Genocide of One: A Thriller (8 page)

As Yeager and Mick met up at the open space Singleton barked out a command: “Garrett.
Meyers. Confirm the kills.”

The two ran off, Garrett checking the left-hand row of tents and Meyers checking those
on the right, starting from the farthest end. This was the first time they realized
what their target was. Garrett silently went from tent to tent, while Meyers listlessly
shook his head.

They reported back to Singleton.

“No survivors.”

“Mission complete.”

Singleton looked at his stopwatch. “Nearly sixty seconds, start to finish. Next time
around I’d like you to tighten that up. Tomorrow we’ll use dummy ammunition and work
on handling anybody who flees. That’s it for today. You did a good job, for the first
day.”

They followed Singleton back to the van. The team members were silent. After they
boarded and the rear door was closed Yeager finally spoke. “Hold on. I made a stupid
rookie mistake. I dropped an empty magazine.”

Singleton tsked and reset the parking brake.

“I’ll be back in a second.”

Yeager tugged on his night vision goggles again and raced back to the pitch-black
training ground. He hovered around behind the tents, groping in the dirt with his
trekking boots until he found a good spot. He knelt down, careful not to get his cargo
pants dirty, and vomited out the entire contents of his stomach.

Can I really be this lucky? The young Ugandan man felt almost afraid. A huge amount
of money had been deposited into the bank account he’d just opened—some two hundred
million Ugandan shillings. In US dollars this came out to about $106,000. Three hundred
times his yearly income.

It was all thanks to an Internet café in the capital, Kampala. The store was on a
corner, at the end of a line of shops that stood at the foot of high-rise buildings.
It was expensive, so he could only afford the café once a week, but the dozen computers
there lured him into an exciting, unknown world.

At first he just surfed the Web from one site to another, but soon he got interested
in studying computers and searched for information on programming. He was dying to
study and learn. He’d had to quit junior high school to help with his parents’ work,
and he was frustrated at his present job—carpentry—and dreamed of someday working
in the digital field.

As he played around in cyberspace he learned another use for the Internet. He registered
with a social networking site, describing himself as a tour guide in Uganda. The guys
he knew who worked with him at construction sites were from all over the country,
and if he needed to he could pump them for knowledge of their hometowns. It was a
sham, of course, but he didn’t plan on getting caught.

For half a year he got no response. But suddenly, a month ago, he received an e-mail
from an Englishman named Roger asking if he would be willing to take on a job “transporting
a vehicle and food to your neighboring country, the Congo.”

The Democratic Republic of the Congo was a bloody battlefield, and his first instinct
was to turn down the offer. But the fee made his head spin.

He thought this had to be some kind of joke, but then he considered that the total,
which came to about $212,000, might not be out of the realm of possibility for a rich
Englishman.

He e-mailed back, telling the man he’d take the job, and was directed to open an account
at the Stanbic Bank and e-mail back the account number. And a short time later he
had confirmed that the advance and the expense money, this huge amount of money, was
in his account.

He withdrew a small amount from the account, just to make sure it wasn’t all an illusion,
and sure enough, the money appeared. The job was for real.

As he exited the bank he looked around, suddenly fearful that the money might be stolen.
It didn’t occur to him at that moment that the bulk of it was safe within the bank.
He felt like the richest man in town. Uganda was steadily developing economically,
but it was still a desperately poor country. Even in the capital, Kampala, where most
people drove old Japanese cars, electricity was only available in limited areas. He
walked down the streets of the city, packed with many different races of people, and
thought about buying something nice for his parents and three younger sisters. It
wasn’t Christmas, so he wondered if it would look suspicious if he bought some expensive
beef to bring home.

Before the young man returned home he stopped by the Internet café where his good
fortune had all begun. He checked his e-mail and saw a message from Roger. This message,
too, took him by surprise. Below a notification that the money had been transferred
to his account, it read:

The young man couldn’t believe his eyes. If he chose option 1, he could keep two hundred
million shillings without doing a thing. He had no idea why they’d given him these
options. It sounded like they were seriously worried about his safety.

