Genocide of One: A Thriller (3 page)

“You’re worried about a leak? You shouldn’t be. I have top secret clearance.”

US military intelligence is divided into three clearance levels: confidential, secret,
and top secret. A strict background check is required for clearance at each level,
including a polygraph test. Even after he left the army Yeager had kept up his TS
clearance, for without it he wouldn’t be able to work at some of the assignments portioned
out to security companies by the Defense Department.

“Look, I know your background. Ex–Special Forces, totally reliable. It’s just that
in this case we have to be extra cautious about security.”

Liban’s vague words gave Yeager another hint. This former Delta Force executive was
talking about a job that required a higher level of security than what a TS clearance
could provide. It required TS/SI, top secret/special intelligence, or TS/SCI, top
secret/sensitive compartmented information. From what Liban was hinting at, this might
even be an SAP, a special access program, the kind of operation with the most tightly
controlled intelligence access of all—an assassination authorized by the White House,
for example. But then why not assign Delta Force or Navy SEAL Team 6 to do it? This
wasn’t the kind of job you give to a private defense contractor.

“What do you think?” Liban said, urging him to make a decision. “Would you like to
sign on?”

Yeager had a strange feeling. The same feeling he had when he was a teenager and his
parents divorced and he had to choose which one to live with. The same sense of indecision
he’d felt when, in the face of an urgent need to make up his mind, he’d decided, just
before graduating from high school, to enter the army in order to be eligible for
a scholarship later to go to college. He knew he was standing at a decisive crossroads.
Whichever choice he made, he knew it would change his life forever.

“If you have any questions, now’s the time. I’ll answer as much as I can.”

“You sure it isn’t dangerous?”

“As long as you don’t screw up.”

“Is this a one-man job?”

“No. You’ll be in a four-man team.”

A four-man team was the smallest operational unit the Special Forces used.

“The rest of the terms of employment are the same as usual. We’ll provide the weapons,
and if you were to die during the operation the Defense Base Act will provide sixty-four
thousand dollars to your family.”

“Can I see the agreement?”

Liban smiled approvingly and took a document out of his briefcase. “You shouldn’t
hesitate. Trust your luck. You’re a lucky guy.”

“Me? Lucky?” Yeager gave a lopsided, half-sarcastic grin. “I always saw myself as
the unlucky type.”

“No, not at all. You’re a survivor,” Liban said, his mouth drawn. “We had six other
candidates for this job, but all of them died. They died in firefights, one after
another. The insurgents have been targeting security personnel a lot these days.”

Yeager nodded.

“Today was the first time I was finally able to meet one of our candidates face-to-face.”

Yeager considered the figures, hoping they’d wipe out the ominous feeling he had.
Forty-five thousand dollars a month. Could he really turn an offer like that down?
So what if it was a dirty job? He was just a replaceable tool anyway, no different
from the gun in his hands. Even if he were to kill somebody, you couldn’t blame the
gun. The one who’s to blame is the one who really pulls the trigger, the person who
actually orders the murder.

Yeager scanned the agreement. It didn’t provide any new clues. He just had to make
up his mind and sign.

Liban held out a pen. As Yeager reached for it he felt a vibration in his shirt pocket
and stopped.

“Excuse me,” he said. He took out the cell phone and checked the screen. Lydia was
calling back from Lisbon. “I’d like to check with my wife first. I told her I’d be
seeing her tomorrow.”

Liban looked like a hunter about to lose his prey. “Sure; go ahead.”

Yeager pushed the call button. Before he said a word he heard Lydia’s small voice.
It held the despair and hopelessness he’d heard so many times before.

“Jon? It’s me. I don’t know what to do.”

“What’s wrong?”

She swallowed back her tears. “They put Justin in intensive care.”

There goes more money, Yeager thought. I guess I have no choice but to sign. “Calm
down, Lydia. We’ve been through this before, and he always gets better.”

“This time’s different. There’s blood in his phlegm.”

This was a sign that his son’s disease was reaching its terminal stage. A chill ran
up Yeager’s spine. He motioned to Liban that he was stepping out, then he left the
office. The stairs next to the hallway were noisy as security personnel rushed up
and down.

