 
# The Last Enemy

Part 1

1934-2010

Luca Luchesini

Edited by Isabel Spinelli

Copyright 2015 by Luca Luchesini

Disclaimer

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, business establishments, events and locations is entirely coincidental.

London - July 27, 2084

This eBook celebrates the 150th birthday of Louis Picard, the man who freed mankind from mortality with the anti-aging drug that he invented in 1981, called Telomerax. While we, the average individuals, remain subject to illnesses, accidents and, more than ever, our own violence, we have painfully discovered along the way that revealed Telomerax as the hidden secret of the happy few in this world.

As Louis Picard and Telomerax are inevitably associated to each other, we have decided to celebrate his birthday with a feature story that is at the same time both a biographical interview and a brief history of the world during the last half a century. We, the chief editors of the New Times, ask in advance for the forgiveness of our readers if at times the biography turns into a historical novel. We also would like to thank Louis for the time he spent with us in holoconference from his private mansion on the Aeolian island of Salina. We have structured the story of his life among four sections:

Part 1: Discovery - Beginning from the birth of Louis in 1934 and ending in 2010, when the drug was developed in secret and a circle of guardians established to protect the secret. That is, until its members were detected by security agencies, at the end of 2010.
Part 2: Detection and Awareness - 2011 to 2023, when knowledge and use of the drug started to circulate.

Part 3: Prohibition and War - 2024 to 2054, when most governments banned the drug and how this led to the breakup of worldly order and the elimination of three fourths of mankind.

Part 4: The New Order - 2054 to present day, when mankind was rearranged along completely new geographic and political lines, with new states, ways of life and the emergence of the new international order.

Thirty years after the end of the war, the controversial question of whether the discovery of Telomerax has been more beneficial or not to mankind, still sparks a heated debate. Therefore as chief editors of the New Times, we want to take the occasion of Louis' birthday to try and build a new, fairer view while the suffering and hatred of the wars is subsiding and slowly becoming a part of history. We hope that you enjoy this journey, and we encourage you to contribute to the discussion and share any relevant opinions or thoughts on our website http://lastenemythebook.blogspot.com.

Part One – Discovery

Chapter 1

Louis Picard was born on July 27, 1934 in the city of Lille, located in northern France. Being the son of a pharmacist and a mathematics teacher at the local high school, Louis enjoyed a comfortable and happy childhood in a respectable family of the French bourgeoisie. Since his infancy, he showed a brilliant mind which his mother nourished with private lessons.

At the age of five, Louis could already read and write fluently. His parents were thinking about sending him to Paris in a special college for gifted students, when the Nazi's invasion of France brought those plans to an end.

We begin the interview by asking him to recall that period.

"Mr. Picard, what was your experience of World War II like?"

The hologram of Louis appears. He is a handsome man in his early forties with dark hair and a bronzed complexion, dressed in a casual white shirt. He responds calmly and sincerely,

"I have to say, my parents did the utmost to shield me from the duress that war brings. Luckily Lille was never the site of a major battle, neither during the Nazi invasion nor during the liberation by the Allied forces in 1944. But you could however experience the poverty, the cold winters and the general sense of uneasiness while living in a place where Gestapo, the powerful and secretive Nazi police force, always had the last word.

Due to its proximity to the British Channel, Lille was under authority of the German military and a few wrong words could have you arrested and detained by the secret police. As a result, my parents tried to keep me at home as much as possible. They, themselves, only went out to work or run errands.

We lived in Rue de Valmy, in a three story building, that housed the pharmacy shop of my father on the ground floor and our apartment on the floors above."

"Do you recall any specific event that helped to shape your life?"

"Well, you have to know that between 1940 and 1941, many houses had been confiscated by the Nazis to accommodate soldiers and officers. Living in our town, one of those officers had fallen to the temptations of the beautiful French women and had contracted Syphilis. He visited my father's shop regularly, for this, as he was the only German-speaking pharmacist in town. Apparently the treatment was successful enough for the high-ranking officer, that my father was able to keep the house.

At the time, I did not understand anything about sexual diseases, however I had the very clear perception that we were better off than the others because my father was good with chemistry, and eventually that would contribute to my own destiny. During those years, the bond with my mother became stronger than ever before, as she spent almost all afternoon with me, reviewing my lessons. At the time when the Allied forces freed us from the grasp of Nazi Germany, I remember the joy, but also the suffering that rang out through the city. Suffering that was caused by the prosecutions which began erupting against the French collaborationists.

Among many shameful events, the women who had any relations with German soldiers or officers, were exposed in public squares and had their hair shaved off. I still remember the face of my mother; the disgust she held in her eyes. And I immediately was moved to disgust along with her. So somehow the victory came with mixed feelings."

"Was your family also affected by the collaborationist prosecutions? And how did that help to shape your mind?"

"We were not affected directly, however my father got some threats for his alleged service to German occupation troops. Those rumors all came from some envious neighbors that could not cope with the fact that he had kept house and shop, while they had been forced to relocate.

He was spared the worst. In the end he always made sure to take care of his fellow compatriots without any preferences over the occupying troops. The public humiliation of those women served as a scapegoat to discharge all community tensions, and we did benefit from it in that way. But my father no longer felt safe in Lille and in the spring of 1945, he decided to move to Paris.

So for me the end of the war was a mixed experience, joyful for the end of the occupation, combined with the feeling that people had not learned alot from it."

The Picards moved to Paris and took residence in a comfortable apartment in Boulevard Raspail, on the Rive Gauche. Louis went to high school and later enrolled in Medicine at Sorbonne University. He was still an undergraduate student, when in 1954, he stumbled on the legendary article of Watson and Crick that described the structure of DNA.

For Louis it was the equivalent of a religious revelation, and although he could not comprehend all of the details, he understood that this discovery was about to change his future and the future of the entire world. He started taking courses in biology and managed to get acquainted with the head group leading researches in biochemistry.

"How would you describe those years? When did you decide to major in biochemistry?"

"It was absolutely insane. I was trying to get two degrees at once, spending more than sixteen hours every day between books, laboratories and in libraries. To better understand the research documents, I also had to teach myself English. Things improved a bit when I eventually graduated in Medicine in 1957, but this led to a clash in my family. I made it very clear that I did not want to continue in the medical field and instead focus on the new frontier of biology and genetics.

But this was purely an intellectual drive. I was still lacking the compelling event that would push me to devote my life to the quest of immortality - if you allow me this hefty expression."

"And the compelling event came with the illness and death of your mother."

"Yes, she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1956 and after a struggle that lasted two years, she passed away in 1958. During that time my father and I used all the connections we had to try to save her, but it was clear from the very beginning that it was a lost battle. And even as a young undergraduate, I could see that doctors - a kin to which I am now a part of - were not able to properly define the problem. There were too many missing pieces and a certain reluctance to apply the latest findings of biology and genetics to experiments.

I felt like we were in the times where medicine was being tested to fight off infections, before Pasteur discovered bacteria.

As for me, in the words of Elias Canetti, I felt like death was physically our only worst enemy. I decided I wanted to figure out a way to conquer it. With a good amount of the arrogance any young man has, I came to the conclusion that Medicine was just a pure waste of my time. So I switched my focus onto biochemistry and the study of genetics because I knew that it was the most promising, and probably only way, to defeat death in my lifespan."

"I see that neither religion nor spirituality were of any comfort to you. Were you already an atheist before you started your research?"

Louis pauses for a few seconds to ponder an answer, and then his blue eyes flash as he continues.

"I would not describe myself as an atheist, neither in those times nor the present. It is true that I was raised in an environment that was quite indifferent to religion and against some of its most dogmatic forms, as my father declared himself a liberal follower of Voltaire, and my mother came from a socialist radical family that backed the French Third Republic.

However, it would be unfair to say that they were completely hostile to religion. They realized that atheism could become a faith in itself, and a very damaging one at that. They were indeed interested in the genesis of religious beliefs and at some time my father also engaged in a letter exchange with Emile Durkheim, the sociologist that studied the phenomena linked to the collective psychology of religion and its influence on society.

The fact is, religion for me always remained one of the many, often contradictory, expressions of my mind that somehow got demoted to a lower priority when other very cogent experiences like love, sorrow, professional achievement, and death came into play. And over the last several years we have all witnessed where having a certain interpretation of religion can lead us.

So you might be better off calling me an agnostic with genuine envy towards those that have true and peaceful faith, and at the same time fear to engage with them. I cannot exactly explain why. Fear of losing control, maybe.

Anyway, back to 1958. Immediately after we had the burial ceremony for my mother in the Montparnasse cemetery, I left France and applied to study Biology at the University of Cambridge, that at the time was home to one of the team of researchers from the so-called "Phage group", and where James Watson and Francis Crick had perfected their research of the DNA structure at the beginning of the 1950s. The environment was fantastic, and by the time I finished my PhD thesis in 1962, I had come to meet all the major researchers active in the field. Among other events, I also met my first wife there, Alicia Paulson. She was working as a research associate in quantum physics at the Cavendish Lab, where a number of Nobel Prize winners had worked. We got married in 1961. We shared the same deep passion for science but for reasons I never quite understood, I never talked openly to her about my actual goals."

"Was this because you did not feel she would approve of your intentions?"

"Well, maybe. Or maybe it was my fault. I was not able to assert and defend my intentions yet, even with the person whom I loved. For sure it did not help the relationship in the long run and eventually we divorced in 1967, as my focus on research started to absorb all my time and energy. Fortunately, both Alicia and I realized we were simply not on the same page. She wanted a child, while I was working on a project in which children would be a big problem - although at that time I did not know it."

Louis stops in the middle of the sentence, and turns his head towards the large glass window in the polished living room of his villa. He seems to hesitate for a moment, looking beyond the blossoming Hibiscus flowers in his Mediterranean garden, and focusing on a point somewhere in the middle of the sea.

"Yet there was still something wrong. What was it?"

"How can I explain...after a few semesters at Cambridge I was already regarded as a sort of "young prodige" of genetics and biochemistry. Before I completed my dissertation, I had multiple offers to join the best universities to continue my research. However there were a few factors which I was not expecting, that threatened to jeopardize my mission.

First of all, I did not have the freedom to lead my research in the direction that I wanted. There seemed to be a certain academic mainstream to follow, and this came with guardrails on the resources you could have at your disposal, and a boss to whom you were required to report your findings. No matter if you were the brightest scholar in centuries.

Second, while my fellow researchers were certainly driven by the desire of knowledge, they had more mundane objectives; such as their academic career, longing for public recognition, and even rivalry against other research groups. Very few, if any at all, shared my total commitment. From this point of view, I was more of a priest or a missionary, than a scientist.

