“I don’t know,” Mrs. Steel said. “All I know is he works at it day and night. It’s never been as bad as this. Nobody’s allowed in to see him. All the shutters are down. I’m not allowed to open the doors or even clean up around the place.” She pulled a cloth from her apron and wiped down the counter, quite superfluously. “And then there’s the security detail that patrols the grounds these days. Over there, you see them? Those two with their guns and the dog? They’re part of the arrangement. Oh of course you must have seen them as you arrived. It’s dreadful, isn’t it?”
Charlotte shrugged. She had become more or less used to such security arrangements as a child. “They’re doing their job.”
“Oh they are. But carrying those guns—I tell you, it gives me a funny turn every time I look at them. And they don’t just let me through when I come back from doing the shopping. They check my car every time. Supposedly, somebody could have planted a bomb in it or a bug or I don’t know what. Ever since he got back, Mr. Kato has been most concerned that he might be being bugged.” She sighed. “He turns up at the most impossible times of day and night, and when he does he’s hungry as a wolf—well, no wonder! I throw something together for him, he bolts it down—pardon my saying so, but there’s really no other way to describe it—and then he’s off again. And it’s been like that ever since he came back. I mean, I’m happy, of course, that he even remembers to eat, but as for what it’s doing to his health…this lifestyle can’t be good for him.”
“He’s always had a tendency to go to extremes,” Charlotte said, thinking of their childhood in Tokyo, and how she had visited him at home once. His tiny little corner of the room, everything neatly in its place but tools everywhere. And the dorm room in Boston. Almost monastic in its stark simplicity. She had often found herself thinking of that room recently. That and his stubbornness in wooing her. And the extraordinary way he had gone about it. No, Hiroshi was definitely not like other men.
Mrs. Steel trotted back over to the little white laptop that sat there like a toy. Obviously, there was still no answer. “Perhaps he’s asleep,” she said. “He has to sleep eventually after all.”
Charlotte just nodded and took a sip of her coffee. She had never taken him seriously when he had insisted it was fate their paths should always cross. When he had claimed they were meant for one another. She had always supposed words like that were merely talk, the kind of thing men said because they thought it would make it easier to get her into bed. Although in Hiroshi’s case she hadn’t even thought that. In the end it had been her dragging him into bed. And then him saying he wanted more than that.
Oh, she didn’t know what to think now. For the first time in all these years, she wondered whether Hiroshi might have been right. Whether they really were meant for each other in some way, perhaps not in any very romantic way. Whether they could ever be anything more than childhood friends. She had never seriously considered a relationship with Hiroshi; whenever he had started talking about it, it had always struck her as a crazy idea, not worth thinking about. But now, for the first time, she tried to imagine it. Wondered what such a relationship might look like. How they would live. Whether they would have children…children! The fact that children even crossed her mind surprised her most of all. What was it like to live with an inventor? That was the question. That, and whether she wanted that kind of life. Whether she could stand it. She didn’t know.
“There,” Mrs. Steel exclaimed. “An answer.”
It was only two words: “Not now.”
Two words that were like a slap in the face. Charlotte felt herself turn red. All at once all her hopes and questions and self-scrutiny seemed utterly ridiculous. How long could you fend a man off before he gave up? How often could you pick someone else before he changed his mind? Suddenly, she was certain the last straw had been in Reykjavík when she had made her escape from Iceland without even trying to talk to Hiroshi before she left. He would never forgive her that.
“Ah well,” she said. Her voice sounded strange in her ears. “You have to expect this sort of thing when you just turn up unannounced. Maybe it’ll work out next time.” She had forced her face into a smile but felt that it must look like a grimace.
“Would you like to leave him a message?” the housekeeper asked, looking terribly flustered. “I’ll give you something to write with. I’ll find you the back of an envelope—”
“No. Thank you. I think it…I don’t think there’s any need.” Charlotte looked at her watch and took her car keys out of her bag. She had a rental car she had picked up in San Francisco. “If I hurry, I should be able to catch the evening flight to Boston.”
Boston. Not that she knew what to do with herself there either.
At first, Hiroshi hadn’t even noticed there had been a message blinking on the screen. He had clicked it away without even reading it and then written a hasty answer to make sure there were no more disturbances—all in an instant, his fingers flying over the keys—and then he had turned back to watch what was happening deep underground below Burntwood Lake.
This was it! That had to be the start sequence. The last of the fastenings decoupled. In a moment the rocket would be hanging there in the magnetic field. But it wouldn’t stay still for long, since the coils could only store a limited amount of energy.
There! Acceleration. He could literally see the storage units unleashing their whole store of energy into the coils in two or three convulsive movements, hurling the rocket out of the shaft and up into the sky. It was incredible how it picked up speed. Mach 1—the sonic boom must have shaken the whole launch site to its foundations. Mach 2, 3, and then it was out. Ignition. Hiroshi held his breath. All at once the seconds stretched out endlessly. But no antiballistic missiles appeared to intercept it, nothing that could stop the rocket’s trajectory. One hundred miles…two hundred, and still accelerating…three hundred. Well, he could safely say it was in outer space by now.
