The Green Trap

by Ben Bova

  “He said they’re trying to grab control of the research breakthrough,” Love added.

  “That means that Lionel Gould is involved.”

  “Lionel Gould?” Hunter’s brows shot up.

  “He’s been a big supporter of mine,” Bardarson said. “He handed us a ton of soft money last time around.”

  Hunter scratched at his soft, round jaw. “I think you’d better have a quiet little chat with Lionel Gould. See where he stands on this.”

  Senator Bardarson nodded. In his mind he recalled the three laws of politics enunciated decades earlier by Senator Everett Dirksen:

  1. Get elected.

  2. Get reelected.

  3. Don’t get mad, get even.

  Bardarson did not want Lionel Gould to get mad at him. On the other hand, he deeply wanted to be elected the next president of the United States.

  WASHINGTON, D.C.:

  NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES

  For the first time since he’d learned of his brother’s murder Paul Cochrane felt relaxed. He was sitting on a concrete bench outside the headquarters building of the National Academy of Sciences, beneath a cloud-flecked sky of flawless blue, feeling the warmth of the springtime sunshine soaking into him. On the bench beside him sat Owen Esterbrook, a microbiologist from nearby Georgetown University.

  Both men were in their shirtsleeves, munching on burgers from a fast-food joint a few blocks up Fifth Street. Cochrane squinted through the early afternoon brightness at the slightly larger-than-life statue of Albert Einstein across the lawn from where they were sitting. Like them, Einstein was seated casually on a park bench, dressed in rumpled sweater and slacks, a benign smile on his saintly face.

  “I wonder what he’d think about this,” Cochrane said between bites on his burger.

  Esterbrook was a much older man, bald except for a fringe of white hair ringing his pate, lean and long-legged.

  “Who?” he asked.

  Cochrane pointed with his chin. “Old Uncle Albert.”

  Esterbrook laughed. “When I was a kid there was a comic strip with an alligator that they called Uncle Albert.”

  “I meant Einstein.”

  “Yes, I know. The Pope of Physics, that’s what Wigner or one of those guys called him when he decided to come to America.”

  “I guess this microbiology business would be out of his field,” Cochrane said.

  With a slight shrug Esterbrook replied, “I don’t think he considered anything outside his field. He was interested in the whole universe, remember.”

  Cochrane shrugged back at him. “I suppose so.”

  “It’s going well, though,” Esterbrook said. “Your brother’s results seem quite solid. His engineered cyanobacteria produced hydrogen like good little troopers.”

  Esterbrook had been asked by the National Academy to examine Michael Cochrane’s research results and try to validate them.

  “I think we can tell Love that your brother hit the nail on the head,” Esterbrook said.

  “How soon?”

  “Another week, I should think. The results look good, and thoroughly reproducible. We’ll start writing the preliminary report in a couple of days.”

  Cochrane nodded happily. It was all coming together. Under Senator Bardarson’s protective wing, they’d eventually be able to tell Gould and his goons to go to hell.

  Cochrane spent the afternoon in Esterbrook’s laboratory on the Georgetown campus, surprised at how small and almost shabby the lab looked. Then he remembered the old dictum: a neat, well-scrubbed laboratory is the sign that no creative work is being done. When you’ve got wires festooned from the ceiling and a crazy maze of glassware tangled over the benches and cables snaking across the floor, then you’re getting some real work accomplished.

  He was back at the Marriott in time to walk with Sandoval down to Water Street and a dinner of blue crab at Phillips Seafood, outside on the patio in the long, lingering sunset by the bank of the gently flowing Potomac. Couples were working paddleboats along the river while the glowing twilight silhouetted the dome of the Jefferson Memorial, across the Tidal Basin.

  They strolled leisurely back to the hotel, Cochrane talking about how well the work with Esterbrook was going, Sandoval silent for the most part, just drawing him out, encouraging him to tell her every detail.

  Back in their room, Cochrane suddenly asked, “So what did you do all day?”

  She smiled and tilted her head to one side. “Oh, this and that. I had a long chat with Fiona, told her it’s probably going to take longer than we thought to pay her back.”

