Jungle Up, page 26
Martin lifted his right hand up toward his head and asked, “Where did I hit exactly?”
Gina guided his hand to the back-left part of his head and said, “Be careful, there’s a big gash that’s still healing.”
Martin dusted his fingers over the top of the bandage and said, “Temporal lobe.”
“Correct. Which would explain why you had several seizures.”
“Yes, that would. How many did I have?”
“Six that I saw. You could have had more before I came on the scene.”
He exhaled.
Gina said, “But the good news is that your memory, at least your short-term memory, appears to be intact. How is your vision?”
He stared at her and said, “Well, either you are a truly beautiful young lady, or my vision is seriously impaired.”
Gina was shocked to feel herself blush. She hadn’t glanced in a mirror in nine days, but she could only imagine how grimy and filthy she looked. She was still clad in the same shorts and T-shirt she’d been wearing for her run. Her arms and legs were covered in dried mud, scrapes, and bug bites, and her hair was a twisted nest. With a light laugh, she said, “Your vision must be severely impaired.”
Martin grinned, then said, “You know what, I’m starting to feel hungry.”
“Hold tight,” Gina said. “I’ll see if I can rummage something up.”
She ducked out of the tent and made her way over to where the provisions were stored. She found a bag of Brazil nuts and a stack of energy bars. She took three, slipping two of them into her pocket.
One of the soldiers glanced up from where they were digging. Gina showed him the single energy bar in her hand. He nodded, then went back to digging. She did a quick survey for Patrick or Bill but saw neither. There was a chance they were still in their tent, but that would be out of character. Especially for Patrick. From what Gina could tell, he was usually the first one up and the last to go to sleep.
Ducking back into the tent, Gina handed Martin the energy bar. “Small bites.”
Martin tore the wrapper open and took half the bar down in one chomp.
“Or just devour it,” Gina said.
She watched him finish the first, then half of the second. Then he drank another bottle of water.
When he was finished, Gina said, “So I’m guessing the reason they abducted you is because you know about these ruins. Where the gold must be buried?”
His gray eyebrows jumped. “We’re at the ruins?”
“Yeah, there’s a huge pyramid fifty feet away from us.”
Martin shook his head back and forth. “I haven’t been back here in thirty years.”
That would explain the compass headings instead of GPS coordinates.
Gina asked, “Are you leading them to the Incan treasure?”
“Treasure?”
“You’re an archaeologist, right?”
“No.”
“But your tattoos . . .”
He snickered softly and said, “When I was nineteen years old and Indiana Jones first came out, I thought I was going to be the next great archaeologist, but after my second semester of college, I changed course.
“Changed to?” Gina prodded.
“Ethnobotany.”
Ethnobotany is the systematic study of how people from a particular region use the local plants. Several ethnobotanists had visited Gina’s village when she was working with the WHO.
“If you’re an ethnobotanist, why did they abduct you?”
“Why do you think?” Martin asked.
It took Gina less than a second.
They were looking for treasure, just a different kind of treasure. Possibly the most profitable treasure in the history of mankind.
≈
“Está despierto,” Gina said. He’s awake.
None of the soldiers even glanced up from where they continued to excavate. There were now more than fifteen different artifacts that had been pulled from the earth.
“¡Está despierto!” Gina repeated, this time several octaves louder.
All four soldiers glanced up at her.
“¿Quién es?” one of them replied.
In Spanish, Gina said, “The guy in the tent, the guy in the coma, the guy who everyone has been waiting to wake up.”
The soldiers’ eyes opened wide. They jumped up and took off running around the side of the pyramid and crashed through the foliage. Less than five minutes later, the soldiers returned with Patrick and Bill.
“He woke up about ten minutes ago,” Gina told them.
Martin had now been awake for close to an hour, but Gina didn’t want Patrick to know the ethnobotanist had spent the last thirty minutes disclosing the details of his abduction to her.
“How is he?” asked Patrick.
“He doesn’t know who he is or where he is,” Gina lied.
Hopefully, Martin would be convincing.
Patrick and Bill raced past Gina and ducked into the tent. The soldiers huddled near the front flap, hoping to overhear what was being said inside.
Gina slowly made her way over to where the artifacts were arranged on the ground. She fell to her knees and examined the ceramic bowl in front of her. It was ten inches round at the bottom and angled out to as much as fifteen. It looked like a large salad bowl, though it must have weighed seven or eight pounds.
Gina glanced nonchalantly over her shoulder, then, seeing that all the soldiers were still huddled near the tent, Gina gently rolled the bowl backward with her left hand.
With a small stick she’d found nearby, Gina scratched three words into the soft earth.
She had just replaced the bowl when someone shouted, “What are you doing?”
Gina turned to Patrick.
“Just admiring the craftsmanship of this bowl. They really knew what they were doing back then.”
Patrick glared at her for a long second, then said, “I need you to fix this guy’s memory. He thinks Ronald Reagan is president.”
Gina fought back a smile.
40
base camp
august 21, 5:13 p.m.
days since abduction: 16
Even with the edges softened by the moisture of the rains, the words written in the dirt were unmistakable: Belippa, Nsé-Eja, and Gina.
