Over the course of approximately eighteen-plus hours, from the moment he’d left the Terrasini restaurant, Jerry Trotter had become an extremely desperate man. He hadn’t slept all night, instead using his old calculator and various files and portfolios to try to figure out ways in which he could emerge from this intact. He knew he was clutching at straws with Harry Hooper, but he was hoping against hope that Edmund Mathews had something more than just money at stake, something that would mean Jerry didn’t have to try to fix this mess all on his own. Jerry had few qualms, but he much preferred to delegate the truly dirty stuff, the stuff that could get you thrown in jail or worse.

Chapter 21.

21.

ONE CENTRAL PARK WEST
NEW YORK CITY
MARCH 4, 2011, 11:55 A.M.

By noon Jerry was near to being a basket case. After finishing the call with Harry Hooper, he went back to doing what he’d done at the end of the night: surfing the Internet just to have something to do. Jerry was buzzing on the amphetamines he’d taken to keep him awake and he knew he had thirty-six to forty hours until he crashed. Every couple of hours he drank a Red Bull, and he chugged Diet Cokes constantly. His wife, Charlotte, had no idea what was going on but was familiar enough with the routine to keep well out of her husband’s way. For Jerry the Internet was a wonderful resource and babysitter, so to speak. You could find out anything you wanted to know on it, as well as plenty of things you didn’t know you wanted to know. It couldn’t help much with finding the Fountain of Youth or proving the existence of God, but otherwise, it was golden.

The Internet was particularly useful when it came to providing practical solutions to all manner of problems. Jerry had recently discovered how to tune his universal remote so that it operated the controls on his TV, and he was grateful for that. This was a different kind of problem. As he sat alone in his darkened study with the shades drawn, he stared at the screen on his Mac, following threads in obscure discussion groups, piling up memberships in esoteric organizations, clicking on links that took him to some tortured recesses of our collective consciousness as represented on the World Wide Web.

Some of Jerry’s on-screen reading reminded him of being at medical school. What he wouldn’t have given to have had this resource back then! The dry phrasing of the medical material hadn’t changed in thirty years. Jerry thought he’d perhaps spent a couple of hours reading about salmonella when he was a student. He’d always been slightly germophobic, especially when it came to the more powerful microbes, and reading about this one made him uncomfortable. But Dr. Rothman’s first specialty, the one that brought him his first Nobel, was fascinating.