Ark

by Charles McCarry

  The period after the last sentence was all but visible as it fell from Yao’s lips. Had he in fact come to the end? Henry waited, in case there might be more. A full minute seemed to pass.

  Henry said, “Let’s sit down, shall we?”

  He indicated a chair. General Yao sat down in it. He crossed his legs. He removed his cap and placed it on a side table. His gleaming hair was as perfectly combed as if he had just risen from a barber’s chair. Daeng entered with a tray of tinkling glasses and a bottle of champagne in an ice bucket. Apparently we had something to celebrate.

  Yao drank a single glass of champagne. Henry had his customary tablespoonful. I managed with a shaky hand to drink half a glass. As if stepping out of one movie and into another, the general stopped being the avenging angel and became his old flirtatious self again. He was entirely at ease, chatting me up about my book.

  “I’m on page one hundred and thirty-two,” he said. “I wish I had read more, so that I could discuss it more intelligently, but thanks to Henry’s merry pranks, I have had little time for novels lately. So far I like it tremendously. The man-woman scenes—perhaps I should say the woman-man scenes—are most enjoyable.”

  “You’re very kind,” I said.

  Yao said, “Tell me, my dear, do you write on a computer?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “I wish I had known. Certain young friends of mine who are very good at that sort of thing could have hacked into your computer. I could have read your book as you wrote it, as people did with Charles Dickens in Victorian times.”

  This banter continued for minutes, shutting Henry out of the conversation. At last Yao looked at his watch, put down his glass, and rose to his feet.

  “Forgive us,” he said to me. “Henry and I are going to have a private word. It’s been a pleasure to see you again, dear lady.”

  He made an after-you gesture to Henry, and then followed him to the opposite side of the yurt. Yao put a hand on Henry’s shoulder, a distinctly un-Chinese gesture, and peered into his face. He spoke softly. I caught the murmured words.

  Yao said, “So, my friend, what shall I take with me back to Beijing?”

  Henry reached inside the neck of his shirt and pulled out a tiny computer flash drive that hung around his neck on a thread. He took off this necklace and handed it to Yao, who unbuttoned his collar and strung the thing around his own neck. They shook hands. Yao’s grip seemed positively fervent.

  Henry walked him to the door. Through the open door I glimpsed troops snapping to attention. Moments later, engines started. Tires crunched. Yao and his escort drove away. Would they creep back in the night, drug the chow chows again, and pounce on me, asleep or awake?

  I needn’t have worried. An hour later, Henry and I were airborne. The skies were as empty as usual, and the ground below as lifeless. It seemed like the last place in the world that anyone would go in order to save the world. No doubt that was why Henry had chosen it.

  Daeng woke me at four in the morning with the announcement that we were on our final approach to Andrews Air Force Base. Henry was already awake. He was wearing a shirt and tie and shined shoes. Suspenders—suspenders!—held up the trousers of a dark suit. After the plane taxied, he stood up and put on the jacket. The change from his usual nerd attire could not have been more dramatic if Henry had appeared in the saffron robes of a Buddhist monk. The plane taxied to a gate. Henry got off. He was greeted by a marine in dress uniform who accompanied him to a waiting helicopter with Marines painted on its fuselage. Evidently Henry was going to call on the president.

  I flew back to New York in a smaller plane. After completing his business in Washington, Henry flew on to Brussels, Moscow, and Tokyo, though I did not deduce these destinations until later in the week, when CyberSci, Inc., announced in a press release—in English this time—that it had granted licenses to the governments of the United States, the European Union, Russia, Japan, India, and China to manufacture replicas of the Spaceplane and the space vehicle that was presently being assembled in orbit by the company’s construction teams. Blueprints and full technical information had been provided to all these governments. No license fees had been charged, nor would any be charged in the future. Each of the governments had solemnly promised, in writing, that the technology would be used for peaceful purposes only.

