The Secret of Immortality: The Tombmakers Village

By C J McKivvik

What would you do if you discovered how to be immortal? Tom Carrott's life turns into chaos when the director of his university research group drops dead while giving a speech, leaving the group unexpectedly bankrupt. Tom stands to lose everything he cares about - his job, his credibility, his girlfriend Eloise - until an ancient Egyptian chest arrives on his doorstep, with a note from beyond the grave.

Tom embarks on a dangerous and life-changing adventure in pursuit of the secret of immortality, with a fake researcher, the CIA, a beautiful Mossad agent named Eshe, the Theory of Everything Important, and a ruthless billionaire who will stop at nothing to obtain the secret.

Lies, friendship, love, danger, and greed are intertwined as Tom and Eshe race to solve the mystery before they lose everything, including their lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Apr 27, 2020
• ISBN: 9780228826545

Book preview

The Secret of Immortality

Book 1 – The Tombmakers Village

Book 2 – Search for the Holobiont

Book 3 – Run for our Lies

Book 4 – Heroes of the Imagination

What would you do if you discovered how to be immortal?

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to

Liz, Debbie, Donna, Roger and Fred.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The book started with an idea or two – words followed, and they couldn’t stop themselves coming. The book is finished now, but the story continues.

Thank you to everyone who knowingly and unknowingly contributed to making this book possible. In particular, my special thanks goes to Michelle for her super editing expertise and insights, Linda, Dave, Jack, Kate, Callum, Isabel and Lori. I could fill this page with many other names – friends and family – from around the world, but the book is big enough already – but thank you, to all of you, for being part of my life.

THE TOMBMAKERS VILLAGE

– 1 –

Dead

The last thing you’d expect to do as you walk to the podium to give the keynote speech at a prestigious conference is drop dead. The timing on this occasion was dreadfully unfortunate as well because Professor John Wainright’s life ended just before he had a chance to eat a magnificent lunch on this, the first day of the International Conference on Life Research being held in Kingston, Ontario, Canada.

The irony.

Before the chatter and dark humor set in among the three hundred and fifty conference delegates there were shrieks and screams and yells and cries for help when – and it happened very quickly – he stopped talking, gasped for air, stumbled into the lectern and then crashed off the stage onto the delegates’ floor below.

Professor John Wainright had just started his speech. He knew it was going to be a good one. A really good one. Great, in fact. This would be the most momentous day of his life had he not died at such an inconvenient moment. That said, dying is quite momentous in one’s life.

He was about to tell a secret: a secret so big that he didn’t write anything ahead of time in case his notes were discovered. He was a knowledge keeper, but on the verge of announcing something to the world that would change everything – forever.

Of course, this being a really good secret, only he knew about it. The whole secret, that is. John Wainright had taken just one precaution with his secret in case he was hit by a bus or something hard and death-making like that, or he was murdered. He made it possible for the secret to be passed on, even if he was dead. If it was meant to be, he had convinced himself one night after several drams of Scotch, then it will be.

None of this was on the mind of Tom Carrott as he watched his boss tumble off the stage. Tom was the Associate Director of the Life Research Group – the LRG – at King’s University where the conference was being held, and at this moment he had no idea that his future, and possibly the world’s, was going to change.

Tom ran from the back of the conference room to the crumpled professor’s body at the foot of the stage. He squeezed in among the others hovering over John Wainright and knelt down beside his lifeless mentor. Tom’s first thought was how much the lumps and cuts on his mentor’s head would be hurting until he realized the professor was dead. It seemed to take forever for an emergency response team to arrive, but everyone knew it was already too late. It may have been the broken neck hinted at by the professor’s head lying at a right angle to his body that gave it away. That, and the blood flowing out of his mouth. And the bone sticking out of his neck.

Professor John Wainright. Aged 65. Died spectacularly. Cause unknown. Heart? Accident prone? Untied shoelace? Bad genes? Murder?

Death.

********

‘Imagine if you no longer existed El,’ Tom said to Eloise, his girlfriend and colleague in the LRG, as they stood watching Professor Wainright’s body being wheeled passed them to the ambulance. ‘Tomorrow the world would still carry on. And the next day. And the next day after that. Days would turn into nights which would turn into days, people would go to work, kids would go to school, news would keep occurring, and friends and family would think about you from time to time. But you would no longer exist.’

‘We all know we’re going to die, Tom, but no-one really thinks about it. It’s just hard to imagine that we’ll no longer, you know, ‘be here’. But if we’re not here, could we somewhere else? And if we were, then how?’

As of 12:15pm on this sunny September Tuesday, just before a splendid lunch, Professor John Wainright was officially no longer here.

But something didn’t seem quite right.

And it was about to get even less right.

The Previous Night

It was the opening night of the International Conference on Life Research, an innocuous title that meant everything, but nothing in particular. It was the formal dinner event preceding the three-day conference that Tom and Eloise and their Life Research Group – the LRG as it was known – had painstakingly organized.

Eloise had convinced Tom to rent a tuxedo for the event and in exchange she promised to wear her satin navy-blue slip midi dress. They seldom dressed fancy, as they put it, but when they did, they looked like royalty. They were both twenty-nine years old and still had their youthful slim figures. At six feet Tom sometimes looked like he towered over Eloise’s five foot-seven frame. Eloise was almost unrecognizable tonight because she typically wore baggy clothes and glasses, never wore make-up, and never did anything to style her shoulder-length brown hair other than to make sure it was clean and combed. Sometimes parted from the middle, sometimes from the left or right sides. She really didn’t care, which was consistent with her overall disdain for the societal expectations still being placed on women.

Tonight, however, they looked like modern-day Barbie and Ken dolls.

