Genocide of One: A Thriller (14 page)

Normally unconventional warfare a hundred klicks away wouldn’t be a problem, but in
the Congo things were different. There was just the one road through the jungle connecting
their location to the fighting zone. Plus every few kilometers there were villages
along the road that were targeted by insurgents. If the insurgents began marching
south they would definitely collide with them if they stayed on the main road. Thomas
was right to let them out here.

“The rebels don’t just attack towns along the main road; they also attack villages
in the jungle. You need to be extremely careful.”

To get to the Kanga band, Yeager thought, they would need to make their way through
the deepest, thickest part of the jungle.

“Finally, here are the items you requested.”

Thomas took down four long, machetelike hatchets from the truck. He’d thought of everything.

“Thank you, Thomas, for all you’ve done,” Yeager said.

“You’re quite welcome.”

The other three men shook Thomas’s hand, thanking him for his help.

“Well, I’m heading back to Uganda. Best of luck to you,” Thomas said, and got back
in the truck.

The canopied truck loaded with junk turned right, and when it disappeared through
the trees everything around them turned pitch black. The men lowered their night vision
goggles. When daylight came they would start their march, but before then they needed
to get into the jungle and stay out of sight. They shouldered their forty kilograms
of equipment, silently nodded to each other, and at a signal started forward. No one
hesitated.

One after another the members of Operation Guardian were swallowed up by the dark,
dense forest that covered the middle of the African continent.

Ever since the
woman calling herself Yuri Sakai had showed up, Kento had felt tense. Using his cell
phone and e-mail made him anxious: he wondered if someone were spying on him, and
when he was out walking at night he’d constantly glance around, fearful that he was
being followed.

On this weekend evening, too, Kento slowed the pace of his experiments so he could
go home later than usual. If he could leave with Nishioka, the lab chief, he’d be
able to have someone walk with him as far as his apartment.

“Kento,” a girl in his class called out to him, and he turned around.

“Yes?”

“You have a visitor.”

“Really?”

“Down at the entrance.”

Normally nobody visited the lab, so an alarm bell went off in Kento’s head. From his
station he couldn’t see the entrance. “Who is it?”

“You should go see yourself.”

“Is it an older woman?”

“No. A man.”

“A man?” A different sort of anxiety came over him. Was this a new sort of threat?
A thought flashed in his mind: he could take some of the chloroform they used as a
solvent and, if need be, drug whoever it was. But that was a stupid idea. It might
work in a TV drama, but in real life he might end up killing the person.

Kento hesitantly made his way down the hallway and peered over at the entrance. Right
inside in the lab stood a neat and trim young man, looking a bit reserved. Of medium
height and weight, he peered mildly in Kento’s direction through his small-framed
glasses. He seemed a soothing, calm type, not at all what Kento had been fearing.
Kento relaxed a bit and went out into the hallway. “Hi. I’m Kento Koga,” he said.

“Doi asked me to come,” the man replied.

“Doi?” Kento repeated, and it finally dawned on him. “I see,” he said with relief.
“You’re from the physical and chemical drug development department.”

“That’s right. My name’s Jeong-hoon Lee.”

Until he gave his name Kento had not detected any accent. “Nice to meet you.”

Jeong-hoon smiled. “Are you busy now? Should I come back later?”

Kento glanced at his watch. It was 7:30 p.m. Luckily, today was Saturday. “Jeong-hoon,
do you have any plans tonight?”

“No; no plans.”

“Okay. Can I see you in about thirty minutes?”

“Sure.”

Kento thought further. The two laptops he wanted Jeong-hoon to take a look at were
back at the apartment. “I’m sorry, but would you mind coming to my place? It’s a ten-minute
walk from here.”

“Can I park my motorcycle there?”

“No problem. Excuse me just a second.” He went back into the lab, drew a map to his
apartment on a memo pad someone had left behind, and came back. “It’s apartment two
oh four in this building. I’ll see you there at eight.”

“Sounds good.”

“Okay. See you then.”

After he said good-bye to Jeong-hoon Lee, Kento hurried back to the work he’d left
half done. He set up one of his experiments so that the reaction could take place
overnight, and then left the lab.

Kento felt a little strange about a foreigner coming to his tiny apartment. He remembered
how bare his fridge was, stopped by a store that was about to close, and bought pastries
and cans of juice. He was about to pick up some beer, but thought better of it. Offering
alcohol to someone riding a motorcycle wasn’t a great idea.