The young Ugandan carpenter stood up, went over to the counter, and got a paper cup
of cola. As he drank the carbonated drink he thought about his name, Sanyu—
good fortune
.

Mind made up, he went back to the computer and typed in a reply to Roger.

His adventure had begun.

Back at the
Sonoda Lab on Monday morning, Kento used column chromatography to refine the compound
he’d synthesized the previous week. He put a sample mixture in a long glass tube,
dissolved it with chloroform, separated it, and made a clear stratum. Adding a solution
containing 0.2 percent methanol was the key. After almost two years in the MA program,
he was getting pretty adept at experiments.

Ready for a lunch break, Kento headed to the locker room. He put the laptops his father
had left him inside his backpack and exited the lab.

The day before, on his way home from his father’s private lab, he’d stopped at a real
estate agency to ask about the apartment building. According to the agent, the worn-out
old building was scheduled for demolition, and people were already being evicted.
“If you move in now the rent would be a steal, but you’d have to move out in two months,”
the agent added. That explained why there seemed to be no one else around. His father
clearly had chosen the apartment in order to remain anonymous. There must be a reason
the research had to be done in secret.

After he got back to his own apartment, Kento had done an online search for the Heisman
Report but came up empty-handed. He typed it in English, too, but again struck out.
It was unusual for a search term to yield no relevant results at all. He wasn’t thrilled
about the idea, but if he wanted more information he’d have to ask Sugai, the reporter.

After he left the pharmacology building, Kento crossed the concrete bridge over the
canal, heading toward the cafeteria on the humanities campus, a long-established routine
for him. From far off he scanned the cafeteria through the window as he walked, wondering
if the girl who was in the English club with him when he was an undergraduate was
inside. Just then someone called out his name.

He turned and there she was, the girl he’d been looking for—Marina Kawai. He hadn’t
seen her for some time, and her hair was now down to her shoulders. Her large, bright
eyes, though, were unchanged.

“Hi, Kento,” Marina said. Kento wasn’t tall, but she still had to look up at him.
She had a heavy-looking bag slung over her shoulder, filled with books. “How have
you been?”

“Ah—fine,” Kento replied without thinking. He realized Marina hadn’t heard about his
father’s death. Not wanting to break the mood, he went on. “How about you?”

“Same as always. Dueling with Carroll.”

“Carroll?”

“Lewis Carroll.”

“Ah,” Kento said, pretending to understand. He figured she meant the author of
Alice in Wonderland
. Did English lit majors really study fairy tales? “What aspect of Carroll are you
working on?”

“Right now,” she said, with a mischievous smile, “‘perhaps Looking-glass milk isn’t
good to drink…’” She said this in English, her pronunciation excellent.

“Hmm?” Kento asked. “What kind of milk?”

“Looking-glass milk. It’s a line from
Through the Looking-Glass
.”

“So you can’t drink Looking-glass milk, huh?” Kento was surprised. He saw a direct
connection between the world of English literature and science. “Was Lewis Carroll
a scientist?”

“A mathematician. Why?”

Kento saw his chance to actually be of help in her research. “The sentence you quoted
refers to a mirror-image isomer. It’s a chemical compound with asymmetric carbon atoms.
It’s like your right hand and left hand—it’s the same shape as other compounds but
has two structures that don’t overlap with them. Unless it’s reflected in a mirror
you won’t get the same shape. In some cases the right-hand-shaped compound will be
a medicine, the left-hand shape a poison. Thalidomide is one example. I think ‘Looking-glass
milk isn’t good to drink’ is referring to that.”

Marina listened blankly to this. “Hmm” was all she said. “What kind of research are
you doing now?”

“How should I put it?” he began, pushing his glasses up higher on his nose. He wanted
to explain it as simply as he could. “I take the parent nucleus that one of the more
advanced students provides and add various side chains to it. Amino groups, nitro
groups, and so on.”

“Sounds pretty hard.”

“Yeah, it is.”