Lastly, my colleagues quickly sensed this division and over the following years I found myself more and more disengaged. So it was clear that, once again, I had to drastically change my approach if I wanted to continue my quest. But unlike my previous change of switching colleges, it was more about how to do it rather than what to do."

The opportunity presented itself on the train that was taking me and Alicia back to Paris during the summer of 1962."

Chapter 2

"On the train you found a copy of Paris Match, the most popular magazine at the time, where L'Oreal had posted research and development jobs available for their soon-to-be-launched skin products division."

"Yes. At first glance, however, I ignored it. I was far too advanced for the positions they were offering and the only thing my research and the job had in common was that there were cells involved. But by the time the train entered the Gare du Nord in Paris, I had come to the conclusion that it was the perfect opportunity and I sent my resume directly from the post office that was inside the station.

A few days later I received a telegram at my father's house that invited me for an interview at their headquarters in Clichy, located in the outskirts of Paris. It was there where I met Xavier Langlois, the director of the hair products department, at that time.

He was a very tall man, dressed in an impeccable suit. He showed me into his spacious office, furnished with antique chairs and a huge round table that served as his desk. He greeted me by asking why a brilliant scientist like myself would ever consider joining a cosmetics company and added that he would not hire me in any case, as I must have some kind of mental problem.

Tough start. One hundred and twenty-two years have passed and I still vividly remember every moment of that interview. He had been brutally honest. After having said that, he leaned back into his chair and stared at me, waiting for my explanation. It was time to make my move.

"Monsieur," I replied, "I read in the job posting that you are looking for a qualified biochemist to run an ambitious project in cosmetic research. After reading my resume, you cannot question my expertise. On the contrary, you have not yet demonstrated to me that your project is ambitious enough for me to consider it."

Xavier's face transformed. He cleared his throat, as an attempt to compensate for his rude introduction and spoke simply.

"Indeed, this project is too intricate to describe in an ad. As you well know, we produce top-selling products, and we want to set up a lab to better investigate the function of cells and apply this knowledge to create rennovated products.

Your education as a physician and your recent experience in cell research obviously qualifies you for the job, but I doubt that you would appreciate our environment. I hope to bring new ground-breaking products to the market."

"Monsieur, then I think we share the same ideas. One of the main problems I am having now at the university, is that we are not focused enough on improving the common good of society.

We have studied the code that rules cell replication, but do not want to seriously commit our efforts to how, for example, this could be applied to aging. Therefore I think that I would be able to contribute more at L'Oreal than at Cavendish Lab in Cambridge.

That is why I am here."

Xavier expression, attentive up until now, opened into a broad smile.

"Are you telling me that you plan to use L'Oreal labs and resources to turn them into a sorcerer's cave to try to produce the eternal life potion?"

"Well, that would definitely be the main goal. Unfortunately, I have to be realistic and admit that most likely I will only end up designing lots of tremendously successful skin cosmetics that will provide L'Oreal with stacks of money and a decent career for myself."

Xavier burst into laughter and ringed the bell on his desk to call in his assistant. A few seconds later, a young woman opened the door and before she could even step in the office, Mr. Langlois told her to prepare the paperwork. I was expected to start working the next day.

"Louis, in retrospect, do you think Mr. Langlois believed your true goals?"

"Not for the first few years. He kept up with my work and he clearly saw that I was also doing a lot of studies and experiments not directly correlated to product research. On the other side, he was also seeing that this side research sometimes contributed to the main product development, almost always with excellent results. So I believe he just figured that that was just my way of working.

He would give me the objectives and ask me how much I needed to achieve them, without further questioning. By 1965, I had already developed a drug able to improve the replication efficiency of a set of skin and hair cells, and this was channeled into extremely popular products. My career took off and by 1968, Xavier was seriously thinking about handing me the responsibility of the whole product development of L'Oreal. I balked at the idea. I needed to focus on research, not to be a company executive.

He was puzzled at my response, so in the early weeks of the summer of 1968, he called me into his office and asked me why I was refusing a promotion. Was I under the influence of all those communists that were rocking the streets of Paris and of half of Europe?

I stuck to the truth and updated him on everything I was finding in my free time, among which, the discovery of telomeres in skin cells.

Telomeres are the structures that allow DNA to replicate and form an exact copy of the original cell, except over time they get shorter, until the cell is no longer able to replicate correctly and eventually dies. I had sent some previous results to my old classmates at Cambridge for some additional review and I could simply not leave the job half done.

Xavier stood up from his desk, and stared at me with a frown. Turns out that I had indeed created my own sorcerer's cave in search of the eternal life potion. Just like in my first interview, I used the interest of the company to defend my point.

I was just a few months away from a major breakthrough in the study of the cell aging process and he would risk spoiling this over a promotion? He eventually gave in, and I could keep running my lab under one condition; I update him regularly on my side research."

"How did this second phase of your research at L'Oreal go?"

"Well, there were three major breakthroughs. First, I was able to produce telomerase, the enzyme that preserves telomeres, therefore guaranteeing perfect cell duplication. This happened in the fall of 1970. Second, I was able to design a drug that transferred telomerase into human skin cells to make them effectively immortal. This was the first prototype of Telomerax.

And third, we started experimenting on human patients. Xavier knew a Swiss doctor named Hans Klettendorf, who was the owner of a fancy beauty clinic called "Le Jardin de Venus" in the Perroy village, off the coast of the lake of Geneva.

There was an agreement that allowed L'Oreal to use the rich and famous customers of this beauty farm to test its new products. Obviously with their consent, and under the full control of an experienced staff. To my surprise, I saw that these special kind of guinea pigs were very eager to undergo risky experiments in exchange for the privilege of accessing the latest rennovations in aesthetic care.

No one except Xavier and I knew that the skin cream was also the first Telomerax prototype and since the clinic customers knew they were using experimental cosmetics, they did not mind if from time to time an expert would come for a few checkups.

The results were absolutely amazing. The skin of the patients treated with the prototype clearly showed a sudden stop in the aging process, to the extent that they were considering reducing the frequency of their other cosmetic treatments. Of course, all the rest of their body was still subject to aging but the results were simply shocking. So I pushed myself to work harder, and Xavier became more and more intrusive on my research, making me feel as if I was suffocating under pressure.

Then I discovered the reason behind his intrusion. L'Oreal was planning to buy Synthelabo, a French pharmaceutical company that was renowned for its research in dermatology. That was why Xavier needed to know all the points he could bank on before heading into the acquisition. In addition, my research would have had to be combined into the one of Synthelabo. The message was very clear, freedom to complete my research in private was diminishing."

"How did you manage to defend your independence?"

"L'Oreal acquired Synthelabo in 1973, and then all of the usual company integration problems surfaced; redundant research projects, competition among different teams and the like. On my end, more and more time wasted on company turf wars. And then came the death of my father, which reopened my eyes to focus on my actual goal. If you believe in fate, that was a sign. So I made up my mind, and I decided it was high time to switch up my career again.

I went to Xavier's office and asked to leave the company. It was time for me to setup my own shop and, with the respectable amount of money I had earned so far, I would ask Hans Klettendorf to become his partner at "Le Jardin de Venus."

The explanation I gave Hans for the abrupt change, was that it was time for me to fulfill my entrepreneurial dream. I emphasized the fact that I was bringing a good amount of capital, knowledge, and experience to increase the clinic business and set up its own exclusive cosmetic lab.

The key advantage of teaming up with me, for Hans, was that he would secure a solid future for his business, at seventy-two years old. This implied that his two sons - neither showing interest to follow in their father's footsteps - could continue to benefit from the profits, while devoting themselves to their favorite hobbies. Only Xavier knew the real reason for my leave, and kept this as the focus during our last meeting.

"Louis," he said, "I admire your commitment but have you ever considered all the consequences? I mean, it could go wrong."

"You mean, what if I do not end up with solid results? Well, you know, people will move on from where I left..."

"No, Louis, what if you succeed and you find your potion of eternal life? You are either ignoring the implications, or simply pretending there are none.

Do you think you can sort it out by publishing an article in Nature magazine, like your heroes Francis and Crick did, and then wait for the Nobel Prize and that's it?"

"Of course not, Xavier. It will be incomparably larger than Penicillin; a revolution."

"Far more than a revolution. Think about it. Everything is based on this very simple and undeniable truth, that we are mortals. Life is just a brief journey, then you go to Hell, or Heaven, or nowhere, but you make room for somebody else. Everything is programmed around this. And if you succeed, the whole system collapses. There is maybe far more to lose than to gain, from a human standpoint, of course."

"Well, I agree it won't be easy to adapt to, but this is the ultimate goal for me and I believe for all of us. Plus, we are almost there. I feel it. The criminal act, or rather the inhumane one, would be to give up for fear, Xavier. And honestly, I am quite surprised that this objection comes from an enlightened and rational person like yourself."

"I know I can't stop you, Louis. This is your passion. But please think. And watch out. It could become very dangerous for you, and those around you. And do not hesitate to come back if you need help."

We never got in touch again. The next time I would see Xavier, would be at his funeral in 1985. He died in a car crash, and by that time I had already been testing the first versions of Telomerax on myself for a few years.

I find it quite ironic how I arrived at the ceremony as the first immortal being on Earth, being proven against by the unpreventable death of my friend. Yet Xavier had made a good point. From that moment on, I was no longer under the protection of a company. I was at high seas, with a powerful treasure that had to be defended from a multitude of threats, by any means necessary. The first mission was to keep it a secret.
Chapter 3

"The Swiss period, if we can call it that, started in 1973 with your arrival at the Klettendorf clinic and lasted more than forty years until you were forced to leave the country in 2017. How would you describe it, looking back?"

"We can roughly divide it into three main parts. In the first fifteen years, I was mainly focused on completing the development of Telomerax and consolidating the clinic research activity.

Then, from the late eighties to around 2010, most of my attention went into creating the network that was necessary to protect the Telomerax secret. The last years were all about fighting off the effects of information leakage that made me, my family, and my friends, subjective to of all kinds of attention from big governments, big corporations, and big crime from all over the world. This eventually endangered our security and survival.

It was a period of increasing anxiety and fear. Without a doubt, the first ten years were the best ones. The clinic had a very competent staff, and performing my duties as lab director was a satisfying job that left me plenty of time to experiment.

I had brought along with me a lot of machinery from L'Oreal and I purposely organized the research activity in a way that doctors and technicians working with me, could not get the full picture. At times, I was sending some of the experiment results to Rodney Gilmore, a research associate who I had met in Cambridge back in the sixties and who had become a professor of biochemistry.

By 1977, I had modified the Telomerax prototype so that it was now possible to employ telomerase not only in skin cells but in a number of other tissues like muscles, kidneys, the nervous system, and liver. But at the same time this information was becoming more and more public. In 1978, Elizabeth Blackburn and her Yale colleagues published the analysis about telomeres that would win them the Nobel Prize in 2009.

