Tom Hyman (32 page)

The thick steel door swung open easily. Inside, on a series of small shelves, sat stacks of documents—colored folders, contracts, company documents, secret intelligence reports, notebooks, computer printouts, a thick black ledger with several rubber bands wrapped around it, and other odds and ends, including several thousand dollars in cash.

Anne sorted impatiently through the piles several times. Lexy looked over her shoulder. “Find it yet?”

“No.”

Lexy sifted through the material in the safe herself. “Jesus, Anne, it’s not here.”

_F “It has to be.”

: .

.

“It ought to be pretty easy to see it, then. Who told you it was here?”

Anne slammed the safe door shut. “Hank Ajemian.”

“Would he lie to you?”

“No. He even told me the cartridge type and size.”

“Did you tell him you were going to try to steal it?”

“Copy it. Of course not.”

“Then Dalton must have moved it.”

They stood looking at each other in the middle of the big office.

“Any idea where else he would put it?” Lexy asked.

Anne shook her head. After all the tension and the effort, the failure to find it made her numb.

She decided to take one more look. She redialed the combination, pulled the door open, removed all the contents, and went through them one at a time, repositioning each item back in its place after she had examined it. The ledger book wrapped with rubber bands was last. She peeled off the bands and opened it.

“Look.”

Inside the ledger, neatly tucked into a rectangular recess cut through the middle of the book’s pages, was a black plastic RCD.

A gummed label on its surface identified it as Jupiter.

“How quaint,” Lexy said. “The old Agatha Christie hollowedout-book trick.”

Anne slipped the Jupiter cassette into her purse with the blank one she had brought, and the two of them went out to the rows of secretaries desks, looking for a computer.

Every desk had one, but none of them was configured to accept this particular kind of RCD.

“Great,” Anne said. “We can’t copy it.”

“What do we do?”

“Take it with us. I’ll find a way to copy it, then return it.”

Lexy threw up her hands in distress. “Oh my God. You mean we’d have to come back?”

“What else can we do? I’ve got to have it.”

“We can leave the blank one here in its place. Then you don’t have to come back.”

“Why?”

“They have copies in Munich, or wherever they’re doing the actual work on this thing. So they don’t need this one at all. It’s only a backup. Like the original negative of a movie. They store it and work from dupes. This’ll probably sit here for years, untouched.”

“I’d rather put the original back.”

“Okay. But leave the blank one here, anyway, for the time being. You don’t want to have to explain to the guard downstairs why you came in with one RCD and are leaving with two.”

“That’s true.”

Anne substituted the blank RCD for the real one in the hollowedout space in the ledger book, wrote “Jupiter” on its label, wrapped the rubber bands around it again, tucked it under the pile of documents on the bottom shelf, and locked the safe again.

She slipped the Jupiter RCD into her leather bag, swung the hinged bookshelf back down into position in front of the safe, replaced the office door keys in their proper desks, and hurried out, with Lexy close behind her.

When the elevator doors opened at the ground floor, four armed men in uniform were standing there waiting for them. The patches on their sleeves indicated that they were employees of something called Protectall Security Services.

Anne and Lexy stood in the elevator, paralyzed and speechless.

The door started to close again. One of the guards jumped forward and stuck his foot in the way. He waved his pistol at them.

“Come on out, girls. Over to that wall over there.”

They grabbed the women and led them over to the section of wall at the back end of the elevator bank. One guard, flourishing a two-way radio, ordered them to leave their bags on the floor.

They obeyed.

“Now stand facing the wall. Put your hands on the wall.”

Anne stole a sideways glance at her friend. Lexy’s face looked the way Anne felt—terrified. God, why had she done this? And why had she dragged Lexy into it?

She heard the guards talking. They were trying to decide who should frisk them. They were mumbling, and Anne couldn’t make out much of what they were saying.

The night security man who had checked them in suddenly appeared, carrying the sign-in sheet with him.

“These the ones?” someone asked him.