“Well, I’d better be off to the library.” She gave him another winning smile and walked
off.

Kento watched her leave and felt a twinge of regret.
I’m making a
drug that treats rheumatism
. That’s what he should have said. That would have been easier to understand.

Still brooding, he went into the cafeteria and bought a ticket for a meal. The room
was noisy, filled with humanities and science students. The humanities cafeteria had
the reputation of serving better food, so students from both areas tended to congregate
there.

He got his tray of food at the counter, and as he turned to look for a table a student
by the window waved to him. It was Akihiro Doi, a friend from his undergraduate days.
He was doing clinical research now, working on reconfiguring the DNA of E. coli to
come up with a set type of protein.

“Hey there, stranger.” Doi grinned as Kento sat down across from him. “I saw you over
there.”

“Saw what?” Kento asked, knowing full well the answer.

“She’s in humanities, right? You guys going out?”

That’s right
, Kento wanted to brag, but he answered truthfully. “We maintain a Van der Waals contact
distance.”

“Ah,” Doi lamented. “That’s too bad.”

“How about you? Any prospects?”

“There’re some cute girls in our lab, but we have more of a metallic bond. We’re just
atoms moving in a group.”

“It’d be nice if you could get a little covalent bonding going.”

“You got that right.”

The two of them were silent for a time, working through their minced-beef cutlets.

“But you know,” Doi said, draining his miso soup, “girls like guys who are good talkers,
but guys like us have actually been trained to be poor conversationalists.”

“You think so?”

“You hold seminars in your lab, right?”

“Sure.”

In Kento’s lab they held weekly meetings dubbed thesis seminars. A student was asked
to analyze a recent published research paper and explain it in front of the others.
Any explanation that was overly subjective or had logical gaps would be mercilessly
critiqued by the others, so you learned to choose your words very carefully. Without
this kind of training, they would have a tough time as full-fledged scientists later
on. As his late father used to put it, “In the humanities it’s the ones who are good
at lying and deceiving who move up in the world, but a scientist isn’t allowed a single
lie.”

Unfortunately, one by-product of this training was that, even in social situations,
Kento and his fellows tended to overthink things and explain everything from a scientific
standpoint. Put them in a group of people eating cake and all they could think of
would be the mechanism of taste receptors.

“I know what you mean,” Kento said.

“Those who only try to say what’s right seldom talk,” Doi pronounced. “Plus girls
in the humanities don’t want to go out with guys involved in the three
D
s anyway, right?”

Now he’d hit a nerve. The three
D
s meant work that was difficult, dirty, and dangerous—a virtual synonym for research
labs. And no wonder, for the researchers who worked there put in fourteen-hour days,
had to deal with foul-smelling chemicals, and were required to wear sneakers so they
could race out of the lab in case of an accident.

“Girls prefer the three
H
s over the three
D
s.”

“Three
H
s?”

“A guy with a high level of education, enough height, and a high salary.”

The only one that applied to him, Kento, thought, was education.

Doi sighed. “It’s pretty sad.”

“You think so?”

Doi seemed surprised. “What, you agree with these awful criteria?”

“Well, think about it. It’s a sort of biological imperative for females to choose
strong males. And the human animal is no different. If women were to choose men who
are the opposite of the three
H
s and produce offspring with them, civilization would go into a nosedive.”

“Granted, but where does love fit in?” Doi seemed to be more of a romantic. “That
twisted way of thinking won’t make you very popular.”

“Twisted? Me?”

“Yeah,” Doi said with a nod. “You need to be more positive.”

For a long time Kento had been thinking the same thing about himself—that he was unfortunate
enough to have inherited his father’s warped disposition.

“You gotta be a more upbeat, cheerful guy if you want to hook up with these humanities
girls.”

As he looked reproachfully at Doi, Kento suddenly realized that his friend was exactly
the kind of person he was looking for.

“You know, there’s something I wanted to ask you,” he said, taking out his father’s
research notebook. “If you want to make an agonist for GPCR, are these the right steps?”

Doi stared steadily at the pages. “You want to make an agonist like this? Not a lead
compound?”