After reading the article I immediately called Rodney and asked him if my correspondence with him had any part of this. He thought I was angry because my work was not mentioned at all in the bibliography and that I was looking to get part of the credit, so he immediately became defensive.

"Well, Louis, you know, I did not quite understand what you were saying in your correspondence and this Australian girl we have here, at Darwin College, is really bright. I just thought she might have a look at it. She could get some insight for her own research, too. You know, I am a professor. You have your clinic, I did not think it would be a big issue if your name did not appear in the bibliography. And anyway, it was private correspondence..."

"I am not looking for any damn glory, Rodney! If I had been, I would not have left Cavendish lab back in 1962. The fact is, I am working for Dr. Klettendorf and I have sworn to secrecy since this is part of our cosmetic research. This article could end my career. Just please do me a favor and keep my name out of the references and please trash all of our correspondence. I cannot afford to put my job at risk. Is that clear, Rodney?"

"I am sorry, I did not mean to put you in trouble. Elizabeth has been working here at Cambridge since 1975. I have never seen someone as gifted as her in biochemistry so when I went through your last letter I asked her to go over your key points, especially in those paragraphs where you describe the way to synthesize the new enzyme. I simply had no idea how to build the verification experiment, so I just asked for a little advice."

"Did you give her a copy of my paper, Rodney? This could cost me my position and more. I do not want to restart at age forty-four."

"What the hell, Louis, of course not. I understand the difference between private letters and open research."

"All right, then. Let's close it here. But please tell me before sharing anything next time. I need to know what's going on."

Apparently I was convincing enough, because no reference to my name or research ever appeared in any official scientific journal. But just as a precaution, I stopped all scientific exchanges with Rodney and other scholars and over time, even the personal ones, slowly but surely severing all ties with my past.

In 1980, I reached the final breakthrough. The drug could now cover all human tissue and my cooperative guinea pigs would take it by applying the occasional skin cream treatment commonly used at every beauty clinic. Once Telomerax was absorbed into the skin, it slowly diffused into the rest of the body, effectively stopping the aging process.

The next step was to run extensive clinical experiments to test if there were side effects after applying the cream. This took place between 1980 and 1984. I would start taking Telomerax myself, toward the end of 1983. Only after the first round of experiments showed no major drawbacks."

"Yet in your research journal you describe some nasty collateral effects, like the results that confirmed existing tumors develop much faster after treatment with Telomerax."

"Indeed. Tumors are to some extent the precursors of immortality. They are made up of cells that keep replicating uncontrollably fast, without aging, making them unstoppable. In addition, they have much higher levels of telomerase. Eleven of my patients, which is roughly two percent of everyone involved in the clinical trials, already had some form of cancer which they were unaware of before being exposed to the treatment.

After leaving the clinic, their tumors developed much faster than expected, establishing a strong connection between Telomerax and cancer progress. As a result, I modified the drug so that you were required to take it regularly in small doses and then eventually I transformed it into a pill. This made it so much easier to use, without the extensive process of bathing in a tub full of cream.

Finally, allow me to comment on the expenses. My initial Telomerax prototypes costed me about $1500 per treatment, for every one of my patients. This was equivalent to what we charged for a day at the clinic, including accommodation. By 1990, I had been able to slash that cost by fifty percent. Immortality was getting cheap."

"Don't you feel guilty for those eleven people whose lives were actually shortened by the Telomerax experimentation?"

"Not really, honestly. There are many other things I feel more guilty about, looking at how the story unfolded. Remember, these people were all aware we were testing experimental cosmetics on them. It is true they did not know my true intentions, but it may as well have been a simple skin care treatment that could have increased their likelihood to get cancer.

On top of that, the precautions I took in developing Telomerax were much more serious than those I used for ordinary products. Of course, I do regret not having understood the connection between Telomerax and cancer before, so that I could have saved some of them....but I did not give up on my main goal, to give my patients an extended lifetime in exchange for some unpredictable and unavoidable experimental risks."

"Then with new discoveries, came the need for further discretion."

"Secrecy meant many things. First, I had to protect the work from my partner, Mr. Klettendorf, which was easy. He could not understand the work behind my research, and because of my responsibility, it was relatively easy to bury the costs of the Telomerax development into the overall cosmetics lab costs. Things became a bit more complicated during the clinic test phase, when Telomerax production required almost three million dollars over four years and accounted for nearly ten percent of the overall clinic costs.

Fortunately Hans was well into his eighties and his sons did not get involved with the clinic, so with just minor tweaks, I was able to keep it under the surface. Then Hans passed away in 1988 and I took over all executive and financial responsibility of the business. This basically secured me from any inside risk, because it would be impossible for anyone to spot what was really going on by just looking at the records.

The real issue was protecting the secret of the formula. On the day of the burial of Xavier, I thought about how he was right to have feared my success.

Luckily, I was living in a country that has made protecting secrets and their bearers, a national mission. My private banker came up with a strategic plan. I stored all of my key research documents and synthesis process in an armored safe with a coded lock. I then let my bank pick a notary, whose name they did not disclose to me, to keep the safe in custody. I then brought the code and a sealed envelope, enclosing the name of the notary to a different bank. That bank chose another notary, also unknown to me, to guard the code.

If I did not check back with the banks, by phone, on a monthly basis and in person at least twice a year, they would tell their respective notaries to recover the safe and have the codes sent in to open it. Together with the scientific documentation, there were clear instructions to send copies to all the major European newspapers and research institutions. Repeat that process ten times, and by 1987 I had ten copies of my research under the custody of ten notaries, that had the content but no easy way to access it and another ten who had the codes but no easy access to the content.

If anything bad happened to me, the result was that Telomerax would become public domain. As I did not know who the notaries were, there was no danger of anyone threatening or torturing me to reveal my secret."

"And how about the manufacturing facility at the clinic? Could anyone interested in the secret just break into the lab, steal the pills, and find the drug formula?"

"After more than twenty years of work I knew the production process by heart and I did not need anything unordinary to run it. All that the occasional men in black might have found, would be just basic components common at any pharmaceutical lab.

Obviously, I would not have done any of this without an agreement. I was basically banking on the assumption that any organization interested in Telomerax would also have had a clear interest in keeping it a secret. So no matter how evil their intention may have seemed, we would have had this crucial goal in common. Removing me from the equation against my will meant immediate public availability to the formula.

At the time, I could only come up with a few ways how the drug could have gone public. The first, being my sudden death in a totally unexpected catastrophe like an accident, or natural disaster. Otherwise, through a failed negotiation with an unreasonable party. Or, perhaps, the chance of someone actually wanting to take it public.

In the first case scenario, I told myself it would have been fate's desire to let all mankind share my legacy. As for the other two, I figured that this would show the presence of such extreme corruption and ignorance that mankind would desperately need this gift.

However, I did not consider the fact that showed up later on, that I would become the prime target of hatred for years after my discovery went public. Then, there was also the time factor. This secret had to be kept over a long period of time, for as long as I would live. Hanging around your neighborhood at age ninety, running a clinic looking barely forty, could get suspicious. Even if people know you are a genius in the business of cosmetics.

Because of this, I knew I had to figure out a way that allowed me to completely change identity and start a new life somewhere else, every thirty or forty years. I immediately realized that the tricky part was not so much transferring the assets and the money, but rather creating a believable story around it, to give the new Louis a real past. I would need assistance from people knowledgeable in the functions of secret services, security agencies, and organized crime. Basically, I could not do this alone. I needed to build a small and extremely trustworthy network of...let's say, 'immortal guardians', whose one mission was to keep Telomerax hidden.

But, unlike biochemistry, this area was unfamiliar to me and maybe it is no surprise that despite the caution I took, and the initial success, this is the part that did not go as smoothly as I had hoped."
Chapter 4

"Was your second wife, Dora, aware of the nature and extent of your work?"

"She was not aware of all the details until 1995, which means thirteen years after our marriage, eleven years after Telomerax was stable, and ten years since I started giving it to her without her knowing. It is worth explaining how I organized this phenomenon, because it marked the beginning of the immortal generation.

I met her in the summer of 1980. She came to the clinic as the rich, young, and somehow bored wife of Johann Feldstein, a respected lawyer and professor at the University of Basel.

She was the daughter of Jacob Bershidsky, a German-speaking Sudeten Jew, who was freed by Allied troops in Dachau. He came back to his Sudeten homeland just to, then, be driven out by the Czechs. He eventually moved to Freiburg, where he worked as a shoemaker. He opted for his German side, decided to forget his past, by declaring no religious affiliation, and eventually became a West German citizen and married Elke Freising. She was a widow who had lost her husband on the Eastern front and now had to settle for a second marriage with a renegade Jew, because she badly needed help to raise her small child, Helmut.

Dora was born in 1953 and lived an uneventful childhood in the German province of the "Wirtschaftswunder", the post-war economic miracle. Her parents decided to keep their former lives hidden and Dora sensed a clear preference her mother had for her elder brother, Helmut. She went to college, where she met her first husband, who was a brilliant professor in commercial law and was ten years older than her. Shortly after they married in 1976, her father called her aside and told her the truth about himself and her mother. He could no longer bear keeping the facts hidden, as his wife was slowly being killed by the Alzheimer's disease and he was afraid Dora would find out the wrong way, if he was not the one to tell her.

She was shocked by the news and almost broke off her relationship with her father. Even worse, she was not able to tell her husband. She felt he was continuously absorbed by his career and their relationship was quietly cooling down after the first months full of passion.

When she entered the clinic, her soul was a complete existential wreck but she was still a very attractive woman; tall, voluptuous and elegant. Her head was crowned by a forest of long, curly brown hair that reminded me of a Greek goddess, but her face was veiled in sadness that emanated from her icy eyes. Even though I was more committed than ever to my research, I could not resist the temptation to invite her to the 'terrace dinner'.

This was a huge celebration held by the clinic that had been started by Dr. Klettendorf and consisted of a lavish meal, taking place every Wednesday evening.

The event was held for the clinic's most valuable customers, on the beautiful terrace on the top floor, overlooking the Lake of Geneva.

We had on average fifty to sixty guests who would spend one or two weeks at Le Jardin, and we would personally choose who would attend the dinner. There were two main purposes.

First, we wanted to create a deeper sense of exclusivity among the already exclusive clients that chose to stay at the beauty farm. Second, we carefully selected the guests to create a network of connections which we could count on, in the future.

Of course there were some golden rules in the selection process. First, newcomers would typically not be allowed to the dinner. You needed to be a regular customer. Next, invitees had to bring something interesting to the table. We were not interested in the "simply rich". They needed to have stories, or skills, or personalities that made them unique. Lastly, all the previous rules notwithstanding, everyone at the dinner had to be liked by myself and Dr. Klettendorf.