  “Huh. Yeah, I guess it will.”

  “It’s all right. She doesn’t mind. She knows we’re good for it.”

  “I ought to be getting a paycheck from the university,” he said.

  “You’re not having it sent here!”

  “No, no,” Cochrane reassured her. “To Senator Bardarson’s office. Andy Love will let me know when it arrives.”

  Sandoval nodded guardedly.

  “Still worried about Kensington?”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “Not anymore. Gould can’t take on the senator.”

  “Paul, Gould owns senators.”

  Cochrane had no reply for that. He thought about the tough-looking little redhead, Quinn. Haven’t seen any signs of her people around, he thought. But in another week or so we won’t need any protection. Esterbrook’ll hand in his report to the senator and the whole process will be out in the open where Gould can’t grab it for himself. Then it’s over. Finished.

  Except, he remembered, you still don’t know who murdered Mike.

  They watched television for a desultory hour, then got ready for bed. When Cochrane finished brushing his teeth and came out of the bathroom, he saw that Sandoval was wearing a shapeless white T-shirt that fell just past her hips. Usually they both slept in the nude.

  He flopped on the bed and when she crawled in beside him and clicked off the lamp on the night table, he started to run a hand up her thigh.

  “I’ve got my period, Paul. Sorry.”

  He felt surprised. “Oh! Okay.”

  She snuggled close to him and whispered mischievously, “I don’t have lockjaw, though.”

  He grinned in the darkness. “No, it’s okay.”

  “You sure?”

  He slid an arm around her shoulders and felt her head nestle in the hollow of his shoulder. Cochrane sighed contentedly.

  “You’re happy?” she asked.

  “Yeah. I really am.”

  “That’s good. I am, too.”

  “We’re not going to get rich, you know. We’re not going to get that ten mil from Gould.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes, Paul. I’m completely sure.”

  He fell silent, staring into the darkness, feeling her warmth beside him, feeling protective and safe at the same time.

  “Fiona told me about your father,” he said, in a whisper.

  “I know. And the rest of it, too, didn’t she?”

  “She did.”

  “I was pretty wild there for a time,” Sandoval admitted. “I still was, I guess. Until I met you.”

  It’s too good to be true, Cochrane told himself. But then he remembered something from a science history class, something that Michael Faraday had said: Nothing is too wonderful to be true.

  “Elena?”

  “Hmm,” she murmured.

  “I love you, Elena. I really do.”

  “I know, Paul. And I’m glad, ’cause I love you, too, darling. Madly.”

  Until he spoke the words, Cochrane hadn’t realized it was true. I love her, he said to himself. I really do love her. For the first time since Jennifer died he felt that there was something to live for. No, he corrected himself: someone to live for. He was overjoyed at her response to him, even though there was still a tendril of doubt in his mind. The hell with it, he told himself. We love each other. She’s willing to throw
away ten million dollars because of me. If that isn’t love, then what the hell is?

  He turned and kissed her gently.

  “Good night,” he whispered. And fell asleep with a smile on his lips.

  NEW YORK:

  UNITED NATIONS SECRETARIAT BUILDING

  Jason Tulius clipped the visitor’s badge to the lapel of his jacket and nodded idly as the receptionist gave him directions to the offices of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. He had been there more than once in the past few years; he knew the way through the maze of corridors and offices that honeycombed the UN Secretariat Building.

  He felt tense, on edge, as he entered the elevator and punched the button. The buzz of conversations in many languages was nothing more than a background hum in Tulius’s ears as the elevator filled up. Shamil isn’t going to like the news I’m bringing, he thought. Finally the doors slid shut and the elevator rose from the lobby level. Tulius felt crowded, almost trapped. Too many bodies pressing too close together. Most of the men in the elevator wore Western business suits, despite their national origin or skin color. The women were more individualistic and colorful, although even they were clad mainly in Western dress.