“Yessir. Those’re the ones all right.” He handed the sheet to the guard with the radio.

“One of you girls Gertrude Stein?”

“That’s me, Officer,” Anne said, surprised at her own boldness.

“And Alice B. Toklas?”

“She’s Alice. What’s this all about?”

“There may have been a robbery in the building,” he said.

“We’re going to have to frisk you ladies.”

“We’re not armed, Officer,” Anne said.

“We’re gonna have to frisk you anyway.”

The guard in charge—the name on his lapel ID was Don Martin—handed his radio to one of the other men. He had decided to reserve the responsibility of the frisk for himself. He walked over to Lexy first and put a hand on her shoulder from behind.

“Have to ask you to spread your legs, Alice.”

Anne, her hands still planted against the cold marble wall, looked across at Lexy again. Lexy winked back. Martin, a tall, very muscular white male with unkempt blond hair that curled out below his uniform cap, ran his hands quickly up and down Lexy’s sides, under her arms, and around her waist. He then bent down and slipped both hands up each leg in turn, stopping a considerate inch or two short of her crotch.

He moved over to Anne. One of his men laughed. “It’s a tough job, but somebody’s gotta do it, right, boss?”

“Shut up, Darrell.”

Martin’s frisk of Anne was much more thorough. He slid both hands over her breasts from behind, cupping and squeezing them in his big hands, and then pinching her nipples between his thumb and forefinger. Anne stared at the wall and didn’t move. She could smell rum and tobacco on his breath.

Martin knelt down and ran his hand up one leg. Anne closed her eyes and gritted her teeth. Why hadn’t she had the sense to wear jeans, like Lexy, instead of a damned skirt?

She felt his hands exploring up along her thigh. It was all she could do to stand still. She could hear the men behind them snickering.

Martin ran one hand slowly over her buttocks and began a leisurely stroking of her pubic bone with the other.

She felt his fingers tugging at the crotch of her panties, trying to insinuate themselves inside. She was about to scream when one of the other guards protested that he was taking too much time.

Martin reluctantly ended his frisk.

“Look through their handbags, Darrell,” he said.

“I did already. Nothing there.”

“You check with the night man?”

The night man, standing right there, answered. “Yeah, I looked too.

That’s what they brought in.”

Martin turned to a fifth security guard, just coming off the elevator.

“What about the safe, Bill?”

“It was locked.”

“Any signs of forced entry?”

“Not that I could see. nothing missing, I guess.

Martin exhaled loudly, showing his displeasure. “What’re you girls doin’ here, middle of the night?”

“We just came in to get something from Gertie’s desk,” Lexy explained in a chirpy voice.

“You work here? In the building?”

“Yes sir. Macro-peripherals, Inc. We both work on software design.

You know, for computer programs and related . . .

computer-assisted peripheral kinds of things.”

“Yeah. Well, the alarm went off down in our office for Stewart

”

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Biotech, up on the thirtieth floor. You girls know anything about D,.

that?

“No sir,” Lexy replied. “Never heard of it.”

The guards stood around for a little while longer, talking in low voices. Lexy and Anne remained with their hands against the wall.

, “Can we go now?” Anne demanded.

I “Yeah. I guess it was a false alarm. But hey, if we need to get in touch with you—” “Just call Macro-peripherals,” Anne snapped.

“Yeah. Okay.” Martin eyed Anne up and down with a knowing grin.

“Hey, next time I might not let you off so easy.”

Lexy picked up their handbags from the floor. “And next time, bozo, we’ll report your behavior to Stewart Biotech and to your boss,” she said.

Anne grabbed her friend’s arm and steered her toward the front exit.

“Never mind, Alice. Never mind.”

Out on Fifth Avenue, they dashed to the curb to hail a cab.

Lexy pulled up her fur collar. “Jesus Christ, I never thought about triggering a remote burglar alarm system. And I thought for sure they’d check out our IDs. That was a close call.”