This evening, most of the delegates from around the world gathered to talk about important things and to mingle with genuinely important people, the number of whom was actually very small. Many delegates were the young upwardly mobile early career researchers trying to secure tenure track positions anywhere across the globe.

Most of the delegates had been on the conference circuit for decades, taking advantage of research funding that promoted the use of grant monies to present their work at conferences; a paid vacation for many. Other delegates meanwhile, shocked the event because their presence provided clear evidence that they were still alive; several younger scholars sheepishly admitting after a few wines that they thought doctors Tiddlesburg, Davies, and Prince were dead.

To look at them, you’d think they were.

The formal dinner was coming to an end, which was a great relief as it was a snoozer.

Tom and Eloise’s work on the conference was, at this point, pretty much done. They were thrilled, and now with a sense of freedom, spurred in part by fine alcohol, they felt on top of the world.

They sat at their round dinner table with six other delegates and looked at one another as their colleagues sipped their coffees and teas and enjoyed the crème brûlée and fruit. With the slightest nod of agreement and mischievous smiles Tom and Eloise got up from the table, wished everyone a wonderful evening, and snuck out of the ballroom.

They held hands as they skipped down the concrete stairs from the stately, limestone Trudeau Building to the sidewalk.

Eloise said, giggling, ‘Let’s go dancing.’

‘You had me at Let’s go,’ Tom replied.

‘SyncPit?’ replied Eloise.

‘Of course,’ said Tom, ‘could it be anywhere else?’

Despite being one of those serious academics, when Eloise let her hair down – which wasn’t often – she was the life of the party. She was the party.

Tom loved her, would do anything for her. He lived for these moments.

They took a taxi downtown to the SyncPit on Ontario Street, which looked onto Confederation Park and the Basin Marina, at the edge of Lake Ontario. The SyncPit was famous for its round dance floor surrounded by seating booths on one level, above which was another level in the main bar where patrons could watch the dance floor, and yet another viewing level higher surrounding the pit below.

Eloise and Tom found some friends who were sitting in one of the booths that framed the SyncPit. Minutes later, Tom’s song request was called – ‘Eloise’ by Barry Ryan. As was custom with any patron’s special request, the Pit was now all Tom’s. When the song started, he leapt to the floor. He put on a dazzling display of Tom-foolery, as Eloise called it, lip-synching to the song with his unique choreography wowing the audience, and most importantly, wowing Eloise.

Eloise, in her blue satin dress, alternated between laughing, singing along, and dancing in the booth, which very effectively encouraged Tom to make even more of a fool of himself. It was her song after all. She never got tired of him being an idiot … her idiot.

The place was packed. The crowd loved it.

As the song came to an end Tom slid across the floor on his knees to a waiting Eloise and cheers from everyone at the bar. He pulled off his rented bow-tie and threw it into the crowd. He stood up, bowed, and lifted Eloise off her feet with a huge hug and twirled her around. Another song came on and they danced with everyone else who had now streamed on to the dance floor.

It was an epic night for Tom and Eloise.

They reveled in that perfect moment in relationships when two people are in absolute harmony, and nothing is more important than simply sharing the time with one another.

Magic.

They glided and gyrated all over the dance floor with one another. The music was brilliant; it was one of those nights.

They smiled, they laughed.

Perfect for Tom. Perfect for Eloise.

They did not know, in this frenzied moment of laughter and music and dancing, that tomorrow would bring with it a change in direction that would seem impossible. Ridiculous even.

Sometimes life is like that.

– 2 –

OMG

Professor Wainright, dead. It was still sinking in.

Tom walked along the musty hallowed halls of King’s University’s Administrative Services, which was located in one of the many limestone buildings on campus. He was on his way to meet the President of the university. It had been two weeks since the Professor’s death and this was the first official meeting to discuss the research group’s future.

There had been an uneasy silence from the university about the group’s future; plenty of platitudes about Professor Wainright’s career, the expected sympathetic social media messaging, flowers sent to the Life Research Group and flags flying half-mast, but nothing about ‘what next’.

Professor Wainright had been Tom’s mentor for the past seven years. First, as his supervisor for his doctoral degree, and then as his boss, doing what the Professor had stated was ground-breaking research. Thanks to an initial funding grant from the federal government they had amassed five researchers, an administrator and an information technology / data specialist over the past three years in the LRG. As Associate Director, Tom was well on the way to having a successful academic career.

But more importantly for Tom was his relationship with Eloise. She was much more driven than Tom; some would say she was obsessive in her pursuit of a hugely successful academic career. While the academic life was fine for Tom, his real passions were to make Eloise’s academic aspirations come true, and for the two of them to spend their lives together. Professor Wainright’s sudden death had not been part of Tom’s longer-term vision for his life, or Eloise’s life for that matter.

So Tom was nervous as he walked to the President’s office, a feeling compounded by the fact that he had never been privy to the financial details of the research group. The only person who had complete access to the group’s finances was dead. Professor Wainright had always insisted that he managed the funds so that others were free to focus on the vitally important research function. Tom liked the idea of ignoring anything to do with money, but he was now regretting his long-standing distancing from all matters financial.

He pushed open the creaky eight-foot high one-hundred and fifty-year old oak door to the outer chamber of the President’s office. Glenis Birtles sat at her mahogany desk, tilted her head forward to look over her horn-rimmed glasses at him, and nodded to the coffee table and seating on the left, where Tom proceeded to walk and pick up the latest edition of the journal Bioethics. He sat down on the leather couch, exhuming the sound of a fart from it as he moved around on its soft circa-1750 leather. Likely one of thousands of fart sounds over the past two hundred and seventy years that had brought laughter and embarrassment to many sitters.

