Tom Hyman (22 page)

“Is something wrong?” Anne asked.

Dalton shrugged, then nodded. “Some business problems.

Things are a bit difficult right now.”

“You can’t elaborate?”

“What’s the point? You wouldn’t understand.”

“You promised me you weren’t going to do this anymore, remember? ” “Do what?”

“Shut me out of your world. Maybe I would understand.”

“I don’t mean you can’t understand. I just mean it’s all rather complicated and boring to anyone on the outside.”

Anne lifted her wineglass and looked at it. “So I’m still someone on the outside?”

“You know what I mean.”

“I know that I’ve learned more from Hank Ajemian about the whole industry of biological engineering in the few times he’s been here to dinner than I’ve learned from you in three years.”

Dalton chuckled. “Ajemian likes to talk. Besides, he’s got a thing for you. He likes to impress you.”

Anne didn’t reply.

Dalton sighed. “Stewart Biotech is in trouble. If we don’t get some cooperation from the banks in the next few weeks, we’ll have to go into Chapter 11.”

“What’s that?”

“We’ll have to get protection from our creditors until we can reorganize.”

“Bankruptcy ? ” “Does that shock you?”

“Well, yes. Shouldn’t it? I haven’t had a clue from you that things were so bad.”

Dalton stared at the big silver candelabra in the center of the table.

“Although from what I’ve heard, businesses do it all the time,” Anne continued. “And go right on as if nothing had happened.”

“It’s serious, just the same. The banks would take control. And we could eventually lose the company.”

“Why have things deteriorated so? Didn’t you tell me that last year the company had the best year in its history?”

“It did. But it’s complicated. We got overextended, and the economy turned sour, all in the same year. And we lost a lot of money in Coronado.”

“How?”

“How do you think? We made a big investment in Goth. When the wing of that damned hospital burned down, everything went with it—Harold Goth, his research, his papers, his files, his computer disks—everything we had counted on to make back our investment. And we didn’t have a dime’s worth of insurance. Nobody would cover us.”

“What was it that he had discovered? Why was it all such a big secret?”

Stewart looked faintly embarrassed. “We were afraid of competition.

Goth had developed a gene therapy that could have been enormously profitable. At least that’s what we thought at the time. Now, we’ll probably never know.”

Anne sensed her husband was avoiding something. “What exactly was this program of his supposed to do, anyway? You never really explained it to me.”

“I’m not sure I understand it myself.”

“I find that hard to believe.”

“It had to do with a complicated series of genetic alterations to the germ line. Goth had developed a genetic formula of sorts that he believed could produce a child with superior attributes-health, intelligence, and so forth.”

“Did he ever test his formula?”

Dalton looked directly at his wife. “Not that I know of.”

“Why did you take such a risk on something untested?”

Her husband laughed nervously. “Good question. I was naive.

And greedy. All I could think of was the profit it could turn.

Maybe it was best that it all came to such a quick end. I doubt the formula would ever have worked.”

After a silence, Dalton folded his napkin and dropped it on the table.

“In any case, the whole venture cost us a lot of money.”

He pushed his chair back. “I’m going back into town tonight.

Meet with Ajemian. There’s supposed to be a snowstorm tomorrow, and we absolutely have to sit down and review our strategy before we see the bankers tomorrow. Ajemian thinks we can arrange for some short-term financing that’ll at least give us a little breathing room—maybe four or five months. After that, who knows. Let’s go in and see Genny.”

On their way to the nursery they passed the music room. A light was on inside, and someone was hitting keys on the piano.

They looked in. Mrs. Callahan was standing by the door, hands on her hips. She turned and greeted Anne and Dalton. “I’m sorry,” she said,

“but she just ran in here. I was just about to take her back into the nursery.”

Mrs. Callahan started toward the piano, but Dalton held her arm.

“Wait a minute,” he whispered.

Genny was standing between the piano bench and the keyboard, reaching up to the keys with her right hand and hitting them in a very deliberate pattern—G, G, F, E, C-sharp, D, A; D, B, A, G, F-sharp, G, C….

Dalton glanced at Anne. “Did you teach her that?”