  In the next news cycle, Henry Peel was identified by senior officials in the White House as the inventor of Spaceplane and also of the ship that the space maidens in red were putting together in orbit. Experts at NASA and the Pentagon calculated that it would cost trillions and require many years to manufacture the Spaceplanes. Commentators who had their doubts about plutocrats bearing gifts speculated that Henry’s largesse might lead to the bankruptcy of the United States treasury, if not that of every other country he had just visited.

  Notwithstanding this risk, every world power that had received the plans would have to build the hardware and launch the ships because none of them could suffer another country to possess such a novelty without matching it ship for ship.

  Ten

  1

  BEAR’S LAWYERS FILED LAWSUITS IN federal court in Washington, D.C., and the world court in The Hague, demanding that CyberSci, Inc., Henry Peel, et al., be ordered to cease work on an experiment to produce thousands of genetically engineered embryos in a secret laboratory near Milan, Italy. The lawsuit charged that Henry intended to implant these embryos in the wombs of unsuspecting surrogate mothers, most likely in secret camps in Mongolia. The babies that resulted would be a new human type intended to be as much superior to ordinary human beings in intelligence and physical stature as people were to chimpanzees.

  The lawsuit got some of the details wrong or simply invented them for effect, but there was truth enough in Bear’s charges. His timing could hardly have been better, coming as it did after the outing of Henry as the inventor and financier of the Spaceplane and whatever it was that his space maidens were assembling in space. The awe and admiration that this feat had inspired was replaced in the news media overnight by almost universal schadenfreude. The mighty had fallen. How wonderful! A cordon of demonstrators formed around Amerigo’s factories to prevent removal of the monsters. The media went berserk. A plot was afoot to take over the world, and the most elusive trillionaire genius in history was behind it. No wonder he had lived in secret. No wonder no one knew what he looked like. This explained why Henry had hidden himself from the world, why he had escaped being revealed as a villain of technology for such a long time, why he had masqueraded as a benefactor of humanity.

  Ng Fred called me. He couldn’t locate Henry. He didn’t use Henry’s name. He used pronouns only. Would I tell him to call Ng Fred as soon as possible? I took the message, but told him I had no more idea than he did where he might be or when he might reappear.

  “If he gets in touch with anyone, it will probably be you,” Ng Fred said. “Tell him to call me immediately. Tell him that before you say hello.”

  Days passed. An 8.4 earthquake occurred in Tierra del Fuego. The shock caused a tsunami that engulfed the Shetland Islands and shook loose enormous fragments of ice from Antarctica. Once again great numbers of penguins and seals set sail on a melting floes, followed by a squadron of television camera crews in chartered airplanes. Two days later, a dormant volcano in the Japan Alps erupted, destroying several remote villages and asphyxiating scores of tourists at nearby ski resorts.

  Dead people, cute threatened animals! For the time being at least, the news media forgot all about Henry’s crimes against evolution. Besides, there were no pictures, there were no quotes, there was no proof of Bear’s allegations, and as far as anyone knew, Henry was a figment of the world’s imagination. Nothing was happening, there was nothing to report, so how could you make this interesting, let alone exciting, for more than a day or two? On the other hand, the stranded penguins, being swept toward certain destruction as their melting icebergs approached the Tropic of Capricorn, touched millions of hearts. Res
cue missions were proposed. Donations flowed. Cascades of fish and several veterinarians and many journalists were dropped from chartered airplanes. Ships steamed at high speed toward the floes, hoping to intercept them and save the penguins before they were destroyed by the sun and warm water, and tow them back to Antarctica.

  2

  IT WAS EARLY EVENING WHEN the phone rang, the wrong time of day for Henry to call, but when I switched on the videophone, his image appeared. He looked restored, somehow—happy, even relaxed. Stifling the impulse to ask where he had been and why he had been there, I told him about Ng Fred’s call.

  “He told me to give you the message before I said hello. Hello.”