  Compared to some of the ambassadors’ suites Tulius had seen at the UN’s headquarters the UNESCO offices were a drab, functional ants’ nest of bureaucrats. Not that anyone scurried busily; the outer office was large and fully staffed with men and women at their desks, but the place was quiet, almost languid. No guards that Tulius could distinguish; not even terrorists were interested in harming UNESCO personnel. Not yet, Tulius thought. Eventually the day will come.

  He was met at the long counter that blocked access to the big room’s interior by an exotically good-looking young woman wearing a swirling, colorful robe.

  “May I help you?” she asked in lilting English.

  “Mr. Shamil, please. He’s expecting me. I am Dr. Jason Tulius.”

  “One moment, please, sir.” The woman went back to her desk, picked up a headset, and pecked at her keyboard. After a few words she looked up and smiled at Tulius, then ushered him through the maze of desks to the private office of Zelinkshah Shamil.

  Shamil was a Chechen who worked as a professional administrator in UNESCO’s labyrinthine bureaucracy. He was a dour, unsmiling man of sturdy build, at least two inches taller than Tulius himself, with skin that looked as if it had been stained by tobacco, a thick black mustache, muscular shoulders, but a soft, bulging middle. His dark eyes always glowered with suspicion.

  “Salaam, Dr. Tulius,” he said, in a rough, rasping voice. “To what do I owe the honor of this visit?”

  Tulius waited while Shamil firmly closed his office door and went to his gray steel desk, gesturing to the hard plastic visitor’s chair.

  “I’m in New York to meet with Lionel Gould,” Tulius said. “He wants to buy the center. I thought you should know.”

  “Gould Energy still wants to buy the Calvin Center?” Shamil grumbled.

  “Not Gould Energy Corporation,” Tulius corrected. “The Gould Trust.”

  Shamil shrugged annoyedly. “Gould Energy, Gould Trust, what difference? It’s all the same man.”

  “He’s making an offer that will be very difficult to refuse.”

  “I see. And our arrangement? What of that?”

  For four years Shamil had quietly been diverting UNESCO funds to the Calvin Research Center, on the promise that Tulius’s scientists would find a way to make cheap hydrogen fuel. A fugitive from the devastation of Chechnya, Shamil knew that a breakthrough in producing hydrogen would shatter the international oil market. OPEC would suffer, but that did not bother Shamil. Russia—the world’s second largest producer and exporter of petroleum—would suffer more. And for the barbarous destruction that Russia had unleashed on his native Chechnya, for the slaughter that Russia was still wreaking on the people, the women, the babies of Chechnya, for the utter destruction of Grozny and other Chechen cities, Shamil had sworn vengeance.

  Jason Tulius, grandson of a Lithuanian lawyer who had died in a Soviet gulag, had just as little love for the Russians as Shamil. He would be glad to see their main source of foreign capital dry up in a global move from petroleum to hydrogen.

  Tulius squirmed uncomfortably in the squeaking plastic chair. “One of my staff apparently made the breakthrough we were looking for,” he began.

  “Apparently?”

  “He was murdered. His data was stolen.”

  “By Gould,” Shamil snapped.

  “I don’t think so. Why would Gould want to buy the laboratory if he already had what he wanted in his hands?”

  “Then… who?”

  Tulius shook his head. “I wish I knew. I have my staff working ballsout to reproduce the murdered man’s work. His brother is involved, too. With some woman named Sandoval. A very beautiful woman.”

  Shamil took a deep, sighing breath. “I have taken many risks to fund your research. I don’t want your work to go to Gould.”

  “Does it matter?” Tulius asked. “I mean, does it matter who owns the hydrogen fuel patent? So long as the world market for petroleum collapses?”

  Stroking his mustache thoughtfully, Shamil replied, “It matters if Gould wants control of the hydrogen work merely to suppress it.”

  “Suppress it?” Tulius felt shocked.

  “The man has enormous interests in petroleum, does he not? It wouldn’t be in his best interests to break the back of the oil market.”

  “I’d never thought of that.”

  “You are a scientist. To you, the beauty of the research blinds you to the realities of the world.”

