Tom Hyman (11 page)

His partner, Haikido Mishima, grunted a couple of words of praise and knelt down to tee up his own ball. Mishima was the number-three man at the Japanese embassy in Washington. He had been the number-one man some years before at the embassy in Mexico City, so he retained possession of the title of ambassador, even though his official position now was that of consul for trade and technology. His real mission was coordinating the embassy’s clandestine intelligence activities. He was several years older than Yamamoto, and not nearly as accomplished a golfer.

Yamamoto could walk off the eighteenth hole of this course under par on a good day. But today he knew he’d be lucky to make eighty. He had suffered a sleepless night, followed by two overbooked and delayed plane flights—one from Coronado to Nassau, the Bahamas, the other from there to Washington. Mishima, on the other hand, was out of shape and not well coordinated. He’d be lucky to get in under 110.

The ambassador hooked his tee shot to the right. It landed short and rolled into the rough, leaving him no approach to the green.

He slipped his club back into the bag with a dispirited sigh and climbed into the golf cart.

“I don’t know why I play this game,” he said. “It just makes me ill-tempered. I’d much rather sit in a garden and read poetry.”

Yamamoto smiled politely. He was quite fond of the ambassador. He was a cultured, educated man, with enormous grace and good humor. He was also charmingly self-effacing, even by Japanese standards, although Yamamoto suspected that there was a hint of mockery behind that modesty. “I predict you’ll give me a very close game today,” he said.

“Nonsense,” the diplomat replied. “You know better. I’ll be in the woods most of the time, looking for that damned little pockmarked white ball. No matter. I expect you’ll make my morning worthwhile.”

Yamamoto wasn’t so sure.

“And I want all the details,” Mishima added. “Even the seemingly irrelevant ones. We have eighteen long holes ahead of us.”

Yamamoto briefed Mishima on the meeting at Goth’s laboratory. He described those present—Prince Bandar, Harry Fairfield, Baroness von Hauser, and Dalton Stewart—and recounted the essential points of Harold Goth’s presentation.

By the time he had finished his briefing, they were riding the golf cart toward the fourth green. Yamamoto had parred the first, bogeyed the second, and birdied the third. The ambassador had triple-bogeyed all three.

“How do you evaluate Goth?” Mishima asked. “Does he know what he’s doing?”

“I wish I could answer that question, Ambassador, but honestly I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“His past achievements speak for themselves. He’s a Nobel laureate.

His brilliance as a geneticist is unquestioned….” Yamamoto stopped the cart by the edge of the green. His ball was sitting on the green, just twenty feet from the pin. The ambassador’s was buried in a nearby sand trap.

“But . . . ?” Mishima prodded.

“But for a decade now he’s been following an extremely risky course with his genetics work. That puts his judgment seriously in question.”

Mishima grabbed his sand wedge and waded into the trap after his ball.

Yamamoto stood on the edge of the grass, watching.

“Maybe the potential reward is worth the risk,” the ambassador said5

bending down for a closer look at his situation.

“Maybe.”

Mishima stepped up to the ball, took its measure, gritted his teeth, and swung lustily. A dense shower of sand spurted out in front of him.

The ball remained stationary. “But you have doubts,” he gasped.

Yamamoto nodded. “All he has is an untested formula. A computer program, actually. He calls it Jupiter. It might do what he claims, it might not. We can’t know until he tests it.”

“And of course that’s what he wants the money for.”

“Precisely.”

Mishima, breathing heavily from his exertions, stood over the ball again and gave it another energetic wallop with his wedge iron. This time the ball shot out of the trap on a low trajectory, soared across the green like a stray bullet, struck the pin with a loud bonk, bounced ten feet straight up in the air, and came to rest three feet past the hole.

Yamamoto shook his head in disbelief.

Mishima beamed in triumph. “You think any of the others will make Goth an offer?” he asked.

“Baroness von Hauser already has. And the American, Dalton Stewart—I think he’s up to something.”

“What about the other two? Prince Bandar and that Englishman, Fairfield?”

“It’s doubtful they’ll do anything.”