He started to giggle, but quickly stopped when Glenis scornfully directed piercing eyes his way, no doubt having experienced this fart moment hundreds of times before.

With thirty-seven years of service to the university and an acute sense of importance of all matters, Glenis protected the President’s time and space as if she were a twenty-year Navy Seal veteran, but a bit more menacing. Tom was tempted to ask if she remembered the day the door was first put in, just to break the ice, but he knew he would come across as a smart-ass. Instead he gave her his best smile and mouthed a gentle thank-you in her direction. He had a funny suspicion he needed more friends in the university than he had at this moment.

Bioethics was no page-turner, so he spent five minutes gazing at portraits of past presidents hanging on the walls, thinking how stuck-up they all looked. He was almost falling asleep on the couch when Glenis quietly informed him the President was ready to see him.

‘You have ten minutes,’ she said as he walked into the President’s office.

‘Well I better walk twice as fast and talk quickly,’ he replied, smiling.

Behind the massive desk sat a massive balding man with slight tufts of white hair on the sides of his head and at the back. Tom thought the President looked long overdue for a serious diet and lessons on high cholesterol, blood pressure and moderate drinking. The President rose out of his chair and came around from behind his desk to greet Tom with a huge smile and mitts that a grizzly bear would be proud of.

‘Sit down, sit down my old boy, how the hell are you doing?’ he said with a Welsh accent that he had not shaken off, and in fact, had worked hard at keeping, since he first came to Canada thirty years ago. Tom still had his own easily identifiable English accent even though he had been living in Canada for fifteen years. But he had no desire or need to cultivate it and keep it fresh.

He sat down on the leather seat across from the President. Between them was a coffee table scattered with academic journals, a silver decanter of water and two crystal glasses.

‘Dreadful thing, that Wainright incident, good grief. Threw us all for a spin or two. Never knew him that well, mind you, but he seemed to know what he was talking about. Can’t always guarantee that at the university these days, can you, Tom.’

Tom started to laugh because he thought that was to be expected. The President stared back at him curiously. There were no smiles or laughter in response; Tom realized the President was serious.

‘Anyway,’ boomed the President again, ‘enough of the chit-chat, let’s get down to business.’

Tom placed his hands between his legs and nodded his head slowly. He was nervous. The President flipped through a couple of pages, which from Tom’s angle, looked like financial statements.

Silence.

Tom’s heart started racing. This was it; the future was about to begin. He reached over, poured a glass of water and had a drink. He sat in silence for five hours … well, alright, several very long seconds … waiting for the President to continue.

‘Hmmm, how do I say this ….Yes … well Tom … hmmmm … well your research group is broke. Out of money. Zippo. Bankrupt. Or rather, it will be in four months.’

The water in Tom’s mouth spontaneously swirled uncontrollably, looking for a way out as he choked his way through the next few seconds – mouth, nose ... it didn’t matter.

‘I’m sorry,’ Tom spluttered, as he leaned forward coughing and wiping his face, ‘you said broke, I’m not sure what you mean.’

‘Broke! As in no money, dear boy. Unless you’re sitting on a pile of buried treasure you’re up shits creek without a paddle, as it were.’

‘What!?’ exclaimed Tom, a bit louder than he intended. He was stunned and terribly confused. ‘I mean, how come? We don’t really spend much.’

‘Well, apparently you do. Your esteemed but now dead Director it seems, spent most of it over the past two years. Let’s see. Hmmm …’ he said as he frowned and tipped his head forward so he could look over his glasses. ‘Well as I look at these figures, well over half of all your funding last year was spent on travel to Africa and related sundry expenses such as interpreters and guides and food and entertainment and the like.’

The President dropped the Wainright dossier on the coffee table, leaned back in his chair and cupped his hands together behind his head. His rotund stomach strained the buttons on his white dress shirt; Tom felt himself preparing to duck, in case the buttons pinged off from the pressure.

Africa!? thought Tom, sitting motionless. Wainright never said he went to Africa. Ever.

‘My boy, this is not the sort of thing the university condones, or at least is willing to explain to the general public or the government. Your boss, it seems, was a master of codes and claims and burying expenses in multiple budget lines. It appears he was funding something that was not approved to be funded. God knows what it was, but it’s left you, me, the university – the research group – all quite in the lurch. Unless you sort this mess out and get more funding you’ve got about four months at most, and then you’re all, well, gone – the university will not fund a cent more on your life group. What the hell does Life Research Group mean, anyway?!’

It was a fair question, one that had plagued the LRG since its inception three years earlier. On the one hand the ambiguity and generality of the name gave the research group an enormous amount of freedom to do what it wanted. On the other hand, it was so general it put off many potential private funders who were concerned that for all they knew they might be funding terrorists.

Africa? Tom’s heart sunk to a new level, squirming just under rock bottom.

Before Tom could even attempt an answer, the President looked at his watch and sighed. ‘Well, best of British, Tom.’ He used the arms of the chair to push his body up, and held his hand out as a guide for Tom to go to the door, as opposed to Tom finding it himself. The President had made his point, and there was no sense wasting any more of his time. He was very clear. It was Tom’s problem, not the University’s. And finishing now would give him five minutes to check Snapchat on his phone before the next meeting.

He ushered Tom out with a totally insincere smile, slapping his grizzly paw on Tom’s back, and wishing him the world’s best luck again. Glenis would see him out. The meeting was over.

And so it was left to the now worrying Acting Director of the now worryingly titled Life Research Group to do something with the now worrying news.

‘Oh and Tom,’ the President called out. ‘One last thing. This is between you and I for now, understand? This is not the sort of thing the university or anyone else needs to know. But I suggest you think seriously about your future as soon as you can. And get moving on it.’