Hans started to spend less and less time at the clinic, leaving me in charge of the terrace dinner. So I broke the rule and invited Dora to the terrace after her first visit. Let me cut it short and keep a bit of privacy here. What matters for the rest of the story is that the next year she divorced her first husband, and we married in 1983.

Beyond physical attraction, we shared a deep dissatisfaction on the way life was organized, and also a resolve to change it.

While I was engaged in my personal struggle against the deaths among my loved ones, Dora held a grudge against the lies humans constantly tell each other which, in turn, make our lives miserable. Knowing this about her, I had to tell her something about my work, yet I could not risk a full disclosure.

On the eve of our marriage, I took her to the lab and explained that I was doing more than simple cosmetics and I was actually involved in a secret research about aging. I could not tell her more, but I would in due time. She had either to trust me, or leave me. After hearing these words she froze, and for a long minute I thought she was gone. The Dr. Picard she loved had a secret he was not yet prepared to tell the world, not even his future wife.

Then she asked me, "Ok, tell me just two things. Can you promise me that you are not hurting anyone and that when the day comes I will be the first to know?"

I responded happily, "Yes! No lies."

"And I have a further request. I would appreciate you to finance my degree in psychology and my psychoanalysis, so that I can set up my psychoanalyst practice in a private studio here at the clinic. I have a simpler goal than you, just to help people get out of their own lies."

"That is a done deal. Frankly, your mission looks more impossible than mine."

She kissed me, and we happily married the following day.

Chapter 5

"Yet this was just the revelation that you had work in progress. How did you manage the full disclosure?"

"She would ask me every few months how my research was going. I would give vague answers about some progress.

In 1985, once I was sure there would be no negative outcomes, I asked her if she would like to join the experiment. She accepted, so I took a close-up picture of her sitting on the terrace, flooded with the spring sun, and we continued our lives. From time to time I would ask her to take a beauty cream bath and then the pills. During the occasional request for an update, she would add a comment that she was not feeling any different.

Then on April 25, 1995, I took another close-up picture of her and put it next to the one taken ten years before. She stared in silence. After a while she whispered, "Wow, Louis, well you are certainly on to something. What's next?"

"I guess we need to keep quiet and wait for a while. A very long while, in all likeliness. Do you think people are ready for this to go public?"

She immediately responded, "Not if I recall our conversations with the terrace guests, nor if I look at my patients. But we risk waiting forever."

"True. We might have a difficult quest in front of us. Even if during the last few years, things in the world have improved a lot. We might still need to wait several years before we bring this to light. And the two of us cannot do it alone. We need to build a bigger team."

"Build a team...with some of our friends? How would you pick them?"

"Let's profile them first. We need to like and trust them. And they have to contribute the skills and connections we do not have, in case we have to disappear and reappear under new identities. But by this alone, the list would contain many names.

Next, they have to be absolutely committed to keeping the secret. We do not need the idealists or believers in the progression of mankind, nor those who could try to use the discovery just for their own benefit. You know that among our guests, the opportunistic crooks far outnumber the naive philanthropists."

I continued, having this checklist memorized by heart,

"We must search for disenchanted people, yet with a very strong sense of their value so that given the right challenge they will fully commit themselves."

"Yes, I agree. You are asking these people to form the first generation of a new mankind - if we can still even call it that. They must stay quiet until the time is right. This is the biggest secret, with the biggest reward, and the biggest risks."

"At the end of the day, the deal is very simple. I give them immortality in exchange for their service to the organization and they are free to do whatever they want with their Telomerax, without telling anyone about the discovery."

"But they will still depend on you to get the drug. How do you know this won't provoke rivalry or resentment?"

"That's why you will not find any scientist among them. I want to avoid any risk of professional competition. The team needs talents we do not have. Too much similarity brings rivalry; differences are much more manageable.

As for the drug, I will give them as much Telomerax as they want. I will never stand between them and immortality, as long as they help protect us. After all, you do not grow jealous of the doctor that heals you."

"Ok, Louis, but how about emotional ties?

You cannot ask people to become immortal and just pretend they will be willing to leave their loved ones behind, or that they will not fall in love over the course of centuries, even if they are the most materialistic people on earth. You can handpick them with no relatives now, but what if they change ideas, get lonely and want out of the project, or fall in love and want their new significant other onboard?

Maybe somebody with the wrong characteristics?

I mean, you trust me now but can you trust me forever? You know you can't. Even I cannot commit to that. Fifteen years together have made me sure enough to commit the rest of my life to you. Now we are talking about eternity, and honestly I do not know if I can do that. No lies, Louis."

"I agree with you that from this standpoint, we must reduce risks. Let's put some facts together.

The drug is not a one-time deal. If you stop taking it, aging restarts after a few weeks and you are back in the mortal ranks. So people can opt out if they want, or even opt back in. I do not want to threaten anyone with things like 'if you are out, we will kill you.'

Violence is not my thing. I just want to make sure the secret is kept. The drug is made in such a way that you cannot deformulate it. I spent the last ten years tweaking it so that any attempt to analyze it or break down its molecular structure, would destroy it.

And it is even harder to track how it works once it is absorbed into the body. The real issue is how to discourage them from telling governments or organized crime groups about Telomerax whereabouts.

They will know that there are ten very well hidden copies of the drug formula and its manufacturing process, waiting to be released to the world if anything bad happens to me or you. They used to be stored in clunky safes, now they are kept in sleek cases with ten floppy disks inside. That way, if any one of our future team members sends me additional and unwelcomed guests, I have enough leeway to negotiate with the new entrants. And those who betrayed our trust, might soon be on the black list of the newcomers they tried to put against us."

"I see sleeping with an analyst has taught you something, Louis," she joked. "How about children? I was planning not to have them, but this is opening up new opportunities."

"Children can be given immortality only when they become adults. This is due to the fact that I have not run any experimentation on them and I am afraid Telomerax could have very nasty side effects on a developing body. I do not think this is a problem. You do not want to freeze your kids at age two. Then parents have about twenty to twenty-five years to work out a way to tell them about the secret and enroll them in the program, or otherwise, let them go."

"Back to our interview, Louis, we all know that at the end of the process only four clients of the list made it into the so-called "Olympic Circle", with two of them being allowed to add their significant others. That makes six people in total. Do you have anything to share about the Olympic Circle that maybe the media didn't cover?"

"Where do I start?...Well, let's go in chronological order. One of the least known parts, is the way Dora and I recruited them. What happened after we were discovered in 2010, has been covered in several books and movies. But, just for the record, I did not invent the name "Olympic Circle". That was made up much later by some tabloids. True secrecy requires no name."

Chapter 6

Tarek made his first appearance at the clinic, in the spring of 1979. He was with a group of Arabian women, and his passport said he was an Egyptian Air Force officer. It turned out that he was taking care of all their needs, behaving like the perfect tourist guide. He would have gone unnoticed if he had not reappeared in 1981 and then again in 1983; each time with a different group of Middle Eastern women and mysteriously keeping a respectful distance away from them. He had earned an invitation, and when I requested his presence on the terrace, he did not object to attend the dinner alone.

During the first dinner, he introduced himself as a retired air force officer, who had served in the war of 1973 piloting Russian-made MiG jets against Israeli Mirage fighters. Then when he retired, he was allowed to keep his status of Colonel on the passport, even though he was no longer active duty. He pretended to work as a middleman in the Middle East, with a special focus on Syria and Lebanon, where the civil war was restarting in the aftermath of the Israeli occupation of 1982.

From then on, he kept returning alone and I kept inviting him. It was not until 1987, over a glass of Grand Marnier at the end of the dinner, that he talked more about his real life.

His family belonged to the inner circle of Gamal Nasser and even after the fall of the president, caused by the catastrophic defeat in the 1967 war, he and his father had managed to keep superior positions in the regime.

Being an essential part of the Air Force chief of staff, he helped design the air attacks that in 1973, put Egypt very close to winning the war. Despite the military success, the war of 1973 turned out to be an even worse experience than the one of 1967. He lost his younger brother in the Sinai desert, where he was serving as a brigade commander, then shortly afterwards his mother died from the anguish.

Aside from these personal tragedies, Tarek believed Egypt should make peace with Israel and as soon as the Camp David Accords ended the war, he left the Air Force.

Due to his vast network, he was able to help a number of Middle Eastern regimes improve their military capabilities.

Over time, his hard work earned him the trust of his most important clients, to the extent that they would request him to escort their daughters and sisters on their trips to Europe.

"You know, back in the seventies it was much easier. It was enough just to go to Beirut to breathe some Western freedom, then the civil war destroyed everything and Europe was the only place left for the rich Arabs to catch a break."

On October 6, 1981, Tarek suffered another blow when his father was killed by a Kalashnikov round, fired during the attack by the Muslim Brothers that left Egyptian President Anwar Sadat dead, along with eleven other elite officers.

"I was alone with my wife and two kids and felt Egypt was no longer the place for me to stay. A dark cloud was starting to loom over the whole region so I packed all my belongings and moved to the Gulf. In 1982 we moved to Bahrein, where business opportunities skyrocketed for people like me, thanks to the ongoing Iraq-Iran war."

"Do you remember the Iran-Contra case where the CIA, with the help of Israel, sold weapons to Iran to finance their secret war against Marxist regimes in Central America? Well, it was just one of the many unorthodox trades in town. My main area of expertise was in the organization of the air defense for Iraq, where I worked a lot with French and Soviet advisers. I also dealt with negotiations between Iran and the United Arab Emirates.

At the time, one particularly flourishing business was the market of forged identities for wealthy exiles and spies in and out of the region. It was nearly impossible for the US and Great Britain to infiltrate native agents in Iran, so they had only two ways to get around it. First, was to rely on the networks of allies, like France or Italy or Germany, with the risk of getting second-handed or false information.

Their second option was to train agents that looked and talked like native Europeans or Middle Easterners, and build them a perfect cover story in a different nation. To do this properly you needed the help of the host country to make sure the details of the picture fitted together; from the social security number to the name of his parents. Printing a fake passport was the last thing to worry about.

The same problem appeared on the opposite side. From Iran, there were spies, traitors and outlaws who needed to rebuild a life without the attention of the Iranian secret police. As long as they could speak Arabic fluently, I could quickly put together a background story with the help of the Egyptian secret service.

For those with an Azerbaijan background, Turkey was given the responsibility to naturalize them as Turks due to the cultural proximity. Armenians were typically taken care of by the French. In any case, there was a mutual exchange between secret services which gave them access to each other's "fake identity warehouses".

"Why would they come to you? Couldn't they just talk to each other?"

"Of course, and in many cases they would. The CIA does not need me to ask a favor to the British MI6 or the Mossad. But Iranians had a bit more trouble in directly approaching their counterparts.

