? Take a dose?”

  “He would never do that.”

  “Then how did he learn?”

  “From panaceans he interviewed.”

  “Interviewed how? Or do we not want to go there?”

  Nelson shook his head. “Probably better not to, sir.”

  James Fife, his father’s older brother, had been a young OSS officer who migrated to the SSU at the end of World War II; from there he moved to the CIG, which was redesignated the CIA in 1947. He became a legend in the Company, especially in the area of psychological warfare.

  “All right. So it cures what ails you, no matter what. And you think you traced it to the fellow on Long Island.”

  Nelson clenched his teeth. He didn’t think—he knew.

  “Cornelius Hanrahan worked as a hospital orderly. In the three weeks he was at Franklin, they had four so-called ‘miracle cures.’”

  “And you know this how?”

  “Our friends at NSA. Remember my request to add a few terms to their ECHELON search list?”

  Pickens frowned. “I thought that had to do with biologicals.”

  “It did. But I included ‘miracle cure’ and ‘spontaneous remission’ to our list.”

  Pickens opened his mouth, then shut it.

  Right, Nelson thought. Don’t say anything.

  He’d shoved the list in front of Pickens, who’d only glanced at it before scribbling his signature.

  “In its scanning of phone calls and texts and apps, they picked up scattered hits on the terms all over the country, but also clusters in and around certain hospitals. One of those was Franklin, and since it was so close, I did a little investigating.”

  Pickens scoffed. “Miracle cures are reported all the time.”

  Nelson gave him a knowing smile and nod. “Exactly. Leukemia cells fading away, wasted kidneys starting to function again, a miraculously shrinking brain tumor. Doctors come up with convincing medical jabberwocky like ‘spontaneous remission’ and such, but they have no idea what happened.”

  “Did you ever hear of Occam’s razor?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then apply it. Because Occam’s razor will lead you away from the idea of a panacea.”

  Nelson bottled his frustration. He understood the natural resistance to accepting a supposed myth as real, but he had to sell this.

  Always be closing.

  “Let me say this again: four ‘miracle cures’ in the three weeks he’s been there. Three weeks.”

  “Are you going to tell me they had no ‘miracle cures’ before he arrived?”<
br />
  “No. But the four previous so-called ‘miracle cures’ occurred over a three-year period.” Three weeks versus three years … Nelson let that sink in for a few heartbeats, then added, “And hallway video footage shows Hanrahan entering their rooms the night before each ‘miracle’ occurred.”

  Looking perplexed, Pickens drummed his fingers on his desk. “I still don’t see … I mean, really … why die to protect the secret of a cure-all? It’s not as if it endangers anyone.”

  Nelson had to rise from his seat for this. He spoke better on his feet.

  “On the contrary, sir: Widespread use will delay countless deaths that, over the course of a single decade, will cause a population surge that will bring economic chaos. Even worse, letting it fall into the wrong hands could prove disastrous. We can’t allow anyone but the U.S. to control it.”

  “It’s a cure-all, Fife. You can’t weaponize a cure-all.”

  “Oh, but you can, sir. Whoever controls the panacea effectively controls the world.”

  “Okay. You’ve lost me now.”

  “Consider, just as a for-instance, North Korea or a jihadist group mutating the H7N9 bird flu to an airborne pathogen. They can release it worldwide and decide which populations they want to protect with the panacea and which they want to let die. Or simply release it and sell the panacea to the highest bidder. Do you see the possibilities?”

  From the slow slump of Pickens’s features, Nelson knew he did.

  Got him!

  But then the director shook himself. “Wait-wait-wait. You inherited your uncle’s persuasiveness. When he was my superior I had to listen while he went on and on about this. He almost had me convinced back in the day, and now you’re doing the same. But you’ve got as much proof as he had—which is none.”

  “I’m sure he would have found some had his injuries not forced him to retire.”

  “Yes, well, we’re all sorry about that, but my point is, all these scenarios assume your panacea is real. That’s a huge leap of faith. Have you ever seen it work?”

  Nelson had to be honest here. “No.”

  “Have you ever spoken to someone who has seen it work?”

  “My uncle—”

  “I’m not talking an after-the-fact spontaneous cure, but a controlled test where this panacea was administered and worked a cure where everything else had failed?”