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SLEEPLESS IN MONTECITO

To sleep or not to sleep. That is the question. Boschvark has spent over two hundred million dollars funding studies on a wide range of health issues, including multiple attempts to determine where the lines between excess sleep, ideal sleep time, and sleep deprivation should be drawn and how each category affects a person’s longevity. Every study has produced different recommendations, which infuriates Boschvark each time he receives the latest one. Even now, working out in the home gym of his estate in Montecito, California, though he hasn’t received results of a new sleep study in more than a year, he simmers with anger as he thinks about the unreliable nature of scientists when they aren’t paid extravagantly to form a consensus on an issue. If the research subject involves something that will affect a public policy he champions, he can get a hundred studies from universities and highly respected organizations that say the same thing with identical certitude. However, paying for a consensus on the issue of sleep would do him no good, because this is about his personal health, thus requiring accurate data supported by unassailable facts.

Terrence Boschvark intends to live for three hundred years if not forever. If the Singularity—the melding of man and machine—doesn’t occur within the next few years, there will instead be a monumental discovery in molecular biology that swiftly leads to human immortality, and if there isn’t such a discovery in molecular biology, then the breakthrough will come in genetic engineering. He is fifty-two years old, and when he thinks about the current average lifespan of a male, he gets so angry that he could strangle someone, anyone, if that would make him feel better, although of course it wouldn’t, at least not enough better to make it worth all the bother that would follow the strangulation.

Every day, Boschvark takes 182 pills and capsules of vitamins, minerals, enzymes, and micronutrients that he believes will help him achieve life everlasting. Except on infuriating nights like this when he suffers insomnia , he sleeps in a custom hyperbaric chamber that supplies an environment rich in oxygen, thus facilitating brain health and ensuring that he’s more clear-thinking than other people. Among additional procedures, every six months his blood is replaced with filtered blood from a group of younger men who submit to tests for diseases and whom he pays extravagantly for their donations.

In spite of all that, he still suffers from an allergy to wheat that greatly restricts his diet and puts him at risk of anaphylactic shock if he is accidentally served ordinary pasta when he has asked for rice noodles. A common sandwich would kill him. The damn wheat allergy causes him to fume with resentment every time he thinks of it, which is every time he sits down to a meal or wants a snack.

At the moment, he is not angry about his allergy or about the meager human lifespan. However, his vexation at his inability to sleep is exacerbated by a constant, abrading irritation that the four men in the search party are dead while Nochelobo’s tart is alive and still poses a threat to the Grand Plateau project.

His workout isn’t exhausting him enough to sleep; he gives it up. Boschvark has been on a high-protein diet and lifting weights all of his adult life, and his supremely oxygenated brain is housed in a body so muscled that he believes he could drag a stubborn horse anywhere he wanted to take it, although he has never tested that assumption. He dislikes horses because of an incident with a pony that his parents gave him for his birthday when he was eight, a humiliation about which he never speaks. Anyway, now that he has given up on both his workout and the possibility of sleep, what he needs is not a horse but his Gulfstream V jet.

He calls Tandor Shaft, a former Navy SEAL and one of three property managers who live on the estate. Tandor is assigned the four-o’clock-to-midnight shift and is ready to deal with anything from a malfunctioning toilet to an attack involving mercenaries hired by the biggest star on the Food Network. Boschvark has never met the Food Network personality, but the man once made an on-air joke about him and is therefore not to be trusted.

Now, he directs Tandor Shaft to wake Heath Granger and Shepherd Eagle, his full-time pilots, who are asleep in one of the estate’s guesthouses. They must go to the private terminal at the airport in neighboring Santa Barbara and ready the jet. After taking a shower and receiving a fifteen-minute massage from his masseuse, who will also have to be awakened, Boschvark will be driven to the plane in the Mercedes limousine—the black one—by Tandor. Granger and Eagle will fly their employer to the accommodating airstrip on his nine-thousand-acre ranch that is four miles outside of Kettleton. He acquired the ranch—one of his nineteen homes—when his company was awarded the contract for the plateau project. Since he learned that this Vida person escaped, he’s endured an abrading irritation, which has matured into a bitter peevishness that makes it impossible for him to enjoy anything. He intends personally to direct the further search for and the inevitable capture of this impertinent woman.