Tom Hyman (4 page)

Part of that buyout involved giving his daughter a prominent role in the running of Hauser Industries.

Then Wilhelm von Hauser had a stroke that left him paralyzed from the neck down. His daughter quickly took charge, and he died shortly after. In the decade since, she had increased the company’s profits enormously.

Her success was undeniable but not uncontroversial. Rumors abounded, for example, that she persistently evaded German laws to sell third-world dictators chemical alld nuclear weapons technology.

Despite public complaints from business rivals, and some charges brought by zealous prosecutors, she had never received more than a few small fines from the courts, for minor offenses like the illegal dumping of toxic waste.

Two years ago, the baroness had acquired a large German pharmaceuticals company and a biogenetics laboratory. This accounted for her presence here today. If Harold Goth had made some big breakthrough in genetic engineering, Gerta von Hauser obviously wanted to know about it.

Stewart found it hard to take his eyes off the woman. The baroness seemed to have it all—beauty, intelligence, wealth, social position, and enormous influence. Beyond that, there was her reputation as someone who made underlings cower in fear and business opponents run for cover. Could she really be so tough?

Stewart wondered. He couldn’t help wondering what a sexual encounter with her might be like. The exotic perfume she was wearing teased his nostrils. His wife, Anne, was much younger and more attractive, but the baroness exuded a peculiarly tantalizing sense of mystery and danger.

A screen door slammed behind them, snapping Stewart out of his reverie.

Dr. Harold Goth strode rapidly into the room, looking neither to the right nor to the left. He stepped behind the desk and focused his attention on a stack of papers sitting there.

He looked the part of the dedicated scientist, Stewart reflected —even a caricature of one. He was a frail, stoop-shouldered man with the owlish, blinking manner of some nocturnal creature uncomfortable in the full light of day. His face was slack and pale.

Blue veins pulsed visibly through the translucent skin on his forehead.

Skinny, hairless white limbs protruded from his shirt and shorts.

Sparse tufts of gray hair clung to his balding scalp like weeds trying to grow from a rock. The bridge of his eyeglasses had a small strip of dirty white tape wrapped around it.

The doctor was carrying what appeared to be a medical supplies catalogue in his hand. He placed the catalogue on the desk in front of him and looked at his visitors for the first time since entering the room. He dispensed with the formality of even a short welcoming statement.

“I’m a scientist, gentlemen,” he declared abruptly, “not a salesman.”

Dalton Stewart stole a glance at the baroness. Her lower lip was curled in an expression of mild amusement. He wondered if Goth had annoyed her with his catch-all “gentlemen” salutation.

The doctor turned and with a jerky sweep of an arm took in the room around him. “Don’t let my modest surroundings color your judgment concerning the ultimate value of the work I’ve been doing here,” he warned. “You know my reputation. You know the value of my contributions to the field of genetics. I consider the project I am engaged in here to be more than just important. I consider it to be urgent. Therefore I have not wasted my limited time or resources on trivialities like paint and furniture.”

Stewart suppressed a grin.

“Fortunately,” Goth continued, “most genetic research does not require either a great deal of hightech equipment or space.

Most of everything I need—centrifuges, incubators, autoclaves, chemicals, lab supplies, microscopes, computers, and so on—I have right here in these few rooms. Some of my equipment is admittedly hand-me-down, but it’s adequate.”

Stewart doubted it.

“Much of the work of microbiology today is done on a computer. The hardware I have here is not the best or the fastest available, but I’ve managed to get by with it. The software I use are either existing programs I have modified and improved, or ones of my own creation. As for data, much of that I’ve also developed myself. And what I don’t have right here is within easy reach of my modem and fax machine. This puts all of the world’s genetic databases at my disposal. Beyond that, I can access thousands of volumes from dozens of scientific libraries.

The fact remains, however, that with newer, more sophisticated computer hardware, I could do a lot more and do it much faster. That new computer equipment would cost about forty thousand dollars.”