  “Perhaps,” Tulius admitted reluctantly. “But even so, I can’t very well say no to Gould. His offer is too good to refuse.”

  Shamil went back to stroking his mustache. “But suppose you took his offer, reproduced the breakthrough the murdered man made”—he smiled—”and still give me the information.”

  Tulius’s eyes widened. “If Gould found out… he’d kill me.”

  “Not necessarily,” said Shamil gently. “Of course, if you refuse to give me the information after all the millions I’ve siphoned to you, well… some of my fellow Chechens are much more impulsive than I. Much more violent, as well.”

  WASHINGTON, D.C.:

  GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY

  If anything, Dr. Esterbrook’s office was even smaller and shabbier than his lab. It was little more than a cubbyhole containing a heavy old-fashioned scroll desk that looked to Cochrane as though the old man had picked it up in a rummage sale, a mismatched pair of straight-backed wooden chairs, and a wall covered with ceiling-high bookshelves. The one window looked out on an alley that, this late at night, was dark with menacing shadows except for a lone street lamp half a block away that cast a forlorn pool of light that only seemed to make the darkness more sinister.

  Esterbrook’s computer was first-rate, though, Cochrane realized as he worked with the older man on writing their report. Cochrane was sitting on one of the stiff wooden chairs with his laptop, appropriately enough, on his lap. His computer was connected wirelessly with Esterbrook’s desktop machine as they laboriously wrote the report they would send to the National Academy and Senator Bardarson.

  “Writing is always such a chore,” Esterbrook muttered as they struggled through a paragraph describing the genetic modifications of the cyanobacteria.

  Cochrane nodded agreement. “Research would be fun if you didn’t have to write the damned papers.”

  Esterbrook glanced up from his desktop screen. “Still, you know what Faraday said: ‘Physics is to make experiments and to publish them.’ It isn’t science until someone else can test your results, and no one can test your work unless you write it down for them to read.”

  Cochrane grunted, thinking, Faraday again. For a cobbler’s son the man had a lot to say.

  He had been working with Esterbrook on this mother-loving report all day, and into the night, taking only a br
ief break at seven o’clock to grab a quick dinner with Sandoval. Then he had kissed her good night and hurried back to the Georgetown campus.

  Despite the old man’s grousing, Esterbrook seemed to be in his element. Cochrane was impressed by how he could take the complex bio-engineering that Mike had done and express it clearly and succinctly. This report isn’t just for other scientists, Cochrane knew. Or even for Andy Love. The senator’s the real audience for this. It’s got to be written so that a scientific illiterate can understand it.

  And it was shaping up that way, he saw as he scrolled through the paragraphs they had put together. Cochrane himself was no microbiologist, so he was serving more or less as a devil’s advocate for Esterbrook, pointing out phrasing that depended too much on specialized jargon, asking questions where the report brought up subjects that he didn’t know about.

  Cochrane glanced at the time displayed in the lower right corner of his laptop’s screen: ten P.M. We’ve been at this for more than twelve hours now, he realized.

  “I’m starting to see double,” he temporized.

  Esterbrook peered at him over his half-glasses. “Tired, are you?”

  Trying to make it sound humorous, Cochrane asked, “Don’t you have a wife to go home to?”

  “No,” the older man replied, completely guileless. “I’ve been a bachelor all my life.”

  “Well, I’m wasted.”

  With a patient little smile, Esterbook said, “But you’re the one who’s in such a rush to get this report out.”

  “I know, I know,” Cochrane said, his fingers shutting down the laptop’s program. “But I—”

  The phone rang.

  Cochrane’s insides jumped. Then he thought, Nobody knows I’m here except Elena. She’s probably wondering when I’m coming home.

  Esterbrook stared at the phone. “Now, who would be calling at this time of night?”

  “It’s probably for me.”

  Gesturing to the phone console on his desk, Esterbrook said, “You may answer it, then.”

  Cochrane picked up the handset. “Hello.”

  “Paul, it’s me.” Elena’s voice: high, hurried, frightened. “Kensington’s here. He—” Her voice cut off.