Port-Menier, Anticosti Island
Located in the province of Quebec, Anticosti Island was home to 150,000 deer, a population that well outnumbered the 280 permanent residents. Called the graveyard of the Saint Lawrence, the treacherous gulf had claimed the lives of thousands of mariners over the years.
Alik Vosky sat on the end of his bed, staring at the blank screen of the television sitting atop his chest of drawers. He was pigeon-chested, and his stubby hands ended in fingernails that were buttery in color from years of smoking filterless cigarettes down to the last few millimeters. His father, an inconsequential bureaucrat whom Vosky had never come to love or admire, was completely bald. It was a fate he had managed to escape, having thick black hair that he wore combed hard against his craggy forehead hoping to conceal a nest of crosshatching wrinkles.
The master bedroom of the small guesthouse he’d rented on the island bore little resemblance to its spartan appearance the day he’d moved in. In less than a week, he had covered all four walls with bulletin boards of various sizes and shapes. Each was cluttered to capacity with dozens of multicolored papers and documents. The papers were a hodgepodge of handwritten and printed documents ranging in size from small Post-it notes to legal pad pages. Between the bulletin boards, Vosky had thumbtacked dozens more randomly overlapping papers to the walls. The floor, covered with a dreary olive carpet stained dark from age, had become a veritable obstacle course due to the numerous stacks of textbooks and scientific journals littering the space.
Ever since he was a child, Vosky had a strong belief in God. But in spite of his prayers, the exquisite pain he would occasionally suffer had now become a daily occurrence. Beginning as a dull ache across his entire forehead, it would quickly reach a fever pitch and then settle in as a relentless ring of pain around each eye. He massaged the bridge of his nose, but he did so more as a reflex than a remedy. His gaze shifted to his night table. An unopened pill bottle sat next to his lamp. He had placed it there the same day he’d picked it up from the pharmacy. For years he took them religiously, but now the bottle served only as a reminder of his prior life and how the medication had reined in the creative processes of his mind. It was on that same day he vowed never to push another one past his lips.
As he often did to distract himself from the endless throbbing, his thoughts drifted to his former life in Russia…a life he yearned to return to. But the large sum of ill-gotten money he had fled with made returning to his homeland impractical. He stood up and walked over to the small desk and sat down behind his computer. He brought up his project’s main file, which was a detailed timeline of events. To date he had achieved every milestone precisely on schedule.
Earlier in the day, he had decided to spend the evening going back over all the key calculations he had made. As his mentor at Kiev University had advised him, a great scientist steps out from amongst the trees every so often to study the forest. Vosky realized it was an observation that was uninspired and hackneyed, but he overlooked it because of his tremendous admiration for his professor.
What Vosky had created from nothing, what his colleagues in Russia had told him was impossible, he had accomplished and now had taken on a life of its own. He picked up the remote control to his television and turned on his library of video recordings. Although he had already watched it countless times, he brought up the story from the United States that featured Dr. Hollis Sinclair’s impromptu news conference. He watched the video twice before turning off the television.
In addition to being an insightful physician and researcher, Dr. Hollis Sinclair possessed charisma. Other doctors working on GNS in the U.S. would look to him for guidance and leadership. That was something Vosky knew he couldn’t allow. As proud as he was of what he’d accomplished on his own, he wasn’t naïve enough to think he could achieve ultimate success without some obstacles and setbacks along the way. What he needed to do with respect to Dr. Sinclair first entered his mind as nothing more than an intriguing idea; now, it was a moral absolute.
He got up, walked past the iron-framed double bed and stopped in front of a night table. Opening the drawer, he pushed a few envelopes and magazines aside and removed three passports. Each had cost him a small fortune, and each was an expert forgery. With a confident grin, he selected one. He then walked back to his computer and brought up his preferred travel website.