Anne shook her head. “No…. I played it for her, this afternoon. I did guide her fingers over the keys a couple of times. But that was all.”

The three adults listened while Genny’s tiny hand picked out the melody of “When You Wish Upon a Star.” At the end of the song’s refrain, she hesitated, then moved to her left to reach the keys further down the keyboard. She struck those in what appeared to be a random pattern.

Anne clapped a hand to her mouth. Dalton and Mrs. Callahan looked at her.

“Amazing,” she whispered. “She’s playing the same chords I used—one note at a time. Listen . . . those three notes were a C chor Now an A Mrs. Callahan nodded. “Well, she’s inherited your musical talent, Mrs. Stewart, that’s for sure, the little thing.”

Dalton Stewart opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out. His face had turned quite pale. He stared across the room at his daughter as if he had never seen her before.

Ambassador Haikido Mishima stopped and stared up directly over his head, shielding his eyes from the bright glare of the skylights. “I really don’t feel entirely secure, walking under those things,” he said.

“Those things” were several large airplanes suspended from the ceiling of the National Air and Space Museum, on Washington’s Independence Avenue.

Yuichiro Yamamoto followed his gaze. “I don’t think they’ll fall on us,” he said. “American technology isn’t that bad.”

Mishima chuckled. “I’m just a superstitious old man. Here, let’s go this way. That looks interesting over there.”

The two men strolled across the floor to the World War II aviation exhibit. Yamamoto had been to the Air and Space Museum many times, and he never tired of the place. Mishima, on the other hand, was not much interested. The ambassador’s tastes tended more toward symphony orchestras and art galleries than science.

“Is Goth’s program completely dead?” Mishima asked.

“Nothing survived,” Yamamoto answered.

“What about that lab assistant of his? The one who promised to sell us a copy?”

“Kirsten Amster. She’s disappeared.”

“What happened to her, do you think?”

Yamamoto shrugged. “People disappear on that island all the time.

Despres’s security police. They’re the lowest kinds of brutes.

And I understand she was careless about going out after dark.”

“We have no evidence, though.”

“No.”

“An unlikely coincidence, then, don’t you think?”

“It’s also possible that the baroness killed her.”

“You shouldn’t joke about such things.”

“I’m not joking, Excellency,” Yamamoto replied, annoyed.

“She was suspicious of Amster.”

“But why would she care? Stewart had already beaten her out of the Jupiter program.”

“But she hadn’t given up. It was probably her thugs who set fire to the laboratory and killed Goth. She may have been trying to steal the Jupiter formula. Amster may have died in the fire with Goth.”

“But her body was not found.”

“No.”

“Surely the baroness is not so ruthless.”

“I mention it only as a possibility.”

“Do you think the baroness ever obtained a copy of the Jupiter program?”

“No. It’s been over a year now, and our sources in Hauser Industries haven’t heard anything of it. And there’s no activity in any of their labs to support the idea.”

“Do you think Dalton Stewart has Jupiter?”

“It would only have been prudent for him to protect his investment by making sure that at least one copy of the program was locked in a secure place. That’s just my speculation, of course. No proof. And in fact, there’s nothing unusual going on at Stewart Biotech, either.”

“What about the Stewart daughter?” Mishima asked.

“She’s normal, as far as we can tell. No signs of anything unusual.

And we’ve read all the lab reports.”

Mishima nodded approvingly. “What does that indicate, in your view?”

“Not much. Except perhaps that Goth’s formula is at least not dangerous.”

“But there could be hidden damage, couldn’t there?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“And she is only a little over a year old. Perhaps too early to tell anything, positive or negative.”

“Perhaps.”

“That may explain why Stewart hasn’t yet done anything with the program. He’s waiting to see if Jupiter works.”

“That could be true also.”

“It’s really a great shame,” the ambassador said, glancing around him with an anxious frown, “that we didn’t get the Jupiter program from Amster sooner.”

