The Deep Zone: A Novel Read Free

silence for a moment. “You know of Reinhold Messner? The great mountaineer?”
    “I know he climbed Mount Everest solo.”
    “And without oxygen. In Europe, a god. Messner said, ‘From such places you do not return unchanged.’ ”
    “I don’t climb.”
    “Mountains are not the only realms from which we may not return unchanged.”
    Mr. Adelheid reached into his blazer, produced a slip of green paper the size of a playing card. He slid it to the middle of the table. A deposit ticket from Grand Cayman National Bank for
Fifty thousand and 00/100 dollars
, payable not to a name but to an eleven-digit alphanumeric sequence.
    “An appreciation for the pleasure of your company this evening. You need only the PIN. Which I will give you.”
    “For doing what?”
    “For joining me tonight.”
    “
Fifty thousand dollars
for a few hours?”
    “Of course.”
    It was dizzying, but another question had to be asked. “How much for doing the … observing you mentioned?”
    Mr. Adelheid named a figure that made his heart jump. For a moment the room blurred and sang like a plucked string. He put his hand on the table, a few inches away from the green slip. Thoughts skittered in his head.
    So this is how it feels
. He watched as his hand, possessed, slid toward the green paper.
    “I urge you to think carefully.” Mr. Adelheid’s voice made a strange echo in the chamber. Or was it the whiskey and wine? “This threshold, like Messner’s realm, is one you cannot recross. Be certain.”
    It came out, quick and harsh, as though he had been waiting most of his life to tell someone. “I have a doctorate from a good university. Nineteen years of government service. I make eighty-seven thousand, four hundred and seventy-six dollars a year. I have been passed over for promotion three times. I do not want to die having had only this life.”
    Mr. Adelheid regarded him thoughtfully. “And there was that unfortunate business with your wife. Forgive me:
former
wife.”
    So he knows. Of course. He would know everything
. He bit off each word: “Yes. The ‘unfortunate incident.’ ”
    It had been nine years, but like a gangrenous wound, this one would never heal; in fact, like such a wound, it seemed to grow deeper and more foul as time passed. Even Mr. Adelheid’s veiled reference made his rage flare. And not just rage. A hot and breathless shame for the losses—and for being one who’d lost the great things.
    Mr. Adelheid said, “It was unfortunate.
She
strayed. And yet—”
    “—and yet her lawyers took
everything
. The house, our savings, the antiques … our
dogs
.”
    “The Airedales, yes. And it goes on.”
    “Oh, yes. On and
on
. Do you know, after she left me, I had tomove into a
condominium
”—he said the word as though it were an obscenity—“in one of those subdivisions with hundreds of them, all identical, lined up. It could be Bulgaria. Every morning I drive from there to BARDA, walk the same two hundred and nineteen steps to the laboratory, and at the end of each day I walk the other way. Week after month after year. That does something to a man.” He paused for breath, aware that he had not spoken to anyone like this for longer than he could remember.
    “I am so sorry.” There was something like sympathy in Mr. Adelheid’s voice.
    The guest’s fingertips lifted, extended, dropped down on the edge of the deposit slip. His chest felt like thin blown glass. A red spot, wine he had spilled, stained the linen beside his hand.
    He put the ticket into his shirt pocket.
    Mr. Adelheid lifted his wine glass for a toast. “Welcome.”
    “Thank you.” They drank.
    As his latest swallow surged through him, he felt empowered. “You know who I work for. Am I permitted to ask who you work for? My guess would be BioChem.” The largest pharmaceutical, headquartered in Zurich, operating in every developed country and many undeveloped ones.
    “No. Nor any other pharmaceutical concern. Are you familiar with