“You sure about this?”

“I saw it myself. A red line like a piece of lint.”

“A red line,” Yeager muttered. “What does Dr. Garrado say?” Garrado, Justin’s Portuguese
attending physician, was one of the world’s leading experts on PAECS.

Yeager couldn’t make out Lydia’s words through her sobs. He could picture her, wiping
away the tears. “What is Dr. Garrado’s opinion?” he asked again.

“He says that Justin’s heart and liver are failing…that he doesn’t have much time
left.”

Yeager forced his frozen mind to think, to review what he knew about the disease.
Once a patient started hemorrhaging from the lungs, he had about a month left.

“You’ll be here tomorrow, won’t you?” Lydia sobbed, as if imploring him.

I have to see my son before it’s too late, Yeager thought. But how the hell are we
going to pay for his treatment? Yeager stared at the closed door of the office. He
tried his best to hold up, but had reached the limits of his strength. His mind was
hovering on the verge of chaos.

Why am I standing here in the hallway of a dirty barracks in Baghdad clutching this
phone? he asked himself. Why the hell am I here?

“Jon?” his wife’s sobbing voice reached him. “Jon? Are you there?”

Misfortune looks very
different when seen from the inside.

The hearse carrying his father’s body wound its way through the narrow streets of
the shopping district in the city of Atsugi, in Kanagawa Prefecture. Kento Koga was
in a black limousine provided by the funeral home, slowly following behind the hearse.

It was early afternoon on a weekday. In the gentle winter sunshine, not one of the
shoppers paused to look at the line of black cars as they passed by. And not a single
one was sympathetic to the shock the young man was feeling.

Ever since he heard about the sudden death of his father, Seiji, Kento was unsure
of his own feelings, as if all that kept him going emotionally had collapsed. Five
days ago, when he’d rushed to the hospital and was told that the cause of death was
an aneurysm of the thoracic aorta, he and his mother hadn’t dissolved in tears. Ever
since, they’d felt passive, inert, as if watching events sweep over them. His father’s
older brother and other relatives who’d hurried in from Yamanashi Prefecture took
over all the arrangements for the funeral without ever being asked. It was obvious
to them that they couldn’t count much on the widow, a full-time housewife, or her
thin, slight, graduate-student son.

Kento had never really respected his father. Seiji had always been so negative about
everything, a man with a warped, jaundiced view of life. He had a respectable position,
for sure—he was a full professor at a university—but Kento always viewed him as a
poor example of an adult. So he was taken by complete surprise when, a half hour ago,
as they were placing flowers inside his father’s coffin, he’d burst into tears. It
wasn’t grief that brought this on, he thought as he wiped away the tears behind his
glasses, but more a visceral reaction brought on by the blood ties they shared.

The coffin lid was closed; the body, surrounded by colorful flowers, lost to sight
forever. This was the last time Kento would ever see him, this professor with long,
haggard features. They’d known each other for but a brief twenty-four years.

The line of cars carrying the bereaved relatives and funeral home staff pulled up
to the crematorium building, and the coffin was placed inside the incinerator. There
were two types of incinerators, one more expensive than the other, and Seiji’s coffin
was in the cheaper one. Even in death they rank people according to how much they
can afford, Kento thought, bristling at the Japanese view of life and death.

The thirty or so relatives and friends in the funeral party headed to the waiting
room on the second floor. Only Kento stayed behind, staring at the tightly shut door
of the incinerator. Inside, his father’s body was consumed by flames. A passage from
a book came to Kento, a science text he’d read in junior high.

Now the time had arrived for all the elements in his father’s body to return to the
place from which they’d come. These scientific facts helped, a little, as he struggled
to cope.

Kento left the incinerator and climbed the staircase in the spacious entry hall to
the waiting room.

The group of mourners was seated in a circle in the middle of the large room, which
was covered with tatami. The mourners sat on floor cushions placed next to low tables.
Kento’s mother, Kaori, couldn’t hide her exhaustion but was still holding up. She
was seated formally, politely thanking all her husband’s friends and relatives who
came to express their condolences.