“What’s the status of our own research programs?”

“At a standstill, like everybody else’s.”

“Why is that?”

“As you well know, Ambassador, experimenting on the human germ line is illegal in most countries, including ours.”

The diplomat appraised Yamamoto with a sidelong glance.

“But we’re doing it anyway, aren’t we?”

Yamamoto studied the green’s perfectly mowed carpet of bent grass.

“Purely theoretical stuff—computer models based on genome studies, projections from animal experiments, that kind of thing. There’s no clinical experimental work being done with humans—” Mishima cut him off sharply: “I know, I know. We’ve become a more enlightened society in the past sixty years.”

“I personally think we should be doing clinical tests on humans.

No real progress is possible otherwise.”

The ambassador removed the flag from the hole for his partner.

Yamamoto crouched down to view the terrain. It was a tricky lie.

It started off level; then ten feet from the hole the green slanted sharply to the left. Yamamoto gripped his putter and concentrated.

“I’m not so sure,” Mishima replied. “Once an ethical boundary is breached, it becomes that much easier to breach the next one, and then the next, until one finds oneself, inexplicably, committing just the sorts of atrocities we once committed in Northern China.”

Yamamoto overhit his shot. The ball rolled six feet past the hole. He glanced suspiciously at Mishima, who was still holding the flag. If he didn’t know the man better, he would have sworn that Mishima had timed his words to disrupt his swing.

Yamamoto diverted his irritation into a tough question: “Can we afford to let the gaijin get ahead of us on this?” He hadn’t intended to be so confrontational, but he felt deeply that this was a matter of the utmost priority for Japan. Failure to act would in the long run expose his country to a terrible risk.

“No,” Mishima agreed. His tone was firm, emphatic. “We cannot. Our people’s survival depends on successful economic competition. The potential economic benefits of a successful genetics package like this are obviously enormous. And if genetic engineering is going to make possible a superior race of men, then we must be that race. There can be no argument against that. None.”

“I completely agree.”

“But all the same, we must proceed in this matter with a strong sense of moral responsibility.”

Diplomatic double-talk, Yamamoto thought. What Mishima really meant was, “We’ll do what we have to do, but this time let’s not get caught at it.”

“I agree with that also,” Yamamoto said.

“So that brings us back to Dr. Goth and his remarkable but untested program. What do you recommend?”

“That we wait,” Yamamoto replied. He tapped his ball impatiently and watched it overshoot the cup by four inches. “Let one of the others finance Goth. Let them test Jupiter. If it doesn’t work, we’ll have risked nothing—and lost nothing.”

“And if it does?”

Yamamoto shrugged. “We could always borrow a copy.”

Mishima stood by his ball, scratching his chin thoughtfully.

Yamamoto began to twitch restlessly, waiting for his partner to make his four-foot putt.

The ambassador eventually got his putter lined up against the ball and hit it. “Borrow a copy,” he repeated. He laughed quite explosively.

“Yes. We could always do that.” He watched his ball advance feebly toward the hole. His diplomat’s mind had already converted the proposed theft into something vaguely acceptable.

“And once we have the software program, we can trust our own scientists with it far more than we could ever trust Goth.”

Mishima’s ball reached the lip, trembled there, as if its progress had been arrested by a single blade of grass, and then fell into the cup with a gentle rattle. Yamamoto cursed under his breath.

Mishima tossed his putter into his bag with an uncharacteristic flourish and hoisted himself into the golf cart. He marked his card with the tiny stub of a pencil he was using and chuckled contentedly.

“I believe I outscored you on that hole. Did I?”

“You did indeed, Ambassador,” Yamamoto answered, smiling between clenched jaws.

Dalton Stewart was met in the reception area by the minister of information, Pierre Etienne Toussaint, and ushered into the presidential palace’s cavernous dining hall.

Their footsteps echoed like gunshots on the carpetless stone floor.