  Henry’s image nodded. Message received. Footnote understood.

  His voice said, “Hello. Would it be convenient for me to come over for dinner?”

  He was in New York? I told him to come over.

  It was a rush—several different kinds of rush—to open the door and see the original Henry standing there in his customary Nikes and jeans and untucked T-shirt and Yankees cap instead of the bespoke suit and tie and burnished shoes he had been wearing the last time I saw him. Had he been anyone else, I would have kissed him. Apart from that brief waltz when the earthquake rattled Manhattan and one other quick touch of the hand, Henry and I had never touched each other’s skin. We hadn’t even shaken hands on first meeting. We had conceived children without touching each other. What Henry’s own impulses in this department were, supposing he had any, I could not guess. He seemed glad to see me, but looked at me, I thought, as if he knew me only from a photograph and was measuring the reality against the image.

  The conversation was slow at the outset—nonexistent, in fact. I thought Henry wanted to say something, but what? His hand lay on the tablecloth. To my own surprise, I reached across the space between us and touched it with a fingertip. I applied a little pressure, whitening the skin. He didn’t seem to notice.

  I thought, Wake up. I said, “What about the news from Milan? Where are our children?”

  He didn’t seem to be startled by the question. “They’re safe,” he said. “They’re healthy.”

  “They’re still on Earth?”

  “Yes. In Milan.”

  “How many are they?”

  “Just two,” Henry said. “A boy and a girl.”

  “Were there others?”

  “Yes, several. They weren’t viable.”

  “You mean they weren’t the kind that can be enhanced?”

  “No. Enhancement was never considered in their case.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Because by then there was no more enhancement.”

  “No more enhancement. You didn’t tell me that.”

  A silence. I said, “Why?”

  “Bad manners,” Henry replied. “Reluctance to admit such a big mistake.”

  “What changed your mind about enhancement?”

  “Two things,” Henry said. “Your moral disgust over the idea, and the sudden realization that two of the embryos were our own flesh and blood, yours and mine. I came face to face with the personal. I had to admit to myself that I wanted them to be like us, not wake up after a sleep of a thousand years as something else. Objectivity went out the window. Emotion ruled.”

  “That took you by surprise?”

  Henry paused before he answered. It wasn’t one of those mental disappearances of his that made you think he was going to step out of this world like a visitor from a parallel universe who suddenly remembers that he has an urgent appointment back home.

  At last he said, “No. I just understood that I was wrong. Apart from everything else, it made me realize that time was getting away from me.”

  I said, “Time is getting away from everybody.”

  Before I could say more, Henry held up an arresting hand. He then looked into my eyes and said what he had come to say. He was perfectly composed. There was no preamble or epilogue, no explanation. He just spoke his piece.

  His exact words were, “I have always wanted to make love to you.”

  I gasped, actually gasped. I was flabbergasted, not that he wanted to make love—why shouldn’t he?—but that he actually said so. My response was not in question, but for the moment I was deserted by the power of speech and gesture. I stood up. I crooked a finger at Henry and left the room like a sleepwalker. He followed.

  It was in no way strange to wake up the next morning and find him asleep beside me. It was still early. Just enough light came through the windows to make him visible. He slept on his right side, facing me, with his arms outside the covers. He looked like the proverbial little boy, a lock of hair on his forehead, eyelashes on his cheeks, the white outline of his drugstore wristwatch on the tanned skin of his wrist, his breathing only just audible. The shadow of a beard had grown on his chin overnight. He smelled different naked—a trace of sweat on his skin, a trace of soap, a trace of the two of us; on his breath, a trace of espresso. I wanted to wake him—dimpling the back of his hand with the same fingertip as before, but first I wanted to study him in his sleep a little longer.

  However, he woke up.

  As soon as his eyes were open, I said, “Why did you wait so long?”

  “You seemed to be elsewhere involved.”

  “Why would that stop you?”

