Genocide of One: A Thriller (52 page)

When the hijacked plane disappeared from control radar at 1:00 a.m., traffic on the
Washington, DC, secret communications network immediately shot up.

And less than an hour later, all the cabinet members who dealt with national security
had assembled in the Situation Room in the basement of the White House.

As he waited
anxiously for Jeong-hoon to contact him, Kento felt more dead than alive. Had they
successfully synthesized GIFT 1? Had the final verification with mouse cells gone
well? And what about the police looking for him?

If he went outside he ran the risk of the detectives discovering him, so he couldn’t
lay in a stock of food. For a whole day he hadn’t eaten a thing and had managed to
tide himself over by licking some sugar. At this late stage in the game he had to
stay sharp.

As he struggled with anxiety and an empty stomach, about to give in to sleep, the
call he’d been waiting for came in, just before noon.

“It was a success!” Jeong-hoon yelled out over the phone. “GIFT 1 was among the samples!”

Kento snapped wide awake. “What was the label number?”

“GI seven B.”

Three flasks were lined up on the table, labeled 7A to 7C. Kento picked up the middle
one and gazed at it, deeply moved.

“You did it, Kento!” Jeong-hoon gave him all the credit, despite the crucial role
he’d played in developing the new drug.

“No way. I couldn’t have done it without you,” Kento said, and laughed. “Oh—what about
the cells you asked Doi to take care of?”

“That’ll take a little longer. They should get to your place around four.”

“Okay.” Kento reviewed the final schedule. Jeong-hoon would fly to Lisbon this evening.
“When are you leaving the university?”

“If I leave at seven, I can be at Narita airport by eight. The flight leaves at ten.”

“Then we’ll meet in front of the university hospital at seven. I’ll bring GIFT with
me.”

“Sounds good.”

As soon as he hung up, Kento got busy. He changed GIFT 1 and GIFT 2 into hydrochlorates,
made them water-soluble, adjusted the concentration, and began orally administering
this to the mice.

Of the mice in the four cages, twenty-four were normal, while the remaining nineteen
had been given PAECS. Kento gave ten from each group the new drug, administering the
dosage the GIFT software indicated. One by one he placed the mice in his palm and,
using a syringe with a long tube attached, injected the drug directly into the mice’s
stomachs. He’d practiced this many times, and the process went quickly.

Next he measured arterial oxygen saturation. A simple clip attached to the mice’s
ears was all it took to get a readout on the amount of oxygen in their bloodstreams.
If the mice with disease onset showed an increase in this value, then he’d know the
drug was working.

But was this kind of perfunctory pharmacological test enough? Even at this late date
Kento had his doubts. Still, with their backs to the wall there was no time to check
metabolism and toxicity. All he could do was trust GIFT’s calculations.

Thirty minutes after administering the drug, results were already starting to appear.
Just as GIFT had predicted. The values for the mice not given the drug continued to
decline, and the decline halted for the ones given the drug. But any conclusion at
this point was premature. Telling himself to keep calm, Kento went about ordering
his experimental notes and transferring the medicine to go to Lisbon into a different
container, all the while checking the measurements every half hour.

After an hour, then two, the readings on the charts for the two groups began to clearly
diverge. After three hours Kento held the hope that the values for the group treated
with the drug would start to rise. And four hours later he was sure of it. The mice
were recovering lung function. The pulmonary alveoli had regained ventilatory capacity
and were starting to send oxygen throughout the body.

Kento watched in astonishment as mice that had been on the verge of death began moving,
albeit unsteadily, and drinking water from the water-supply devices. He couldn’t believe
his eyes. The new drug’s effects were so dramatic it was hard to believe. The concomitant
allosteric drug’s powers were so tremendous he thought for a moment that maybe it
was all a sleep-deprivation-induced hallucination.

Just as he was studying the graphs in his lab notes again to make sure there were
no errors, someone started banging loudly on the front door.

Kento was so startled he nearly screamed.

The police.

The detectives had finally zeroed in on his apartment.

