Tom Hyman (3 page)

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 oil 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.

Genetic engineering was a subject of interest not only to Yamamoto, who owned a company that manufactured human insulin and other genetics-based drugs, but also to the Japanese government, who saw it as the next great technology frontier-one in which they were determined to grab the lead. Yamamoto’s presence here, Stewart suspected, represented not only his own interests but his government’s as well.

On the far end, her straight ash-blond hair falling so perfectly that it looked as if it had been ironed in place, sat the Gerrr.an baroness Gerta von Hauser.

The baroness was dressed, rather incongruously, in a white tennis outfit, complete with eyeshade, sneakers, and ankle socks.

Stewart suspected that the baroness was the kind of person who left nothing to chance, so he supposed the tennis togs were a tactic on her part to demonstrate that she didn’t take this meeting very seriously.

It was just a diversion for hen-something she was managing to squeeze in between matches on the groomed grass courts at the National Palace, where she was staying as a guest of the island’s president, Antoine Despres. Stewart was not fooled. The baroness would not have traveled all the way to Coronado for a game of tennis, even with the president of the country. She was here for business.

Gerta von Hauser was in her mid-forties but looked younger.

Vigorous exercise, careful diet, and the energetic attentions of an army of stylists, masseuses, pill doctors, and cosmetic surgeons had seemingly frozen her aging process in place. There were a few furtive wrinkles around her eyes and throat that betrayed her true age, but few people ever got close enough to her to see them.

She had acquired the title of baroness eighteen years earlier through a brief marriage to the Baron von Holwegg, a doddering Junker aristocrat more than three times her age. He slipped in the bathtub and killed himself two months after their marriage. One of his servants claimed he was roaring drunk at the time; others swore that the baroness had arranged it. In any case, she reverted to her maiden name, von Hauser, but kept her dead husband’s title. This violated both German law and custom, but no one ever challenged her on the matter.

Dalton Stewart gazed at her long, tanned, well-muscled legs and wondered if the sexual aura she projected wasn’t also a facade.

The woman was so totally immersed in her business interests that he doubted she had time for anything else. Among her legendary triumphs was her bargain-basement buy-up of major oil, chemical, and nuclear industries throughout Eastern Europe in the wake of the communist collapse. In the space of less than a year (and amid unsubstantiated rumors of bribes and blackmail) she had made Hauser Industrie, A.G the dominant economic force in Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and the Balkan states. In the years since, the financial benefits of that conquest had been enormous.

The baroness’s formidable position in the international business community had an interesting history. She had inherited a dark legacy.

Like the Krupps, the Hausers had been for many generations one of the most powerful families in Germany and Europe. Gerta’s great-grandfather had manufactured the mustard gas Germany used in World War I; her grandfather had used slave labor in his factories to build the V-1 and V-2 rockets Hitler launched against Britain. Gerta’s father, Wilhelm von Hauser, had been an officer in Hitler’s Waffen-SS.

He was convicted of war crimes in 1946. After serving one year of a forty-year sentence, he was released by the Allies to help rebuild postwar West Germany. He quickly reassumed control of the family’s business interests, and by the mid-sixties he had built Hauser Industries into the largest privately held company in Europe.

Baroness Gerta had succeeded her father to the company’s top post ten years ago. Her ascent had been highly improbable. The Hausers were conservative Prussians, with a very traditionalist view of a woman’s role. But Gerta was an only child. Her father had been desperate for a male heir, but her mother had been unable to have any more children after her.

Despite Gerta’s early and strong interest in the business, her father refused to take her seriously. She got his attention, finally, by using some of her inheritance money to buy controlling interest in one of Hauser’s competitors—a company that Hauser had almost succeeded in putting out of business. Within five years Gerta had turned the other company around and forced her father to buy her out to prevent her from annihilating his own subdivision.