Interface (20 page)

DR. RADHAKRISHNAN V.R.J.V.V. GANGADHAR

INSTITUTE OF BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH -
CALIFORNIA BRANCH

Finally, a clue here. Robert J. Coover was a very rich man. A
billionaire. The building in which Dr. Radhakrishnan was standing
was the Coover Biotech Pavilion;
 
Coover had
 
had it thrown
together a couple of years ago when he decided that biotechnology
was the wave of the future.

It made sense, in a way. This Elton State thing had just been a
fishing expedition, a stratagem to attract promising talent. Now that
Dr. Radhakrishnan's project with the baboons had succeeded so
brilliantly, Coover understood that it was time to pull away and get
serious about forging ahead. And Dr. Radhakrishnan was ready to
do some forging.

It was 9:30 a.m., one of the few times of day when he and his b
rother in Delhi might be awake simultaneously. In Delhi, the opposite side of the world from Elton, it was 10:00
p.m.
and Arun would probably be watching the news on his television set.

Dialing
  
India
 
was
  
always
  
an
  
adventure.
  
He
  
got
  
through e
ventually and reached his brother at his home in one of the p
leasant
  
colonies
  
on
  
the
  
outskirts
  
of the
  
metropolis,
  
where go
vernment officials lived with their air conditioners. As he had an
ticipated, the English language version of the news was running in
the background. The sound quality on the phone was very bad an
d Arun had to run over and turn the television down in order for th
em to get through the obligatory several minutes of family-r
elated small talk.

"Me? Oh, I'm fine, everything is going well enough," Dr. R
adhakrishnan said. "I heard some - some rumors about a new d
evelopment in the city and I wanted to ask you if you knew an
ything about them."

"What sort of rumors?"

"Has anything been happening lately with the Ashok Cinema?"

A silence. Then, "Ha!" Arun sounded satisfied, vindicated. "So n
ews of this heinous crime has even reached Elton, New Mexico!"

"Only the most tenuous reports, I can assure you." Dr. R
adhakrishnan did not want to put his brother off by explaining to h
im that if a hydrogen bomb were dropped in the middle of C
onnaught Circus, it probably wouldn't show up in the American m
edia unless American journalists were killed.

"I knew it would come out eventually. Little brother, it is c
orruption and CIA intrigues. Pure and simple. That's the only ex
planation."

"Are they planning to do something to the theater?"

Arun laughed bitterly. "Let me catch you up on events. The As
hok Theatre does not exist anymore, as of yesterday!"

"No!"

"I kid you not."

"I knew it was decrepit but-"

"It is more decrepit now. They have smashed it to the ground.

Within twenty-four hours the site was picked clean by a million
harijans. The came from every quarter of the city, like piranhas,
descended on the rubble before the dust had settled, and carried
away every piece of the building. Why, my secretary says that today
they had earth-moving equipment there, digging a basement!"

"But . . . who is 'they' in this case?"

"Guess."

"I can't."

"Maclntrye Engineering. The right hand of the CIA!"

Like many Indian politicians of a certain age, Arun liked to find
the CIA everywhere. Gangadhar, having spent some time in the
States and gotten an idea of the way that large American institutions
actually operated, had his doubts. He had come to realize that
MacIntyre Engineering would be a far more fearsome multi-
national corporation if it had nothing whatsoever to do with the United States Government.

"Since when are you such a cinema bluff anyway?" Gangadhar
asked.

"What do you mean?"

"Why is this such a heinous crime? The Ashok Theatre was a dump. It was high time for it to be torn down anyway."

Arun sighed at his brother's naivete. "It is not so much what they
did as the way they did it," he said.

"How was that?"

"They swaggered. They came into town like pirates. Little
brother, it was like the old days, when the Brits or the Yanks would
charge in and do as they pleased."

"But Arun, we are a sovereign country. How could they-"

"A sovereign country run by men." Arun sighed. "Corruptible
men."

"They bribed their way in?"

"Gangadhar, do you have any idea how long it would normally
take to obtain all the permits to raze a theater and begin construction
of a new structure?"

"Weeks?"

"Months. Years, Maclntyre did it in days. They only got here
a
week ago. The telephone lines were smoking, Gangadhar, so many
of their people were phoning in from the States, calling all the right
officials, sending round limousines to take them out to lunch. I
have never seen anything like it."

Someone was rapping on the frame of Dr. Radhakrishnan's
door. He looked up to see yet another delivery person from GODS
carrying a package. This one was the size of an orange crate.

"Just a moment, I have to sign for something," he said. He
beckoned the courier into his office, signed his name on the notebook computer with a nonchalant flourish, and waved him
out. He withdrew a penknife from his desk drawer and began to
cut the fiberglass tape that held the top of the box in place. It was a thick-walled styrofoam sarcophagus.

"Do you have any idea what sort of structure they intend to
build?" Dr. Radhakrishnan continued.