Tom could hear himself thanking the President for his time and thoughts, but his mind was in a cloud. Get moving on his future? Holy Shit. Everything seemed quite surreal. Wainright, his mentor, dead. Wainright, a thief. Wainright, a liar.

Wainright. A right bastard.

– 3 –

Khan El-Khalili Bazaar

Azim was a fixture in Cairo’s Khan el-Khalili Bazaar. He knew almost everyone. With three decades of life working in the Khan el-Khalili he had more knowledge in his head about Cairo and Egypt and its people and its history than you would ever find on the Internet. He seemed very nervous at the beginning of this new day.

A woman in a long white dress watched Azim finish unloading some antiques from a compact van in front of his stall in the crowded Bazaar. She had been doing this daily for the past week from her vantage point across the road in the coffeehouse. Typical surveillance work. On this assignment, she was on a need-to-know basis, which meant she didn’t know exactly what she was looking for, but if anything unusual happened, she was to call her handler.

After several days of this Eshe Hayes had seen nothing unusual. Three times a day she would sit with a coffee and a small plate of Umm Ali, reading Cairo’s daily Al Ahram newspaper. She would gaze into the street and people watch, just like thousands of others in the heart of Cairo. In this early morning surveillance, it was sometimes difficult to watch Azim because there were so many people, mostly Egyptians, walking by. Later in the day it would be the tourists who would get in the way, as this was a popular place to buy jewelry, antiques and souvenirs.

Azim, of course, had no idea he was being watched, as this elegant woman was pretty good at her job. And with her large dark lens sunglasses on, no-one could tell exactly what she was looking at.

As soon as the van left, a man pulling on an old donkey that was hitched to a cart shuffled slowly in front of Azim’s stall. Nothing unusual. Eshe took another sip of coffee as she had done countless times before when her vision was blocked. She looked down and scanned the newspaper.

Eshe heard a loud scream. She looked up. A second later there was a flash of light and she was blown several feet into the back wall of the café. She fell into a crumpled heap as broken wood and torn cloth fell on her, dust swirling all around from the explosion. Her vision was blurred. Her ears were ringing, but she could hear muffled screams. She wanted to get up to see what had happened, but she felt as though something was pinning her down. Her body just didn’t want to move or couldn’t move - she wasn’t sure which. She was bleeding, at least she thought it was her own blood. There was an ugly four-inch long gash on her left arm just above her wrist, and blood on her other arm and both legs. Her dirty and stained white dress was ripped at the knees, and a small jagged piece of wood protruded from her lower abdomen.

A few moments later the dust subsided. She looked out to Azim’s stall. It wasn’t there anymore. There were bodies and body parts lying on the road and around her, and frantic movement and noise and screaming and crying and smoke.

Chaos. Her ears kept ringing and ringing.

A horrible burning smell pervaded the Khan el-Khalili Bazaar.

And then Eshe passed out.

– 4 –

The Package

Tom lived a mile from the King’s University campus on a quiet street in a small ninety-year old stone and wood two-story house he had recently purchased as an investment, and only then because he thought he was in a secure, long-term position at the university and could make the payments. Comfort zone. Ha, that’s funny, he thought, smiling to no-one in particular as he meandered home at the end of the day. But most of his thoughts kept returning to Eloise and how to break the news to her.

Life, remembered Tom, begins at the end of your comfort zone. At least that’s what the t-shirt said. He didn’t think he was at the end of his comfort zone just yet, but he could see it quickly closing in. The really annoying thing was that he felt fairly content with the life he was currently living. This was a gut-wrenching jolt from the President.

Four months left for the Group, then they all lose their jobs, himself included, and more importantly, Eloise. And what then of their relationship? The University, as illustrated by the President just an hour earlier, would extol the group’s virtues when it was successful, but in the group’s moment of need, it would happily let it go under the bus and avoid tarnishing the university’s lofty ivory tower image. Someone would be the Fall Guy. It wouldn’t be Wainright, the bastard, as the university would also face the heat, as would the President. Yes, the Fall Guy would be Tom, and it would only make matters worse if he made a big stink about it.

Shit.

This ivory tower was a fair-weather friend at best. At worst, it was a collection of multiple egos claiming success over others in a world that was increasingly more about impressions and image, and less about substance. From previous experiences Tom knew all too well that image-conscious successful people want to be seen with other successful people; none of these people want to be associated with so-called losers. A university was no different in these times, despite the altruistic, idealistic assumption that universities should produce servants to the people and make the world a better place.

Tom was oblivious to the heavy rain. This downpour had not been in the forecast, and all he had was a windbreaker. He didn’t feel the water soaking his hair and running beneath his collar. The weight of the world pressed down on Tom’s sodden shoulders as he plodded along, his mind cluttered and whirling. His thoughts of an impending darkness in his life were such that he didn’t even notice the sprays of muddy rainwater hitting him as cars drove through the deepening puddles. He’d had better days.

Tom almost walked into the UPS Delivery Guy who was striding back from Tom’s front door.

‘Are you Tom … Carrott?’ he asked, looking down at his manifest.

‘Yes, that’s me,’ said Tom.

‘Seriously? Carrott?’

‘Seriously,’ Tom deadpanned, having painfully gone through this moment hundreds of times before.

‘Oh, well, nothing wrong with a Carrott is there, eh?’ said the UPS guy, ‘Good for your eyes they say,’ he chuckled. ‘I’ve got a package for you and I need your signature.’

‘Sure,’ said Tom quietly as the UPS guy leaned into his van and pulled out a surprisingly heavy cardboard box roughly the size of a large suitcase. Tom signed the form, picked the package up and awkwardly stumbled up the path to his front porch. He put the box down on the damp steps, and fished his keys from his pocket, only just now realizing that rainwater was running through and off him like a broken faucet. Tom opened the door and slid the box into the house, not in the mood to even wonder what it was he had been sent.

