Forty-Eight X (11 page)

Now, just as he had demanded of his team, he would return to stay, for a year or five, whatever it took to achieve the result. He would just one day suddenly depart from his duties at Stanford. He left the details of how his departure would be revealed to General Shell.

General Shell set a “mythological” plan in motion and tapped Colonel McGraw to carry it out. A Nobel Prize winner would soon disappear from the world stage. The Lemuria Project was more important than one man.

“I want the world to see Dr. Wagner’s Achilles’ heel,” was how he explained his plan to McGraw, “and we’ll do it with a Trojan horse.”

M
argaret Wagner was a student at Princeton working on her PhD in genetics. She was following in her father’s footsteps, studying the biochemical activators of cells. That gave her several burdens to bear. She had the impossible task of competing with her father’s reputation as a Nobel Laureate. She also had to overcome everyone’s perception that any success she had was due to nepotism. That’s why she had chosen to study at an institution far from her father’s sphere of influence. Unfortunately, the perceptions remained.

Maggie Wagner—she had always gone by Maggie—had puffy round cheeks that still looked like baby fat, deep set brown eyes, and big ears. She thought she looked more like her father than her mother. Maggie had considered her mother a stunningly beautiful woman. She considered herself plain. But she was young and knew how to make the most of her attributes. She wore makeup well and had an attractive figure. She would not have been called a beautiful woman, but nevertheless she could be eye-catching. She wasn’t in the business at this time in her life of luring a husband, but she was still a young woman who enjoyed attention now and then. So, she often showed off an attractive figure in tight jeans and cashmere sweaters and favored wearing sandals and open-toed shoes. She felt her feet were her best feature, with toes always perfectly pedicured and adorned with bright cherry red polish. Her dirty blond hair was cut in a short flip, and her glasses most often sat atop her head rather than on her nose, because she spent so much of her time peering into microscopes.

Maggie bent over her microscope and intently adjusted the illuminator to shine blue light upon the slide of brain tissue she was studying. She was looking for the illumination of scientific discovery. The twenty-five-year-old researcher was looking for fluorescence. She had tagged a virus that attacked the motor centers of the brain with a fluorescent gene culled from primitive jellyfish and had injected it into mice. Now and again, she retreated from the microscope to rest her eyes. Through a window of her laboratory, she glimpsed a group of fellow graduate students taking a break, sipping coffee, watching television in the lounge. She returned her gaze to her microscope, seeking out an object just a few microns long. Exactly where in this brain, where on the dendritic cell that carried messages across a chain of millions of cells, would this virus attach itself? Her eyes ached and her mind went elsewhere.

“Hold on tight,” her father yelled as he held onto her bicycle and ran frantically alongside her. She was afraid to be let go. Her father, in his late forties with a gut, was panting and just as afraid for his precious little girl.

Then the little girl yelled out, “Let go, Daddy!” Her voice said both “keep me safe” and “let me go” at the same moment. It was a life ritual repeated in some form at some time in every human life, when a child demands some independence and a parent first fearfully lets go.

“Keep pedaling, Maggie. Keep pedaling,” her father hollered, and he let go.

She wobbled a moment and then the bike steadied. There are some moments, just seconds in a life, that last a lifetime. She turned her head to look back. Her eyes said it all: “Look, Dad, I can ride!”

Julius Wagner was beaming. Maggie was six years old, and he had just taught his daughter to ride a two-wheeler. With all their subsequent mutual scientific and academic achievements—father and daughter—if you could ask them to retrieve a memory of the best of times, this was perhaps it.

Maggie focused her mind again on her work. Where was the weak point in this brain, and where were its strengths? Then she was distracted again by the very loud babble among her friends in the lounge. Her peers were still on break, but now they had gathered at the window that overlooked the micro-research lab and were staring at her. She caught but a fleeting glimpse of an image on the television screen behind them before the screen returned to the newscaster. But she was sure. The news involved her father. Another award? She expected he was due to receive the Presidential National Medal of Science. She imagined he would ask her to accompany him to the ceremony. Her mother had stood at her father’s side in Stockholm when he accepted his Nobel Prize. She was ill then, and frail. But she put on a wig and summoned the last of her strength to be with her husband for his greatest achievement. Florence Wagner would die just two weeks later. Since her mother’s death, Maggie Wagner had been called upon to be her father’s feminine companion. It was another one of those burdens she bore for being the daughter of a famous father.