  “I’m not a poacher.”

  Was that why Adam got his picture in the paper? I didn’t ask. Henry’s face revealed nothing.

  I said, “Tell me, really. How long has this been on your mind?”

  “Since you solved the riddle of the sphere that first day in Central Park,” Henry said.

  “You’re serious?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “It wasn’t my bottomless eyes, my glowing face, the wind in my hair, my graceful carriage?”

  “I have eyes to see with. But that’s when it started.”

  “So you were looking for a marriage of true minds?”

  “That and getting naked.”

  After a while we showered together as if we were living in the age of innocence and this was the first morning of the honeymoon, and we had come to each other the night before as virgins dying of curiosity. It was a large glassed-in shower, as spacious as an ordinary bathroom, a multifunction water joke with all sorts of showerheads and nozzles spraying water from all directions. I had never been able to figure it out. It was no mystery to Henry, who knew exactly which knob controlled which showerhead.

  In his backpack Henry had brought a toothbrush and an electric razor and a clean T-shirt and socks and underwear. One does like a confident man. Because my hair was soaked, it took me longer to get dressed.

  When finally I emerged from the bedroom, I found him strolling around the house, looking at the paintings. He was drinking coffee. He gave each picture at least five minutes of scrutiny, as though looking within it for other, concealed paintings. When I stood beside him, he put his arm around me. He kissed me on the forehead. We continued the tour in this fashion. All the while, he never took his eyes off the pictures.

  I said something to him and he said, “Hmmm?”

  We had breakfast. It was Sunday. The city was quiet. I played with the illusion that we could go window-shopping if the spirit moved us, or walk out for lunch at a nice little restaurant somebody had recommended. As if Henry had issued a command, no earthquakes or volcanic eruptions were reported. Nothing rumbled beneath the sidewalks of New York except the subway. The phones did not ring. Henry showed no disposition to leave. We watched a movie, putting it on hold a couple of times to fool around. We turned on the music and danced, for heaven’s sake. He was a good dancer. We had a long, long talk. Suddenly Henry was so domestic, and so was I, that it wouldn’t have surprised me if he had suggested a game of gin rummy in front of the fireplace, or asked for a liverwurst sandwich on rye with lots of ballpark mustard and a slice of red onion and a glass of beer for lunch.

  Or proposed marriage—Ng Fred for best man, Melissa as maid of honor
, Clementine frisking the guests, the last of the Duchins conducting the orchestra, no strobes or klieg lights because Henry had bought up every camera on the planet.

  At eleven that night, when it was eleven in the morning of the next day in Mongolia, Henry’s phone rang. It was Ng Fred. Henry listened to what he had to say, then made some calls. After that, he told me what was happening.

  “He says Beijing is sending a delegation to the Spaceplane plant. Can you be ready in fifteen minutes?”

  “Five,” I said.

  I packed a bag. Henry never bothered with luggage. He had jeans and T-shirts and sneakers and baseball caps and razors and toothbrushes stashed on all his airplanes. The car took us to the airport. We flew eastward, into the darkness of other time zones, and met the sun again somewhere over Afghanistan.

  As we approached the factory in Mongolia, we watched from fifty thousand feet as a Spaceplane launched. It rolled along the tarmac of the long runway, then lifted off, then climbed to an altitude so far above us that we could only see it on a monitor. There, it seemed to pause for an instant before it accelerated and vanished.

  3

  THE DELEGATION FROM BEIJING ARRIVED at noon exactly aboard a large military transport. Dozens of men filed off the plane, each with an identical laptop slung across his shoulder and an identical briefcase in his hand. Their somber suits were identical. They formed up in ranks on the tarmac like terracotta soldiers and waited impassively for whatever was going to happen next. It was obvious even to me that these men were not bureaucrats, but troops disguised as bureaucrats. That the deception seemed to be designed to be detected gave the masquerade a certain extra frisson.