Despite everything, he had persevered. And he knew the goal he had struggled toward for so long was now, at last, tantalizingly near.
With the eavesdropping devices in place, Joseph Cooper moved quickly from the lab across the dark, weedchoked campus to a small brick outbuilding. The windows were boarded up with thick planks and reinforced with steel bars. The building’s one door was triple-locked.
He took out a penlight from his pocket and shined it on the locks.
There were two pin tumblers and one Medeco high-security—well within his range of expertise.
From his back pocket Cooper extracted a small leather pouch.
It contained a set of eleven basic lock picks that he had fashioned himself from strips of flat, cold-rolled steel, one-fiftieth of an inch thick, and three varieties of tension tools made from thin strips of spring steel.
He attacked the top pin tumbler first. He inserted a tension tool into the keyhole and slid it along the bottom of the keyway as far as it would go. Next he selected a pick with a serrated top and bottom, called a rake, and slipped it into the keyway above the tension tool.
He applied a slight clockwise turning pressure to the tension tool and then, grasping the rake, yanked it back out of the keyhole with a quick, controlled motion, to bounce the tumbler pins back up past the plug’s sheer point. The tension tool twisted the cylinder to the right, free of the pins that had held it in place, and the latchbolt slid back out of the strike box and inside the lock housing.
The second pin tumbler took longer. It appeared to be a newer lock, and the tumbler pins wouldn’t “bounce.” Using a narrow pick with a bent end, and keeping a slight but steady clockwise pressure with the tension tool, he patiently felt out and lifted each pin past the sheer line. When he had raised the last, the plug turned and unlocked.
Predictably, the Medeco gave him the most trouble. He had not had a lot of practice with this type, and its design required that he employ two picks simultaneously at different angles on each pin to raise it.
Holding the penlight in his mouth and steadying his hands against the door with his little fingers, he struggled for ten minutes before the lock finally yielded to his finesse.
Cooper opened the door cautiously and played the light around. Inside was a long, windowless storeroom. Shelves of large glass jars lined both walls. The air was heavy with the stale odor of formaldehyde.
Cooper walked slowly along between the rows, flicking his narrow beam of light back and forth. The jars glowed a ghostly, transparent amber.
Each one contained the remains of a human baby. Some were fetuses—physically grotesque ones, with missing body parts, gross skeletal abnormalities, enlarged or distorted features, excess numbers of limbs, and other defects not apparent to Cooper’s untrained eye.
But many of the jars held what appeared to be newborn infants. Some were white; most were black. They were intact and looked relatively normal. Stillborn, he guessed.
Each jar was labeled with cryptic information that he couldn’t decipher. Only the dates were apparent to him. The contents of some jars were ten years old. The newest was dated from eighteen months earlier.
For the next hour Goth busied himself preparing the strands of DNA for sequencing. He removed tiny amounts of the DNA-rich liquid from the test tube with a micropipette and mixed them in several small glass vessels with a series of biochemicals called dideoxy compounds. He then placed the vessels into a series of wells at the top of a sequencing apparatus, a clear plastic slab containing a thin gel sandwiched between sheets of glass.
When he was satisfied that everything was in order, he turned on the sequencer’s heating element to start the separation, a process that would take all night to complete. In the morning the gel, with its newly acquired coating of the DNA-rich broth from the vessels, would be hardened into a plasticlike sheet. Goth would remove the sheet, treat it with special chemicals to fix it, and then expose it to X-ray film.
The film would make visible about four hundred base pairs along a segment of the DNA, whose sequence he could then read. He would need to repeat this process sixty times to get a readout of the entire strand of DNA that concerned him. It was an outdated, timeconsuming, and laborious method, but in his reduced circumstances he had no other way to do it.
He checked the thermostat that regulated the temperature of the sequencer to make certain that it was operating properly. A faulty mercury switch in an earlier one had ruined several gels and cost him a week’s work.
Goth cleaned up the work area, picked up a folder containing the day’s notes, and extracted the RCD—the removable cartridge disk—from the computer. He locked the folder and the hard disk in a cheap vinyl attache case, turned off the computer and the lights, and left the lab, carrying the case with him. There was nothing more he could do until the morning.
He knew he was very close now. These results would have to be tested and retested, confirmed and reconfirmed, before he could lay all lingering uncertainties to rest. But he was close.
He locked the lab door and retreated down the narrow corridor to the small pair of rooms in the back of the building that he had converted into living quarters.
He removed a small cotton blanket from an ancient floor safe that sat in one corner of his bedroom, opened the safe, and slid the attache case in alongside stacks of his research notes and a backup copy of the RCD. He closed the door and spun the dial to lock it again.
He had been thinking a lot about his future these past few weeks.
Fifteen years ago, he had stood on a stage in Stockholm in a rented tie and tails and received the Nobel Prize in biology.
He was only forty-five—one of the youngest scientists ever to have received the prize. How his spirits had soared that day-how invincible he had felt.
Would he ever again be so rewarded for his achievements? He knew it was unlikely, at least in his own lifetime. And yet the research for which he had won that Nobel Prize paled in significance next to his present work.
