The Rise and Fall of Khan Noonien Singh, Volume One (14 page)

“Tell me more about Chrysalis,” he prompted. “Who are they? What do they want?”

“Bunch of egghead do-gooders,” Offenhouse murmured, slurring his words slightly. “Trying to make a better world through chemistry, or something. Don’t know, don’t care. Making a bundle, though. Tax-free. Plenty of venture capital, just like I need. Got big ideas for that dough, big ideas. Gonna be a millionaire before I turn forty. ...”

[81]
Seven scowled. When was the human race going to learn that there were more important things than profit? He tried to steer the other man’s reminiscences down less financial avenues. “Chrysalis,” he reminded. “What are their names? Where can I find them?”

“Whole thing’s run by this Indian woman,” his unwitting informant revealed. “Don’t know her real name, only met her once. Really scary broad, supergenius freak. Has secret lab in India somewhere. Everything goes through Delhi, her people take it from there. New shipment going out this morning, from JFK. ...”

This morning?
Seven thought. That had possibilities. He was about to press Offenhouse for more details when the phone rang unexpectedly. Seven raised a quizzical eyebrow. A call after midnight? This office kept decidedly strange hours.

The answer occurred to him suddenly
India,
he realized. There was a ten-and-a-half-hour time difference between Brooklyn and India; it would be approximately ten-thirty in the morning there now.
That’s why Offenhouse came in so late. He was expecting this call.

The phone rang again, its piercing alarum reaching Offenhouse even through his hypnotic daze. He stirred fitfully, making a halfhearted attempt to rise to his feet. Seven placed a firm hand on Offenhouse’s shoulder, blocking his ascent. “Don’t worry,” he assured the tranquilized businessman as he pressed Offenhouse back down onto the floor. “I’ll get it.”

He wasn’t lying this time. If this call was indeed from Chrysalis, as he had deduced, then Seven was very interested in finding out who was calling and why. He reached for the phone. “Hello?” he said, in a flawless impersonation of Offenhouse’s own voice. Expert vocal mimicry was yet another skill the Aegis had taken pains to teach Gary Seven.

“Offenhouse?” said a masculine voice at the other end of the line. Seven heard a distinctly British accent. Upper-class, Oxford maybe, or Eton. “This is Williams. Just calling to confirm that today’s shipment is on schedule.”

According to Offenhouse, it is,
Seven remembered. “Everything’s set,” he said, imitating the businessman’s brusque tone. He rifled through
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the most recent folder, looking for the pertinent details. “From JFK, right on time.”

Williams sounded nervous, as though constitutionally unsuited for espionage and intrigue. A scientist, not a spy. “You’re sure this line is still secure, right? There’s no chance anyone’s listening in?”

“That’s right,” Seven improvised, guessing that Offenhouse had indeed taken precautions against wiretaps. The recent Watergate scandals had made the entire nation alert to the dangers of incriminating audiotapes. “You can speak freely,” he encouraged Williams.

“I hope you’re right,” Williams said, sounding only slightly more at ease. “Did you get the replacement parts for those high-speed centrifuges? It’s a bloody bother when the blasted things keep breaking down.”

“No problem,” Seven answered. “They’re on the way.”
Ah, here it is,
he thought, locating the relevant itinerary among Offenhouse’s papers. A private jet, leaving John F. Kennedy Airport at two A.M. for Delhi, with a stop in Rome en route.
For Roberta and her new employers?
he assumed.
All roads do indeed seem to be leading to India, but where does the equipment go from Delhi?

“I have to go now,” he told Williams. The longer they spoke, the more chance he stood of making a careless mistake and raising Williams’s suspicions. He glanced down at the Xeroxed document on the desk. “Expect the shipment at four-thirty tomorrow morning, your time.”

You can expect me there as well,
he thought. Performing the necessary calculations in his head, he deduced that Williams, or his agents, would be meeting the flight roughly seventeen hours from now. Thankfully, Seven knew a faster way to get to Delhi, even if Roberta was in for a long flight.
I imagine she’ll be very surprised to hear she’s going to India.

