Lord of All Things (54 page)

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 looked 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.

“What’s my role?” he asked. “What would I do here exactly?”

Bennett seemed to have been waiting for the question. “You’ll set up your own department. Outside the rest of the organization and answering only to me. You’d have a sufficiently large budget and the freedom to use it as you see fit. And, of course, I would expect you to be able to keep secrets. But above all, Mr. Coldwell…Jeff…I expect you to bring me whatever Hiroshi Kato’s working on. If you can, bring me him, too. I want to control everything he creates. Nothing more, nothing less. And let me put it like this: I would rather he were no longer working at all than that he were working for somebody else. If you understand what I mean.”

“I do indeed.” Coldwell nodded slowly and thought about what he’d just heard. Back in the old days it would have been on posters—“Dead or Alive.” “It may require, shall we say, unconventional methods to achieve that.”

Bennett twisted his face into a grin like a shark’s. “Officially, I don’t know anything about that. But I won’t be watching you too closely.” The grin widened. “As I understand it, you’ve built up some experience with unconventional methods over the course of your career.”

Coldwell raised his eyebrows. “I’m surprised you know about that.”

“I have my sources,” Bennett said. The way he said it sounded a little strange. Almost suggestive.

To hell with it
. “I see,” Coldwell said and took the contract. Bennett passed him the platinum-plated pen to sign with, which he took as a good omen.

It took three weeks to put together a good team, gather all the information it needed, and work out a plan. It took another three weeks to practice and prepare, and then the first group took up position among the pines not far from Hiroshi Kato’s mansion and trained its binoculars on it.

“House used to belong to a country singer. Famous guy,” one of the men remarked as he swept the glasses over shuttered windows, closed French doors, and an unused pool.

“Really? Who?” asked the man next to him.

“Name escapes me.” He put down his binoculars. “Hey, Bob, who was the singer who did ‘He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands’? That version with the steel-guitar intro?” He started to imitate the sound of a steel guitar but thought better of it. “Huge hit about…huh, twenty years ago.”

“Johnny…Johnny someone. I know who you mean,” the man called Bob said. “He lived here?”

“Yep.”

“Cool.”

They watched the house until they knew the daily routines—when the gardener came, and when he left; when the patrol guards took their break (they had instructions never to take their break at the same time as the day before, but of course they ignored them); and when the shifts changed. They watched as a skinny little Japanese guy came out of the house once and talked to the gardener; he was the man from the photographs they had all studied. When they saw that the housekeeper, an older woman with a head of blond hair that could be seen from miles away, drove off and wasn’t coming back, they passed on the information to their backup team, who found out Patricia Steel was visiting her sister Barbara in Sacramento, where her brother-in-law ran a grocery business specializing in organically grown fruit and vegetables.

“Okay, that’s one less witness,” Coldwell said when they updated him on the situation. “Let’s do this thing.”

The next morning the night guards were in for an unpleasant surprise when the two vans arrived with the relief shift. Both vehicles had the black paintwork, tinted windows, and logo of J. Irons Security Inc. they had been expecting, and the men who climbed out were dressed in familiar uniforms, but they were also wearing silicone-rubber masks of the presidential candidates in the last election. They shot all the dogs straightaway and then pointed their weapons at the night watch, who less than ten minutes later were handcuffed, blindfolded, and locked in the garden shed. The fake guards marched up to the house. They knew where the alarms were and how to disarm them. While some of them spread out around the perimeter of the house, others broke through the front door with the tools they had brought. It only took a few seconds. Then it was their turn for an unpleasant surprise: the house was empty.

It was unnervingly empty. Most of the countless rooms had no furniture at all. They found one room with a mattress on the floor and a thin cover over it, and another with just a chair. The only rooms furnished anywhere near normally were the kitchen and the dining room next door. At last, in the farthest corner of the house from the front door, they found a big room with a spectacular view of the garden and the valley beyond. It held a few tables arranged in a U shape. In the middle of one tabletop lay a few small pieces of plastic that turned out, upon closer inspection, to be keys snapped off from a computer keyboard. They had been arranged to spell out two words: FUCK YO*.

Rodney Alvarez looked at the clock. It was past midnight. Again. When Allison wasn’t there—she was visiting a friend in Phoenix—he never managed to go to bed, no matter how firmly he resolved to do so. Just one more website, he had said to himself what seemed like ten minutes ago, but that had led to one more and then another after that.…Tomorrow he’d be yawning his head off again in the office.

Enough, already. He put his computer to sleep with a resolute flourish and stood up. He stretched and then realized with a guilty start that he had forgotten to unload the dishwasher. He wondered whether he could put it off till morning. Not a good idea: he was always rushed for time in the morning, and he would be half-asleep and good for nothing. On the other hand, Allison would be back by the time he came home from the office
.
Do it now then, quickly
. He trotted off to the kitchen and opened the machine. There was a clean, cold smell. First step: grab all the spoons from the cutlery basket in one fistful, get them over to the drawer by the stove. Just as he picked up the knives, there was a ring at the door. At ten to one? Rodney tiptoed into the hall and peered through the peephole.

It was Hiroshi.

What was going on now? Rodney opened the door. “Don’t you think this is a strange time of night to be calling on honest, hardworking citizens?”

Hiroshi gave a thin smile. “Don’t you think that’s a strange way to greet an old friend?” He pointed to the knives. Rodney was still clutching them in his hand like a bouquet of flowers.

“One last bit of housework,” Rodney said, opening the door wide. “I was just going to bed. Come on in. Long time no see.”

Hiroshi came in, stepping inside briskly and neatly in that typical way of his. Rodney always found himself thinking of old samurai movies when he saw Hiroshi walk. He had a small tote bag slung over his shoulder. And somehow, for some reason he looked like…like a refugee. Rodney had no other way to describe it, and he also had no idea what made him think so, but there it was.