It was only months after receiving the prize that he began his work on the germ line. No one had supported his effort. On the contrary, everyone had condemned it. His colleagues had warned him that it would be professional suicide. His friends had deserted him, and so had his wife of twelve years, herself a prominent geneticist.
But Goth was not dissuaded. His motivations were complicated, but one reason dominated all others: the simple glory of the quest. He saw a unique chance to make an extraordinary contribution to science and to the future of the human race.
Someday, he thought, his accomplishments would set him apart as a man of the ages, as a name to be spoken in the same breath as Mendel or Pasteur, or even Einstein.
He stepped to the window and pulled back the edge of the shade. The medical school’s deserted buildings looked like a ghost town in the moonlight. Behind them loomed the crumbled towers of the old Spanish fortress.
Goth folded back the sheet of the narrow cot that had been his bed for the last five years and slipped under it. He looked at the two novels on the small steamer trunk he used as a night table.
Both were Sherlock Holmes pastiches. He had read them once and found them thin; nothing, unfortunately, compared with the master. But he had read Arthur Conan Doyle through so many times over the past decades that he knew all the Holmes stories by heart. It was a shame there were no more. They had been his only escape from reality.
He took in a deep breath and let it out in a long, ragged exhalation of exhaustion and despair. There were stark realities to be faced. He needed money desperately. He was half a million dollars in debt. He had long ago liquidated all his possessions.
And no one he knew of—no individual, no institution—was willing to extend him any more credit. If he did not get some financing soon, he would have to close the lab and abandon his work.
Eventually, somebody somewhere else would make the same discoveries he had made and reap his rewards—and his immortality.
His effo
rt would be wasted.
And his dream would die.
Goth removed his glasses, folded them carefully, and placed them beside the books on the steamer trunk. He turned out the light and lay back against the pillow, his eyes wide, his brain far from sleep.
There was only one possible way he could think of to get the money he needed. The thought of it made him shudder with disgust. But he really had no choice. He would have to do it.
Cooper pulled a small point-and-shoot camera from his pants pocket, checked the film, adjusted the flash, and began firing away. He moved quickly along the rows of jars, crouching and shooting, until he had photographed everything in the storeroom.
The 35 mm lens took in a wide field, but the camera was loaded with a special high-density black-and-white film whose negative could be enlarged tenfold with no loss of definition.
Cooper would normally use several rolls of film and photograph everything two or three times, just to cover himself against any possible failure. But a nameless menace seemed to lurk in the thick, foul air. After only one roll Cooper began to tremble and sweat.
He started to reload and then gave up. He jammed the camera back in his pocket and bolted out of the shed. He fumbled in haste to relock the door and then fled across the grounds of the medical school back toward the Road of the Mountain Guns.
The moon cast a dim, shadowy light on the road’s rutted surface.
Cooper descended as fast as he dared, trying to shake the images of those jars of human fetuses from his mind.
From what Dalton Stewart had seen so far, Dr. Harold Goth’s research center was a huge disappointment. Stewart had expected to find a modern facility, with state-of-the-art technology and dozens of white-frocked technicians watching computer screens.
Instead there was this rundown collection of rooms with broken floor tiles, dirty windows, and ancient equipment, housed insile a decaying single-story brick structure which had not seen a coat of paint, a repointed brick, or a roof repair in over a decade.
The center had once been a medical school, Stewart had learned—one of those offshore diploma mills that used to crank out second-rate American doctors before it lost its accreditation back in the mid-eighties.
The only other individual on the premises besides Goth appeared to be a short, perpetually frowning darkhaired female lab assistant who didn’t look old enough to have finished high school.
Stewart followed the four other visitors into a cluttered, dimly lit laboratory. The research assistant was busy in a far corner, fiddling with something on a counter top.
Five folding metal chairs, their seats blistered with rust, had been arranged for the visitors in a semicircle facing a battered oak school desk. The desk was buried under a haphazard pile of computer printouts and dog-eared books and manuals of every size and description, their pages bristling with reference markers made from torn shreds of paper.
Stewart brushed off the seat of the chair nearest the door and 20
sat down on it. There was no air conditioning, and the oppressive heat was made all the more stifling by the accumulated odors of chemicals, mildew, and human sweat. He pulled a white cotton handkerchief from his pocket and patted his brow.
Stewart was the principal owner of Stewart Biotech, a conglomerate of chemical and biological manufacturing and research facilities. He was forty-six years old, tall and trim. His dark, handsome face and self-confident smile had graced the covers of many magazines, from Fortune and Forbes to Time and People.
He was a modern American success story. From a small, debtridden Long Island drug supply house he had bought with some money borrowed from an uncle, he had built an empire. It was a tribute to his skill at self-promotion that his personal net worth was estimated variously to be anywhere between one billion and three billion dollars. In fact, he was worth considerably less than a billion. How much less depended on the day of the week and the month of the year, because his fortune was in a constant state of flux. Like many entrepreneurs, he was an active, high-stakes gambler whose plunges could win or lose him millions every week. Even the banks who backed his financial adventures never knew for certain how much money he had.