The radio signals the rocket was sending back to base and that base was sending on to him along more than twelve hundred miles of microscopically thin data cable were becoming weaker with every second. Hiroshi followed the rocket’s course, stony-faced. Now came the moment when he had rewritten some of the programming. The moment of truth…yes. The rocket changed course. It shifted by just a few degrees, but enough to keep it within the plane of the ecliptic and send it toward Jupiter. Just as he had planned.
With a mixture of deep satisfaction and exhaustion, Hiroshi sent the base an instruction to cease radio communication with the rocket. Once that was done, he sent the kill signal, the order that would make the nanites take the whole launch site apart and then the data cable that led back to him and finally each other. Until there was nothing left. He didn’t wait for all this to finish but broke the connection straightaway, including the one to the webcam. Then he sank back into his seat and massaged his temples. Only now did he feel the strain he had been under the whole time he had been watching.
And this was only the start. The real challenges all lay ahead.
Unlike the incident in the Russian Arctic, this launch did not pass unnoticed by the wider world. Quite the opposite. Given that it had taken place in one of the remotest regions of the North American continent, an astonishing number of people caught wind of it. There was even a bit of wobbly video footage that somebody had taken with their smartphone showing the rocket climbing into the sky at the head of a column of fire, which looked noticeably different from the usual TV images. The webcam owner had been ordered to hand over the whole contents of his server to the police, of course. The news channels portentously reported that the log files were currently being evaluated, and they all played the same slow-motion clip of the rocket shooting up out of the hole—images that showed nothing at all, really, other than a cylindrical blur popping up and then vanishing.
Footage of Burntwood Lake itself showed the devastation caused by the launch. When the shaft had collapsed in on
itself, it had swallowed not only the island but all the water in the lake. The helicopters sent by the big news networks were circling over a waste of mud and dead fish. The Canadian prime minister condemned the incident and repeatedly emphasized his government had nothing to do with it. He declared that no effort would be spared to get to the bottom of the matter and find out the truth. One commentator, however, put forward the question of what laws might be used to prosecute whoever was responsible. After all, it was not actually illegal for private individuals to launch spacecraft in Canada, although this was more because no such law had ever been needed than because legislation had been considered or debated. Meaning that all that was left was a suit of criminal damage, but that would need to be proven first. Since Burntwood Lake wasn’t even in a nature reserve, that whole tranche of legislation did not apply.
In a statement, the US president assured his Canadian counterpart of his fullest support in the search for the perpetrators of what he called “this subversive act.” He went on to say with firm resolve that they would not tolerate the American continent being used as a base for any actions that might endanger world peace.
Hiroshi wasn’t surprised to see them standing at his door the next day. The first was a man called Elmer Garrett, whose long, lantern- jawed face Hiroshi remembered well from Reykjavík—Garrett had questioned him several times, and today he wore a grim expression. There were two other men whose names Hiroshi didn’t bother to remember, and John Takeishi, the young lawyer who would rather have been a jazz clarinetist. Garrett said there had been an incident in Canada. Perhaps Hiroshi had heard about it. Very like what had happened on the island in the Russian Arctic. They had a few questions they would like to ask him.
Hiroshi asked them to come in and told them that yes indeed, he had heard something about the incident in Canada.
“What do you know about it?” Garrett asked, having presented a business card that described him as a “special investigator.”
“What I saw on TV,” Hiroshi replied. “And on the clips going around the Internet.”
“What do you make of it?”
Hiroshi shrugged. “By the look of it, I would say that there were more extraterrestrial probes waiting for their moment.”
They all nodded. Evidently, they had already thought of this on their own. It was hardly a very original conclusion.
“May I ask where you were at the time?” Garrett asked, pulling out a little notebook that made him look as though he were reenacting a favorite scene from a Humphrey Bogart movie.
“Here,” Hiroshi replied truthfully. “I’m not going anywhere these days.”
Garrett wrote it all down. “And can anyone confirm that?”
“My housekeeper.”
3
“What if we were to assume,” Adamson said, “that Hiroshi Kato caused that incident in Saskatchewan?”
It was the wrong thing to say and the wrong time to say it, as he realized as soon as he’d spoken. Nor had it been a good idea to waylay his boss here in the lobby. Roberta Jacobs looked at him in dismay, even in shock, as though he had just molested her.
“Bill!” The way she spat his name out spoke volumes, a whole encyclopedia of disdain. “Do you never get the feeling that this man has become an obsession?”
“Over in Russia he stopped one of those things in its tracks. And if he can do that, then he can start one.”
She had recovered her poise. Now she was getting angry. “Hiroshi Kato made a statement,” she said, making every word count. “He says he doesn’t know what stopped that probe. Our analysis of the radio signals he sent and received supports that statement. Sure, once he was on the island he managed to trigger the self-destruct. But he handed over that code to us and to the Russians in case any other probes became active. As for whatever else Mr. Kato can or cannot do, I would like you to stick to the facts rather than let your imagination run away with you. We’ve had specialists looking at his research and how far he’s gotten.”
“What does that mean? Which specialists?”