President Despres appeared to have a passion for white, Stewart observed: white marble walls and floors, white marble pedestals with white marble busts of Roman emperors. A ridiculously long dining table was covered with a white damask tablecloth, and the chairs all had white cloth cushions. The only touches of color were two faded tapestries on the end walls, and four potted jungle plants that occupied the corners of the gigantic hall. The effect was oppressive.

It made the vast, eerily quiet, airconditioned interior feel like a mausoleum.

Toussaint directed Stewart to a seat four chairs down from the head of the table and then disappeared. Stewart stood behind his chair and waited. He could hear occasional footsteps echoing on distant marble, but none came through the large doorway.

After an interminable duration, he heard a sudden flurry of footfalls.

They beat on the stone floors in a hurried staccato, like soldiers marching double-time. The sound grew steadily louder.

Four of Despres’ palace guards burst abruptly into the dining hall and positioned themselves one on each side of the room, forefingers ostentatiously curled around the triggers of their automatic weapons.

A tense, expectant silence fell. All eyes were riveted on the open doorway. Dalton Stewart found himself holding his breath.

After another delay, His Most Supreme and Enlightened Excellency Antoine Auguste Despres, President for Life of the Republic of El Coronado, came into the room.

After the dramatically staged entrance, Antoine Despres himself was a distinct anticlimax. He was short—about five-three—and slightly built, with a mulatto’s yellowish-brown skin. His eyes were greatly magnified by the thick lenses in his glasses, and his round, bald head appeared too big for his scrawny neck. His suit was white and presumably well cut, but his sunken-chested posture largely defeated the efforts of his tailors.

The minister of information pulled out the chair at the head of the table and Despres sat down on it. Toussaint then took a chair opposite Stewart and gestured urgently for the American to sit down. Stewart sat. He suddenly realized the president was now staring at him.

“We are honored to have you visit our island nation, Mr. Stewart,”

Despres said. His voice was high-pitched and had an unpleasant grating quality to it.

“Thank you, Your Excellency,” the American replied, a little too loudly. His words bounced off the walls and reverberated through the room. He lowered his volume and told Despres how grateful he was for the opportunity to meet him in person.

A servant appeared, carrying an ice bucket with a bottle of white wine inside. The minister of information opened the bottle, tasted it, and nodded his approval. The wine steward filled the three glasses and moved silently to a corner of the room.

President Despres made a long toast, the import of which was his hope that his country and the United States could overcome their differences and restore the beautiful friendship they had once enjoyed.

Stewart reciprocated with a toast of his own, praising Despres’

enlightened leadership, his humanitarianism, and his outstanding achievements in making El Coronado a true showcase of modern democracy in the Western Hemisphere.

Despres answered with another toast. The exchanges dragged on for some minutes, severely taxing the American’s inventiveness and requiring a refill of wine. By the time Despres had had his fill of flattery, Stewart felt exhausted and slightly drunk.

When the appetizer appeared—a cold fish soup of some kind —the president launched into a long, rambling defense of his administration and the wonderful things it had done for the country.

He was a great patriot, loved by his people, but misunderstood abroad.

All the problems of El Coronado could be laid at the doorstep of his enemies, who were jealous of his popularity and his achievements.

The President talked almost nonstop for nearly an hour, ignoring his lunch entirely. With the arrival of dessert he finally wound down and Stewart began his pitch.

“I come to you, Your Excellency, in the hope of getting your blessing for a clinic and a research laboratory that my company, Stewart Biotech, would like to open here in the near future.”

The president raised a languid eyebrow. “And why have you chosen our little island for this?”

“Because this facility will be run by Dr. Harold Goth, the American scientist whom you have so graciously allowed to use your medical school for his research. He assures me this island is the perfect place.”

“Does he?” The president’s tone was mildly ironic.

“He said that if it hadn’t been for your understanding, for your generosity and support, the important breakthroughs he’s been able to make in his research would most likely never have happened. Now our company wishes to underwrite Dr. Goth’s research so that he may accelerate his efforts.”

The American continued his pitch. While careful not to refer directly to the island’s abysmal condition, Stewart painted a glowing picture of the economic vitality that the president, with his help, could bring to his country if His Excellency was willing to give him a free hand.