They had a station in Bahrain that they used as outpost to talk to other Arab countries of the Gulf, mainly Saudi Arabia. After the war with Iraq broke out, Bahrain and Kuwait became the equivalent of Istanbul and Lisbon during World War II in Europe. They knew I was working for Iraq but I had purposely built my reputation as a professional and not as a partisan, so they would feel comfortable to approach me.

I gave them access to the Egyptians and the French and, in return, my importance in the eyes of the British and the Americans grew enormously. To put it short, Louis, if you happen to pass by the Middle East and run into trouble, just drop me a call. Chances are, I can help you out no matter what."

This was exactly what I was looking for, so I decided to put Tarek on Telomerax immediately. But a test was required, before the full disclosure. The key test, which Tarek was completely unaware of, took place in October of 1993, just after the Oslo agreement between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization of Yasser Arafat. He was back at the clinic with his wife, and during the dinner I deliberately started playing good cop.

"Tarek, it looks like you will soon be out of business. Saddam Hussein is under control, confined in his own country. The Berlin wall has fallen and no one can dispute the supremacy of the US. The Soviet Union is transitioning with difficulty, but in peace, to a more democratic and liberal regime. I am afraid I won't see you again, as you will move back to Beirut beauty shops."

"Louis, you do not have to worry at all. I am sure all of this is going to end in my favor. You are disregarding the underlying factors. They entail more tension and conflict."

"You mean, the terrorists might backfire?"

"I am giving you a synopsis, not talking about specifics, but nothing in the groundwork is set in the right direction."

"Nothing? I mean, Tarek, communism is dead, economic growth is more robust than ever, and people are rushing to re-establish freedom everywhere.."

"People rush to re-establish what they were already used to and what they liked. In Yugoslavia, people are more interested in settling old nationalist scores, rather than in restoring democracy and rule of law. Just look at the massacre in Sarajevo. The Middle East is no exception.

Over the last forty years, governments have tried to modernize society in vain. They are now steadily losing territory, power, and influence to those that want to restore traditional order.

Saudi Arabia is full of resentment against America after having been saved by Saddam.

But I am wasting my time and yours. Here in the West, you just cannot understand."

"I understand very well that the Saudi regime is certainly not a liberal one, but given some time..."

"You see? You use the word regime, and you immediately imply alot of other things.

For example, that people do not like the system but cannot change it due to lack of power. Also, that if given the right conditions they would transform it into something like Switzerland, except with a lot of sand instead of snow. You refuse to see the reality. The simple fact is that the vast majority of Saudis, Iranians, and Syrians do not call it a regime. They call it a government and you know why?

Because they are all in all satisfied with the life they are living, and no matter how imperfect these governments may seem, they see them as the best guarantee to preserve their traditions and values against a number of external threats. These threats include things like the multinational oil companies and pornography. However, I am not saying they are right. I am saying this is how they see, feel, and therefore are. And you cannot change it....at least for now. It would take generations to change a culture, so we would certainly not witness it in our lifetimes."

"All right, but at least between the Israelis and the Palestinians things are going better and this will eventually reduce tensions."

"Ah yes, our cousins! I am not optimistic about them, either. I know you won't believe me, but I will tell you anyway. This peace agreement is a much bigger danger for them than for the Palestinians. They risk losing the single, biggest reason of their unity, the enemy from outside. I swear, the Israeli leaders, Shimon Peres and Ytzhak Rabin, have much more to fear from their fellow citizens than from their old enemy, Yasser Arafat."

"Tarek, I cannot agree. You are speaking out of past resentment, and although I understand it, I cannot justify it."

"You will see, Louis. Nobody is ready for peace because they all live with war. And people always choose what they know, and what keeps them alive. Even if this requires some sacrifice from time to time. Simply put, people never grow up."

On November 4, 1995, Ygal Amir, a right-winged Orthodox Jew assassinated Yitzhak Rabin at a pro-peace demonstration in Tel Aviv. The morning after, I called Tarek at his new office in Dubai. After a few rings he picked up the phone.

"Hi, Louis. Too bad I did not bet anything with you last time we discussed about future events..."

"I will give you a reward anyway. One free week stay at 'Le Jardin' for you and your family, for the Christmas season. I have to talk to you about a few things over dinner."
Chapter 7

Our second recruit, Valerio Orsini, was born in Rome in 1952, as the heir of a declining yet very respectable family of the Roman aristocracy. In the tense social climate of the seventies, his beliefs started sliding to the far right and he began attending the rallies of neofascist organizations.

His mother realized the danger he was exposed to, and shortly after he got a degree in Political Science, she managed to find him a job at the Vatican press office. Then in 1977 he met Anna, who became his long-term girlfriend. His brilliant intelligence and manners quickly earned him many connections both inside and outside the Vatican, to the extent that in 1980 he was approached by the Italian Secret Service. They were looking for insider knowledge on where the newly elected, Pope John Paul II, intended to lead the Church in the struggle against Communism.

He politely declined and he was thinking about reporting the story to the Secretary of State, when he received a call by a man who called himself Alberto, asking to see him in person. They met at the Pincio gardens, in the center of Rome, and on the balcony overlooking Piazza del Popolo, Alberto showed him a set of photos that revealed to him that Anna was not only his girlfriend but also the mistress of the all powerful Cardinal D.

"I know how you feel," Alberto said in a whisper. "Your world is falling apart. We do not want to blackmail you. It is not your fault at all. And we won't tell Anna either. These pictures will build up the file on Cardinal D. in case we ever need some help from him in the future. But we want to give you a chance.

Either you continue with your fiction, pretending things are the way they were or you embrace reality and start playing the predator instead of the prey. You have to decide for yourself."

Over the following years, the network of Valerio kept growing and he never asked for money in exchange for the information he was giving. He only asked for more connections and introductions. In 1983 he broke up with Anna and by 1986 he also left the Vatican, setting up his own public relation and consultancy agency, which quickly grew in the booming Italian economy of the eighties.

He arrived at the clinic for the first time in 1986 and took part in his first dinner in the spring of 1988.

He grabbed my attention by predicting that the Berlin Wall would fall in one year.

"You mean, it is not going to last another ten years?"

"I mean what I said, Louis. One year from now, give or take three months. This is the consensus in my community, and they rarely guess wrong."

"Your community...would that consist of journalists and those involved in the media?"

"They are also part of the community, but are not the most significant ones. At my agency you listen to all kind of stories; many of them fake, many of them true. Some are secrets that cannot get around, others get out precisely to make them known in the most appropriate way. The US and the Soviet Union have signed the peace treaty. Obviously, the US has won, so the Berlin Wall will fall."

"But nothing hints to that happening any time soon! The Soviet Union has an army stationed in East Germany. Will they just sit and watch?"

"The Soviets have been bankrupt since 1985, after the Saudis eagerly complied with the US request to set the price of the barrel of oil at ten dollars. Of course, it was not an act of charity! They got huge market share in exchange. And this also pleased China that has to fuel its massive industrialization, even if people here won't realize this for the next ten years.

You do not need to be a genius or a spy to know that, yet people get convinced by the muscular, cowboy side of the story. That's why Reagan had to rearm and launch the Star Wars bullshit that will fill some deep pockets in the military industry.

Anyway, the Wall comes down next year, believe me. And it will be peaceful."

"Peaceful? I told you, there is the Red Army in East Berlin!"

"It has to be. Otherwise Soviets would not be allowed to disengage quickly and they cannot afford to be pulled in any type of confrontation just to save the ass of some local red dictator. These guys will be given few choices; either surrender to the new era in their countries, or get a one-way ticket to Moscow if they feel they are not safe in the New World. Any other option they might think of, would be too risk."

"So all what we read in the news in a deliberate lie? You are telling me that conspiracy theorists are right, the men in black are secretly running the world?"

"Not at all. Most of my colleagues write and report in absolute good faith. The point is, it matters what side of reality you show and what information you let out. And as far as conspiracies are concerned, there are lots of them, everywhere; creating all sorts of dissimulations. The only thing that is missing is the great mastermind behind it all. And there is no one. In my position, I would know.

All I see is a giant game of conspiracy and counter conspiracy, with varying degrees of success, but where no one ultimately controls the outcomes and where you have to be quick to take action if the opportunity arises."

"But somehow we do not want to face this and then we invent things like the Great Architect....when in reality no one is in control."

"Exactly. We have our eyes fixed on Gorbatchev, Bush, and Kohl but who knows, maybe the one who will make history in the next twenty years is hiding in a cave in Afghanistan, and the founder of the next big religion that will replace Christianity and Islam has just passed away in a remote Indian village. Then our descendants will realize this in two hundred years, assuming we do not commit suicide before then."

"Valerio," Dora jumped in, "I sense a type of regret, or more like disenchantment in your words."

"Well, you know, I learn lots of things every day that would give the average person a feeling of unlimited access to the mysteries of history. In fact, even hundreds of years after the occurrence of events, historians keep coming back in search of answers.

So over the years my desire has become less passionate. I would be happy just to bump into one story that could become the story of the next few hundred years or even the next few decades. You know, in the Northeast of Italy, some rivers flow underground and randomly surface a few kilometers before they reach the sea.

I am looking for a story that is like an underground river that becomes the new sea where everybody wants to sail. I am afraid, though, that this is just wishful thinking."

"And if you found it, what would you do? Just dig and make it headline news?"

"If the river is deep underground, chances are that the public would not believe it. And exposing it to light too early could even harm it. It would be a once in a lifetime opportunity, where mankind can marvel in how history unfolds. You should look at this story with an open eye, and not biased views."

In the spring of 1996, I called Valerio in his Rome office. He was in the middle of the buzz of commentaries on the Italian general election that had been won by the center left party, which gave power to the former Communist party for the first time.

"Hi Valerio, I think I have found a story that beats your underground river."

I had barely finished my sentence when I could already hear Valerio shout to his secretary to find him a place on the first flight to Geneva.

Chapter 8

George McKilroy was the name of our third recruit. He was born in Chicago, in 1955, as the first born of a single mother who managed to send him to college by working long hours. George was very good at math and after getting his bachelors at Northwestern University, he won a scholarship at Caltech in Los Angeles, California.

He fell in love with the Silicon Valley lifestyle and after his master in game theory in 1977, he started looking for the most promising startups. He joined Apple as their twenty-first employee, and left three years later in 1980, after the new Apple shares had made him rich.

With this initial capital, he joined Sausalito Ventures, a small firm which he helped develop into a two-hundred million dollar one, which was later sold to Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, one of the Valley titans.

By the age of thirty-five, George was already known in Silicon Valley, with his enemies putting him down as a very lucky lone rider and his friends praising him as the business god.

He arrived at the clinic for the first time in the winter of 1985, driving a BMW that caught the attention of everybody. Not so much for its size, but for the obnoxious phone that was installed on his dashboard.