He dripped, squished and sloshed his way down the hall to the kitchen and placed the soggy carbon copy of the form he signed on the counter. He noticed the senders name written in the corner. It took a moment for him to register that the package had been sent by one Professor Wainright.

Really?

Just then Tom was jumped on by Fred, his five-year old yellow lab who had been waiting, in hiding, in the kitchen. He’d been doing his usual daytime activity of sleeping, chewing his teddy bear, staring at the wall and more sleeping while Tom was at the university, and now he was ready to play. He followed Tom as if tied to him with elastic, his teddy in his mouth, hoping that Tom would take it and throw it down the hall. Fun times.

Tom absently patted Fred’s head, staring at the paper in his hand. His eyes opened wider and his forehead furrowed when he looked again to see the package was indeed from Wainright.

‘What!!! Are you friggin’ kidding me?!’ He walked quickly back down the hall, Fred following. He stared briefly at the package, then kicked it. This wasn’t a good idea for his foot, and not a terribly good idea for the package. But he kicked it again because it felt good, even though it had hurt him the first time. This time he used his other foot. That hurt too. But it also felt good. He was lividly angry at Wainright.

Tom stared at the package. Wainright was screwing up his life quite royally despite being dead. Tom decided not to open the package. His growing sense of despair coupled with his anger that he should be put in this position was overwhelming. All he wanted to do right now was dry off, warm up, get changed, make a hot drink and recalibrate in light of the new knowledge passed to him by the university’s President.

Besides, he had to meet Eloise in an hour to tell her about his meeting with the President. It was going to be a tricky conversation. Most of all, he needed to think.

Tom sighed as he opened the front hall closet, pushed the package inside with one of his throbbing feet, shut the door, and stumbled upstairs to have a quick bath.

The package sat there quietly, as packages often do. Inside the package was a suitcase. Inside the suitcase there was a chest. The chest had travelled several thousand miles, a long distance for something three thousand years old. It had just been kicked several times. It had seen life. It had seen death. It had made and lost fortunes for many people over the centuries. It had been the bringer of war, and the symbol of peace. It had been the source of knowledge and the keeper of secrets. It had known darkness and had provided light. It was all these things. But no-one had ever used the full extent of its potential. And no one had ever kicked it.

Secrets

In fairness to the Professor, he wasn’t planning on dying at such an inconvenient moment. And he certainly didn’t want to burden his favourite student with the responsibility of saving the Life Research Group. But this was a very small burden compared to the larger one that was about to change Tom’s life. This was Wainright’s Plan B: In the event that the professor died, his lawyer was instructed to send a particular heavy suitcase to Tom.

Heavy because it contained an ancient Egyptian chest. In that chest were clues to secrets: weighty signposts to hidden revelations. These were heavy clues. They were signposts to secrets that were hidden. You could find the secrets if you knew what you were looking for, but if you didn’t know about them, then it was simply a very old and kickable chest filled with objects and words with meanings that connected the past with the future.

For those who would seek to see past the surface of the chest’s contents, an old knowledge would be discovered, which would reveal a powerful new understanding that could change the world.

Wainright knew this. After decades of investigating and deciphering clues he had finally found the connections that would reveal the secrets. With the help of two old friends, he had finally put it all together: his life’s work.

Tom was smart – book smart and street smart – and had a willingness to learn. Wainright knew this. So he entrusted Tom with the responsibility of nothing less than changing the world in the event that the professor would die before he could finish the job. Wainright was leaving his legacy, his least desirable attempt at immortality, in the hands of someone who knew nothing about the secrets, let alone changing the world. In retrospect, of course, it might have been useful to let Tom know about this.

The package sat inside the closet. To the left of the package was a pair of smelly old running shoes longing to be used again, and to the right were old winter boots, an umbrella, Fred’s leash and a stick. Several hoodies and three jackets hung above the package. It was dark in there, a strange and odorous place from which the world was to be changed.

The chest was still sitting quietly as footsteps and unflattering mutterings about Wainright the Bastard passed by. The front door creaked open and closed quickly with a loud slamming bang. Tom walked off the porch, still trying to work out how to give the news to Eloise.

It was raining heavily.

Tom didn’t realize it, but it was truly the first day of his new life. Nothing would ever be the same again. This was no ordinary package in his closet; it was an opening to a new world.

– 5 –

Truth

Eloise was already downtown at Curry Original, their favourite Indian restaurant, listening to Sitar music, inhaling the blended cooking aroma of kormas and vindaloos, and waiting for Tom. She’d ordered a glass of wine, eagerly anticipating their conversation. Things, she thought, were finally starting to align in her life. Now in her second year as a post-doctoral fellow and developing what she considered to be an important area of research – Mindfulness as Business Strategy – her goal was to obtain a tenure track position at a prestigious university. It didn’t matter where in the world this was, Eloise was one hundred percent committed to her research. Life, she decided, would simply sort itself out around her career.

And she had Tom. And they had a great time together. And it was going so well for her in the Life Research Group that there had already been discussions about a possible tenure track position at King’s University. She was well-liked, the students enjoyed her classes, and Professor Wainright had already told her he would be a vocal advocate for her being offered a tenure track position. Tom was helping make her dream of an academic career come true. Not that she needed a man for that. As her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother would always tell her, a woman should never need a man to make her dreams come true.