“That’s right. I’m not looking for candidates, but for a complete model.”

“The only steps I understand are the last two.” Doi pointed to “Binding assay in vitro”
and “In vivo activity assessment.”

Kento asked, “So are these two the verification processes for determining whether
the synthesized compound will bind to the receptor?”

“Right. First you make a cell that has the target receptors and check the binding
in vitro. The next step is to verify in vivo, using lab animals. For example, you
recombine the genes of mice, create the entity that has the receptors you’re looking
for, then inject them with the synthesized compound.”

Kento thought of the forty mice in that shabby apartment. “So these directions are
correct?”

“No way,” Doi said, shaking his head. “It’s way too oversimplified. Plus there aren’t
any clinical trials listed. It looks pretty amateurish to me.”

“I suppose so,” Kento admitted. His father was a virologist, after all, so maybe that
was only to be expected. “What about this?”

Kento took the white laptop out of his backpack and turned it on. “Can you handle
Linux?”

“I’m okay with it,” Doi said as he scanned through the computer. “There’s a program
here I’ve never seen before. GIFT. Heard of it?”

“No.”

Doi booted up GIFT. A few seconds later, when the program came up on the screen, the
two grad students let out a shout of surprise.

The screen was divided into three panels. One large pane on the right side displayed
odd computer graphics. On top of gentle wave patterns were a number of projections,
like thick flower petals, with a pocketlike cavity in the center. It was a mysterious-looking
3-D image, so detailed it looked like a photo.

Kento soon recognized what it was—an enlargement of a cell surface. This microscopic
world, less than a micron in size, filled the screen.

“This is weird,” Doi said, moving the cursor to point to the two frames on the left.
“There’s information here. This computer graphic is showing mutant GPR769.”

Exactly the receptor I need, Kento thought. What my father wanted was the material
that will bind with the pocket in the middle.

“The frame on the bottom is the sequence of the gene that will produce this receptor,”
Doi said, crossing his arms. “But do you have any idea how many types of G-protein-coupled
receptors there are?”

“Seven or eight hundred?”

“Exactly. And out of all those, there’s only one whose distinct form has ever been
determined—a receptor in a cow’s retinal cell. We can only deduce the structure of
the other GPCRs by analogy. We look at how similar the gene base sequences are to
guess what the complete product looks like. This model here is probably created in
the same way, so I’m not sure how accurate it is.”

“Does the software have any other functions?”

“That I’m not so sure about,” Doi said, picking up the research notes again. “Maybe
it’s used for the first two items here.”

Kento looked at the notes.

GIFT appeared to be software that used genetic information to predict what kind of
protein would be created, depict the actual shape, and actually design the chemical
structure of the material that would bind with it. “So you’re saying if we follow
this software’s instructions we could create a drug?”

“There’s something not right about it,” Doi said. “I can’t follow the calculations.
If you want to know more about that, you have to have somebody else help you out.”

“Who? Do you know anybody?”

“Let me see…” Doi stared off into space. “There
is
someone. An amazing guy doing physical chemistry drug development. An exchange student
from Korea.”

“Really,” Kento said, interested.

“I heard him speak once on molecular dynamics simulation, and he made it really easy
to understand.”

“What about his Japanese?”

“He’s fluent. Speaks English, too.”

“Would you introduce me?”

“Sure. I’ll find out when he’s free.” Doi glanced at his watch. It seemed like he
needed to be getting back to his lab. He stood up, picked up his tray, and said, “Well,
I’ll call you.”

“I appreciate it.”

“Let’s hope we’ve both got some covalent bonding in our futures.” Doi laughed and
headed off to return his tray.

Kento smiled and put the laptop back in his pack. One task down. Now he’d just have
to wait for Doi to contact him about this Korean student.

There was one other thing he needed to take care of. He picked up his cell phone and
dialed Sugai, the newspaper reporter, whose number his mother had given him the night
before. But as he punched in the number of the science section of the
Toa
newspaper, he remembered his father’s warning.