Genocide of One: A Thriller (38 page)

Pierce nodded and sighed. “I never knew war could be this terrifying.”

Esimo came over, Akili in his arms. He looked up worriedly at Pierce, and they exchanged
a few words. Esimo was trying to comfort his friend. And he started addressing Yeager.

Pierce had somehow recovered his composure enough to translate. “He said, ‘Thank you
for saving my son.’”

Yeager smiled in spite of himself. He felt a little calmer. “You’re welcome.”

Esimo smiled back and said something to Pierce. He seemed to be imploring him about
something. Pierce listened, a perplexed look on his face.

“What is he saying?”

“He wants to take Akili and go back to their band.”

That was out of the question. If Akili went back to the area where the camp was, they’d
all be killed. He knew they’d already decided what course to take, yet Yeager felt
a great deal of sympathy for this tiny father. His fate was to live apart from his
son. “Tell him this. If you take your son back to the camp, the Mbuti people will
all be in danger.”

A wave of desperate sadness swept over Esimo’s face as he heard this. He stared down,
and after some hesitation, seemed to make up his mind. “If that’s the case, then can
I go back alone?”

Yeager understood the struggle he was going through. On the one hand Esimo wanted
to stay with his son, but on the other he was worried sick about his tribe members,
the ones who had committed their lives to each other, who had always stood together.

Yeager was faced with a very practical problem. If they lost their guide, Esimo, what
then? He turned to Pierce. “Any new intel?”

Pierce fingered the laptop and gazed at the display. “There’s a reconnaissance report
from a PKO unit. The insurgents in the north are already headed our way. They’ve been
radioing our GPS coordinates.”

Yeager checked his map. Their landmark before they got to the town of Beni in the
southeast was the Ibina River in the south, so they should be able to get there without
Esimo’s help. But with the arrival of the Predator drones the situation had grown
much more strained. They’d be completely exposed when they tried to cross the broad
Ibina, targeted by the Hellfire missiles. If the enemy force pushed down from the
north, they’d be cut off at the river.

Either way, Esimo’s role as guide was over, and he had to get back to his tribe. For
his sake and safety it was best to let him go sooner rather than later. “Tell Esimo
he can go back to the camp. But unless he circles around to the west the enemy might
find him.”

Pierce translated this into Kimbuti, and Esimo expressed his thanks. Yeager went back
to the others, explained the situation, and gave them a little time to say good-bye.

Garrett and Meyers, and even the sullen Mick, thanked Esimo for all he’d done. The
mercenaries would never forget how the tiny Mbuti man had saved them.

One by one Esimo shook their hands. Pierce bent down and gave him a hug. Though from
polar opposite worlds, the two men were clearly close friends.

The Mbuti man smiled bashfully the whole time he was saying good-bye, but when he
was about to leave and handed Akili over to Pierce, a short, shrill cry broke forth
from him, a profound sorrow emanating from the depths of his being.

Akili reached out, as if to keep his father from leaving. In tears, Esimo walked off,
but after a few steps he turned to Akili.

Watching this, the mercenaries were startled by a small voice from the grotesque-looking
child. Until now the child had never said a word, but now, in Pierce’s arms, his mouth
was moving, desperately calling out to his father.

“Epa…”

This wasn’t some whimsical, meaningless sound an infant made. Awkwardly, Akili sounded
out a single word, over and over.

“Epa…Epa…”

Pierce’s eyes went wide in surprise, then he shook his head sadly and spoke to the
mercenaries.

“In their language
epa
means ‘father.’ Akili is calling out ‘Father, Father.’”

Yeager pictured his son, lying ill in a hospital in Lisbon. As Justin lay there, writhing
in pain, desperately gasping for air, he must be calling out for his father, too.

“Tell this to Esimo,” Yeager said, fighting to keep his emotions in check. “We’ll
protect Akili. Someday you will be able to see him again, so take care of yourself
until then.”