Eloise had worked hard to get where she was. She had a rocky upbringing as an only child; her mother left her husband and took Eloise to start a new life at the age of four. Eloise still saw her father often, but it was clear that her parents were simply not good for one another. As she got older, Eloise was continually uprooted as her mother sought new opportunities as a writer and an artist and dove in and out of relationships with numerous men, and occasionally, it seemed, women. Eloise loved her mother and her father, but all she really wanted was the stability that had evaded her for what seemed forever. She didn’t understand how much she wanted stability, in fact, needed it, until she got much older. Now, she thought, she finally had the stability that would provide the foundation for her to follow her dreams, as cliched as it sounded, and be the best she could be. And she loved the life of an academic.

Tom walked in and saw Eloise at their table in the corner. It was where they had sat on their first official ‘date’ a year ago. Now, as then, he mentally pinched himself when he saw her; she was very easy on the eyes, and bright and funny. She could be strikingly beautiful, model-like if she wanted, if she dressed in the latest fashion and wore make-up. But that wasn’t Eloise. Instead, she let her dark hair fall naturally to her shoulders and wore very plain clothes that always seemed to be a size or two too big for her body. It didn’t matter what she wore, she always looked good to Tom. What she couldn’t hide, however, were her blue eyes, eyes so blue that she was often asked if she wore coloured contacts. She was perfect, thought Tom. Well, alright, sometimes she was way too preoccupied with her research work, but he thought he could help her change that over time. He wanted to spend the rest of his life with her. He had long ago decided that he would do anything for Eloise and her career.

Eloise smiled and waved to Tom as he walked over to the table. He had a unique swagger that sometimes looked like a slight limp, as if one leg was longer than the other. He had a boyish grin; the kind you’d expect he’d still have in his nineties. That’s what had attracted Eloise to him in the first place, his instantly contagious smile. He never thought about it much himself but occasionally Eloise would point it out to him. And like Eloise, his deep blue eyes caught the attention of the women, and the men. Coupled with his full head of black hair, nowadays slightly peppered grey, he was on his way to looking more distinguished as he aged. In short, he had a lot of sex appeal, which was only enhanced further by his British accent.

His looks, however, couldn’t distract from his clumsiness, which he had had for as long as he could remember. It was cute, thought Eloise. She watched him trip over his own feet as he got closer. It was never dull going places with Tom; he gave her comic relief that took some of the stuffiness out of her own seriousness.

There was no time for dinner tonight, just drinks and a quick catch-up; Eloise had term papers to mark. The waiter brought over a Sauvignon Blanc for Tom, just as Eloise had requested.

‘Cheers,’ said Tom, as he grinned broadly. They tilted their glasses to one another, smiled and had a sip.

‘Sooooooooo,’ Eloise asked, still smiling as she leaned forward, ‘how did it go with the President?’

‘Well, it didn’t exactly go the way I thought it would, but I’ve got a pretty clear understanding of the future – well the near future anyways, for us – well … us and the Group.’

‘That’s great,’ replied Eloise, thinking naturally that everything was on track and it was business as usual.

Tom had gone through a hundred different ways of saying the next sentence when he was in the bath, but it never sounded right. Shit, he thought. Oh well, it is what it is.

‘But here’s the thing, El,’ he paused and took a big sip of his wine.

‘Uh-oh, there’s a thing?’ she said as she took a sip of wine and chuckled.

‘Ah, well … yes, there’s a thing. Actually, a tricky sort of awkward thing, really.’

‘Tricky? I didn’t know things could be tricky.’

‘Well it’s probably only tricky because it’s a thing that just happened and we haven’t put our minds to it,’ replied Tom, smiling.

El laughed.

‘Do you think you’ll be telling me before I retire, Tom, or will I have to beat it out of you?’

Tom’s smile widened as he nodded. He looked over to the bar, put his hand up and ordered two more wines. His smile faded as he stared down at the table and sighed.

‘Wainright’s a bastard.’

‘What? Tom! He’s dead, you shouldn’t speak badly of him. Why would you say that? And in any case, why is him being a bastard tricky?’

‘Well El … hmmm … you see, well … the tricky thing is he’s left us with no money in the LRG. Seems he’s been stealing from all the accounts for the past year or two according to the President and Financial Services. So now we’ve got to find new funding, and quickly, like in the next four months, or the Life Research Group no longer exists, and we don’t have jobs.’

It was a blunt delivery of the hard facts.

Eloise stared at Tom for a few seconds.

‘What? Are you kidding me? You are, aren’t you? What do you mean? That’s crazy, that’s got to be a mistake. He would never do that to us. … No, I don’t believe it.’ She leaned back and stared at Tom.

‘Oh, I get it, you’re having me on, aren’t you? Good one. I almost fell for it. Well played, Tom Carrott.’ She leaned forward again, sipped some more wine and smiled, looking somewhat relieved.

‘It’s crazy El, I know, but it’s not a mistake. I’m not kidding. I saw the numbers myself. All those trips he’s been on this past year have been to Africa. Africa! What the frig’s in Africa?’

El’s eyes widened as she saw Tom’s face and heard the seriousness of the tone in his voice.

‘Oh my god. You’re not kidding, are you?’

Tom shook his head slowly. There was a long silence. He could see Eloise starting to mentally unravel.

‘Oh shit. What about my research, Tom? My career? What will my Mum and Dad say? I’ve got to start applying for positions at other universities. I can get started on that tonight … Oh shit.’

‘Whoa, whoa … slow down … slow down there, El … let’s not panic, we’ll sort something out, there’s still lots of time. We just have to think it through.’

‘You think?! Four months to find enough money for all of us full-time staff, even for just a one-year period. Do the math, Tom, that’s a lot of money. And let’s face it, we’re not exactly lighting up the world with boundless new knowledge that’s making society better. Don’t see the funders queuing at our door. Would you fund us? I mean, seriously, would you? Jesus!’