George eagerly showed off the phone, and soon all the guests were curious. Some people said he was one of the many diplomats working in the surroundings of Geneva, while others associated him with finance, very few guessed technology.

For me, moving around with a phone in the car was not enough to guarantee admittance to the terrace, but when he popped up again the year after with the same BMW but a different, smaller, and more futuristic phone, I gave in to my own curiosity and invited him to the next dinner.

To my great surprise, I discovered that he had come back with the very specific goal of getting invited to my special event.

"Dr. Picard," he said, "last year I did my research and learned about your terrace admission rules. I thought, wow, this guy must be a great man of networking, worth getting to know better. So I came back and if you would not have invited me this time, I would not have returned next year."

"You can call me Louis," I smiled. "It is a privilege I give only to people who demonstrate self-confidence, and you definitely belong there."

"You need to be like that, when your job is all about selling innovations."

"Like being able to place and receive calls from anywhere? I noticed the phone is much smaller than it used to be last year. Maybe in a few years time, you can put it in your pocket."

"As a matter of fact, one of the companies I am investing in right now with my venture capital fund, is developing some vital parts of the software and hardware needed to make mobile phones work. You will never see us in the shops with our brand, but I can assure you that all phone companies are depending on us big time. Are you also active in the technology startup sector? You grasped the concept with remarkable speed. Something I do not see often, not even in California."

"Well, you know. We are also active in technology, but it is more along the lines of biotechnology. We hand make products for our own use, and we do not plan to sell or license any of our findings. At least, not in the near future."

"I see. And who are your competitors, if I may ask?"

"I do not believe we have real competitors, honestly. Our cosmetic research is very much tailored to each of our customers' requirements. Of course, we compete with many other beauty farms here in the area, but we do not try to copy each other's products. We try to offer our own unique atmosphere. Imitation can be dangerous."

"That's interesting, because in the technology market, and especially during startup, there are some golden rules. The first one is obvious, you need a creative idea and a good team able to carry it out. The second one is less obvious, you have to make sure someone else is following in your tracks or at least trying to create something similar."

"That would be a major problem for me," Louis answered, his thoughts drifting away for a second.

"Louis, you will never create a market otherwise! There is no market without competitors. Of course you want to be the best, but if you are alone no one will ever understand your product and you will not go anywhere. Imagine if tomorrow you discover the best cosmetic product ever, the recipe for eternal life.

If you do not tell the market, it simply does not exist. As soon as you say you have this new killer product, rest assured a flock of competitors will pop up, pretending they also have it.

Some of them will be only wannabes, looking to get their hands on money, but some others will end up with similar products. The point is, you have the market! And market defines value, the amount you can sell your product for, and your reputation, too."

"I like your example. Do you really think you can sell it on the market? I mean, the potion of eternal life?"

"Ok, I agree. Maybe I went too far, but you can certainly find something that makes you look forty when you are seventy, or perhaps gives you an extra twenty years added to your life, or extends your sexual potency....you are the expert here."

"George, I worked for years at L'Oreal before setting up shop here. I can guide you, if you want to enter the biotech field and you would be surprised to learn how reasonable my fees would be.

Nevertheless, why would you balk at the idea of launching the potion of eternal life into the market? You plan to put a phone in the pocket of each of us, after all. Maybe, with time, your techno wizards will also manage to fit a small computer inside. And so why not the potion of eternal life?"

George was amused at the idea and started staring at his glass of Brunello, while pondering an answer. Dora suddenly jumped in to prevent him from thinking too long.

"Immortality is not appealing enough for you?"

"The problem is," George conceded, "I am not really sure we would have something called a market after it. Forget about all the problems that would arise - although there would be many, I believe I am rich enough not to care too much.

My problem is, I simply find it appalling to work for the next several thousand years with the same guys of KPCB. They would be corrupted by power, and even worse, I would be dragged down with them.

On the other hand, I take your point. After mobile communication, I promise you my next venture will be in biology. Consider yourself enrolled as a consultant. Money is no issue."

George kept his promise, and from 1988 he would regularly ask my advice about requests for fundings he was receiving from biotech scientists and he would take me on regular tours of the most promising biotech labs in America.

Unknowingly, he was giving me far more than money. He was allowing me to check how far away other researchers were from Telomerax and where genetics were heading.

Then, towards the end of 1996, he told me about an experiment that had been done in Scotland, where a sheep named Dolly had been cloned out of the cells of her mother. The experiment would be publicized the following year because a number of parties, from governments to big pharmaceutical companies, were evaluating the results and the possible applications. George had been called in, because by now he was one of the most successful and respected investors in the biotech sector.

He was not as upbeat as usual. He told me he felt uneasy, like we were crossing some kind of invisible line.

"The problem is, Louis, we cannot help crossing it. Yet, I feel increasingly fearful. I wonder what will happen if we continue in this direction."

"George, I get your point. But before you continue, there is something you have to know..."

He was not particularly shocked by the disclosure. He pretended he had guessed it in our conversation eight years before. I think he also had gotten used to worse things, from the DNA projects he had seen in his activity of venture capitalist.

"George, we have to keep this discovery under wraps for a while. And I need you to keep watching what's going on in the sector. We cannot afford a competitor here."

"But what if somebody else publicly discovers it? Or what if they discover us? "

"Do not worry, George. You and I are good guys, we do not have the guts to push the limits. However, I do know of someone, and she has what we are missing."
Chapter 9

"Helena Rodrigo Fatima would become a key part of our team. She was a customer of 'Le Jardin' since 1989, and she had heard about us from one of her colleagues from the London branch of Lehman Brothers.

She decided to give it a try for a weekend break. I was struck by this very energetic, yet very severe woman whose business card carried the title of "Corporate Investment Vice President", and who was not even thirty."

"She was proud of her humble origins and gave some hints of her troubled history, but it was not until 1996 that she started to open up to Dora. During one of the dinners, she told my wife of the traumas in her family. She was born in the ghetto of Mexico City, sometime in 1961, and she managed to attend a tiny Catholic school until age eleven, when her family was slaughtered in a drug war.

Her brother was a low key pusher who tried to cheat his boss. As soon as the boss found out, he sent the death gang to her home to give an example to the rest of the dealers. Luckily for Helena, that afternoon she was at school, preparing for the summer examinations."

"When I came back home," she recalled, "I found a small crowd of neighbors screaming. I immediately froze in expectation of what I was about to see.

I went past the people who recognized me and they fell completely silent. All three of my family members laid on the floor, soaked in blood. They had shot my father on the doorstep, straight in the heart. My brother was trapped inside. They made him kneel and shot him in the face, right in front of my mother. They had run out of rounds, so they cut her throat. And they would have done the same to me. Before leaving, they told neighbors that this was the law of Conchito Aguirre, the local boss. They knew the police would do nothing, even if someone dared to tell."

"The missionary fathers managed to send me away to a boarding school in Guadalajara, where I completed high school with the highest marks. I wanted to get out of this environment with all my might, and studying and learning were all I could bet on, but I had no money to continue to university, so in 1978 I was back in Mexico City. It was like returning to hell."

"Why didn't the priests finance your college? You were good at school, after all," asked Dora.

"They had no money. If they had sent me to college, they would have had to refuse admission to primary school to ten children and leave them on the streets. I do not blame them at all. You know why? They told me the truth. It was a triage.

I was an adult and I had better chances than when I entered school. I also knew they were honest. For two years I helped them out with their records and I was aware of how low their finances were. The only thing I disappointed them in, even with all the prayers and good intentions, was my crave for revenge. The more they preached about forgiving, the more I hated those who exterminated my family. How could I take pardon on them?"

"Back in the capital, I quickly decided my survival strategy. I was already very attractive at the time, petite but very well proportioned and athletic, and I realized the effect that my flashy Hispanic eyes had on men. So I started to go to some high-end clubs where I eventually selected my prey. I became the mistress of Emiliano Rojas, the son of a big heroin and cocaine dealer. To get to the point, I was a bitch, and a very clever one at that."

Dora was shocked by the abruptness.

"Helena, it takes me months to get my patients to admit they married their partner just to please their father or mother, but you..."

"If you start lying to yourself, you lose sight on your target, and you cannot lie to others when you do not have a fixed story. My target was to get my revenge and get out of that place forever. I managed the first one, but not the second."

"Unlike other girls at the night club, I would not spend my money on dresses and jewels but rather on the fees and books to study Economics. My boyfriend noticed I was not only very enjoyable in bed but I also had a good brain attached to my body, so he started asking me some advice about money laundering and where to invest the clean cash. By the time I graduated in 1983, I was not only running the accounts of the clan, but I was sent to the United States to specialize in corporate finance and international tax law."

"In 1986, I graduated and landed a job at the Mexican branch of Chase Manhattan Bank. My responsibility was overseeing the clan investments and bringing in new customers, many of whom belonged to narcos gangs. It was in the posh office of Chase that one day Paco Aguirre showed up, the first and only son of Conchito. I felt my revenge was within reach, at last. And it was much easier than I expected."

"While my boyfriend had a deep commitment to the family dynasty and his duty to continue expanding the business, Paco was the typical ignorant second generation narco living under a flow of money and cocaine. I quickly became his object of desire and Emiliano immediately noticed. On a Saturday night at the club I drank a few more tequilas; not too many to lose control, not too few to make people realize I was playing. I could feel the eyes of both Emiliano and Paco on me, their desires exploding.

Then I let Paco approach me in the club's private rooms just to start shouting as soon as his hands started grabbing my dress. Emiliano quickly stepped in and slapped me in the face, but I was not to be blamed too much, after all I had demonstrated to whom I belonged. The body of Paco was left mutilated the morning after, in front of the main gate of the villa of Conchito Aguirre, who could not claim any revenge because his son had done the wrong thing and the Rojas were higher than he was in the narco hierarchy.

I see you are not scandalized by this, Dora. Then I will tell you another thing. Getting my revenge made me feel good. I felt a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment. Yet poor Paco was not guilty for the death of my family, at the very most he was guilty of being an idiot."

"No, Helena, I am not scandalized. Reality is, you can overcome resentment with replacement victims. Although it is horrible, it works. Especially if you have good reasons to believe that the victim is somehow guilty. It's the wrath of the righteous."

"In my case, I was indeed in the right. Having achieved revenge, I had to plot a way out of the narcos, but I could not spontaneously break up with Emiliano. So I let finance and money occupy more and more space in our conversations until his passion faded away and he was looking at me just as a very reliable assistant. Then came the offer from Lehman to go to London to work at the emerging market finance desk.

The deal with the Rojas was straightforward: I could leave Mexico and no longer be involved in illegal activities. On the other hand, I would become their trusted investment guardian. Not only for them, but also for affiliate gangs in other countries and if needed I could ask for more special services, if you know what I mean."