When he heard this, Esimo said “thank you” again and again, gave his child one last
hug, and then ran off. Akili was in tears, and the mercenaries took turns soothing
him.

Esimo was finally swallowed up by the jungle, and the men felt as if the spirit of
the jungle that had been protecting them had vanished. But they had no time to wax
sentimental. If they didn’t get a move on, the enemy would be upon them in less than
an hour. Garrett had been patched up, and Yeager signaled them to move out. “Let’s
go,” he said.

Garrett got to his feet. “He lost something,” he said, and picked up a large leaf
from the ground. Inside the rolled-up leaf were the coals that Esimo had so treasured.

“That’s the fire of life for them,” Pierce said. “I’ve lived with the Pygmies for
a long time, and there’s one riddle I’ve never solved. I’ve never seen them light
a fire other than by using coals. That fire may have been burning in this jungle and
handed down by them for tens of thousands of years.”

Esimo had gone back to his people and their warm fire. Yeager prayed that the Pygmies’
fire of life would burn forever.

Kento stayed holed
up in his tiny lab, fighting hunger. On top of the desk, the two laptops his father
had left him were up and operating.

The GIFT countdown continued. By tomorrow night he would know the structure of the
new drug.

The black laptop was connected again with the Congo. As before, he had a call from
Poppy and was instructed to pass along updated intel to Nigel Pierce. But the satellite
image only lasted fifteen minutes before it cut out. It then reappeared, only intermittently
showing the situation in the Congo. They were apparently employing multiple earth-orbit
satellites, switching from one to another. And they were using different types of
cameras, too, as a normal video image was replaced by an infrared image, only to switch
to a strange monochrome screen.

Every time there was a close-up of the sea of trees, Kento peered intently at the
screen, hoping to catch some new information, but the trees blocked his view, and
he couldn’t see what lay beneath.

“Isn’t there a reconnaissance image taken at a lower altitude?” Pierce asked him.

“No, there isn’t,” Kento replied. Everything he saw was high-altitude imagery.

A long silence followed. Soon after the reconnaissance images faded, Kento’s cell
phone rang.
OUT OF AREA,
the display said. The regular call from Lisbon. Once more amazed by the reach of
global communications, Kento answered.

“Here are today’s readings,” Lydia Yeager’s melancholy voice said.

The numbers she gave were Justin’s blood gas results. Checking the arterial blood
indicated how well Justin’s lungs were functioning. Kento noted down these three indicators
in his notepad.

“How are things at your end?” Lydia asked.

“The drug development is proceeding.”

“I hope to hear some good news,” Lydia said, and hung up.

Kento compared the arterial oxygen pressure value and the pH she’d given him and,
using the dissociation curve published in a specialized text, calculated the degree
of arterial oxygen saturation. This was the value that showed the amount of oxygen
in the blood. In late-stage PAECS there is hemorrhaging from the lungs, and the oxygen
saturation level rapidly decreases, leading to death. The ratio of decrease is set,
so if you plot the change in value you are able to calculate very accurately how much
time the patient has left. In Justin Yeager’s case this meant seventeen days. Unless
he took the new drug by March 3, Japan time, he’d be dead.

The deadline that his father had given him, the end of February, had accurately predicted
Justin’s condition. This, too, had to be the work of a superhuman intelligence.

Kento wanted to know Maika Kobayashi’s readings as well, but the university hospital
was under surveillance, and he couldn’t get in touch with his friend Dr. Yoshihara.
All he could do was pray that she would hold out until the drug was ready.

The black laptop, the one used to communicate, gave a short beep. He had mail. A message
appeared on the screen, and Kento typed in his reply to Pierce on the other side of
the world, telling him he had new information.

Pierce, breathing heavily as he walked through the jungle, said through the voice
link, “Could you read it to me?”

The message was in English, and as he read it aloud Kento mentally translated it into
Japanese. It seemed to be a record of a radio message, and it said, “We found no bodies
in the missile impact zone.”

