Tom Hyman (43 page)

Stewart rose gingerly from his bed and stumbled into the small room next door that he used as an office.

There was a message on the machine. He pressed the Play button, then heard Ajemian’s voice:

“Sorry to call in the middle of the night, Dalton, but this is urgent.

Please call me back as soon as you get this message. You can reach me at—” Stewart was shocked to hear his own voice, raw and groggy with drink, suddenly interrupt: “What the hell you want?”

“Sorry, Dalton. I know it’s late—” “What the hell you want?”

“Are you drunk?”

“Probably.”

“I located our missing copy of Jupiter. Anne had it.”

Stewart heard himself mumble an indistinct curse. “You give it to her?”

“No, I didn’t. She took it herself.”

“Not possible.”

“Let me tell you what happened. She broke into your safe and took it.

She left a blank in its place.”

“This a goddamn dream, or what?”

“It happened, Dalton. And she wanted me to tell you.”

“Who did?”

“Anne did. Dalton, are you listening to me? She told me Jupiter won’t work the way you’re using it.”

“How the fuck she know?”

“She’s been working on it.”

“Bullshit. I’ve got to sleep, Hank.”

“She says without the right access code—” The conversation ended. The answering machine beeped three times and then rewound the tape.

He listened to the taped message again and then dialed Ajemian’s home number in Croton-on-Hudson, New York. Ajemian answered immediately.

Stewart apologized for the previous conversation. “I was drunk. I thought I was having a bad dream. What the hell’s going on?”

“Anne says Jupiter won’t work.”

“Yeah. I already know that.”

“You do?”

“The Romanian mothers started giving birth yesterday. All stillborn.

Every damned fetus. Something wrong with their blood.

And the doctor there, Laura Garhardt, killed herself. The baroness is in a tearing rage. She’s convinced it’s sabotage. Anyway, the program’s a total washout.”

“I’m sorry.”

Stewart sat down on the edge of the desk. “Yeah, I know. You warned me. What else did Anne tell you?”

Ajemian described their conversation in detail. Stewart sat rubbing his aching forehead with his fingers, trying to organize his thoughts.

“You’ve got to get that copy of Jupiter back from her, he said finally.

“And the access code.”

“Not me, Dalton. This is your business.”

“You’re right there in New York, for chrissakes. And she’ll listen to you.”

“She’s already listened to me. I asked her for the code. She refused.

She doesn’t want anyone using Jupiter. She believes it’s dangerous.”

Stewart felt a surge of fury. “She’s calling the shots all of a sudden?”

“She hasn’t forgiven you for what you did.”

Stewart rubbed the back of his neck. The hangover fed his anger. “If she knows something about Jupiter that I don’t, she’s going to have to tell me what it is.”

“Don’t do anything you’ll regret.”

Stewart didn’t reply.

“And you’ve got to get the baroness to give us some debt relief,”

Ajemian said. “Our payments are eating up all our profits.

We’ll never get Biotech turned around unless she gives us a better repayment schedule.”

Stewart looked out the window. A light, misty rain was falling.

“Now’s not the best time to negotiate with her. She’s chewing on the carpets.”

“Well, that’s the situation. It’s up to you.”

Stewart didn’t want to wrestle with anything as mentally tiresome as rescheduling Biotech’s debt, or anything to remind him of the precarious condition of his business empire. “I’ll talk to you about this later,” he said.

“There won’t be a later, Dalton. I’m quitting.”

“Don’t talk nonsense.”

“We’re fighting each other, and it’s getting worse every day.

The situation here at Biotech’s impossible. The baroness wants to keep the company on the ropes, and you’re not here fighting for it. I don’t know what the hell you are doing. But it’s not like it used to be between us. I owe you a lot, Dalton, but I can’t continue in these circumstances. I’m getting out now, before things fall apart completely.”

Stewart didn’t have the energy to argue with him. “I’ll talk to you later.”

He cradled the phone slowly. He pressed his fists against his eyes.