As he hurried along the road, a memory came back to him from junior high. He’d been
at his father’s parents’ home and had gotten into an argument with his grandfather
and uncle. The Koga household’s men—his grandfather and the present head of the household,
his uncle—had a visceral hatred of Chinese and Koreans.

“Never trust a Chink or a Korean,” his uncle insisted while the men were drinking
one night. Kento was frankly surprised. Could there be that many foreigners living
in Kofu?

“Uncle, do you know any Chinese and Korean people?”

His uncle stared in amazement. “No,” he said.

It was Kento’s turn to be astonished. “How can you hate people you don’t even know?”

His grandfather, shooting him a stern look, broke in. “When I was young, in Tokyo,
I got into a fight with some Koreans. I got really hurt.”

His grandfather had always been known for his physical strength. “Have you ever had
a fight with Japanese?”

“Many times.”

“So you hate Japanese, too?”

His uncle’s jaw dropped. “Don’t be an idiot. There’s no reason for Japanese to hate
other Japanese.”

“But that’s strange. You fought with both groups, but why hate only those who come
from the Korean peninsula?” Kento deliberately used this way of referring to them
rather than the term his grandfather had used—Chosenjin—because when his grandfather
used this term to designate a particular race it had a derogatory tone. Kento sensed
a foul sort of discrimination behind their words and wanted to dissociate himself
from their stance. “Aren’t both of you just forcing yourselves to come up with reasons
to hate them?”

“Enough with the arguments, you fool!” his grandfather shouted, his face full of hatred.
It was as if a deep-seated enmity within him was finally bursting forth.

“He’s at that age when you say things like that,” his uncle said in a sarcastic tone.
“You’re just like your father, Kento. Always argumentative.”

Kento found it upsetting for them to berate him over something like this. Any love
his grandfather and his uncle may have for their relatives seemed trumped by the intensity
of their hatred for
Chinks
and
Chosenjin
. They were narrow-minded people who knew only the small town they lived in and had
decided that all foreigners were inferior. But what exactly did these words,
Chinks
and
Chosenjin
, mean? People they’d never once talked to? If so, they didn’t even know what the
words really designated. Their poor excuses for brains wouldn’t allow them to see
the contradictions in their own arguments. Kento, still just in junior high, was thoroughly
disgusted with them.

Later Kento was horrified when he learned about the genocides that the Japanese had
carried out. Right after the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, which leveled Tokyo,
false rumors spread that Koreans were committing arson and poisoning wells. The government,
police, and even newspapers spread these baseless accusations, and Japanese, stirred
up by the rumors, massacred several thousand Koreans. They used guns, swords, and
cudgels, and even tortured some people, tying them down faceup and repeatedly driving
trucks over them. Japan at the time had conquered Korea and made it a colony, and
a guilty conscience was at work, as well as the fear that the Koreans might exact
revenge on them. The violence soon escalated to the point where even many Japanese
were mistaken for Koreans and killed.

It was ordinary citizens who committed this barbarity. The thought sent a chill down
Kento’s spine. If his racist grandfather and uncle had been there at the time, they
would have killed Koreans along with everybody else. People who had no qualms about
expressing feelings of discrimination against other races could, without much provocation,
let their brutality explode and slaughter others.

What evil spirit had possessed them? And what sort of fear and pain must the people
who were killed have experienced? Japanese don’t understand how frightening their
own countrymen can be.

The only ray of hope within these horrifying visions was the venomous sentence his
uncle had spit out:
You’re just like your father.
Until junior high Kento had been oblivious to the discrimination lying hidden within
Japanese society because of the home environment in which he’d been brought up. His
father, Seiji, liked foreign exchange students. “Liu wrote a great paper,” he’d say
about one. And of another, “Kim did a great presentation at the conference,” proud
and pleased at each and every accomplishment of theirs. And his only son inherited
this tendency. For Kento this was the sole virtue he was proud he shared with his
father.

As Kento climbed the stairs to his apartment he thought about the way Korean-Japanese
and Japanese had helped each other after the Great Hanshin Earthquake of 1995. Times
had certainly changed. Kento could only pray that the guest who would be visiting
in a few minutes held no grudge against the Japanese. When you had such foolish ancestors,
difficulties followed you forever.

Inside his apartment, Kento hurriedly picked up his scattered clothes, making a space
in the one-room apartment where a visitor could sit. Then he took the two laptops
from under his bed and put them on his desk.

Right on time he heard a motorcycle roar up outside his building and come to a stop.
He went out on his balcony, looked down at the alley below, and saw Jeong-hoon Lee
get off his 750cc motorcycle and take his helmet off. Not many researchers rode such
huge machines.

