The Methuselah Gene Read Online Free PDF Page B

sexy MacBook , and I felt a renewed pressure in my solar plexus, which might be labeled stress from suppressed anger.   The act may have been Oscar worthy, but it was horseshit, as Darryl would put it.   Who the hell was this Walter Mills, anyway?   And did he work for—or get hired by—some rival drug company like Raxco -Bessel in Cincinnati, as Darryl suggested?   Or was it Merck or Pfizer?   The names were changing all the time as mergers went down.   Of course Darryl’s theory meant the big brass balls rolling around up on mahogany row at Tactar were only guilty of putting M- Telomerease behind them, and covering up its side effects.   This meant the real thieves still might not suspect what they were getting into.   Or worse, maybe they did.   Given Darryl’s alternate scenario, it led me to the one nagging question that intrigued most, and would answer all the others: why would a man involved in industrial espionage move to some tiny town in Iowa?
    Â 
    At the Des Moines airport, I rented a blue Taurus, and drove twenty miles down I-35 south of the city to Bevington , then west fifteen miles to a quaint and popular point of interest called Covered Bridges on State Road 92.   A site where they’d filmed the movie Bridges of Madison County , and where the local bridge restoration society painted and maintained five of the six historic bridges.   The sixth had burned, I learned when I stopped for coffee.   Fifteen more miles took me past Stanzel , where I turned south again toward what was called the Thompson River.   Zion, I knew from a dot on the map, was six miles beyond the river, square in the middle of the southwest corner of the state.
    The middle of nowhere.
    More lazy than bored, I turned on the car stereo, and flipped the digital selector past a gospel preacher to a faint rendition of the 80s song, “Blinded by Science,” by Thomas Dolby, which I couldn’t quite pull in from Omaha, and made me wish for XM over AM.   Finally, I tuned into a country station playing Faith Hill fairly clearly, and settled into listening just as the corn fields Darryl had referenced appeared on the rolling horizon like rogue waves from some distant earthquake.   Passing a faded and rusted old relic in a scrub field first, I identified an ancient Burma Shave sign.   Then came the August corn.   Tall, green, but still a bit too early in the season to be harvested.   The quiet sea of gently undulating stalks grew thick on the hills, yearning toward a country sun that was slipping into mid afternoon over a dirt road break to the west.
    This surely beat listening to Hepker , I concluded, with some appreciation of the serenity.   Maybe it even beat the monotonous view from the crowded deck of one of Jeffers’ favorite cruise ships.   I would see.
    I was in the middle of singing along with humorous exaggeration to Faith Hill’s rendering of an old Merle Haggard tune when a cow suddenly came out into the twisting road from an open field hidden by corn.   I swerved to miss the beast, and lost control.   The Taurus angled toward the field, then suddenly flopped into a ditch that hadn’t been there only moments before.   A crunching, snapping sound as the car’s underbelly met a convex hump of packed dirt . . .   Then the car was pinned, and I found that I couldn’t muster enough traction even by gunning the engine first in forward, then reverse.   Great.   Now the right side wheels spun uselessly as dust billowed around the car in a fine patina of gray mist.   I swallowed the dry lump in my throat and tried to recall when exactly the paved road had become a dirt road.   Only a few minutes of inattention, and now I was stuck.
    I got out and spread a map on the car’s hood, mindful of the cow.   But the hulking, bespeckled thing finally tramped off, satisfied with having pigeonholed another dumb city