Ajemian was an alarmist. He knew the situation was bad, but things were not going to fall apart. He was not going to let them. Never.

He’d be damned in Hell before he’d repeat his father’s disgrace. He was going to turn things around. Starting today.

Starting right now.

He found some painkiller in the bathroom medicine chest, swallowed it, and forced himself through a long, very hot shower.

By the time he had shaved and dressed himself, it was eightthirty A.M.

He stopped off at a restaurant a block away and took his time eating breakfast. After two cups of coffee, his head still pounded, but with a diminished ferocity.

He returned to his apartment, called the Hauser company receptionist, told her he wouldn’t be in today, and then asked her to put him through to the baroness. The baroness was not in.

Stewart reached her at Schloss Vogel.

She was still in a fury from the failure at the Romanian clinic.

She told Stewart that she was firing the entire staff.

“What good will that do?”

“What good? They were incompetent idiots!”

“They were the best people you could find,” Stewart reminded her. He relished the opportunity to rub it in.

“It was Garhardt’s fault,” the baroness fumed. “The woman was against the project from the beginning. She may have sabotaged it.”

“You have any evidence?”

“She was in charge. She had the final approval of all the genome sequences. Either she purposely tampered with them or failed to discover that someone else had tampered with them—” Stewart cut her off. “Let me tell you the real reason the project failed. Because of you. You insisted on rushing the project, and this was the result.

Jupiter will function properly only if fed the right access code. This was Goth’s way of protecting the program from theft.”

“How do you come to tell me this now?”

“Because I just found out.”

“How is that?”

“I’ll explain it later. First, I have a proposition to make. I expect to have the correct access code shortly. When I have it, we’ll set up a new pilot program. But this time, I intend to run it. And I intend to staff the project exclusively with my people.”

“And are you going to pay for it, too, Dalton?”

“No. You are.”

“How do you intend to make that happen?”

“Because you’re intelligent enough to see it’s the only thing to do.

We both need the program to succeed. I’m now offering you the only chance left to rescue the project. But it’ll have to be on my terms this time, not yours.”

The baroness laughed derisively. “And how do you expect me to accept such nonsense. Access codes—mein Gott! Dalton, you’ve gone quite mad.”

“Those are the terms. If you don’t like them, I’ll develop Jupiter on my own.” I dj, “So you kept a copy. You’ve been planning this all along.”

“No, that’s not right. But Ajemian did find our copy.”

“Where?”

“It’s not relevant. I’m going ahead on this. With your backing or without it.”

“How? Who’ll loan you the money?”

“Take my word for it, Baroness. I can get it.” ; “Bring me proof that Jupiter will work your way, and I’ll accept ‘ your terms.”

“I thought you might.”

Stewart hung up before the baroness had time to say anything further.

For the first time that day he began to feel some optimism.

Jupiter still mattered to her. That was good. Because he was going I

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to do to her exactly what she had been trying to do to him-screw her out of the deal completely.

And if the baroness tried to get around his terms, that’d be L okay, too. He’d cannibalize Stewart Biotech. He’d sell off enough pieces of it to finance a couple of years of development. And the hell with the rest of the company—there wasn’t much left, anyway. He’d break it up and let the baroness and the banks fight over the scraps.

He called the airport and booked a flight to New York City.

The men across the way were still watching her. During the day they kept the window shade pulled three-quarters of the way down. Anne could see nothing through the open space between the shade and the bottom sill, but she knew that in the darkness on the other side those huge binoculars and that dish antenna-presumably a listening device—were trained on her. At night the shade was often all the way up, and the room dark.

She had decided they must be Dalton’s doing—no doubt with the baroness’s encouragement. She wondered how long they had been at it.

Days? Weeks? What could they have found out? Could they have seen her use the Watson access code?