Whatever his actual wealth, he was widely admired as a businessman with drive and imagination. His energy and enterprise —and his flair for publicity—had won him an international reputation and many powerful friends. Wherever he went, he was accustomed to making his presence felt. He projected an enormously appealing image of strength, charm, and sophistication.
Despite all these outward manifestations of success, Stewart was not a particularly happy man. He had been married three times, and he had no children. Behind the dashing, worldly image lurked an apprehensive, hungry soul, pursued by childhood insecurities and cravings that no amount of success seemed able to still.
At this precise moment, Stewart felt especially unhappy. He was beginning to suspect that he had made a dumb mistake coming here.
But still, he was curious. Dr. Harold Goth was one of the world’s greatest biologists. Or at least he had been. The file put together by Stewart’s research department in New York presented a picture of a brilliant scientist in decline. As a leading figure in the fields of molecular biology and genetics, Goth had held important positions at three of the most prestigious universities in the world.
He had written two books on genetics that were regarded as classics.
He was also responsible for developing several breakthrough laboratory procedures and held a patent on a special apparatus he had invented to speed up the process of gene splicing. In 1984 he had been awarded the Nobel Prize in biology.
But like many men of genius, Goth was a maverick—a man who preferred to pursue his own goals. He was single-minded, egotistical, and contemptuous of anyone who disagreed with him.
Former colleagues who had once admired his work thought that in the last decade he had lost his way. Others thought him simply power-mad—a man who had let his ego and his greed for renown get in the way of his responsibilities as a scientist.
Stewart’s file showed Goth’s problems becoming serious in 1992. He had publicly condemned a new law passed that year by Congress banning genetic experimentation with the genes of the human reproductive system—the so-called germ line. His defiance cost him his university teaching post and all the funding for his research. He moved his laboratory to Switzerland and raised enough money there to continue his work. But two years later controversy caught up with him again, and Switzerland sent him packing.
So here he was, Stewart thought, a fugitive—cast up on an impoverished Caribbean island, flat broke and desperate for help.
Under the circumstances, Stewart reflected, it was a tribute to Goth’s still-powerful reputation that he had been able to command the presence of the five individuals who now sat in the stale tropical heat of his grubby little lab, waiting to hear what he had on his mind. Like Stewart, the other visitors were all enormously successful international financiers and industrialists, and all were heavily invested in biotechnology, one of the more cutthroat areas of modern business competition.
Stewart glanced down the row of chairs. His four companions wore varying expressions of boredom and discomfort. It amused him to see them in such modest surroundings, stripped of their usual protective layers of advisors, assistants, and bodyguards.
Goth had been adamant—he would allow no one inside his laboratory or his office except the five principals. To make the humiliation complete, he had hired two local department-store guards to search each of them for weapons and recording devices.
In the chair next to Stewart sat the Kuwaiti prince Bandar, clad in a floor-length white dishdas7a and a white kufiyya, held on his head by a twisted length of black cord. He had a nervous habit of pushing back the edge of the cloth with his fingers, like a woman brushing back long tresses.
Bandar was easily the richest of the five. His worth was stupendous—in excess of $100 billion. But the prince’s wealth, derived from the huge o
il reserves under his country’s desert, was an accident of birth and geography, not the results of risk, intelligence, or hard work. The prince was childish, vain, and selfindulgent. He knew or cared little about business affairs. He hired others to do his work for him.
Goth had been smart to invite the prince, Stewart reflected.
Bandar controlled a fortune so vast that even his sybaritic excesses could not deplete it. Underwriting Goth’s research would be as insignificant an expense to him as throwing loose change to a beggar.
And the prince’s requirements for what he got in return would probably not be demanding.
In the next chair over from Bandar was Harry Fairfield, the British pharmaceuticals tycoon. Redheaded and ruddy-faced, Fairfield was a cockney from the London docks who had started his business career at sixteen as a drug runner for an East End gang.
He punched and kicked and shot his way to the top of the drug trade, and by the early 1970s he was making millions wholesaling heroin and cocaine. In the eighties, weary of the building pressures from both the police and his rivals, he elected to get out of crime before he was either sent to prison or killed. He invested his profits in legitimate drug companies and eventually made himself respectable.
Despite his new image, Fairfield’s business tactics remained something of a holdover from his drug-dealing days. If the normal strategies didn’t work, he didn’t hesitate to use muscle or threats to intimidate his competitors. Beneath a veneer of British working-class respectability, Fairfield was a shrewd and primitive brute, the English equivalent of a Mafia don. He was disliked and feared throughout the industry.
Next to Fairfield sat Yuichiro Yamamoto, a Japanese industrialist whose companies were involved in a broad range of hightech ventures, from computers to cybernetics to space vehicles.
Yamamoto was probably the most cultured and urbane of the group. A handsome, diminutive man in his early forties, he spoke fluent, accentless English, dressed elegantly, and displayed a connoisseur’s taste in everything from food and wine to art and music. He had been educated in the United States and England, and unlike many of his Japanese counterparts, he understood the Western mentality—and knew how to take advantage of it. Yamamoto was married to a relative of the Japanese royal family and had many powerful friends in that country’s top business, social, and governmental circles. It was expected that he might one day run for prime minister.
Tom Hyman Page 2
