The Green Trap (15 page)

They waited. She looked up at him. He pressed the ice to his aching cheek, and noticed that his saber was lying on the floor between the coffee table and the sofa.

“Hello, Ms. Sandoval.” Gould's growling voice sounded even raspier in the phone's speaker.

“Mr. Gould,” she said.

“You have news for me. That is good.”

“We've just had a brawl with your man Kensington,” she said, her eyes on Cochrane. “We'd like you to tell him to leave us alone.”

“Kensington? A brawl?” Gould sounded surprised.

“He made advances on me.” Sandoval stretched the truth slightly. “Dr. Cochrane threw him out of his apartment.”

“I'm stunned,” said Gould. “Cochrane actually got the better of Kensington?”

“He did.”

“And this is the news you're calling about?”

“You obviously know that we went to Boston, Dr. Cochrane and I.”

“Yes. I told Kensington to keep an eye on you, not to engage in mayhem.”

Cochrane jumped in. “We found my brother's computer files. If he set down the results of his work anywhere, it's on those discs.”

“That is good,” Gould said. “Very good indeed.”

“Does your offer often million still hold?” Sandoval asked.

“Of course.”

Cochrane said, “We should be able to tell you what my brother was working on within a few days.”

“A few days? But you said—”

“A few days,” Cochrane said firmly. “In the meantime, I don't want Kensington anywhere near us.”

“I see.”

“You can trust us,” said Cochrane.

They heard Gould make a noise that sounded like a grunt. “I will have to trust you, obviously.”

“We'll call you in a few days with the results of what we find.”

“I shall await your call eagerly.”

“By the way,” Sandoval added, a hint of venom in her voice, “Kensington told us there are other prospective buyers for this information.”

“He
what?”

“We know that you're not the only possible market for our information,” she went on. “And we thought you should know that Kensington might not be as reliable as you think.”

“That is bad,” Gould growled. “I'll have to speak to him.”

“Do that,” said Sandoval. And she pecked at the button that cut the phone link.

Cochrane looked at her. “You're going to get Kensington in deep shit with his boss.”

“He deserves it,” she said, with a malevolent smile.

 

F
or two days Cochrane pored over his brother's CDs. The first disc he examined was little more than a duplicate of what he had gleaned from Tulius's pirated files: cryptic results of experiments with the stromatolites, trip reports, expense vouchers.

The second disc, however, went into more detail about his experiments. Mike was measuring the oxygen output of different strains of the cyanobacteria he had cultured in his Archaean Gardens.

“For the life of me,” he said to Sandoval over dinner, “I can't see anything that Mike was doing that's worth his getting killed over.”

“It must be there,” she said, sitting across the tiny kitchen table from him. “Gould doesn't make offers of ten million dollars on a whim.”

He rubbed his bleary eyes. “If it's there, I haven't found it yet.”

“You will, Paul. I know you will.”

He shook his head, then picked at the frozen dinner she had pulled out and microwaved.

“Have a drink,” Sandoval suggested. “Relax a little. Then we'll go to bed and get a good night's rest.”

That brought out a grin. “When we get into bed together I don't feel like resting.”

She smiled back at him. “Neither do I, if the truth be told.”

It was after they'd made love and Cochrane lay sweaty and sticky with her body warm and musky beside him that he suddenly thought to ask, “What's this guy Gould do, anyway? Where's he get his money from?”

“He owns Gould Energy Corporation.”

“Never heard of it,” Cochrane said into the shadows of the darkened bedroom.

“It's a holding company. They own electric power utilities, oil refineries, some research facilities. I think he tried to buy Calvin Research Center last year.”

Cochrane thought that over. Then, “Guess he found it cheaper to buy Mike.”

“I suppose that's how he saw it.”

“And now he wants to buy us.”

“If you can deliver what he's looking for.”

“We'll see.” But as he lay there waiting to fall asleep, Cochrane started building a chain of logic: Elena told Gould that there are other buyers looking for Mike's results. If we don't deliver to Gould he might think we're dickering with the competition, looking for more money. He won't like that. He won't like that at all.

O
f all the gaudy office towers erected during the oil boom of the 1970s, the forty-five-story skyscraper that housed the headquarters of Gould Energy Corporation was among the more modest. No neon lights outlining its silhouette at night. No glittering metal spire at its top. A simple glass-and-steel structure from the outside, with the finest climate control and electronic security surveillance on the inside.

Lionel Gould's office was opulent without being extravagant. It was large, but furnished elegantly. Persian carpets on the floor and Renaissance masters on the walls. Gould sat behind his modernistic curving desk of teak and stainless steel, impatiently drumming his stubby fingers. He never enjoyed meetings with his chief financial officer. The woman was a climber, and she had climbed the slippery corporate ladder so high that her next move had to be against Gould himself. She was clearly unhappy about being summoned to the office on a Saturday morning, and even
more clearly determined to show Gould that she had the determination to do whatever was necessary to further her career.

“If you wanted the results of Cochrane's research,” she was saying in an
I told you so
manner, “you should have let us buy out the Calvin labs.”

She was a youngish-looking fifty, thanks to exquisitely skillful cosmetic surgery. Her hair was a rich chestnut brown, her face sculpted beautifully without looking taut or waxy, her figure trim. She wore a dark business pantsuit, with a tailored white blouse under the severely cut jacket.

Gould looked at her with a jaundiced eye. “Tulius caught on to what we were seeking. He raised the price to the sky.”

“Still, it might have been worth it.”

“May I point out,” Gould said, “that it was your own office's analysis that recommended against the buy?”

The CFO allowed a wintry smile to crook her thin lips. “Since when did you allow anybody's analysis to shape your judgment?”

He smiled back at her, with equal warmth. “I determined that it would be far cheaper to buy the man instead of the entire company.”

