Genocide of One: A Thriller (9 page)

Consider all means of communication you use—landlines, cell phones, e-mail, and faxes—to
be tapped
.

No way, he told himself, but he still had the vague, uneasy feeling that he was being
watched. He glanced around the cafeteria, but didn’t see anyone suspicious. He shook
off the feeling and punched in the number.

A young man’s voice came on the line. “
Toa
newspaper, science section.”

“Hello; my name is Koga. I was wondering if Mr. Sugai is there.”

“Just a minute.”

Kento regretted how curt he’d been with Sugai at his father’s funeral and felt sheepish
about contacting him. But Sugai was his only source of information.

“Hello?” he heard the reporter say.

“Hi, Mr. Sugai, this is Kento Koga. Thank you again for all you did at my father’s
funeral.”

“Ah, Kento,” Sugai said, his tone friendly.

Relieved, Kento went on. “I have something I’d like to ask you. It’s about the Heisman
Report you mentioned at the funeral.”

“The Heisman Report? Well…” he said, and paused. “What are you doing tonight?”

“Tonight? I’ll be in the lab until twelve.”

“Can you get out for a while? If you meet me at the Kinshi-cho station, I’ll buy you
dinner.”

“Yeah, okay,” Kento said. It sounded like a lot of trouble, but he knew Sugai was
just being kind. Kento quickly figured how he could make up the time he would lose
with his experiments. “I should be able to get away at nine.”

“Great. I’ll see you at nine at the south entrance to the station. Bring your appetite.”

Kinshi-cho was just outside Tokyo, the last shopping district before Chiba Prefecture.
Unlike the Shinjuku or Shibuya districts, though, Kinshi-cho was located near residential
areas, and the shopping district was a jumble—half entertainment district, half nice
stores. Shady little bars dotted the street alongside a modern shopping mall complete
with a supermarket and a Cineplex. There was even an outstanding concert hall, the
kind that could host a world-class orchestra. The district was a mix, then, of high
and low culture, the upscale rubbing elbows with the tawdry.

Kento stood outside the station, a cold wind blowing fiercely as he waited for Sugai.
Whenever he pictured the reporter’s face, he couldn’t help recalling his father, especially
his father’s litany of complaints.

His father would often bemoan his lot in life when he was having a drink with dinner.
People in the humanities earn five hundred thousand dollars more in their lifetimes
than those in the sciences, he said. In other words, in a typical forty-year career
a scientist had to advance the cause of science while earning more than ten thousand
dollars per year less than people in the humanities.

“They never pay us a decent salary, and still they claim Japan is a science-centered
nation. Bunch of assholes.” His father, usually tipsy by this point, didn’t hide his
low opinion of Japan’s politicians. “Guys in the humanities swipe all our work. The
telephone, TV, the automobile, computers. These were all created by scientists. What
have those sly bastards in humanities ever contributed to civilization?”

When he was in his teens, Kento found his father’s discontent depressing. Later on,
though, something happened—an event concerning the development of the blue light-emitting
diode—that made him see that his father’s opinions weren’t so far off the mark.

Blue LED was supposed to be impossible, but when a technician successfully developed
it, he and the company that employed him got into a legal dispute over it, which ended
in a trial. In the first trial the plaintiff—the technician—was awarded two hundred
million dollars, but in the second trial this judgment was overturned, and the company
was ordered to pay the technician only six million dollars out of the $1.2 billion
profit they got from his invention. The judgment was so out of line that one could
only conclude that the judge had thrown judicial independence to the wind and was
basically at the beck and call of the company executives.

Scientists and technicians were shell-shocked at the decision. An invention that brought
in tens of billions of dollars to the industry was only worth, to its inventor, what
a major league baseball player earned in a year. Many scientists saw the case as a
turning point and predicted that Japan’s international competitiveness would decline.
In an age when a nation’s power depended on its science and technology, treating its
scientists and engineers so poorly was not the path to development. The day was not
far off, they believed, when Japan would be outpaced by China, Korea, and India.

“Civilization can go to hell as far as I care,” Kento’s father once spat out, a malicious
smirk on his face. “The only ones who can rebuild science and civilization are scientists.
Humanities guys wouldn’t be able to figure out electricity no matter how much time
you gave them.”

When Kento became an adult he started to feel there was some truth to what his father
said. During his four years as a science undergraduate he’d been run ragged. His only
outside activity, the English club, was something he could barely find time to attend.
Students in the humanities, by contrast, skipped class and had a good time. At least
it looked that way to Kento. If they really did earn five hundred thousand dollars
more on average over the course of a lifetime, that was pretty hard to accept. Society
seemed set up so people who skimmed off the top profited more than those who broke
their backs actually creating things. Thinking this way, though, made Kento uncomfortable.
Like the very skin he was born into, he knew how hard it would be to rid himself of
this warped genetic inheritance from his father.

In front of the station, Kento stuck his numb hands deep into the pockets of his down
jacket and remembered something that had been puzzling him for a while.

After yet another one of his father’s drunken rants, Kento had once asked him, “If
you hate your work so much, why don’t you just quit?”

“I can’t give up research,” his father had replied.

“Why not?”

“Once you become a researcher, you’ll understand.” His father smiled, a contented
expression lingering on his face, the kind of look he never showed his family.

What did that smile mean? What part of his inner life did it express? Kento was himself
a researcher now, but he still didn’t know the answer. All he’d learned by devoting
himself to research was that people in the sciences are lousy at getting along in
life.