Kento’s grandparents were there, too, from Kofu, as well as his uncle and his family.
The Kogas were a fairly well-to-do merchant family from Kofu, in Yamanashi, and though
they’d recently been losing customers to a large supermarket that had moved into the
neighborhood, Kento’s uncle, who had taken over the family business, managed to keep
their store going. It was the second son in the family, Seiji, who was the odd man
out, for after attending a local university he’d gone on to graduate school in Tokyo,
finished his doctorate, and stayed on as a researcher at the university instead of
seeking a job in industry.

Kento never felt comfortable with his father’s side of the family. He stood there
for a moment, wondering where he should sit, finally settling down on a cushion in
the farthest corner of the room.

“Hello, Kento.”

From across the table a thin man, hair streaked with gray, was speaking to him—his
father’s friend, a newspaper reporter named Sugai. Sugai had visited their house in
Atsugi a number of times, so Kento knew who he was.

“Haven’t seen you in a while. You’ve really grown,” Sugai said, coming around the
table and sitting beside him. “You’re in grad school now?”

“That’s right.”

“What are you studying?”

“I’m in a pharmaceuticals chemistry lab, working on organic synthesis,” Kento said
curtly.

He tried to make it clear he wasn’t in the mood to talk, but Sugai went on anyway.
“What exactly do you do?”

Kento reluctantly explained. “We use computers to design new drugs, which are then
created based on these plans. We combine all sorts of compounds.”

“Shaking a test tube in a lab?”

“You could say that.”

“Sounds like research that helps people.”

“I suppose so…” The words of praise made Kento uncomfortable. “Anyway, it’s all I
know how to do.”

Sugai inclined his head, puzzled. He might be a reporter, but he seemed unable to
bring to light the doubts Kento held, deep down, about his own abilities and aptitude
for the work he was doing. At this point Kento wasn’t anyone special, and Sugai didn’t
figure that would ever change.

“Scientific research in Japan has some serious fundamental problems, so we’re counting
on you” was all Sugai said.

Fundamental problems
. The guy’s a science reporter at a major newspaper, yet he has no idea what he’s
talking about, Kento thought angrily. Something about Sugai rubbed him the wrong way.
He couldn’t pinpoint it, but his kindness came off sounding more like hostility, and
Kento ended up feeling slighted.

Ten years ago his father’s research had been written up in the science columns of
all the big newspapers. It was the first and only time Seiji, in his role as scientist,
had been in the spotlight. Sugai had written the column. The term
environmental hormones
was sweeping the nation, and in his research at the university lab his father had
determined that the ingredients in a particular controversial synthetic detergent
didn’t harm the human endocrine system.
REPORT BY PROFESSOR SEIJI KOGA OF TAMA POLYTECHNIC,
the bold headlines had said, and when he saw this it was the first and only time in
his life that Kento was proud of his father. But his newfound respect soon faded when
he found out that his father had accepted a large research grant from the detergent’s
manufacturer.

Seiji’s field had been virology, so why had he, this one time, done research into
materials that disrupted the endocrine system? And was his research really objective?
Had he skewed the data to pander to the company that was shelling out all this research
money?

Since then researchers throughout the world had looked into the effects of environmental
hormones on the body but had never found conclusive proof that they were harmful.
But their conclusions were less than satisfying, because they still couldn’t state
categorically that the hormones were harmless. The whole thing illustrated the limits
of science, Kento had decided. But still, the incident had engendered a dislike toward
his father and a distrust that he couldn’t shake. And he’d lumped Sugai, who’d written
the article, in the same category—people who lived in a corrupt adult world.

“It’s a real shame. He still had so many good years ahead of him,” Sugai said, clearly
shocked at the sudden death of a friend the same age as he.

“Thank you for coming all the way to be with us.”

“It’s the least I could do,” Sugai said, his head bowed.

To fill in the lull in the conversation Kento picked up the teapot on the table and
poured them each a cup of tea.

Sugai sipped and reminisced about Seiji. They were all the stereotypical anecdotes
you’d expect from a cheap TV drama—about how his father had been well respected at
work, how deep down he must have been so proud of his son. It made Kento feel all
the more how dull and prosaic his father’s life had been.

Finally out of topics, Sugai changed the subject. “Someone said you’re going to do
the memorial service for your father as soon as we finish our tea.”