“But he's dead now, and you have nothing.”

Gould heaved a sigh. “I have my hopes. This thing is far too big to allow minor setbacks to stop us.”

The CFO started to reply, hesitated, then finally asked, “Do you actually believe you can pull it off? Change the entire automotive industry—“

“Someone will,” Gould said firmly. “It is inevitable. The world demand for oil is constantly increasing, the world supply of oil is constantly decreasing. Sooner or later the price will go so high that the market will collapse.”

“But until that happens our profits will be astronomical.”

Gould leaned back in his padded desk chair. “My dear lady, the reason I sit
here
and you sit
there is
that I can see beyond the p-and-1 statement for the next quarter.”

Her face flushed but she said nothing.

“I look further into the future than you—or any of the board members, for that matter. And what I see is a disaster of monumental proportions. Which is bad. Bad for us, bad for the industry, bad for the nation and the world.”

“I've seen disaster scenarios, too,” said the CFO.

“But you don't believe them.”

“You do?”

“I certainly do. There is a point, up in the future somewhere, when there simply isn't enough oil left on earth to sustain the world's industrial needs. Not to mention the needs for transportation: automobiles, trucks, airliners.”

The CFO shook her head. “That's so far in the future.…“

“How far?” Gould snapped. “Twenty years? Ten? Five?”

She did not answer.

“We must be ready for that time. We must be!” He slammed the flat of his hand against his desktop. “And I'm thinking that the time will come sooner rather than later. The world is heading at breakneck speed toward a global disaster!
Why sit we here idle?'

“You haven't been exactly idle,” the CFO pointed out. “We've bought half a dozen nuclear power plants in the past two years, six overseas refineries, and if this deal with Chrysler-Daimler goes through—”

“Piffle!” Gould spat. “Fingers in the dike. We've got to develop a fuel to replace petroleum. The oil's running out, and if there's nothing to replace it, the world's economy will collapse.”

“The government won't allow that to happen.”

“The government!” Gould fairly shouted. “Don't look to those politicians in Washington for an answer. They're part of the problem!”

She was silent for several moments. At last she asked, “You really think it could happen in five or ten years?”

“An economic collapse that will make the Great Depression of the 1930s look like a church picnic. Factories shut down for lack of fuel. Cars without gasoline. The airlines, freight lines, trucks, ships—all stopped dead.”

“My god,” the CFO half whispered. “We've already gone to war over oil.”

“More than once.”

“But this…”

“War and terrorism and god knows what else. That's why we must act! Act now! Act decisively.”

“You should have bought Calvin Research while you had the chance. It still may not be too late.”

“No,” Gould said firmly. “Tulius and his people don't have what we want. But I'm on the verge of getting it from another source. And when I do…” He smiled contentedly and laced his fingers across his vest.

“You'll save the world from this disaster,” said the CFO, with unfeigned admiration in her voice, her expression.

“And make unholy profits for this corporation,” added Gould. “Which is good. Which is very good indeed.”

C
ochrane peered at the digital clock display on his desktop's screen: 11:42
A.M
. Close enough for a lunch break, he said to himself. He got up from his chair and stretched his arms over his head; the ceiling was almost low enough for him to scrape his fingertips. His spine popped satisfactorily and he grunted with the effort.

“Anything?” Sandoval asked. She was sitting on the sofa dressed in denim shorts and a tan T-shirt, bare feet tucked under her, reading a novel from his bookshelf:
The Sun Also Rises,
he saw.

Heading for the kitchenette, Cochrane replied, “I can see what Mike was doing, but I still don't understand what makes it so goddamned important.”

He opened the refrigerator, pulled out the drawer where he kept the lunchmeats. “There's nothing there that's worth ten million bucks.”

She laid the opened book face down on the coffee table and stepped to the bar that separated the kitchenette from the living room. “There
must be something, Paul,” she said as she perched on one of the stools. “There's got to be.”

Cochrane pulled dishes from the overhead cabinet, a loaf of sliced whole wheat bread from the breadbox. “How's the Hemingway?”

She hiked her eyebrows. “The novel? It's about a nymphomaniac and a man who was castrated in the war. Very romantic.”

He couldn't decide if she was being sarcastic or not.

Halfway through their sandwiches and fruit juice Cochrane asked, “What do we do if I can't find anything?”

She chewed thoughtfully for a moment, then swallowed. “We'll have to tell Gould.”

“He won't like that.”

“Neither will I. No ten million.”

“He might think we're holding out on him. Holding him up for more money or going to another bidder.”

Sandoval's eyes shifted away from him for a moment, then back again. “Yes, he might at that.”

“What then?”

She shrugged. “We disappear. One way or the other.”

“Are there really other bidders?”

“Kensington thought so.”

“Who could they be?”

She gave him a sad smile. “We won't know until we find out what they'd be bidding on.”

Cochrane put down his half-eaten sandwich. “Okay. I'll get back to work.”

“I'll do the dishes.”

“Woman's work,” he joked.

“Watch yourself.”

Chuckling, he went back to his desk. Doggedly he plowed through Mike's notes: his experiment design, the different strains of cyanobacteria he was working with, the variables of water flow, temperature, hours of sunlight, nutrients in the water.

“Same old shit,” Cochrane muttered under his breath. The BMAA stuff had been a sideline, a red herring, he knew now. Mike wasn't after a way to produce neurotoxin.

Then Mike's reports started dealing with something quite different. Gene splicing. Genetic engineering. Altering the genetic structure of several lines of cyanobacteria. Checking their output of oxygen against the changes made in their DNA.

Three hours later he pushed his wheeled chair back and got to his feet again.

Sandoval looked up from her book hopefully.

“It makes sense,” Cochrane said, “but it doesn't make sense.”