“Wait!” Williams interjected hurriedly, before Seven could hang up. “What about that uranium? I promised the director that I would remind you just how urgently we require that processed ore.”

Uranium?
A startled expression transformed Seven’s ordinarily inscrutable features. He hadn’t seen anything about radioactive
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materials among Offenhouse’s files, unless that particular cargo had been disguised somehow. He quickly leafed through the manifests until he found one highly suspicious item: a large shipment of lead “construction materials.”
That must be it,
he concluded, but what were Offenhouse—and Chrysalis—doing with potentially fissionable uranium? The discovery added an alarmingly nuclear dimension to what Seven already deemed to be an extremely hazardous situation.

Genetic engineering, germ warfare, nuclear proliferation.
Sometimes,
he brooded,
it seems positively miraculous that humanity hasn’t destroyed itself already
. ...

“Huh? Wha—?”

Ralph Offenhouse came out of a daze to find himself in his Brooklyn office, seated behind his desk. Groggy and confused, he blinked and shook his head, trying to clear the fog from his thoughts. A lingering sense of blissful well-being swiftly faded from his mind, giving way to uncertainty and bewilderment.

I
must have fallen asleep at my desk,
he guessed. The funny thing was, though, he had no memory of actually sitting down here, or even of turning on the lights. The last thing he remembered was climbing the stairs to his office; after that, his mind was blank.
Weird,
he thought.
I
haven’t been working that hard lately, have I?

For a second, he feared he’d had a stroke; heart disease ran in his family, so that wasn’t a completely unlikely scenario, even though he hadn’t even turned forty yet. He wiggled his fingers nervously, checking for paralysis or tremors. “Hello,” he whispered, making sure he could still speak.

Everything seemed to check out. What’s more, he didn’t feel weak or impaired. If anything, he felt more relaxed and better-rested than he had in weeks. He didn’t even have a hangover, which ruled out an uncharacteristic drinking binge. So
what the hell happened to me?
A thought occurred to him and he groped for his pistol, only to find it safely stowed away in his side pocket, right where it belonged.
That’s a relief,
he thought.
Can’t be too careful these days, especially in this part of town.

[84]
Raising a hand to wipe his brow, he caught a glimpse of his Rolex.
Wait a second, what time is it?
He peeked urgently at the face of the watch.

One-fifteen
... well after Williams at Chrysalis was supposed to call for an update on this morning’s shipment. “Damn,” he muttered. Had he missed the freaking call?

There was only one way to find out. Bending over, he pulled out the lower right-hand drawer on his desk. Inside, beneath a spare ashtray and a box of Kleenex, was what appeared to be an ordinary cigar box. He cleared the stuff on top, then lifted the lid of the box, revealing the tape recorder hidden inside. According to a numerical display on the machine, the machine had already taped one call tonight, even if Offenhouse had absolutely no memory of any such call.
This keeps getting stranger and stranger,
he thought. When he first started taping his calls, with an eye toward having something to hold over Chrysalis later on, he’d never thought he’d need the tapes to fill in a gaping hole in his own memory.
How the heck did I end up with my own personal eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap?

He rewound the tape until the beginning of the last call, then hit Play. “Hello?” he heard his own voice say, then listened in amazement as he and that jittery Brit, Williams, carried on a conversation that Offenhouse didn’t recall at all. He was particularly surprised to hear himself tell Williams that those stupid centrifuge parts were on the way when he hadn’t yet managed to get any of those components at a decent price.

That’s not me,
Offenhouse realized, with a certainty that came from somewhere deep inside him. The voice on the tape sounded exactly like him, but he knew somehow, on an almost subconscious level, that he had never said those words. Somebody else had taken his place.
Doped me probably,
he guessed,
then pretended to be me on the phone.
Somebody who now knew all about the shipment flying out of Kennedy in less than an hour.