"Well, not really. I am not sure I want to understand that."

"Dora, when you grow up in the midst of violence and eventually get out of it through violence, you learn that there is a certain logic you have to abide by. Gratuity is the first thing you have to avoid. Anyway, in the first months in London I was stalked by a guy that would follow me in the metro from downtown to my house in Tottenham Court Road. I waited for the monthly business meeting with one of the head cartel representatives. At the time, they were buying Italian treasuries by the millions and after we settled all the deals, I told them about my little problem. They asked just a few questions and made no comments.

The next three days, the guy was still following me. On the fourth day, he got blocked by a pack of hooligans who stumbled out from a pub, drunk. It lasted a few minutes. It looked like one of the occasional street brawls, but I noticed that all the members of the mob were hitting him except one, who kept whispering something in his ears. My stalker was left unconscious on the street, and I did not see him ever again."

"Helena, I think there is more to you than the cynical narco-turned-banker character. Why would you then finance all these organizations, that try to get children out of the streets?"

"Several reasons. Easy answer; it worked for me. It saved me and made me who I am today. I really want to return the favor and make sure others get a chance. And let me underline it once again: I have no guilt whatsoever, for what I did in the past. I wanted it, it made me happy, and I deserve happiness.

At the same time, I feel reality is so wrong. Not so much for the evil, but for human ignorance. Think about it, if twenty five years ago the death gang of Conchito Aguirre had limited themselves to kill only my brother, all would have stopped there. There would be no backfire. He had done the wrong thing and he had paid the price set by the laws of the slums. But they went too far. And that triggered my search for revenge. So it looks like the world, our society - I do not know how to call it exactly - even the simple way we interact with each other has deep flaws, and it probably can't be fixed, but I need to give it a try. I would feel ashamed if I didn't, now that I earn one million dollars a month.

But I realize it's like building a cathedral in the Middle Ages. If I am lucky I will maybe see some walls being erected during my lifetime, but for sure not the finished product."

"Well, Helena, I am happy you are here. You will be surprised by how good we are at taking care of our customers. I need you to talk with my husband, before leaving. He has a generous offer waiting for you."
Chapter 10

"Louis, the team was ready by the late nineties of the last century. What were your plans? What was your primary goal at the time?"

"I held the first meeting with Tarek, Valerio, Helena, and George in the summer of 1999. Some of the members already knew each other, like Helena and George, but no one was aware they all had access to Telomerax. The agenda was always focused around two main points; if and how to take Telomerax public, and if anyone had spotted any threats to our group, how to address it.

During the first meetings, we determined that in order to go public we first needed a better understanding of all the possible consequences, and a detailed plan to address them in the most effective way. After this was settled, I asked for each member to vote unanimously on certain subjects.

I had no special voting rights. My vote would be counted like the others. Our first poll's results stated there would be no fixed dates for the meetings. We would meet at least once a year, possibly in different locations, or anytime one of us had something relevant to share with the group. Another point of agreement was that the best time to go public had to be one when economic and political tensions were low, as everybody was conscious that dropping a bomb like Telomerax in a geopolitically-tense environment could have horrible consequences. It was clear that this opportunity window would be very short, a few years at most, and it would pop up once every few decades. This led the team to split between the pessimists and the optimists, and it was a good thing."

"Who were the pessimists?"

"You should have guessed by now! Tarek and Valerio made it clear they had no hope in the world. They believed that the right time would never come. They thought that the affairs of mankind were in such a dire state that we would have to wait centuries for a revelation, unless we wanted to create a catastrophe.

On the other side, Helena and George, driven maybe by their New World optimism, saw the possibility coming in the near future. They presumed in less than twenty years. This left Dora and me on the needles to make a final decision."

"How did the poll on taking Telomerax public, go?"

"We held it in 2000, as both the economic and political situations seemed to be going steady, with a wave of optimism that reminded me of the beginning of the nineties. The big pusher was Helena, but she realized she needed to do some research on it so she asked George to work with her. Remember that, at the time, George was getting started in the biotech sector so he went through Helena to get introduced at Lehman and leverage their macroeconomic and political intelligence.

He pretended to have a lead on a product that would increase the average lifespan by thirty years. However, he wanted to have a detailed report of all the consequences, such as: extension of retirement age, ethical debate, and so on, before seeking further capital funding.

That's why he knocked at Lehman's doors. Of course, if interested, Lehman could take part in the venture."

"What was the outcome? Did Lehman end up investing in your idea?"

"Believe it or not, the vice president told Helena that they had more interesting projects on their hands and could not invest in yet another startup, so they would reconsider it in a few months. A few months later, as soon as Helena and George were considering to reapproach Lehman, September 11th occurred."

"And this made everything more difficult..."

"Indeed. In the meeting we held in May 2002, we all thought we had missed the opportunity presented at the start of the new millennium. We held the meeting in New York, and when Tarek told us about all the new security measures that were being enforced just to get his visa approved, we understood we had to wait for a major political change before reconsidering the decision.

This meant going dormant until a new President was chosen in the US. We also felt we had to be more cautious and be prepared to change our identities within the next decade. George and Helena were known at Lehman, so they would be the first to make the move.

Helena left Lehman in 2004 and joined a hedge fund stationed in Singapore, which specialized in emerging markets. She did not join as Helena Rodrigo Fatima, though, but as a newly graduated twenty-six-year-old named Rosa Montero Gutierrez, with a PhD in Economics. Let me continue calling her Helena, otherwise the rest of the interview will get very confusing."

"Were you the one that provided her with the new identity?"

"No, this was an advantage from Helena's powerful connections in the drug cartels. Rosa Gutierrez really had existed. She had died of overdose in the aftermath of a rave party in Acapulco, in 2002. The narcos had stolen her identity just in case it would be needed. And as Helena was still supervising the cartel's investments, they did her the favor. Our own organization of identity change came fully into play for the first time, when we organized the simultaneous death and divorce of George."

"Was George's wife aware of Telomerax?"

"George had given her Telomerax without telling her all the details. He knew he could not completely trust her, so as the relationship soured over time, he set up the perfect death. By 2003, he declared to have a rare form of cancer, and he started losing weight. From time to time he would visit 'Le Jardin' where he underwent a light, controlled chemotherapy. I was dead afraid that it might interfere with Telomerax, so for one year I suspended the treatment.

In 2005, he started attending less and less public events, with photos of him looking frailer and frailer appearing in magazines. In the meantime, Tarek procured a brand new identity from the CIA thanks to the French secret service. George McKilroy would become Sean Ewals, a twenty-five year old graduate from Boston University, who had inherited a small fortune from his deceased parents."

"How come the identity was obtained from the CIA via the French secret service?"

"Tarek had done a favor for both agencies. In 2004, the Americans were involved with Iraq and the CIA needed air support for their secret operations. Due to secrecy, they refused to ask the US Air Force for help because this meant that their archrivals, the NSA, would know. So they looked for external support. At the same time, although France was publicly portrayed as being against the Iraq war, their air force could not bear the fact that their UK and US cousins had plenty of room to test their latest weapons. To close the triangle, Jordan had just made a deal with France to supply a dozen brand new Mirage 2000 fighter jets for their armed services. Do you see how it is coming together now?"

"You mean that the French were hired by the CIA to bomb targets in Iraq? This must be where Tarek enters the picture."

"You got it. Tarek was the mediator. He was going back and forth from Jordan, since that was where major effects of the war were taking place; with refugees, spies, and soldiers on leave, contractors searching for new assignments, and all the rest you can imagine. One day, at a restaurant, he spotted a French Air Force officer and began a conversation. The officer stayed silent and pointed to an article on a training mission having to do with the recent Mirage contract, that was already public news.

Tarek then called his contacts at the Jordan secret service and found out that the French were not happy, as Jordanians would never let them fly into Iraq by their own initiative. US approval was needed for that. Jordanians would not ask for it directly, as it would sound like an attack on their troubled neighbor, nor would the French ask the US and risk exposing themselves to diplomatic blackmail.

The US had to make the first move, but how would they do it? After all, they were already set with what they had. Tarek knew very well, though, that there could be something they were missing. Once he was back in Dubai, he immediately contacted the CIA station manager, who he had known since the beginning of the Iran-Iraq war. Would the CIA be interested in getting free air support from Jordan, on jets flown by French pilots under cover?

The French pilots would get all the real life training they wanted. In case anything bad happened, the occasional French instructor would be blamed for accidentally trespassing into the Iraq airspace.

Organizing this deal brought him huge credit, and all he asked for in exchange was free access to the pool of secret identities. Initially he asked for unlimited access, but eventually he settled for two identities a year, for ten years. This was the news of the year at the 2005 meeting, that was otherwise quite gloomy and uneventful."

"When did the final act take place?

"In September 2005, we invited Sheila, George's wife, to 'Le Jardin'. I behaved as if I knew George was about to die and tested her feelings. She was obviously sad, but she also made it clear the marriage had not been working for some time, even before the illness. She basically had not left him, out of kindness.

That was all we needed to know. I called Helena, who in turn called her friends on the West Coast to organize his "death".

A white van arrived at George's villa in Sunnyvale, California, and after entering the garage, it unloaded the body of a man about the same age and with the same complexion, who had died from overdose the night before in Los Angeles. George boarded the van and sped away to the private terminal of San José International Airport, where he received his new set of papers. He then boarded a Gulfstream jet that took off and headed to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Once in Rio, George/Sean spent a couple of weeks relaxing and washing away the effects of the chemotherapy, then he visited a beauty clinic specialized in plastic surgery. It was not a dramatic change, but as George wanted to continue to work in the Silicon Valley startup business, he had to undergo some minor face-lifting. We had nothing to worry about, though, considering more than six months had passed since he had met anyone face-to-face and his last images did not resemble him at all.

Back in California, the doctor who was also on the narcos payroll, notified the public authorities of the death and contacted George's recently appointed lawyer, Scott Drummond, for the execution of the will.

He had been given the will by George himself a few weeks before, with the explicit order to open it as soon as he heard about his death and act according to the instructions.

What Scott read was strange, but not unexpected, as he was used to eccentric millionaires. Basically, George left his villa and assets with a value of over five million dollars to Sheila, and asked to be buried immediately with only the coroner and the lawyer in attendance. Then, he asked to be cremated and his ashes left with Sheila. Only after the cremation, could the death be publicly announced and in the will there were also the coordinates to a half a million dollar account to fund any public ceremony Sheila and his friends might have deemed appropriate. All that was left over had to be distributed to charities.

Scott thought a man like George should have had a much bigger fortune, but there was no trace of it in the will, and maybe - who knows - much of it had gone away to pay for the treatments."

"Did you attend the commemoration ceremony to make the death seem realistic?"