I glanced up from Andy’s phone and said, “They weren’t looking for Paititi.”
“It would appear not,” he said. “I’m assuming you’re familiar with Belippa.”
I nodded. “My sister has MS. Belippa makes two of her medications.”
Belippa is a pharmaceutical giant. It was started in the mid-1990s and over the past twenty-five years it had grown into the sixth largest pharmaceutical company in the world, with average yearly revenues of more than $55 billion.
Two years earlier they’d increased the price of one of Lacy’s medications by more than 400 percent. We had enough money to cover the costs, but several people who Lacy knew in the MS community were no longer able to afford their medications.
After this huge price hike, I’d spent my fair share of time researching the company. Belippa didn’t perform well until 1997, when they released one of the first groundbreaking drugs to treat HIV. Three years later, at the turn of the millennium, the company went public with one of the largest IPOs in history.
Over the next decade, they developed several medications to treat MS, high blood pressure, and diabetes. Their most profitable product was released in 2003: an autoimmune suppressant called Mireva. Mireva had been the most profitable pharmaceutical drug on the market for the last eight years running.
Four years ago, Belippa released a new drug to treat hepatitis C. And now, according to the most recent article I had read, Belippa had their sights set on the holy grail of diseases.
I said, “Cancer.”
Andy nodded. “Yup, cancer.”
The article I read theorized the cure for cancer would be worth an estimated fifty trillion dollars—that’s more than half the money that exists in the world today.
Andy said, “So these people who have Gina, they must work for Belippa?”
“We have to assume as much.”
“But then how did they end up at the ruins?”
“I’m not sure.”
I drew a Venn diagram in my head. Three circles. The Expedition circle, the Thomas circle, and the Gina Abduction circle. Each circle overlapped with the other two, but there was a tiny area where all three overlapped.
How did three different groups end up in the exact same spot in the middle of more than a hundred thousand square miles of jungle?
I asked, “What does Nsé-Eja mean?”
“I have no idea.”
“Have you told anyone else about this?”
“I wanted to tell you first.”
A wave of nausea came over me, and I grimaced. I fought back the urge to throw up, and it passed.
I said, “Can you go get Diego? We’ll see if he knows what it means.”
Andy nodded and left.
Less than two minutes later, the flap to the tent opened. It was Diego and Camila.
At the sight of me, Camila squeaked wildly. She reached out her arms, and Diego handed her over.
Diego said, “She has been very worried about you.”
“Have you been worried about me?” I asked, bobbing her up and down lightly. I was so weak it felt like she’d gained forty pounds since I last held her.
She wrapped her arms around my neck and touched her cold nose to my face. I soaked up Camila’s love for twenty seconds, then reached down and handed Andy’s phone to Diego. I’d zoomed in on the photo and the only word on screen was Nsé-Eja.
I asked, “Do you know what that word means?”
Diego’s chubby cheeks went flat. “No, no, no, no,” he murmured under his breath.
“What does it mean?”
“I tell you earlier. The unfriendly tribe. The headhunters.” He paused. “The cannibals.”
41
pyramid ruins
august 15, 11:23 a.m.
days since abduction: 10
Bill Wyeth ducked out of the tent. He couldn’t listen to any more of Patrick’s interrogation of Martin Lefbrevor. The ethnobotanist didn’t even know what year it was—he thought it was 1982—so obviously he couldn’t be expected to remember the location of a tribe he’d encountered in the middle of the Amazon jungle.
“How do you get there?” Patrick shouted from inside the tent. “I know you know how to get there!”
Bill walked until he was out of earshot. He bypassed the soldiers digging up artifacts at the base of the pyramid and wandered over to a large rock near the outer edge of their campsite. He set down his daypack and let out a long breath.
How had it come to this?
He’d met Patrick Sewall the summer of 1979 during freshman orientation at Johns Hopkins University. When Bill took his seat in the small auditorium, he had found himself seated next to a handsome dark-haired kid from Northern California. Patrick Sewall exuded the palpable confidence of a star high school quarterback, but he’d been far from it. He was captain of the debate team and a diver on the swim team. Bill had never met anyone so comfortable in their own skin. Patrick was double-majoring in biology and chemical engineering, and he planned out his day in fifteen-minute increments.
For the next four years, Bill acted as Patrick’s short and flabby shadow. Though he hit the books hard, Bill, an economics major, was just able to keep his GPA above a C average. Meanwhile, between dating a new girl every other week and taking six more credits than Bill each semester, Patrick was somehow able to coast his way to summa cum laude.
After graduation, Patrick headed back to Northern California to pursue an MBA at Stanford. Bill moved back in with his parents in New Hampshire and took a job as a loan officer at a nearby bank.
After three years at the bank and little to show for it, Bill packed up his car and drove cross-country to reunite with his best friend. He and Patrick shared an apartment on the outskirts of Silicon Valley. Bill soon found employment in one of the valley’s increasing number of banks, while Patrick spent his days working in a lab doing biomedical research and his nights wooing Trisha, a Stanford graduate student as well as a San Francisco 49ers cheerleader.