But a voice soon shouted out “Messenger service,” and all the tension drained from
him. The cells that Doi had genetically modified had finally arrived.

When he opened the door the man standing there was clearly a messenger-service employee,
not some detective pretending to be one. Kento took the package, locked the door,
and returned to the lab.

The package was a small cardboard box, inside of which were four plastic flasks and
a few sterilized instruments, plus a memo with notes on the experimental procedures.
In what he took to be Doi’s handwriting was a detailed explanation of how he did the
binding assay.

The flasks contained CHO cells introduced into the genes of the disease-onset mice.
The receptor, mutant GPR769, which caused PAECS, had been forcibly expressed on the
cell membrane. Moreover, this receptor was fluorescently labeled by a special reagent,
so when it was activated it would give off a bluish light. In other words, if GIFT
1 and GIFT 2 made the receptors glow, then the new drug development was a success.

As Kento reviewed the experimental procedure, he was startled for a second because
he didn’t have the device called a plate reader, but when he saw the words
If you simply want to confirm that there is a glow, it can be detected by the naked
eye
he breathed a sigh of relief.

Now it was just a race against time to get everything ready. This part of the process
was outside his area of expertise, so the unfamiliar operations took time. He had
difficulty just transferring the cells to a petri dish. He did everything carefully
to avoid any mistakes, and in nearly an hour all preparations were complete.

The genetically modified cells were spread around the round, flat glass plate. Using
a pipette, Kento drew out some of the GIFT 1 solution and slowly sprinkled some on
top of the cells.

Nothing happened right away. If the data from the mice were correct, the G-protein-coupled
receptors would activate within thirty minutes, so GIFT should start binding before
that.

But thirty minutes later there was still no bluish light. Kento was panicking. Had
he made some error? Or had GIFT 1 not bound with the receptors?

He left his desk, went over to the closet, and once more measured the mice. The arterial
oxygen saturation levels for the group given the drug had risen even further. So why
was there no change in the cells?

Kento looked back at the petri dish, and it suddenly hit him. The room was too bright
for the naked eye to detect the faint light given off by the cells. He switched off
the overhead fluorescent light, felt his way in the dark, and trained his eyes on
the lab bench. And there, in the little glass dish, were countless gleaming blue lights.
The realization pierced through him, and all the hairs on his body stood on end.

It was activated.

As he stared wordlessly, the binding of GIFT and the receptors occurred one after
another, with new bluish glows lighting up the petri dish.

He’d successfully created a drug no one else had made in human history. Only one person
in the world—he, Kento—had, at this instant, confirmed that mutant GPR769 was activating.
Nature was showing its hidden, true face to him alone.

A chill ran through Kento, as did a strange sense of euphoria. The human brain must
contain a reward system for intellectual discovery, he thought. As he basked in the
quiet joy, a smile rose to his face, motivated neither by happiness nor enjoyment.
A kind of smile he had never experienced in his life. And a realization hit him: this
was the same smile his father had when he’d told him, “Research is the one thing I
can never quit doing.”

This is what science is all about, Kento realized. His father didn’t have any great
achievements to his name, but still in the midst of his daily research he’d made many
small discoveries that only he was aware of. And this excitement was what kept him
going. Unraveling the mysteries of nature had given him—and now his son—a dizzying
sense of joy.

As Kento sat there, steeped in bliss, he thought of the other side of science and
technology—the terrifying side. The scientists who developed the atomic bomb must
have been in thrall to the same sense of joy. It wasn’t a desire to kill masses of
people that drove them to devote themselves to developing the atomic bomb. Weren’t
they instead excited by the prospect of making Einstein’s prophecy a reality? By bringing
a massive new energy source to mankind? The sense of euphoria brought on by challenging
the future was, for human society, always a double-edged sword.

Kento stood up. He turned on the light, put on his coat, and got ready to go out.
He divided the precious GIFT, portions for Justin Yeager and Maika Kobayashi, into
two small containers. A half year’s dose for each.

Just then, somebody knocked at the door.

Kento stood still and listened.