“Okay, got it. Thank you, Kento.”

“What is this?”

“It’s a transmission from the enemy, intercepted by the PKO,” Pierce replied.

Kento was on standby again. He saved the message and then stared at the small laptop.
A thought suddenly hit him. If the computer had e-mail function, wouldn’t it have
a record of past communications?

Why his father had gotten involved in all this was a mystery. And this was a great
opportunity to answer that. He began scrolling through the computer, the unfamiliar
operating system slowing him down. He cautiously moved the mouse and accessed the
data on the hard drive, and a new window opened with a long list of file names, all
in English. He had no idea where to begin, so he located the search function, typed
in his father’s name in Western-style letters, and clicked
FULL TEXT SEARCH
.

A list of files immediately popped up, all reports on his father’s personal history.
The letterhead on the reports was the same: Defense Intelligence Agency. Kento wasn’t
familiar with the name, so he looked it up on his electronic dictionary and learned
it was a US government espionage service.

But why would a spy organization’s documents be on this laptop? The question threw
him momentarily, but then he understood. Poppy must have hacked into the US government’s
communications network and accessed the DIA’s documents. If he could download images
from military reconnaissance satellites, this was a piece of cake.

He scanned the documents further and found his father’s academic article included,
in Japanese. His report on investigations into viral infections among the Mbuti Pygmies.
The DIA analyst added this note:
At the same time and the same place, Dr. Nigel Pierce was staying there doing anthropology
fieldwork
. I see, Kento thought. So his father and Pierce met each other in 1996, in Zaire,
the former name of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In the report was an item
entitled
Other foreigners staying there at the time
. Kento skimmed through the list, and when he came across another Japanese name he
yelped in surprise.

So this inconspicuous woman was in eastern Zaire at the same time. Had she and his
father met each other there, worlds away from Japan? Kento had a bad feeling about
this. The word
affair
, which his mother had let slip, came roaring back into his mind.

Kento called up the search function and typed in this mysterious female doctor’s name.
One document, complete with a photo, popped up on-screen.

Kento scrutinized the image. The photo was of a woman in her thirties. A photo taken
for a passport or some sort of ID. She looked a little younger than he remembered,
but the small face, with no makeup, definitely belonged to the woman he talked with
on campus.

The report’s letterhead said
CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY
. So the CIA had been investigating Yuri Sakai. Kento read through the background
investigation report.

All this matched what the newspaper reporter Sugai had found out. The rest of the
report, though, contained new information.

Kento wasn’t sure what f
amily record
referred to, so he scrolled down until he saw a Japanese document. It was a typical
koseki
, or official family record. An English translation was attached, but of course he
didn’t need that. The first thing he wanted to know was her present address, but it
wasn’t listed. He searched through the record of her parents’ names and home address
and came across a startling fact.

On November 4, 1996, according to the record, Yuri Sakai gave birth to a baby. That
was not all. The baby was a girl named Ema. The column for the father’s name was blank.
And there was no record of a marriage. In other words, Yuri Sakai, unmarried, gave
birth to her daughter without acknowledging the father. No way! Kento thought. Ema
was born in 1996. The same year she and his father, Seiji, had been in Zaire.

Kento groaned. The suspicion that his father had had an affair was confirmed in the
worst possible way. He had a half sister. While he was still alive, his father often
came home late, telling his wife that he was tutoring a shut-in child, when in reality
he was visiting his own daughter. An image that came back to him seemed to support
this conjecture. On the night he met Yuri Sakai, he sensed another person inside her
parked van. That might have been her child.

Kento scanned the laptop’s contents, desperately hoping to find something that would
deny this, but that was all he could find.

He stood up and restlessly began pacing the small apartment. Sugai must be continuing
his background check on Yuri Sakai. How much did he know? Even if he knew all this,
wouldn’t he hide it from Kento? For his part, Kento wasn’t about to let his mother
know.