“CIA specialists who copied every scrap of data on his computers. Established experts in nanotechnology who went through that data. Satisfied now?”
Adamson swallowed. “I’m quite sure that—”
“And everybody else is quite sure that not,” Jacobs interrupted him. “If you will excuse me, Mr. Adamson, I have an appointment.”
With that she stalked off toward the front door. Adamson watched her go. He could probably thank his lucky stars that he worked for a government agency; in a private company, he’d have been fired by now. However, his behavior was not entirely without consequences. Two days later he learned that he would be transferred to another department. Effective immediately.
“Space-colonization planning!” Even as he sat in the living room with his brother-in-law that evening, Adamson still couldn’t quite believe what had happened. “I didn’t even know that DARPA had anything to do with loony tunes like that. And now I’m in charge of it.”
Mitch Jensen furrowed his brow. “Outer space? Isn’t that NASA’s bird?”
“You’d kind of think so, wouldn’t you?” Adamson took a slug from the can of Bud he was holding. It was too warm to taste like much. “They could have just come straight out and called it make-work. Hell, they could have me carting wheelbarrows of sand up and down the parade square.”
CNN was on the television. The sound was turned down, but the pictures spoke for themselves. The only story was the lake that had been destroyed in Northern Saskatchewan.
“I say Kato pulled a fast one,” Mitch Jensen declared, nodding toward the TV. “He knows more than he’s letting on. All that data on his computers—that was all fake, if you ask me.” He emptied his can and then crumpled it in his fist. “It’s just that nobody does ask me.”
“You guys still watching him?”
Mitch shook his head slowly. “Mr. Hiroshi Kato is now officially off the list of suspects. Circular to all departments concerned. The president has taken him under his wing. They’re considering which medal to give him for what he did on Saradkov Island.” He weighed the can in his hand, aimed, and then threw it neatly into the cardboard box that stood by the television. “The man’s above reproach. Up on a pedestal. He has nothing to fear.”
Jeffrey Coldwell still didn’t know quite what to make of all this. He didn’t even know which way to look.
On the one hand, there was this piece of paper on the table in front of him. An employment contract offering a salary around five times what he was earning right now. Five times! That would mean the end of the dry spell he’d been in ever since Larry Gu had died and he’d been dismissed from Gu Enterprises. Sure, he hadn’t actually been fired. Even the Communist Party top brass knew that could look bad. But they also knew how to persuade a guy to quit of his own free will.
They had had to sell the ranch, and of course they got way too little for it, as always when you had to sell in a hurry. Then Nancy had gotten the divorce, which had cost him all the money he still had. The hell with it—she had been way too young for him anyway. But after that he had just had to take whatever jobs came up, and they had been anything but his dream career. He was a textbook example of the failing professional. And it all looked downhill from here. But this contract was his chance to get back to where the grass was greener. To get things back on track. To drag himself up by his bootstraps. Which was why his eyes kept coming back to the salary.
But his eyes also drifted again and again to the man on the other side of the desk—the incredibly ugly, glass-and-steel desk that sat in the middle of the light, wood-paneled office like a turd in the punchbowl. Coldwell had looked up James Bennett III, of course, before catching his flight to Boston. Half an hour on the Internet had turned up more pictures than anyone could ever want of glamorous receptions, elegant parties, and other social events. The young man in the pictures had l
ooked like the American dream: handsome, happy, successful.
Just amazing what image-manipulation software can do these days, he had thought when he shook the hand of the new chair of Bennett Industries. The James Bennett III he met in the flesh looked like the funhouse mirror image of the man in the photographs: puffy with drink, somehow crooked and out of proportion, his hair dull and thinning, his eyes unsteady. Anything but good company. But there was still that salary to think of. He didn’t have to work for the guy because he liked him. He wasn’t holding down his current job for the fun of it either.
He cleared his throat once Bennett had finished explaining what he wanted. “To be straight with you, Mr. Bennett, I signed a confidentiality agreement. Strictly speaking, I shouldn’t even comment on what you’ve just told me.”
Bennett raised his eyebrows, which made him look almost exactly like a cheap movie villain. “Do you really believe the Communist Party of China will send lawyers over and haul you up before an American court if you tell me?”
“Not lawyers. They’ll send killers.”
“I understand.” Bennett toyed with the platinum-plated ballpoint pen he had used to write that incredible salary into the contract himself. “In fact, I’m not really interested in what Mr. Kato did in Hong Kong. I’m interested in what he’s doing now. As I understand it, that isn’t covered by your confidentiality agreement, am I right?”
“That’s exactly how I see it.” Coldwell nodded. He had only even mentioned it to show he knew what secrets meant and how to keep them.
In fact, he wasn’t worried that the Chinese government would send killers after him. First of all, he was small fry for them, and second, he had seen worse and survived it. The early years in Hong Kong hadn’t exactly been a walk in the park. He had run into trouble with the Triads. At one point, he had thrown himself from a car right before a hail of bullets turned it into a colander. He knew all about solving problems with a fistful of banknotes and a handshake. And he had learned to live with the idea that that often meant the one causing trouble would meet with an untimely death.
Lord of All Things Page 54