A moment later there was another knock on the thin front door. He tried to pretend
he wasn’t at home, but whoever it was didn’t go away. The visitor continued to knock
persistently. Perhaps the revolving dial on the electric meter outside told him someone
was in the apartment.

But Kento was no longer afraid. The earlier determination to develop the drug, no
matter what happened, had now turned to anger. He stuffed the drug, his lab notes,
cell phone, and laptop into his backpack and faced the door.

“Who is it?” he called out.

“The police,” a man’s voice replied. “I have some questions I need to ask you.”

“Just a second.”

Kento stepped into his shoes, unlocked the door, turned the knob, and opened it.

A thin man was standing there, and when he saw Kento’s face his eyes instantly changed.
“Are you Kento Koga?”

Kento quickly turned away, held his breath, and threw the test tube he had in his
hand at the detective.

The detective let out a painful groan, doubled up, and started vomiting. The test
tube Kento had prepared for self-defense contained a compound that, while not very
toxic, emitted a horrible smell, so awful that with one drop on your clothes you couldn’t
ride the subway. And a shower wouldn’t simply wash it away. Most likely this detective
would be taking tomorrow off from work.

Kento slipped past the detective, still on all fours and throwing up, and ran as fast
as he could down the outside staircase. The sun had already set. He glanced at his
watch and saw it was 6:00 p.m.

I’m okay, Kento told himself as he searched for a taxi. Jeong-hoon had given himself
two hours from the time he arrived at the airport until his flight took off. If he
raced to the hospital he’d be in time. Hungry, exhausted, legs wobbly, Kento summoned
up his final ounce of strength and ran down the road.

No matter what, you have to deliver the medicine
.

And save the lives of Justin and Maika.

The Boeing 737 continued at an extremely low altitude, so low it was on the verge
of crashing.

The altimeter showed 330 feet, but to Yeager, now seated in the copilot’s seat, it
looked like they were sliding down the surface of the ocean. The ocean, solid black
until now, was catching the morning rays of the sun, the occasional whitecap showing
that dawn had arrived.

Meyers, looking determined, clutched the control stick, undaunted by the alarm telling
them they were getting too close to the ground. “Where are we?” he yelled.

“About four hundred and fifty kilometers southeast of Miami,” Pierce answered. He
peered at the laptop and conveyed instructions from Japan. “Ascend in one minute and
twenty-five seconds. Heading east-northeast. We’ll get the precise route after we’ve
ascended.”

“We’re going to ascend here?”

Ascending would mean they would be picked up on radar again.

“Why don’t we veer fifty kilometers to the east? It’s insane to intentionally ascend
into the Air Defense Identification Zone. F-22s will be on us in no time.”

“Ema’s got everything under control. Just ascend. Yeager, do you remember how to operate
the autopilot?”

“Got it.”

The autopilot control, on the upper part of the instrument panel, was a simple device
controlled by a small lever and switch.

“Everything’s down to the second from here on out. As long as we don’t make a mistake,
we won’t be shot down.” Pierce glanced down at the laptop on his knee and went on.
“We’ll start climbing in twenty seconds. Increase speed to four hundred and thirty
knots, and ascend fifteen degrees. Then maintain an altitude of thirty-three thousand
feet.”

“Roger that,” Meyers said.

Pierce began the countdown, and at zero Meyers pulled the control stick. The nose
left the sea right below them, and they began to climb into the dim sky.

Shouts rang out in the Operation Nemesis command center when the Boeing reappeared
on radar. From the amount of fuel the hijacked plane had on board, they had concluded
it must have crashed.

Rubens, in the command center, focused on the screen before him. The screen showed
a display sent from NORAD and the White House, which were linked by a videoconferencing
system. The display showed the Florida peninsula with the position and direction of
the Boeing plane flying over the Atlantic indicated by a triangular marker.

Was the plane that suddenly appeared in their airspace really the hijacked CIA aircraft?
In the Situation Room of the White House the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
sought confirmation from an air force general.

“It can’t be anything else,” the general immediately answered. “We’ll have interceptors
scrambled in less than a minute.”