Eloise was beginning the mental journey in her own maze of angst. Tom had seen it before. He knew he’d only add fuel to the fire if he tried to console her, or say it was all going to work out. At this moment, despite two quick wines, he didn’t have a good feeling about it all either. But he wasn’t going to hop on the angry bus and head to the pity-party like Eloise. She needed time to digest the news. Fair enough. So without making things worse he suggested instead that they get going and mark some term papers for the courses they were teaching. His preference would have been a few more drinks with Eloise, have some laughs and make a plan, but that was not going to happen with the other Eloise now at the table. He called the waiter over, paid the bill, and then they walked back to campus.

It was a quiet walk. Tom knew Eloise was already busy thinking about her future. He wondered if he was in her future in some way. He wanted to ask what she was thinking but was afraid of what the answer might be. He could feel his own life beginning to unravel.

The one thing that he knew he wanted in his life was Eloise. Love is blind and Tom had been blind for a year now; he’d lost the way with his own life ever since he’d met her. Not that he knew that. Which is why he resolved, on this brisk September evening walk back to campus, that he’d continue to do anything to keep Eloise in his life. He needed her, it was that simple, and the easiest way he could think of being in her life was to keep the Life Research Group afloat.

But how could he do that?

An uncomfortable silence walked with them until they reached campus. Tom walked Eloise to her office and they kissed goodnight. They had said very little except that they would talk about things some more over the next few days.

Tom told Eloise he was headed home to mark his papers, but he wasn’t. Instead he was planning to hit the problem head on, the sooner the better.

Think

He needed a plan. Tomorrow afternoon he was meeting with the staff of the LRG to tell them the bad news and present his strategy for the future, which, at the current moment, was MIA. And so, with necessity being the mother of invention, at 9:30pm he sat at the desk in his home office looking for inspiration. He looked first at Fred, who insisted the most important thing right now was to receive a cookie. Maybe two if he could really turn on that cute Labrador smile of his.

It wasn’t necessarily inspiring to be looking at Fred, but it was a useful reminder to Tom to never forget the simple things in life, the free things that serve to keep him grounded. It would be a recurring thought over the next while.

With Fred now happy and sitting on his cushion in the office, Tom looked at his laptop screen then wrote the opening line of his Survival Project. "The first painful fact is simple. A large amount of money is needed to fund the LRG, on research that I know is not fashionable in the typical funding circles like government funding agencies." And even if there was some money, there were no funding cycles out there that could turn successful proposals around in time to give them the funding they needed. Desperate times.

The second painful fact was Eloise. He didn’t have to write this down. He stared out the window into the darkness. As much as he knew she was committed to him, he knew she was more committed to her research. She would leave King’s and go anywhere to continue her work.

Leaving. Without him. Good-bye, Eloise. The thought was unbearable.

The third painful fact was Wainright. Yes, he was a Bastard of the highest order to be putting him in this predicament.

For fifteen minutes these three pain points spun around Tom’s head while he stared into the darkness outside and at the LRG’s website. There were no sudden flashes of inspiration hitting him, except for one, at minute Fifteen, when he remembered the graduation gift he received from Wainright when Tom was awarded his doctoral degree – a thirty-seven year old bottle of Lagavulin Single Malt Scotch Whisky. Tom didn’t drink Scotch, but he was saving the bottle for when he got a tenured position at a university. But shit, this moment was deserving of Scotch, if ever there was a deserving moment. His creative drive needed some swirling inspirational malt, as Wainright often called his Lagavulin, to boost the firing of his brain’s neurons.

Tom reached around in his bare kitchen cupboards, eventually finding the bottle tucked away in the dark reaches of the farthest corner of the highest top shelf. He also needed the right atmosphere. He put some inspirational music on – tonight it was hard hitting music from his Texas Blues compilation – he sliced some chunks of cheese, grabbed the Scotch and a glass, and a big bag of New York bagel crackers.

He returned to his home office determined, and with some essential - albeit desperate - tools for creativity. He was ready.

To officially begin what he was now dubbing his new life, his re-birth, he stood up, raised his glass of Scotch in the air and exclaimed, ‘To Wainright, you sick bastard, I thought I knew you, but it seems I never did. I am where I am today because of you, and I will be where I will be in four months because of you too.’ The Scotch raced down Tom’s throat.

The Scotch quickly took effect. Tom started seeing things in a different light. Unsurprisingly, it all seemed much less of a problem. Three glasses of straight Scotch and some pounding blues tunes later, there barely seemed to be a problem. He was surfing the Internet trolling for ideas, looking at conference paper titles, scanning research at other organizations, government websites, blogs, blogs and more blogs, chat groups, Reddit posts, anything and everything – freewheeling – looking for ideas that had stickability – and convertibility – ideas that could be transformed into hard and quick cash for the Life Research Group.

As the Scotch blurred Tom’s coherent thought processes, but stimulated others, his Internet search became increasingly random and obscure. He stumbled upon a website dedicated to the Turritopsis dohrnii, the immortal jellyfish. Life forever, in other words. He started reading.

The jellyfish is immortal, the website explained, because it alters its cells through a development process known as transdifferentiation, transforming them into new types of cells. This, in theory, can go on indefinitely, which effectively makes the jellyfish biologically immortal.

By now, the Texas blues had been replaced by Canada’s Dead South, and then U2. Bono was singing I still haven’t found what I’m looking for, and Tom and his whisky thought this meant something. The interconnectedness of it all – beyond coincidence surely. But what? How do the pieces fit together? He looked at other websites he’d found but kept coming back to the jellyfish.

How unscientific he thought. Everything he aspired not to be. Scientific rigour, evidence, hard data, facts … that was his research life. That was who he was, dammit. Not beliefs, faith, religious order, spirits, coincidence, or any woo-woo mumbo-jumbo. He was a fully-fledged, card-carrying skeptic.