Her computer monitor faced away from the window, so they could not have read anything off the screen. Printouts were another matter. She had often left them on the top of the small bookcase under the study window, and she had frequently dumped piles of books and papers on the chair beside it. Both areas would be easily visible to those binoculars. Had she exposed anything of value? The more she thought about it, the more frightened it made her.

She did have one advantage: they didn’t know she knew they were watching her. She continued to open the drapes at the same time every morning and close them when she retired at night.

She gathered together all the important material relating to Jupiter, removed the Jupiter RCD from the computer, and packaged everything in a cardboard box. She put the box in a shopping bag 356

and took the material to a bank on Fourteenth Street and locked it in a safety deposit box. Knowing that someone might be following her, she took the bag and the now empty cardboard box back with her to her apartment. In the study, she turned on the computer, called up her word-processing program, and created a document with the title JUPITER

INSTRUCTIONS in boldface across the top. On the page below, she made up an elaborate series of steps that one supposedly had to take in order to make the program work. When she was finished, she looked at it and decided that it wouldn’t fool anybody.

She finally hit upon something more subtle. She wrote what appeared to be a letter addressed to her from a fictitious professor of genetics at M.I.T. In the letter he referred to his past working relationship with the late Dr. Goth and explained that in order to make the Jupiter program function, it was necessary to initiate it with a password.

That password was “Minerva.”

She printed the letter out and read it through a few times. There was still a problem: the letter wasn’t typed on departmental letterhead.

Maybe her fictitious professor wouldn’t have used it, but it looked suspicious; and one telephone call to M.I.T would confirm that he didn’t exist.

Two problems, one solution. Anne slapped the letter down sideways on the top of the bookcase, then quickly placed a book across the top of the sheet, concealing the date, the address, and the missing M.I.T

departmental letterhead. Just to make sure they got a good photograph, she turned on her gooseneck desk lamp and directed the light toward the top of the bookcase. She left the room that way and went into the kitchen and had lunch with Genny and Mrs. Callahan.

After lunch Anne returned to the study with Genny. She looked at the letter lying on the top of the bookcase. Surely the men in the window across the way had photographed it by now. She dropped another book directly on top of the letter and turned off the lamp.

“Will you read me something, Mommy?”

“I will.”

Anne read to Genny for about an hour. Actually Genny did most of the reading. She had been able to spell out words since she was two, but in just the last six months her reading ability had developed enormously. She could sound out almost any word in, say, The New York Times, and she knew the meanings of ninety percent of them.

Of course, many subjects still baffled her, because she couldn’t place them in a meaningful context.

But she was learning fast. She already knew who the President was, and she could recite from memory all the states and their capitals, and a mass of other data she had absorbed from an almanac Mrs. Callahan had given her. But at the moment she was entranced by Nancy Drew mysteries, which were much more fun than the Times.

“Why are you worried, Mommy?”

Anne shrugged and smiled. “I’m not worried.”

Genny laughed. “Yes, you are too worried. I can tell.”

Anne embraced her. “How can you tell?”

“I don’t know how. But I can.”

“Will you be able to explain it to me someday?”

“I hope so, Mommy.”

“Anyway, you’re right. I am a little worried.”

“You should go see Auntie Lexy, then. She always cheers you up.”

“Well, as a matter of fact, Lexy and I are going to have dinner together. So when Mrs. Callahan comes back with you from the puppet show this afternoon, I’ll be out.”

“Can we get a video?”

“Okay. But just one.”

“Can I wait up for you?”

“You better not. You’ve been up past ten every night this week.”

“But I don’t need all that sleep.”

“You certainly do need all that sleep.”

“No I don’t. Really. I wake up at night sometimes and stay awake for a long time.”

“You do? And what do you do during all that time?”

“I like to listen to sounds in the street. I like to listen to people.

I can hear them talking. And I can smell a lot of different things.

Strange, funny things. It’s fun.”

“You really should be sleeping. It’s not good for you to stay awake at night.”

Genny scratched her cheek thoughtfully. “I have something to show you, Mommy,” she said finally.