Page 110 of The Fourth Option
“She’s on the Xylaxyn protocol,” Matheson said. He received regular reports on Vargas’s mother, one of the first to get the treatment during the clinical trial phase. “I think I can honestly say she’s getting the best palliative hospice care in the world.”
Vargas sighed. “She’s dying. She looked gray.”
“Conscious?”
“Yes.”
“Comfortable?”
Vargas offered a rueful half smile and shook his head. “You’re not selling, here, Derek. There are no cameras.”
Matheson felt a pang in his gut. “I want to do everything I can for her. You know I mean that. I mean it as a physician and a friend.”
“Thank you.” Vargas sipped his drink. “How long does she have?”
“I’ll check with the team tonight,” he replied. “It could be as long as six months.”
In truth, she might have a month. Xylaxyn could make her comfortable. It could lessen the worst symptoms of her liver cancer and buy her a few extra weeks. Matheson was not eager to be the messenger of that news.
Vargas swirled the liquid in his glass.
Matheson looked past him at the distant rainfall. What was he supposed to say? How do you make small talk with a volatile psychopath drinking tequila and contemplating his mother’s death?
“On to business,” Vargas said, leaning forward, eyeing the two men across from him.
“What can we do for you?” Kimbel said a little too quickly.
“You know, Mr. Kimbel, Matheson here is a doctor, and doctors plunge their hands into blood and guts.”
“We can speak plainly here,” Matheson said. “Transparency among business partners is a sign of health.”
Vargas laughed. “You are such an American. So high-minded. So condescending. So full of shit.”
Matheson desperately wanted to reach for his sparkling water but remained frozen in place.
“My grandfather,” Vargas said, “owned a sugar plantation in Cuba, back in the days of Batista,FulgencioBatista, my namesake. Did I ever tell you that?”
“I thought your family was from San Salvador,” Matheson replied.
Vargas tossed back the remaining ounce of tequila.
“No. My father lost everything when Castro came to power. He held on for a long time, fighting for his land. He thought the Americans would save us. ‘They hate theComunistasand theMarxistas’, he told me. But the Americans didn’t come. Castro’s people did. They took the cane fields, killed my grandfather, many of our family. My parents made it to Nicaragua. And there, my father said, ‘The Americans will protect us here. They love Somoza.’?”
He stood, re-upped his drink at the bar cart, and sat back down. “In 1979, when I was eleven years old, Somoza fell. We crossed the border to El Salvador, fleeing theSandinistasbecause once again, the Americans didn’t come. Instead, they were pouring money and guns into El Salvador, letting thecontrasdo the dirty work.”
“I see,” Matheson said, desperate to offer some understanding. “So that’s how your family ended up in San Salvador?”
“My father had learned; it wasn’t so much that he hated Communists or even the Americans. He now saw them as two sides of the same coin. The ideological struggle of the Cold War was really just a fight over money. The governments, whether American- or Communist-backed,fought for the fields. In our case, the sugarcane fields. That’s when my father taught me how to play this game, how to get a business off the ground. It has nothing to do with transparency.”
He set his glass on the coffee table between them.
“Be careful about how you speak to me, Dr. Matheson. Your company crawled out of the same swamp as mine, a benefactor of powerful people in the government who profit from the rise.Youthink you’re a genius.Ithink you’re smart enough to know that when you need someone like me, you jump at the chance. I kept you afloat when you were on the verge of losing it all. That makes us partners for life.”
Vargas grabbed his drink and sat back.
“Do we understand each other?”
“We do.”
