BooksBarbecue
Back Jungle Up Save as PDF
Chapters (63)
  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39
  40. 40
  41. 41
  42. 42
  43. 43
  44. 44
  45. 45
  46. 46
  47. 47
  48. 48
  49. 49
  50. 50
  51. 51
  52. 52
  53. 53
  54. 54
  55. 55
  56. 56
  57. 57
  58. 58
  59. 59
  60. 60
  61. 61
  62. 62
  63. Author’s Note

I asked Lacy to do a few internet searches and see if she could come up with a connection between Jordan Mae and Belippa Pharmaceutical.

An hour earlier, after going without a signal for more than half a day, my Garmin inReach had pinged. A message from Lacy had finally come through. After several hours of searching, she had found a connection between Belippa Pharmaceutical and Jordan Mae.

The president of Belippa, Patrick Sewall, had a son.

Daniel.

Daniel Sewall and Jordan Mae were Facebook friends. They’d gone to UCLA together.

Four months earlier, Daniel had been reported missing.

His last known location: Bolivia.

“This isn’t about cancer,” I told Gina. “This is about a missing son.”

49

49

silicon valley
may 8, 2:32 p.m.

Patrick Sewall poured himself a glass of iced tea and made his way to the office in his Silicon Valley estate. As he often did, he wondered why he kept the enormous six-thousand-foot house when it was only him living there.

It was abnormally warm for an early spring afternoon in Northern California, somewhere in the mid-seventies, and he flipped on the small fan in the corner of his office. The air began circulating as he sat down in the ergonomic chair behind his desk, took a sip of tea, then set the glass on a coaster.

The coasters were custom-made, pictures of him and Trisha on their twentieth wedding anniversary. They’d gone to the Canary Islands—Tenerife, to be exact—a tropical paradise off the northwestern coast of Africa.

Trisha’s skin was sun-kissed in the picture. She wore a light-yellow dress and held a large blue cocktail. Patrick was holding a similar drink, and both of them were smiling from ear to ear.

Sixteen months later, Trisha would be diagnosed with an aggressive form of bone cancer and seven months after that, she would be gone. Leaving him a single father to their nineteen-year-old son, Daniel.

For the thousandth time, Patrick considered packing away the coasters.

Maybe it was time to move on.

He took another sip of tea, then flipped open his laptop and logged into his email. His face brightened at the sight of one of them. It was from Daniel, and like always, the subject heading read “Checking in.”

For the past five months, Daniel had been hopping around South America. He was twenty-seven years old, a microbiologist by trade, and after doing lab work at Belippa for the past four years, he was on a journey of self-discovery.

At least, that’s what Patrick called it.

Daniel, on the other hand, called it a microbe hunt. He believed the next great pharmaceutical advancement would be microbial, that is to say, a single-celled organism: fungus, virus, algae, protozoa, or bacteria.

And since there was no place on earth with a greater concentration of microbes, Daniel headed for the Amazon rainforest.

Patrick clicked open the email.

Hey Dad.