Goth paused for a moment and stared out the window to arrange his thoughts. Prince Bandar flicked the cloth of his kufiyya out of his face and yawned noisily. A fly alighted on Stewart’s cheek; he brushed it away. The baroness crossed her legs and began pumping her foot back and forth impatiently. Fairfield, looking terminally bored, leaned back and stretched his arms over his head. Yamamoto sat motionless, watching the doctor with an alert, attentive gaze.

“I have reached a critical stage in my research,” Goth said, turning back to his select little audience. “The primary work has been done.

All the necessary breakthroughs have been made.

What remains is the painstaking but absolutely necessary task of checking and testing and retesting all the data. This takes time.

And it takes money—money that I regrettably do not have.”

Goth leaned a hip against his desk and picked up the catalogue he had placed there earlier. He opened it to a page marked with a paper clip and held it up. “Consider this little instrument,” he said, pointing to a full-page color advertisement for some piece of scientific equipment. “It’s called a PCR—a polymerase chain reactor. It replicates trace quantities of DNA. Having one would save me many hours of tedious labor. There are no secondhand ones available. A new one costs ten thousand dollars.”

Dr. Goth opened the catalogue to another page. It showed a pair of beige boxes, somewhat larger than the PCR. “This is an ALPS automatic DNA sequencer. Hooked up with the proper computer equipment and program, it can sequence large segments of DNA. It can do in a few minutes what it’d take me days to do with the old X-ray gel method.

And it’s far more reliable. It costs a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars.”

The doctor closed the catalogue and dropped it back on the desk.

“There is other equipment I could use as well. Beyond the additional equipment I also need financial backing to carry my work from the experimental stage to the stage of practical application. This means expanding the facility here and hiring more staff. With the added help, I could complete this last stage of my project in about a year’s time.”

Stewart shifted in his chair. What the hell was this secret project?

Was Goth just building the suspense, or was he actually reluctant to tell them?

“As you know,” the doctor continued, “I have chosen to work in an area of genetics considered taboo in many societies. As a result, I’ve had to put up with obstacles beyond those required of my research. Lack of funds. Bureaucratic harassment. Professional ostracism. Ridicule and libel from the media. Even sabotage and death threats from religious crackpots and political extremists.

Yet I’ve continued on in the face of all this because I know the value of my work far outweighs any dangers or inconveniences I might face personally.”

The unsettling thought crossed Stewart’s mind that Goth’s secret might be some wildly impractical fantasy. Years of research without results often encouraged a certain type of scientist to start seeing breakthroughs where none existed, to start making rash claims about discoveries not supported by his work. Delusions of grandeur were an occupational hazard for aging scientists, and Goth seemed to be showing some of the symptoms.

“What I believe I have accomplished, gentlemen,” Goth said, “is, on one level, quite simple to describe.”

Stewart leaned forward in his chair. Silence gripped the room.

“I’ve developed a better human being,” he said.

Anne Stewart walked down the brick path that led from the main house to the guest cottage. She wore a white dress and carried a picnic basket under her arm.

It was an unusually warm day for early March. The sky was crystalline, the air sweet with the smells of early spring. The lawns, free of snow since the first week in February, were already pale green with fresh growth, and the forsythia bushes were putting forth their first yellow buds.

The lawn sloped away from the main house, an Italianate stone mansion of forty-eight rooms, in a broad apron many acres in size. To the north it stretched a thousand yards to the edge of Long Island Sound, where it enclosed a shallow cove of sandy beach. A large boat house dominated one end of the cove. To the east, south, and west, the landscape was an artful blend of gardens, stone walls, hedgerows, ponds, and small groves of trees.

Beyond the immediate grounds lay hundreds of acres of fields, and beyond the fields was a deep border of forest—a small wilderness that effectively hid the estate from view, except from the waters of the sound.

The property, built by an oil baron at the turn of the century, was landscaped to re-create, insofar as such a thing was possible, the mood he claimed to have experienced while strolling the grounds of Versailles: an overwhelming sense of tranquillity and permanence.

At Anne Stewart’s side was Alexandra Tate, a neighbor who had, in the two and a half years since Anne’s marriage to Dalton Stewart, become a close friend. She carried a portable ice chest with two bottles of white wine.