M
aggie Wagner watched the television newscast replay over and over again. Another knife was slicing through her soul. Her mother had died of ovarian cancer just a few years before. She and her father had both suffered then, watching the malignancy and the poisonous chemotherapeutic agents slowly but persistently peel her mother’s strength away, one painful layer at a time, until death came. She knew her father was still mourning, and perhaps lonely, but she had always assumed it was his obsession with work that prevented him from taking any time out for a social life. His life, like his speech patterns, seemed monotone. He often spoke of “colleagues” but rarely of “friends,” and she had never heard him speak of female friends.

“My colleague, Dr. Adler, took a position in Nigeria, of all places. He got a great title but what does he expect to accomplish there?” Dr. Wagner would say. Or: “The Lubers invited me for dinner again. I’m just not up to being that social yet.”

But her father was also a relatively healthy man. She shivered to imagine it, but it was not unreasonable to think that her father still had a libido and that he might frequent prostitutes. But his death, this death, was an unimaginable scandal.

“Dr. Julius Wagner, Nobel Prize winner and founder and director of the Stanford Genetic Research Institute,” the network news anchor began, “was found dead in a hotel room this morning. The body of a woman, an alleged prostitute, was with him, shot and killed according to police ballistic experts, with the same weapon that Dr. Wagner then used to kill himself. The room had been set afire. The bodies severely burned. But police and forensic experts have pieced a timeline and evidence together and speculate that Dr. Wagner may have murdered the prostitute after some altercation, and then, after setting the room afire to destroy the evidence, became despondent and shot himself in an apparent murder-suicide.”

The story was headline news for two days and quickly subsided after the funeral. Except for the brief bio introduction of her father as a Nobel Prize winner, his scientific accomplishments were forgotten in the rush to glorify the tawdry details of his death. Scandal was entertaining and made news. Celebrity dishonor and murder trumped old war news and floods every time. But in less than one week, after the blindingly bright flame of public shame, Julius Wagner’s name had disappeared from public consciousness. More copy was written in a single day about prostitution, male depression, the sexual appetites of septuagenarians, the current generation of male libido stimulants, and other lurid hypotheses of her father’s sex life, than had been written in his entire lifetime about his scientific accomplishments. One misstep was all it took to destroy a reputation and the good works of a lifetime. It was for that that Maggie Wagner mourned as well.

“I have to admit I was skeptical that we could carry this off,” General Shell said over a private dinner at his home halfway around the world, in SOCOM, the Special Operations Center, Pacific Command, headquartered at Camp Butler in Okinawa.

Colonel McGraw and the general sat on a veranda, sipping on icy blended margaritas made by the tubful by the general’s Japanese houseboy. Together they listened to satellite radio as the story Shell had written and McGraw had directed unfolded around the world.

“Having the professor simply disappear would have set off a worldwide search. Having him killed, there’d be a lengthy search for his killer. But dying in flames with lurid contexts, the business was over in days. If this all comes to a good end, Link, I think one of these will be yours someday.” And the general tapped one of the stars on his shoulder.

McGraw never wallowed in successes or failures. His thoughts were analytical—what went well, what didn’t. He had accomplished the mission he was given but was most happy to be back in command of his troops and was ready to take the field again in a new action.

McGraw recalled a line from Shakespeare: “Some are born great; some achieve greatness; and some have greatness thrust upon them.” He was wise enough not to let a few successes go to his head, but deep inside he knew he was destined to achieve great things. He was just lagging. At his age, in his former life, he had already become the pharaoh of Egypt, Ptolemy I. What a difference a few millennia make.

M
aggie hadn’t been back to California since her mother had passed away. She was too busy at Princeton working on her PhD. And in those few years, she had only seen her father three times, and briefly: once when he passed through Boston to headline a conference on DNA extraction and purification techniques and twice as his partner at award ceremonies. It wasn’t that they were estranged. They were just both too occupied with their careers to bother with much more than the requisite birthday or Father’s Day gifts and the occasional “what have you been up to lately” phone call. She would have gladly made efforts to accompany him at his behest for special events, but in the last several years he had been spending more and more time abroad and she had rarely been called to fulfill her role as his female escort.

In the furor of publicity over her father’s scandalous passing, she had refused to be interviewed by any press. She would not feed any public frenzy of curiosity. She mourned privately, and in quiet moments alone, she reminisced about the best of times, when she was a happy child growing up in Palo Alto. More than the honors of publishing or the approval of her professors and peers, she realized now that it was her father’s praise that was most important in her life. It was something she would never have again. She didn’t need to provide an apology or a glorious epitaph for her father’s life. His foibles would be buried with time, she hoped. His accomplishments would survive forever.