“I’m sorry I got you into this,” Anne said.

“Are you kidding? We pulled it off, didn’t we? And you were great!

Sorry you got molested like that, though. That Martin bastard barely felt me up at all. That really pissed me off.”

Ambassador Mishima accepted the applause with a bow and a self-deprecating smile. “I welcome you to the glamorous metropolis of Mikasa,” he said.

Appreciative laughter rippled through the room. Mikasa was anything but a metropolis. It was an isolated mountain village, a few kilometers inland from the small city of Sapporo, on Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido.

His audience, twenty-five men and twenty women, was gathered in a conference room on the second floor of a new building that housed the most modern genetic research facility in the world. Beyond the tightly drawn window blinds of the laboratory building were clusters of cottages and dormitorylike structures and a small pedestrian square with a variety of shops and stores, all spread out in a park-like setting of trees, lawns, and gardens.

These buildings had all once been part of the Olympic Village, built to house the athletes at the 1972 Winter Games in Sapporo.

Only the laboratory building was new—that and the double rows of high-security cyclone fencing that now encircled the entire village, separating it from the outside world.

The forty-five individuals in the audience had been carefully selected by a special government committee appointed by the prime minister.

They were among the very best microbiologists and geneticists in the nation. Together with a staff of several hundred technicians and support personnel, they would live and work in the self-contained isolation of this village for an undetermined

length of time. Contact with the outside world would be severely limited and carefully monitored.

All the participants had volunteered for the project—not just because the pay and the benefits were extraordinary but because serving in the project had been presented to them as a matter of patriotic duty.

There was a third attraction. Although no one yet knew the details of the project, the word was out in Japanese scientific and academic circles that it was to be on the cutting edge of bioge netics. Working on the project would almost guarantee its participants extraordinary professional and academic stature—and a

1-very secure future.

,u Today, they were to be formally introduced to their work.

Ambassador Mishima coughed gently and began the introduction. He pressed a button on the remote-control unit in his hand, ‘; and on a big screen at the front of the room there appeared two black-and-white photographs of an old automobile—a front view and a side view.

“Does anyone know what this is?” he asked.

After a puzzled silence, a young man at the back of the room raised his hand. “It’s an American automobile,” he said. “A Ford sedan.

Nineteen fifty-one, I believe.”

Mishima grinned. “Your father must have been in the auto business.”

“No. But I was a teenage car nut.”

The others laughed and applauded.

“Well, my teenage car nut, your answer was very good, but it was also wrong. The car you see up there on the screen certainly does resemble an American Ford four-door sedan, manufactured in Detroit in 1951. But in fact, this automobile was built in Osaka, Japan, in the year 1952.”

Mishima paused to let the surprise sink in, then continued. “Of all the autos ever built in our country, this one is perhaps the most important—because it was assembled in a very unusual manner. In a project sponsored by our government, a dozen American Fords were purchased anonymously in the U.S imported to Japan, and brought to a small shop outside Osaka. At the shop a trained crew of industrial technicians dismantled the autos piece by piece and examined them exhaustively. Every part was tested, weighed, measured, photographed, and analyzed.

When the technicians had learned everything they could, they put the cars back together again. Then they tore them apart again, and put them back together again. They repeated this process over and over, until they knew how to assemble a Ford sedan in their sleep.”

Mishima observed his audience closely as he talked. The tense, concentrated expressions on their faces told him that they were trying very hard to anticipate what possible connection his tale could have to their present circumstances. He was happy that they were so attentive—and so mystified.

“These men then built their own automobile,” he continued.

“It was identical to the car they had so thoroughly studied. Building it was a very difficult task, because in our country at that time there did not exist the specialized and sophisticated machine tools and dies necessary to manufacture such a product. In 1951 we were a long way from state of the art in any endeavor, but particularly in automobiles.

All our factories had been destroyed by the bombing. So before these men could make this Ford, they had first to invent the tools to do it.