Two years later, Patrick and Trisha married. Bill was best man at the wedding and gave a teary-eyed speech. When, two years after that, the couple gave birth to a son, Bill was named godfather.
By 1994 the Silicon Valley boom was underway. Bill took a job with search engine pioneer Netscape, and Patrick, with a background in biochemistry and a master’s in business, was looking for funding to start his own lab. Within a year, Patrick had raised two million dollars from venture capitalists and launched Belippa Pharmaceuticals.
The lab consisted of just six employees, but within three years they had developed a groundbreaking medicine to treat HIV.
As Patrick’s new company gained traction, Bill, too, was finding success, both in the workplace and in his personal life. He’d recently taken a job at a new start-up called Netflix that had plans to upend the DVD rental market. And he’d recently gotten engaged to a girl he’d met on Match.com—Bill was one of their first beta customers.
Bill and Martha married in late 1999. Sadly, Patrick was preparing for the launch of the Belippa IPO and was unable to attend their wedding.
After Belippa went public in early 2000, Patrick became a multimillionaire overnight. Over the next several years, Belippa expanded, employing over three hundred and fifty people, with a pipeline of profitable drugs released each year.
By 2007, Bill had moved up the ladder at Netflix. He was VP of Sales. But he wasn’t sure about this new direction the company was headed in—a streaming service—and he cashed in his stock options while they still had a shred of value.
As Bill watched Netflix’s streaming service revolutionize the entertainment industry and the stock options he’d once owned skyrocket in value, he found himself self-medicating. First it was booze, then pills. After Martha filed for divorce in 2011, Bill hit rock bottom.
A horrible phone call from his old friend Patrick forced Bill to reevaluate his life. Trisha had terminal cancer. She died seven months later, and it was at her memorial that Patrick offered Bill a job with Belippa. He said he was going to step away as CEO, but he wanted someone involved in the day-to-day whom he could trust.
Because of Patrick, Bill had always kept a close eye on the pharmaceutical industry. He quickly moved up the ranks to the same position he’d once held at Netflix. He would always be the man who threw away a fortune in stock options, but at Belippa he was getting a second chance to make his mark.
It wasn’t long before Bill was acting CFO. He spearheaded a movement to raise prices on all Belippa drugs across the board—as much as 400 percent in some cases. The move worked, insurance companies paid, and revenues soared.
In 2015 the active CEO was accused of sexual harassment and resigned. Two days later, Bill Wyeth was unanimously installed as CEO.
A troupe of howler monkeys moving through the canopy snapped Bill from his reverie. He reached down and grabbed his daypack. He pulled out a paperback book and thumbed the cover. The book was titled The Last Shaman: Searching for New Medicines in the Amazon.
The book was written by Martin J. Lefbrevor, PhD—the same man who, when asked just minutes earlier by Patrick what kind of car he drove, had answered, “An ’81 Chevy Caprice.”
The ethnobotanist—who was born in Calgary in 1956 and was considered one of the leading authorities on Amazonian botany—was fluent in six indigenous languages and had spent twelve years bouncing around South America, studying with different tribal groups and their healers, learning their therapeutic knowledge of the local flora.
Bill opened the book and found the passage he’d highlighted in bright yellow:
There are countless “Wonder Drugs” just waiting to be discovered in the Amazon rainforest and it’s only a matter of time before big drug companies isolate and synthesize these compounds for commercial purposes. The result would be patents worth billions of dollars in profit; and in the case of the cure for cancer, trillions of dollars in profit.
“Trillions,” Bill mumbled to himself, which he always found himself doing when reading that passage.
He thumbed to the middle of the book, where there was a series of glossy photographs. There were several pictures of Lefbrevor—thirty years younger and with a full head of dark hair—surrounded by indigenous people. On the fifth page of pictures was an image of a golden jaguar faceup in the dirt. And just below the golden jaguar was another picture: a jungle-cloaked pyramid.
Bill held the book up in front of him, the picture of the pyramid superimposed next to the actual pyramid. Even the angle was the same.
In his book, the ethnobotanist wrote that he’d stumbled across the golden jaguar and the stone pyramid in the middle of the Amazon jungle. Then after hiking for two more days, he encountered a tribe.
The legendary Nsé-Eja.
Approaching the Nsé-Eja’s village, Martin had been struck by one of the tribes’ poison-tipped arrows. He woke up in a bamboo cage, surrounded by war-painted tribesmen with yellow teeth filed to points.
Their shaman spoke bits and pieces of Portuguese—he said the language was “left over” from one of his previous lives—and he spent several days with Martin. Between explaining to Martin that they would soon remove his head and sacrifice it to their gods, then feast on his body, Martin was able to ask the shaman many of the questions he’d asked the other witch doctors with whom he’d studied.
When Martin asked about cancer, the shaman was confounded. He didn’t know what Martin was asking. In his fifty years as shaman and going back four generations of past shamans, they’d never encountered a villager with any growth, any protuberance, or any metastasizing mass.
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