But wow. What if we could be immortal? Couldn’t we, the Life Research Group, justifiably look at the implications of this? Has anyone considered this? Are there scientists out there trying to make people immortal? He knocked back some more scotch. How totally, super awesome friggin’ cool.

He was drunk, of course.

And so, into the early hours of the new day he surfed and thought, and sang and thought, and drank and thought, and danced and thought. Some thoughts collided with one another while others fit like a glove. He scribbled notes when he thought things made sense and let other thoughts simply hover around at 120,000 feet altitude, knowing that at some point some of these might also land and make some kind of sense.

And he raised his glass to Wainright once more, this time to congratulate him on his fine taste of Scotch, which was tasting pretty damn good at 2am. What had been a shitty day was turning into a celebration of life. For the first time in ages, Tom admitted to himself he was actually having some good ideas – some real ideas. And the bonus, he was enjoying it. He really wanted to call Eloise but knew that would end badly. Like the Phoenix rising from the ashes, he was ‘seeing’ – experiencing and feeling – the rebirth of his own existence. He didn’t know where it would all lead, but he was certain it would be better than the mental space he was currently living in. All this from reading about a bell-shaped jellyfish about the size of a person’s pinky nail and wondering about immortality.

Just down the hallway quietly sat the ancient Egyptian chest. In the chest sat three boxes. The lids of the boxes were inscribed in gold, real gold, with the words Ankh – the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic symbol for Life, Kephri – a god of creation, the movement of the sun, and rebirth, and Osiris – the judge of the dead and the underworld that granted all life.

So there it was. Immortal jellyfish swimming around in Tom’s mind while an ancient Egyptian chest sat just a few feet away with messages on immortality waiting to be seen. Sometimes in life you cannot explain with scientific reasoning why certain things happen, the interconnectedness of it all.

And then, out of nowhere, Tom had an idea. A massively brilliant idea. At least he thought so.

On this re-birthing night, as Tom put it, the pinball neurosynapsing of his mind, a surprisingly tasty thirty-seven year old Scotch, a website for a jellyfish, some brilliant lyrics, and a UPS delivered parcel lying lonely in a hall closet all felt like more than just a coincidence.

Which, as it turns out, is why the Central Intelligence Agency would soon be involved.

– 6 –

Roundtable

The members of Life Research Group waited patiently for Tom in their meeting room on the fourth floor of the Adams Building. They were seated around a massive, round oak table, meant to emphasize the equality of each person in the LRG. The chairs around the table were also made of heavy oak; the standing joke was that one condition of being employed in the LRG was that you must have the strength to pull the chairs in and out at least twice in a one-hour period.

The roundtable and chairs dominated the meeting room, which overlooked the stone landscaped courtyard immediately below. Beyond that, a swath of one-hundred-year-old maple trees stood on the slope of a gentle hill that led up to the football field and tennis courts.

The sun was shining into the meeting room, requiring the venetian blinds to be angled slightly. It was hot and the air conditioning had been turned off since this was now autumn. There was a whiteboard on the side wall and a blackboard at the front of the room. A noticeboard with nothing on it except pins, likely placed there in the 1950s, hung on the back wall of the room and beside that was a clock from around the same era. There was once a poster on the side wall that celebrated the 150th anniversary of the university but it had been defaced by bored students, or possibly bored faculty members, so it had been removed to eliminate any further temptation to deface it completely. A metal garbage can beside the door completed the austere look.

There was no ‘head’ of the table where the Boss sat. This was traced back to King Arthur and his knights of the roundtable in the late fifth to early sixth century. The LRG’s roundtable certainly was not new when they got it, but definitely not that old. It was in fact the only large table available at the university’s used furniture storage warehouse when the LRG was created. But the message of equality was still important, nonetheless.

A flat organizational structure with a roundtable – that was the LRG. That’s how John Wainright liked it. He was the Director for sure, but not aloof or arrogant like many academics and always happy to help out, which, for a time, included pitching in to clean the kitchen and make the coffee whenever there was none, or if it was a day or two old. These simple acts endeared him to the LRG staff.

As did his absent-mindedness. One day he made a large pot of coffee but forgot to put the pot under the percolator; the countertop, cutlery drawers and floor were awash with Starbucks Italian Roast. Over time, the thrill of the Director making coffee for everyone shifted to fear each time he wandered into the kitchen.

There were also stories – legends – of him driving to a conference for two hours before realizing the conference he was to be attending was in the opposite direction. He once took his grandson for a lovely walk around the streets in his stroller, a walk that ended abruptly when he looked in the stroller and realized he had forgot to put his grandson in it. On another occasion he tripped on his own luggage at the bottom of an escalator at the Airport’s arrival floor, resulting in six other passengers behind the professor falling over with him with numerous pieces of luggage breaking open and causing chaos all around.

Professor Wainright was not sitting at the LRG’s roundtable today, being dead ranking as one of the more unique and indisputable legitimate reasons for missing a meeting. Here, stepping into Wainright’s shoes as Acting Director, was a more youthful, and in fact alive, but late and horribly hungover, Tom Carrott.

Tom walked into the dull, lifeless meeting room with the spectacular view and headed to his usual seat at the roundtable. He noticed a seat was missing. ‘Christ,’ he said to the other Lifers, as they liked to be known, ‘don’t tell me Wainright’s chair died as well.’

You could hear a pin drop. Bizarrely, a pin dropped out of the noticeboard at precisely this moment. Everyone waited in silence for another pin to drop. It didn’t. ‘Wow,’ said Peggy, the

Reviews for The Secret of Immortality

[malcolm · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is an Awesome book! Great story and believable characters. Could not put this book down. Check out the other views on Amazon.