His heart pounding all of a sudden, he switched off the recorder and grabbed the phone, hastily dialing his contact at Chrysalis. “Williams?” he said a few moments later. “This is Offenhouse. I think we have a problem. ...”

SOMEWHERE ABOVE EUROPE

MAY 16, 1974

“OUCH!” ROBERTA EXCLAIMED
as Takagi pricked her upper arm
with his hypodermic needle. She flinched involuntarily, then flashed the young scientist a sheepish smile. “Sorry. I don’t like needles, which is pretty funny for a biochemist, I guess.”

“Not at all,” he assured her, deftly withdrawing the hypo. He leaned over Roberta, bracing himself with one hand against the back of her first-class seat, just in case the plane they were travelling on encountered any unexpected turbulence. As midair inoculations went, his technique was smooth and almost painless. “I don’t like getting shots myself, but these vaccinations are a good idea, considering where we’re going.”

“Wherever that may be,” she said ingenuously, even though she knew full well that this jet was ultimately bound for Delhi. When they’d compared notes late last night, Seven had given her as much of the itinerary as he’d managed to glean from that guy Offenhouse’s files, but, of course, she had to play dumb as far as Takagi and Lozinak were concerned.
There was a smallpox epidemic in India a few months ago,
she recalled,
which probably explains their insistence on these shots.

Unless, that is, this had something to do with the secret germ warfare program Seven suspected. She still found it hard to believe that her two new friends, Walter and Viktor, could possibly be involved in
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something so sinister and barbaric. Breeding superbabies was one thing, that was arguably a positive goal, but growing bacteria by the ton? How did that fit into the utopian vision of what Seven had called the Chrysalis Project?

The shades had been drawn over all the windows in the passenger compartment of Chrysalis’s private jet, presumably to prevent “Ronnie Neary” from tracking the plane’s progress over Europe and Asia. The pressurized cabin smelt faintly of cigarettes, but at least she had plenty of legroom. With only four passengers aboard—herself, Takagi, Lozinak, and the huge Latino, whose name she had learned was Carlos—they each had a row of plush leather seats to themselves, with another row to spare for Isis and her molded plastic carrying case. First-class all the way; Chrysalis clearly had money to burn, not to mention a need-to-know mentality bordering on the paranoid.
I
hope they’re not planning on blindfolding me once we get to Delhi,
she thought.

“That’s all,” Takagi announced cheerfully Placing a rubber tip over the point of his hypo, he returned the syringe to the black leather doctor’s kit resting on the seat next to Roberta’s. He then buckled himself into his own seat, across the aisle from hers. “You might as well get comfortable,” he warned her. “We have a long flight ahead.”

Tell me about it,
Roberta thought glumly It was at least a seven-hour trip from Rome to Delhi. Rolling down the sleeve of her blouse, she snuck a peek at her wristwatch. After arriving from New York, the plane had departed Rome at about four P.M., which meant she still had about six-and-a-half hours to go. She tried to calculate their arrival time in Delhi, but the tricky time differences just made her head spin.
Probably just as well,
she concluded. Ronnie Neary would have no idea how long this trip was supposed to last.

“You sure you can’t tell me where we’re going?” she pleaded, intent on staying in character. “It seems to me that I’ve taken a lot on faith at this point.” She gave Takagi the most plaintive expression she could muster. “So when are you folks going to start to trust me?”

The amiable Japanese researcher squirmed uncomfortably in his seat. “It’s not that we don’t trust you,” he insisted. “It’s just that,
[87]
well—” He chewed nervously on his lower lip as he struggled to find the right words. “I mean, you know, the way things are—”

“No,” Carlos grunted from the seat behind her. “Don’t tell her anything.” The unsmiling Latino had been introduced to Roberta as Lozinak’s bodyguard and “security consultant.” In turn, she’d pretended not to have seen him before, since Ronnie Neary would never have noticed being followed all over Rome by the huge, silent phantom.
Pretty darn careless of me,
she admitted,
but, hey, I’m just a whiz-kid geneticist with no street smarts.