All well and good if things had gone according to plan, which they hadn’t, not by a long shot, starting with the fact that Cole was dead. A lot of people were dead, in fact, and some—well, it was hard to say just what they were. Only three people had come out of that jungle alive, not counting Fanning, who was already well on his way to being … well, what? More than Cole had bargained for, that was for sure. There might have been more survivors, but the order from Special Weapons was clear: anybody who didn’t make it to the dust-off was bacon with a side of toast. The missile that screamed in over the mountains had made sure of that. Richards wondered what Cole would have said if he’d known he wouldn’t be one of them.

By then—by the time Fanning was safely locked away, Lear was on-site in Colorado, and everything that had happened in South America had been wiped from the system—Richards had learned what it was all about. VSA, for Very Slow Aging. Richards had to hand it to whoever had dreamed up that one. VSA: Very Silly Abbreviation. A virus or, rather, a family of viruses, hidden away in the world, in birds or monkeys or sitting on a dirty toilet seat somewhere. A virus that could, with the proper refinements, restore the thymus gland to its full and proper function. Richards had read Lear’s early papers, the ones that had gotten Cole’s attention, the first one in Science and the second in Journal of Paleovirology, hypothesizing the existence of “an agent that could significantly lengthen human life span and increase physical robustness and has done so, at select moments, throughout human history.” Richards didn’t need a PhD in microbiology to know that it was risky stuff: vampire stuff, though no one at Special Weapons ever used the word. If it hadn’t been written by a scientist of Lear’s stature, a Harvard microbiologist no less, it all would have sounded like something from the Weekly World News. But still, something about it hit a nerve. As a kid Richards had read his share of such stories, not just the comic books—Tales from the Crypt and Dark Shadows and all the rest—but the original Bram Stoker, and seen the movies too. A bunch of silliness and bad sex, he knew that even then, and yet wasn’t there something about them that struck a deep chord of recognition, even of memory? The teeth, the blood hunger, the immortal union with darkness—what if these things weren’t fantasy but recollection or even instinct, a feeling etched over eons into human DNA, of some dark power that lay within the human animal? A power that could be reactivated, refined, brought under control?