"If they had gone through the normal channels, I would, but the
ink is hardly dry on the blueprints, the workers themselves probably
don't even know what they are building. The pace of the
construction is frantic. They have actually purchased a local cement
factory for their own private use! Gangadhar, everyone says that
America had gone downhill, but you would never believe it if you
could come here and see this. The only parallel I can think of is the
Manhattan Project."

"Did I ever tell you about the time I went to the Taj Mahal?"
Dr. Radhakrishnan said, suddenly, on a whim.

"I don't know. Why?"

Dr. Radhakrishnan had gotten the lid off the styrofoam box. The
walls were three inches thick. The interior was filled with a swirling
fog of dry ice. He waved his hand over it to dissipate the cryogenic
mist. In the middle of the container, neatly packed between large
chunks of dry ice, was a small rack made of clear plastic, about the
size of a cigarette case. It was made to hold several narrow glass
tubes. At the moment, it held two of them.

"I was standing there looking at some of the inlay work on the north wall of the structure. Magnificent stuff. And this group of
Americans was there. Had come all the way around the world to
see the Taj Mahal. It was beastly hot, must have been forty-five
degrees. They were all dirty and tired and as usual there were
pickpockets all over the place. And one of them said, 'Hell, we should just build one of these things. In Arizona or somewhere.'

"You're kidding."

"Not at all. He thought that they would just raise some money
and replicate the Taj. And all the other Americans just nodded as
though that were a perfectly reasonable idea."

"It's unbelievable."

Dr. Radhakrishnan had opened the little case now, taking care
not to burn his hands with the intense cold, and removed the two
narrow glass tubes. Each one was mostly empty except for a small
dark wad of material near one end. He raised them up toward the
light.

"They have no values of any kind," he said. "Nothing means
anything to them. The Taj is just a construction project, a particular
manipulation of assets. And whatever they're doing on the Ashok Theatre site is more of the same."

He saw a glint of red and realized that the dark wads must be
tissue samples of some kind, which had presumably leaked a bit of
blood against the glass walls of the tubes before they had frozen. He
stepped over toward his window to allow the winter sunlight to
illuminate them a little better.

Arun's voice sounded far away. "Maybe they're building a Taj in
Delhi so they don't have to take the bus all the way to Agra," he
joked.

Dr.
  
Radhakrishnan
  
said
 
nothing.
  
He
  
had
 
recognized the contents of the tubes.

Mr. Salvador had mailed him pieces of two people's brains.

12

From two thousand feet above the California coast, Dr.
Radhakrishnan could see the whole thing taking shape. This was
one of those especially nice corporate jets with oversized windows:
a Gale Aerospace Gyrfalcon. The windows gave him a panoramic view of the entire parcel: there was the flat, sandy plain where the future position of the private landing strip was already marked out
with little fluorescent orange flags. There was the gravel access
road, which was rapidly being transmuted into asphalt by a road
crew. There was the grove of trees that would be turned into a little park where the workers could recreate. And finally, high above the
pounding white crests of the Pacific, there was the rocky bluff
where the facility itself would be constructed.

Was being constructed.

"My God," Dr. Radhakrishnan blurted. "It's half finished."

Mr. Salvador smiled. "This sort of rough structural work always
goes surprisingly quickly. I suppose that putting on all the door-k
nobs will take eons. Care for another cigar?

The coastline passed beneath them. The afternoon sun was now s
lanting in through the windows on the left side of the Gyrfalcon.

Dr. Radhakrishnan still didn't know how to take all of this. He
had been thinking about it for days and still hadn't figured it out. It

was way too much. Totally unrealistic. He had scraped for money
and recognition his whole career. Now he was getting everything.

The Manhattan Project, as Arun had said. This could not be h
appening. But it was happening.

His instincts told him that there was no rational explanation for
bis frantic expenditure of money. But that was a closed-minded
attitude not befitting a scientist. He was not a businessman. Who
was he to say that it didn't make financial sense?

Dr. Radhakrishnan V.R.J.V.V. Gangadhar belonged on this
business jet. And he deserved his research institutes also. It was
altogether fitting and proper.

"I couldn't help noticing you had some newspapers in your
briefcase," Dr. Radhakrishnan said. "I didn't get a chance to pick
one up this morning."

"Yesterday's
New York Times,"
Mr. Salvador said.

"Oh," Dr. Radhakrishnan said disappointedly. "I was hoping to take a look at the stock quotes."

"Say no more," Mr. Salvador said. He put his cigar down and
moved to the front of the cabin. He sat down in a leather swivel
chair in front of a portable communications setup that was built
into the forward bulkhead of the Gyrfalcon, just behind the
cockpit. It included a telephone and a fax machine, a keyboard, and
a couple of flat-screen monitors. The fax machine had been oozing paper almost since the moment they had taken off in Elton, and by
now a long curlicue had piled up beneath it on the deck. "These
Gale birds are pricey but they have peerless avionics," Mr. Salvador
continued, punching away on the keyboard.

A stock ticker materialized at the bottom of one of the monitor
screens, scrolling from right to left. "Can you make this out from where you are?"