Yamamoto cringed inwardly. He knew the ambassador was going to criticize him for not moving faster. He had spent hours mulling over his failure, trying to anticipate the questions and be ready with the right answers. Now that the moment was at hand, he felt nervous and defensive. The ambassador was a far more skillful and dangerous interrogator than his self-deprecating manners would imply. Still, Yamamoto knew he was on solid ground.

He had nothing to be ashamed of. “She wanted a lot of money,” he reminded Mishima. “And your office was slow to give me the necessary approval. By the time it came, it was too late.”

Mishima focused his gaze squarely on his companion. “Ah, but you never gave us any indication that the matter might be so urgent,” he said, his voice soft as a whisper.

Yamamoto forced himself to meet Mishima’s eyes head-on. “I had no reason to think it was.”

Mishima nodded. It was a maddening habit of his, Yamamoto thought—always nodding, whether he agreed with what you were saying or not.

“In any case, it’s too late now,” Mishima declared. “We mustn’t indulge ourselves in recriminations.”

My sentiments exactly, Yamamoto thought.

They walked past an exhibit of the Enola Gay, the American bomber that had dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Yamamoto knew that Mishima had lost relatives there. Not that that mattered very much to Yamamoto. His own grandfather had died at Iwo Jima. He had lost two uncles at Okinawa. And a greataunt had died in an air raid over Tokyo.

Every family lost members. He resented the special status accorded those who had died at Hiroshima, or Nagasaki. War was war and dead was dead.

The two Japanese found themselves back in the museum’s main hall. It was crowded and noisy.

“Jupiter is too important to drop,” Mishima said.

Yamamoto waited.

The ambassador leaned toward his companion’s ear. “There remains one further possibility open to us. We must try to get DNA samples from the Stewart child and her parents. If we can do that, then I think there is a way we can proceed. It will be difficult and tedious, but in the long run it might be the best approach. In any case, we must be wise enough to pursue it. Listen very carefully. This is what I want you to do….”

Cooper sat in a soundproof room in the basement of a building on the huge NSA campus at Fort Meade. In the ten years that he had worked for Roy, he had been at Fort Meade only once before.

He hadn’t liked it then, and he didn’t like it now.

Roy came in with two other men Cooper had never seen before.

One was tall, the other short. Both wore crew cuts, gray suits, and that amusing manner of complacent self-importance that bureaucrats high up in the spy business seemed to favor. Roy introduced the tall one as Harry, the short one as Jack.

They each shook Cooper’s hand and sat down across the small conference table from him. Cooper sensed that he made them uneasy. His bone-white hair and ebony skin tended to remind white people of cannibals. He ought to get a bone put through his nose, he thought, and really scare them.

“We’re still very goddamned disappointed in what happened at Coronado, Mr. Cooper,” Harry said.

“We’ve been through this a hundred times in the last twelve months.

The place was blowing up around me.”

“We now know who’s responsible for that,” Roy said.

“Who?” Cooper asked.

No one answered him.

“This nigger doesn’t need to know. That it?”

They laughed, embarrassed.

“We’ve reviewed the tapes from your surveillance bugs,” Jack said. “We think that the Jupiter program may have survived.”

“Yeah? You know where it is?”

“We’re getting close,” Harry said. “We want you to relocate in New York City. We’ve arranged everything. Even got you a job.”

“Oh?”

“At the Hilton hotel.”

“As what? A bellboy?”

Jack shook his head. “You’ll be in the kitchen.” He grinned.

His teeth were bad. “Have to keep you out of sight, you know.”

Cooper bowed his head, doffing an imaginary straw hat in Jack’s direction. He felt like saying “Yassuh” as well, but he knew that would be carrying insubordination too far.

“This is important, Cooper,” Harry said, his voice suddenly stern.

“Jupiter could be the biggest thing since they discovered the atomic bomb—” “Bigger,” Jack cut in.

“—and if it’s that big, then there’s only one nation on earth big enough to own it—the United States of America.”

Amen to that, thought Cooper.

On his morning drive into Manhattan, Dalton Stewart tried to think things through. He let his head fall back against the plush black leather upholstery and closed his eyes. Inside the perfect cocoon of his limousine it was hard to focus on the reality facing him, because it was so out of place with the material luxury of his surroundings.