"There was no ceremony organized. I just paid a public obituary in the "Mercury", the local newspaper, and gave all the remaining money to a charity that helps children with leukemia. Dora and I flew to California with Sheila. She did not expect George to pass away so soon and she felt somewhat guilty during the flight. As soon as she learned the contents of the will, however, the guilt turned into resentment as George had decided to part ways from her before his last journey.

She handed the box of ashes over to me, together with the will and the funeral party budget. If I wanted to set up a ceremony, it was up to me. As for the ashes, she thought George would be happier to be buried at the clinic, since he loved the place.

A few days later, I called him in his new house in Connecticut and he told me that he did not like the Geneva lakeshore as his final resting place. Then he asked about the half a million dollars and when I told him it was gone to charity, he was a bit upset.

I burst into laughter. "Boy," I said, "dead men do not usually complain that their will has been followed through with, exactly as was written!"

"When did Tarek and Valerio switch identities?"

"Valerio jumped into his new life in 2008, soon after the death of his mother. He first sold his public relations business, took a plane to Brazil - like many retired Italians of his age did, even if he looked much younger - and reappeared a few months later after a short visit to the same clinic that had served George, back in 2005.

He re-entered Italy under the name of Antonio Colonna, an Argentinean son of native Italians, who was repatriating like some soccer players with Italian ancestors do. The customs officer told him he looked just slightly older than the twenty-two years written on the passport, and Antonio was quick to blame the dire economic situation of Argentina for making him become a migrant.

He immediately set up his new public relations and media company in London, and started shuttling across Europe to rebuild his network. He got in touch, this time, with the young public relation professionals who were replacing the old generation of Valerio's former colleagues.

As for Tarek, he did not really change his identity. Over time, he was able to set all of his family members' birth dates back by fifteen years, pretending there was a mistake in the records. He relied on the fact that he had actually started a second life before, when he left Egypt in the eighties.

As for his family, he put his sons on Telomerax between 2002 and 2008, as soon as they hit twenty five years of age. He just told them it was an age-delaying drug, and they would get about twenty to thirty years of life added on. He told me, the description he gave his sons bought him about thirty years to prepare a better explanation."

"And how about you, Louis? Who did you transform yourself into?"

"Dora and I liked our professions and wanted to change as little as possible, but we could not continue to live in the closed neighborhood surrounding the Swiss clinic. So we pretended to retire, sold the whole clinic, morphed into a young couple - a biologist and a psychiatrist - and relocated to Lugano, in the Italian speaking canton of Switzerland.

For a while I considered going to a fancier place, like Monte Carlo or Cannes, but we realized there were too many of the old customers from 'Le Jardin' there. As a young biologist, I founded a startup which allowed me to stay at the forefront of biological research - both contributing to new developments and watching out for the invention of drugs similar to Telomerax."
Chapter 11

"And then we arrive at January of 2009, when Barack Obama took office at the White House. According to your strategy, at the time, the economy was still not ready, as the world was in the midst of the financial crisis. Is this when you decided to change your strategy to reveal Telomerax?"

"Yes. The turning point was the meeting we held in the fall of 2009, in a resort on the Greek island of Patmos. It was no coincidence, as this is the island where the apostle John is said to have received the final book of the Bible, Revelations.

Once again, the group was split between George and Helena versus Valerio and Tarek. George and Helena, who were now dating, were pushing to make the announcement of Telomerax within the next ten to fifteen years, while Valerio and Tarek did not see this as a realistic timeframe. Dora and I were arbitrating in the middle. We argued for three days, and eventually we came to the conclusion that it was time to start "preparing for the preparation" or to set "a date for the date", if you may.

It is better to go directly to the motif of the meeting, which was opened by Helena, who gave a bleak outlook on the economic perspectives."

"Gentlemen," she said, "as we traveled here we saw how dire the situation of Greece is. I can tell you, that this crisis will spread to the rest of Europe and there will be governments falling from Ireland to Italy. Our data at the firm shows that China will manage to dodge the crisis, and the US will bounce back in three to four years, but Europe and other areas will stay stagnant for several years."

"All right," Tarek jumped in, "so we can adjourn the meeting to 2015. Even though politics are somehow improving after George Bush and his cowboys, we do not know how the crisis is going to evolve. Europe could divide itself, creating an uproar around the world."

Helena fell silent, staring coldly at Tarek for a long second and then turned her eyes to George without changing expression.

"Tarek, please..", George said, "..if we keep following this line of reasoning we will never be ready. We saw over the past sixty years that the window of opportunity opens for a period of two or three years maximum, and by the time you realize it's there, it's already gone. If we continue like this, we will wait for centuries."

Valerio slowly raised his hand, with his impeccable manners, and waited a few seconds before starting.

"George, if there is one thing we have on our side, it is time. We have tested the identity change process and it worked perfectly, buying us enough time until at least 2035. I have looked over the research that Helena and you started back in 2000 and got in contact with my connections at the World Bank, and you know what I found out? That despite all the uneasiness, things are improving overall. Slowly, but surely.

If you look at these slides, the statistics show that international income, deaths caused by violence, and births per woman are all going in the right direction. So there is evidently no reason to rush. We can sit back and relax."

"Valerio, for once I do not agree with you," Tarek burst out. "Your statistics would have shown you the same thing for Europe on the eve of World War I, and we all know how that ended up. On the other hand I do agree we can talk about this over a glass of wine for the next thirty years and do nothing in the meantime. In other words, just do usual business."

"That would mean we sit around twiddling our thumbs while someone else is discovering us or, worse, discovering Telomerax. You know that very well, Tarek," Helena hissed. "You did not wait for Israeli pilots to plan their attacks and then make up a strategy to counteract them back in 1973. Apparently all these luxuries and petty conspiracies have washed away the fighter that was in you."

Tarek was about to reply, his eyes seething with rage, but George was faster and harsh enough to defuse the fire Helena was starting.

"Helena, please cut the bullshit now. It is getting personal and we cannot afford it. The fact is, we have a huge opportunity here to become the most famous people in the history of mankind, surpassing Jesus Christ, Mohammed and the likes, and we are letting it slip through our fingers. We just cannot let that happen.

May I also remind you, that research in biotechnology is expanding big time, from fertilizers to - guess what - techniques that fight aging. I know it because I am investing in a number of ventures. But I cannot control everything forever. How long do you think it will take before someone else finds it and we become the biggest morons of all time? Louis, do you really want your discovery to go to waste?"

This hit home. "I agree," I said, "We can no longer rely on my strategy we have followed for the last ten years. I was also approached by a number of biotech firms and these guys are starting to get ideas of how to get to Telomerax. They are still far away, as there are a number of obstacles they have not yet figured out, but nothing that could not be solved over the next thirty years or so."

"So in my opinion we must at least start preparing the disclosure, so that when the next window of opportunity appears in the next ten to twenty years, we are ready to go public. I think we should forget about all the talk on politics, and economics, and focus on a very simple question: how do you prepare mankind, of the Internet age, to the idea of becoming immortal?"

As Tarek was still getting over the attack from Helena, Valerio took over the challenge to answer on behalf of the team.

"We certainly cannot set up courses of philosophy and biochemistry for billions of people, nor ask the Pope to announce it from the balcony of Saint Peter, after briefing him that our invention is not so much at odds with the Catholic doctrine.

We first have to get a communal idea of immortality. One that fits Telomerax, yet stays generic so as to upset as few people as possible. Our goal is, when the announcement comes, it is not totally unexpected and everyone can cope with it. Just think of aliens. We see and read so many movies and books with enough evidence, that if a spacecraft appeared in the sky, quite a few people would say it was high time they showed up.

Anyway, a number of trends are already working in our favor. For example, people know that there is a lot of research and money being spent on biotechnology, so something extraordinary can pop up at anytime. A bit like when people were talking of computers eventually being in every office, during the sixties. It sounded like science fiction but it naturally became part of the world.

Second, there is also a trend to delay aging and stay fit as long as you can. This obviously gives us a lot of leverage. Third, at least in developed countries, people are coming to terms with the fact that as long as you are fit, you have to work to keep society sustainable. This means major macroeconomic and political adjustments might be accepted, for example you don't retire until you are dead.

Fourth, there is undoubtedly an ethical and, in many cases, religious aspect. Who has access to immortality? At what cost? Is this lifestyle acceptable? I can imagine all sorts of reactions. But let's face it, even today discrimination in healthcare access is a reality and the same applies to ethical values.

Think of access to cancer therapy and abortion in the United States, just to focus on the most developed nation on the planet. The question here is if adding immortality to the equation would cause people to run away, or embrace it. I do not have an answer.

When it comes to the environment, global warming, and all the way down to the preservation of whales, I believe immortality will be nothing but yet another variable in the puzzle."

"Good summary Valerio," Dora intervened, "but how do you translate that into a program? What do we have to do? We are just six, and unlike Saint John, we have got no revelation."

"Do not underestimate the power of media and word of mouth. I mean, you do not need an army of people to build an efficient communication system. We have to immediately spread scientific propaganda. I think we have to use a two-pronged strategy.

The first one should be led by George and Helena. They have all what it takes to go out in the open and fund biotech startups with the goal of increasing longevity by let's say, a two-hundred year lifespan. Of course this will be initially dismissed as marketing hype but..."

"...It will reach people in the right circles," George took over. "They are the ones who fund studies, give us other ideas, make investments....in a nutshell, it will alert the wealthy that a major change is on the come up. Some will like it, others will not, it does not really matter. Everyone will find a way to adjust to it."

"Exactly. Part of it will also leak into the mainstream media, where it will become part of pop culture," Dora finished.

"And this is where you come in, Valerio," said Louis. "How do you plan to spread the word?"

"I do not have a clear plan yet. Let me take advantage of the extra time we have," he chuckled.

"If it's any help, I do not see anything drastically different from what you do now in advertising. Promoting a few good movies is an easy task, same goes for books – which, by the way, now you can publish them online yourself. We must use the occasional scientific discovery or celebrity misdeed to spread some uncontrolled rumors on new drugs that can extend youth.

The good thing is that with the Internet nowadays, we can determine the effect all those campaigns will have. At my new company, we have developed software that monitors how news trends and even personal reputations are spreading around the Internet and how new events affect them. The point is, we can create a kind of "immortality readiness barometer", or "Immortalometer" to make it short, and monitor how it evolves."

So the decision to initiate the preparation was made, with everybody in favor of it, except Tarek.

Since it was not a vote to announce Telomerax, we did not need unanimity to move forward. However, I was a bit worried, and asked Tarek why he was opposing.

"I have no reason, at least not a rational one," he said. "if I was rational, I would buy all the arguments that have been discussed. All I have is a gut feeling, telling me this is not a wise decision."

"In retrospect, he was right. The next ten years proceeded in a much different way than we could have ever imagined."