Kento went to the front door. “Come on in.”

Jeong-hoon removed his shoes, stepped inside, and looked around the tiny apartment,
grinning.

“Sorry to make you come all this way,” Kento said.

“No—I’m the one who should apologize for dropping in like this.”

After this polite exchange Kento had him sit down at the desk. “These are the two
laptops I’d like you to take a look at.”

“These two?”

“Yes, that’s right.” Kento noticed how stilted their conversation was, like a dialogue
from a beginner’s language textbook. “By the way, how old are you?”

“I’m twenty-four.”

“Me, too,” Kento said. “If you don’t mind, maybe we could speak to each other more
casually?” He hurriedly added, “You understand what I mean by
casually
, right?”

“Yep, sure do,” Jeong-hoon said, immediately showing that he did.

Kento laughed. “You can call me Kento.”

“Call me Jeong-hoon.”

“Here. Have one of these whenever you like,” Kento said, lining up the cans of juice
he’d just bought on the tatami mat. “Now, the thing is, this smaller laptop won’t
boot up, and I was wondering if you could figure out what sort of data is on it.”

Jeong-hoon opened up the black laptop and pushed the on button. As before, the screen
remained a frozen blue. He tried the on button and the force quit function several
times each, but was puzzled by the lack of response. Jeong-hoon took his own laptop
out of its case, connected it with the small black laptop, and tried a number of operations.
Kento didn’t know much about computers and had no idea what he was doing.

After a half hour he turned to Kento, who was sitting on the floor. “This is a mystery,”
he said.

“Pretty tough to crack?”

Jeong-hoon nodded. “I thought it might be broken, but I can’t say that for sure.”

“So there’s a chance it’s not broken?”

“Yeah,” Jeong-hoon said, and thought for a moment. His gentle eyes now looked sharp
and focused—the face of a researcher. “If you can lend it to me for a week I could
find out more. What do you think?”

“Hmm.” It was Kento’s turn to think. His father’s final message had told him not to
let anybody else have the computer. And then there was the incident with Yuri Sakai.
Lending the laptop to Jeong-hoon might get him in trouble. “I’d like to, but the computer
is somebody else’s, not mine, so I can’t lend it to you.”

“Okay. Understood.”

“Let’s take a break,” Kento said, offering Jeong-hoon a canned drink. As they relaxed
Kento thought about the other laptop. The goal was to determine the true nature of
the GIFT software, which should be Jeong-hoon’s area of expertise, but Kento worried
about how much of the background information he should reveal. Still, he did want
to get Jeong-hoon’s opinion of the task set before him: to create a drug that would
treat a chronic disease, all in the space of a month.

Kento decided he could trust Jeong-hoon. “I’m going to tell you something now and
I’d like you to keep it a secret, okay?”

Jeong-hoon frowned suspiciously and nodded.

“What I need to do is create a GPCR agonist in less than a month.”

“Are you kidding? In a
month?
”

“That’s right. That’s why the GIFT software was created.”

Kento briefly summarized the strange research his father had left behind. When Jeong-hoon
heard that his father had passed away he expressed his deepest sympathy, but other
than that, he listened in silence. At the end, as he explained the fact that several
crucial steps were left out of his father’s plan to create the new drug, Kento felt
a little embarrassed. “It’s impossible, right? I think it’s just a bad idea my father
came up with. A virologist in over his head.”

Surprisingly, Jeong-hoon didn’t automatically agree with him. He frowned, turning
things over in his mind. “Let me think this through, logically, without any preconceptions.”

“Sure.”

“I know what your father was thinking when he planned this.”

“Are you kidding?” Kento said in surprise, and leaned forward.

“There’s only one condition that would allow an impossible plan like this to succeed.
GIFT would have to be perfect.”

“Perfect?”

Jeong-hoon nodded. “If the software models the form of the receptor and designs a
chemical structure that will flawlessly bind with it, then the only issue remaining
is what the people involved do with it.”

“You mean the process of actually synthesizing the drug?”

“Right. Which is why in the steps your father outlined he included the minimal assay
needed to determine if the synthesis worked or not.”

Apart from the question of whether this was really possible, logically Jeong-hoon
was entirely correct. As long as the drug design software created a perfect blueprint,
all that would remain for the drug to be complete would be synthesizing the chemical
compound.

The software you’ll need for the research is in the white laptop, so use that.

His father’s message had given him all the directions he needed. As Jeong-hoon had
said, assuming that GIFT was perfect, they should be able to complete the task.