The euphoric glory of the day had so far failed to improve Anne’s mood.

The dispirited gloom that she had felt through most of the winter still clung to her. She counted heavily on Lexy Tate’s company to cheer her up.

The two women reached the guest house, a small Tudor-style cottage with vine-covered brick-and-wood walls and leaded glass windows. They stepped onto the terrace and looked around. On one side was a small duck pond ringed with lacy green boughs of hemlocks; on the other, a grove of maples, their branches still bare of leaves.

“Gorgeous,” Lexy declared, taking in the view with a broad, encompassing sweep of her arms. “Paradise. This is it, right here.”

Anne deposited her picnic basket on a big wrought-iron table, pulled out a chair, and sat down heavily.

Lexy propped a foot up on the stone parapet that enclosed the terrace.

“Do you know what that word really means, by the way?”

“What word?”

“ ‘Paradise’ ! ” Anne shrugged. “Besides heaven, it also means a park. It’s from the Latin paradisus. And/or the Greek paradeisos.”

Lexy’s mouth fell open. “How did you know that?”

“You told me. About six months ago.”

“Did I? Christ, I must be getting Alzheimer’s. Did I also tell you who told me?”

“Maybe not.” Anne Stewart extracted a paper napkin from the picnic basket and began wiping away a sticky yellow coat of tree pollen that had accumulated on the table’s glass surface.

“It was a guy I dated one summer when I was sixteen. He was a freshman at Princeton, and I was very impressed with him. An intellectual. His father wanted him to go into investment banking, but he planned to devote his life to poetry and booze. One night we ended up on the local country-club golf course. We wandered around the fairways in the moonlight with a bottle of vodka while he laid this paradisus line on me. The gist was that since we were, in effect, already in heaven out here on the golf course, that anything we did would probably have the Lord’s blessing. I thought it was a pretty good argument, so I went along with it.” Lexy came over to the table and sat down across from Anne. “We fucked our brains out on the fourteenth green.”

Anne nodded absently. She continued to scrub the tabletop, pressing down with such force that the table’s wrought-iron legs began rattling noisily on the stone terrace.

“I thought it was a kind of funny story,” Lexy said.

“I’m sorry. You did tell me,” Anne replied.

Lexy sighed and watched Anne in silence. Finally, she leaned across the table and grabbed her friend’s wrist, stopping her in mid-wipe.

“Are you compulsive about dust, or do you just harbor a secret desire to be a cleaning lady?”

Anne flushed in embarrassment. She released her grip on the paper napkin. “Sorry.”

Lexy screwed up her face in a scowl and flicked a wrist at the napkin, as if it were a bug to be shooed away. It fell to the terrace floor.

“If you’re really so concerned about the dirt, you should go right over to that phone and call the housekeeper. Tell her the table on the guest house terrace is filtly beyond description, and she had better send someone down to clean it, immediately.”

Anne slumped back in her chair. “Oh, for godsakes, Lexy, I could never do that.”

“You could too do it,” Lexy insisted.

“I can’t boss people around. It’s not in my nature.”

“You don’t have to boss anyone around. You just have to be firm.

You’re letting the staff here get away with murder.”

“Is this another lesson from you in upper-class manners?”

“If you like.”

“Honestly, if it were up to me, I’d fire them all. I hate servants.

I hate to be waited on. The whole idea offends me.”

“Why isn’t it up to you?”

“What do you mean?”

“If you really want to fire them, then why can’t you? Maybe that’s exactly what you should do. Let a few heads roll. And I’d start with your housekeeper, Mrs. Corley—the Wicked Witch of the West Wing.”

“I’ve already tried. Dalton won’t let me. ‘Mrs. Corley’s been with the family for twenty years. Can’t do without her.”

“ “You can’t let Dalton push you around, either. He has to let you run the household. And Mrs. Corley hasn’t been with the family twenty years. It’s more like four. Before that, I think, she was an assistant warden at some maximum-security correctional facility upstate.”