“That’s right.”

“I have to be going just after that. So I’d better ask you now, before I forget.”

“Forget what?”

“Have you ever heard of the Heisman Report?”

“Heisman Report?” Must be some sort of academic paper, though he’d never heard of
any researcher named Heisman. “No, I’ve never heard of it.”

“Your father asked me to look into it, and I was wondering what I should do now.”

“What’s the Heisman Report?”

“It was a report to the president of the United States from an American think tank
thirty years ago. Your father wanted to know the details.”

Must have something to do with a viral epidemic, his father’s field. “I can’t help
you there,” Kento said.

His tone was unexpectedly detached, and Sugai, seemingly surprised, stared at him.
“I understand. Don’t worry about it, then.”

Kento didn’t care what Sugai thought of him. The relationship between a father and
son was nobody else’s business. Parents and children with a perfect relationship were
a myth, anyway.

The funeral director soon came to assemble them. The mourners, who had been talking
in hushed, subdued tones, shuffled to their feet and followed him downstairs.

Kento stood in front of the incinerator and received the bones of his father. The
whitish bones laid out so simply, so bleakly, before him told a graphic tale of how
a single human being had now vanished from the earth.

His grandparents and his uncle were sobbing quietly. And Kento, for only the second
time since his father had died, found himself crying, too.

The memorial service soon followed, and then the ceremonies for sending the departed
on his way were over.

The alarm clock buzzed Kento awake early the next morning, and after a quick breakfast
he left his parents’ home, located in a subdivision in Atsugi. He had to get back
to his grad-student life, back to his one-room apartment and a life of following the
instructions of an assistant professor, slogging through one boring experiment after
another.

As he walked out of the typical three-bedroom house into the cold morning air, Kento
started to worry about his mother, who was alone now. His mother’s parents would be
staying with her for a while, but after they went home she’d be all by herself. It
was impossible for him to imagine what must be going through her mind now that she
was widowed at the age of fifty-four.

As he’d left she said, “Stop by and see me some time.”

“Okay. Will do,” he replied, and set off for Hon-Atsugi station.

The university Kento attended, the Tokyo University of Humanities and Science, was
located on the other side of Tokyo from Atsugi, in Kinshi-cho, the town closest to
Chiba Prefecture. Fifteen thousand students attended the school, which was a fifteen-minute
walk from Kinshi-cho station. As you walked northeast from the station you came to
a canal called the Yokojikken River, which divided the campus in two: the science
campus was on the left bank and the humanities campus was on the right. Only the medical
faculty, with the university hospital, was separate; it was located closer to the
station. The university boasted a ninety-year history, but with the steady reconstruction
over the years even the extensive farmlands that used to exist there—part of the school
of agriculture—were covered over by new school buildings. Like universities within
Tokyo itself, the campus was dreary, a sprawl of uninspired concrete structures.

From his parents’ home the journey took two hours, with one change of trains, so Kento
had plenty of time to think about his future. His family’s financial situation worried
him most. When he was in his second year of studying for his MA, Kento had decided
not to look for a job but go right into the doctoral program, which meant he would
have to rely on his family for three more years’ worth of tuition and living expenses.

One of his friends, a student in the humanities, teased him for still sponging off
his parents, lecturing him on the need to go out and get a part-time job, but this
was a typical way of thinking for humanities students—they just played around and
never studied. Almost all the classes in the pharmacy school were required, and dropping
even one unit meant you’d flunk out. After you passed the national pharmacy licensing
exam and the graduation exams, what faced you in grad school was a life spent running
experiments and nothing else. Days so unbelievably hectic that
harsh
didn’t come close to describing them.
Unimaginable
was more like it. In the pharmaceuticals research lab that Kento belonged to, you
were stuck in the lab every weekday running tests, from 10:00 a.m. until far into
the night. The only days off were Sundays and holidays, but tests often ran late,
and half those days off were still spent in the lab. Lengthy vacations were out of
the question, and if you could get five days off in a row for the summer Obon festival
or New Year’s, you considered yourself lucky. You spent nine years like this to get
to, finally, become a “doctor.” A part-time job? Give me a break.