He scratched his head, polished his dirty glasses, and went back to the computer.
This secret past that threatened to shake the Koga family provided the answer to other
questions: Why the CIA had investigated Yuri. And why Yuri tried to snatch this laptop
away from him. The CIA had something on Yuri, which is why she approached Kento. And
even now, somewhere in Tokyo, she was trying to track him down.

Uneasily, Kento called up the search function and typed in a third name.

He hit the enter key, and a list of documents containing his name flashed on the screen.
He called up the first report, from the DIA, and shuddered when he saw it. They were
hidden photos taken of him. A close-up taken with a telephoto lens that showed him
talking with Marina Kawai on campus.

The background report on him was accurate, down to the smallest detail. Included was
a report on his friends and acquaintances provided by the Japanese police. Kento went
through the names on the list one by one. Luckily, Sugai and Jeong-hoon Lee’s names
weren’t on it. The United States hadn’t caught on that he had some powerful reinforcements,
so he could still contact them without putting them at risk.

There was also a report of the messages between the Japanese police and the CIA concerning
the door-to-door search of the Machida district.
Can’t you check all the residences?
the CIA asked, to which the Public Security Bureau replied,
Considering the population density of Machida, it’s impossible to cover with just
ten investigators
. For the time being, at least, this little lab should be safe.

The final document contained some language he couldn’t follow. An order was given
to the paramilitary department of the Special Operations Group of the CIA:
Kento Koga, already designated a terrorist, will be handed over from the local police
and sentenced to special rendition following our extradition treaty. The destination
is Syria.

Kento didn’t understand the meaning of
rendition
, so he checked his electronic dictionary. The only definition that seemed to apply
was “the handing over of an escaped prisoner.”

Why Syria? He had no idea, but the awful threat pressing down on him was clear enough.
If the police caught him, he wouldn’t just be sent to prison. He’d be sent abroad,
and he might never see Japan again.

He remembered the words his father had left him with:
I’d like you to do the research alone. Don’t tell anybody. But if you find yourself
in danger, give it all up right away.

His hands were shaking. Why was this happening when all he wanted to do was save sick
children? But even if he stopped trying to develop the new drug, nothing would change,
would it? The US intelligence agencies and the Japanese police would never stop looking
for him.

He opened the first document again, the photograph of him and Marina together. Her
smiling face seemed to be sending him a message:
Don’t give up
. Whatever the future held, he had no other choice.

The cell phone rang, snapping him out of his thoughts. “Don’t waste your time looking
at superfluous things,” the voice on the other end said. The low, machine-generated
voice of Poppy.

Kento was shocked. “You’re monitoring this computer?”

“I am,” Poppy replied, and the screen started changing on its own. One by one the
files on the hard drive were erased. The small laptop was apparently connected through
the Internet to Poppy’s host computer. Just don’t erase the photo of Marina, Kento
thought. But it, too, vanished.

“I’ll send you whatever you need. You just focus on your work.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“What?”

Kento did his best to keep his voice from quavering. “If I’m arrested, are they going
to kill me?”

“They will. But before they do that, they’ll torture you.”

Kento pictured his fingernails getting ripped off, and he started to feel queasy.

“Just follow my instructions and there will be nothing to worry about. If you don’t
want to die, do what I say.”

He had to trust Poppy. “All right.”

“We have a new satellite image coming in. Get in touch with Pierce.” With this command,
Poppy hung up.

Kento turned back to his task. The monochrome high-altitude image of the jungle showed
a large river stretching from east to west.

Pierce was speaking, and he sounded exhausted. “We’ve just arrived at the Ibina River.
A large town, Beni, is off to our southeast.”

The satellite image showed a large gray patch, as if a giant had ripped out a section
of the jungle. This must be Beni. Pierce and the others were about thirty kilometers
northwest of the town.

“There should be a road that runs north from Beni. Do you see any movement along it?”