A crowd of people spilled out of the station. Kento brushed aside his built-up discontent
and scanned the passengers. Sugai appeared, giving a little wave as he approached.

Kento wove through the crowd as he went forward to greet him. “Sorry you had to come
all the way out here,” he said.

The middle-aged reporter was dressed casually in a sweater and jacket but no tie.
He peered through his glasses at Kento. “You live alone,” he said with a laugh. “So
I figured you aren’t eating all that well. What would you like? Meat? Fish? Chinese?
Ethnic?”

Kento wasn’t up on the latest food trends, so he chose something simple. “Meat sounds
good.”

“Great.” Sugai scanned the buildings around the traffic circle in front of the station.
“Let’s do Mongolian barbecue.”

Sugai took him to a nearby bar and grill. They sat down across from each other in
a small, partitioned-off room and ordered their meals.

They drank mugs of beer and ate for a while, reminiscing about Kento’s father until
Sugai broached the reason for their meeting.

“So you were interested in the Heisman Report?”

Kento leaned forward. “In my father’s lab notebook he’d written the name of the report,
in English, and I was wondering what it was all about.”

“In his lab book? Is that all it said?”

“It also said ‘number five.’ Heisman Report number five.”

“I have a vague memory that that report was divided into five sections,” Sugai said,
looking up, as if searching his memory. “I think I mentioned that an American think
tank had produced the report.”

“You did. I figured it had to be related to my father’s field, virology.”

“It may have had a section about viruses,” Sugai said, and looked back at Kento. “But
in a word, the Heisman Report is about extinction—research into the extinction of
the human race.”

Kento reflexively stared at the reporter. “Extinction? Of the human race?”

“You’re too young to remember this, but when the report was written some thirty years
ago, the international situation was very tense. The United States and the Soviet
Union were staring each other down, armed to the teeth with huge numbers of nuclear
weapons. Everyone was terrified there would be a nuclear war that would destroy mankind.”

“They were seriously afraid of that?”

“They were. This was the Cold War era. During the Cuban Missile Crisis the world came
to the brink of a nuclear attack.”

Kento was shocked. The whole thing sounded like science fiction.

“Physicists who had helped develop nuclear weapons predicted an all-out nuclear war
and came up with something called the Doomsday Clock, a kind of countdown to the destruction
of mankind. By the time the first hydrogen bombs were successfully tested, the clock’s
hands were two minutes away from destruction. Fortunately, though, with the collapse
of the Soviet Union, the hands of the clock were reset.”

As the waiter took away their empty plates Sugai ordered another round of beers and
went on. “The White House began research into possible causes for the extinction of
mankind, including nuclear holocaust. They wanted to prepare for any potential crisis.
A researcher named Joseph Heisman, who worked at a think tank, prepared a list of
possible events that could cause the human race to be annihilated. And that became
the Heisman Report.”

“But why would my father be interested in that?”

“My guess is there had to be something in it related to your father’s field. Something
about viral infections.”

“Like a lethal virus that wipes out everyone on the planet?”

“Exactly.”

Could his father, of all people, have been fighting some unknown virus that pushed
mankind to the edge of destruction? A professor always short of research funds, toiling
away at a no-name university? He remembered his father’s long, exhausted face and
smiled. This was hardly the face of mankind’s savior.

Sugai looked at him dubiously, and Kento quickly stopped smiling. “Do you know the
details of what’s in the report?”

“After your father asked me to look into it, I went through some old files but couldn’t
find anything. When it first came out, though, there were special reports on it in
magazines.”

Finding these magazines from thirty years ago wouldn’t be easy, Kento thought.

“Our company should be able to track the report down,” Sugai said. “When your father
insisted on finding out more about it, I asked people at our Washington bureau. They
said there should be an original copy in the National Archives.”

“Could I ask you to continue looking into it?”

“I’ll be hearing from them soon, and I’ll let you know as soon as I get a copy.”

“I really appreciate it.”

After eating his fill of Mongolian barbecue, Kento thanked Sugai, said good-bye to
him at the station, and walked back to his own apartment.

He hadn’t drunk very much—he’d been too fascinated by the topic they’d been discussing—and
his mind was still clear. He turned on the light in the room, switched on the heater,
and sat down at the small desk next to the wall. He took out the two laptops from
his backpack.

He tried to power up the black laptop, but again it wouldn’t start up. He did a force
quit and turned to the larger laptop.

This one started up fine. The screen showed the same 3-D image of an orphan receptor
embedded on the surface of a cell.

Kento, struggling with the unfamiliar software and operating system, copied the base
sequence of the mutant GPR769 onto an external hard drive. Next he connected his usual
computer to the Internet.

He accessed a site that allowed searches of base sequences. Once you inputted a base
sequence, the site would show genes that had a similar sequence.

He pasted the mutant GPR769 into the search window, clicked
HUMAN
for the target organism, and did a BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) protein
data bank search. This wasn’t his area of expertise, but he’d learned how to use it
as an undergraduate. If the receptor in question were a protein involved in viral
infection, this would link his father’s research to the Heisman Report.

The search results came up, and Kento stared at the screen. The closest homology to
mutant GPR769 was, naturally, GPR769. Of the nine hundred base sequences, only one
had mutated. Because of this, only one of the amino acids that make up the receptor
had been transposed.

Kento clicked on a link to find out more about the GPR769 receptor. The English, full
of medical terminology, gave him some trouble, but he could make out the main points.

He’d never heard of the disease, so he searched to find out more.