The Green Trap

by Ben Bova

  “It was truly a serendipitous discovery,” says Abu-Omar.

  After performing the reaction, the researchers studied how the reaction works. They found that the water’s oxygen atom bonds to the silicon atom of an organosilane molecule, leaving behind a hydrogen molecule composed of one hydrogen atom from water and another from the organosilane. The hydrogen yield is proportional to the water used. In essence, Abu-Omar’s group has found a new means of splitting water.

  There are many hurdles on the way to making this hydrogen-production process practical, Abu-Omar stresses. For one thing, researchers will have to determine whether the reaction works on a large scale. And organosilane is expensive enough that the economics of the process would be prohibitive.

  —Aimee Cunningham

  SCIENCE NEWS

  September 17, 2005

  MANHATTAN:

  GOULD TRUST HEADQUARTERS

  What do you mean, you don’t have it?” Cochrane shouted.

  Lionel Gould looked like a fat Buddha, sitting in his high-backed desk chair, arms folded over his belly. Except that he was wearing an open vest and a wrinkled shirt rather than saffron robes. And he was frowning unhappily, not smiling.

  “Just what I said,” Gould replied, his voice a low growl. “Which is not good.”

  Cochrane had flown to New York on the first available plane and gone straight from JFK to the Gould Trust headquarters. Rain clouds were building up in the twilight sky as he was ushered into Gould’s office. Sandoval was nowhere in sight and Gould angrily demanded that he turn over the computer hard drives.

  “Kensington took the third computer from me last night,” Cochrane explained. “You mean he’s not here yet?”

  “I mean,” Gould rumbled, “that I have seen neither Mr. Kensington nor any of the three computer drives. Nothing.”

  “He’s got them,” Cochrane insisted. “All three of them.”

  “Then where is he? Where are those hard drives?”

  Cochrane sank into one of the chairs in front of Gould’s desk. “I don’t know,” he said weakly.

  Gould glared at him, beads of perspiration dotting his upper lip, his forehead. Through the window behind him Cochrane caught a flash of lightning that backlit the towers lining Central Park.

  “He broke into Don’s house and Sol’s, up in Massachusetts,” Cochrane muttered, as much to himself as to the angry man behind the desk. “It must have been him. He took their computers. Then he showed up last night in Cabo and took Vic’s notebook. That was the third and last of them.”

  “You saw him in Cabo San Lucas?”

  Rubbing his stiff neck, Cochrane replied, “Saw him and got roughed up by him. He grabbed the third computer and left us both on the floor. I thought he’d be here by now.”

  Gould slowly shook his head. “I haven’t seen him for several days. He was supposed to be following you and making certain that those computers were brought to me.”

  “He was in Cabo last night,” Cochrane repeated.

  “And he acquired the third machine there.” Gould pursed his lips in thought. At last he said, “If Mr. Kensington has all three machines, and he is not here to give them to me, something must have happened to him. Unless he’s offering them to someone else.”

  “Someone else?”

  “A competitor. A rival. Tricontinental, perhaps. That oaf Garrison in Texas. Perhaps even an OPEC minister.”

  “But I thought you were all in this together.”

  Gould huffed. “The great international conspiracy, is that it? Well, yes, we do cooperate in many ways, at many levels. But what your brother has discovered is so big that, well… boys will be boys.”

  Cochrane stared at him.

  “The possession of a cheap and efficient method of producing and distributing hydrogen fuel is so immense, so powerful, that it would give its possessor a huge advantage over all his competitors.”

  “But I thought you wanted to suppress it.”

  “Of course! It must be suppressed, for the good of the industry. But eventually the time will come to bring it out into the open, to swing the industry away from oil and into hydrogen. Whoever possesses your brother’s process will be the king of the energy industry.”

  “But the others—your competitors—they’ll know about the process. The can develop it for themselves.”

  “Not when I have the patents,” Gould said, practically purring. “They can develop their own version of the process if they wish, but they’ll have to pay royalties to me. I will have a corner on the market, as my esteemed predecessors would have said.”

  “But none of that will happen if somebody else gets my brother’s data from one of the missing computers.”

  Gould’s face instantly darkened into a thundercloud. “Exactly so, Dr. Cochrane. Exactly so. If someone else reduces your brother’s work to practice before my legal staff obtains a patent on it… if someone else merely publishes your brother’s papers, it could ruin my chances for patenting the process.”

  “Senator Bardarson,” Cochrane remembered. “He knows—”

  Gould waved an impatient hand. “The good senator won’t rock the boat. He needs me too much to interfere.”

  “The National Science Foundation…” Cochrane’s voice trailed off into an awed silence.

  “If our current president were able to run for reelection, he’d be on my side, too. This is an immense business, sir. Truly immense. We’re talking about a transformation as vast as the original move from horses to the internal combustion engine more than a century ago.”

  Cochrane nodded, accepting the reality of it. Then he spread his hands. “Well, I did what you wanted. Now it’s between you and Kensington. Where’s Elena? It’s time we should be—”

  “Ms. Sandoval is quite comfortable, I assure you. The real question of the moment, however, is: where is Mr. Kensington?”

  “That’s your problem.”

  “No, it’s yours. How do I know you haven’t done away with him and have the computers in your own hands?”

  Cochrane felt truly surprised. “Done away with Kensington? Me?”

  “The man has always been loyal to me. Why should he turn traitor now?”

  “I can think of ten million reasons. Maybe more.”

  “I refuse to believe that Mr. Kensington would turn on me,” Gould said stubbornly. “For any amount of money.”

  “Then where is he?”

  “I’ll have to put some people to work on that,” Gould said. “In the meantime, you will be my guest. Here. In this building.”

  “You mean prisoner.”

  “Dr. Cochrane, this matter is much too important to allow you to wander freely. Guest, prisoner, whatever you wish to call it, you will remain here for the time being.”

  “Where’s Elena?”

  “As I said, she’s quite comfortable.”

  “Where is she?” Cochrane demanded, his voice rising.

  Gould made a strange smile as he pressed a key on his desktop phone console. “She’s here in this building. I’ll have her join us for dinner.”

  Cochrane followed Gould out of his office and down a flight of wide stairs to the living quarters on the floor below. A butler offered Gould a burgundy jacket, which he waved away. In his unbuttoned vest and rumpled shirt Gould led Cochrane through a richly appointed living room and into a small but very luxurious dining room: a solid teak table large enough to seat eight comfortably, thick Oriental carpeting, paintings on the walls that Cochrane would have expected to see in a museum.

  The table was set for three. Damask tablecloth and napkins, solid silver tableware. A young woman in a maid’s black outfit was pouring water into crystal glasses.

  “Where—”

  “Hello, Paul.”

  He spun around and there was Elena, beautiful as ever in a gold-trimmed black floor-length gown, cut quite low. Cochrane rushed to her, put his arms around her.

  “You’re all right?” he asked.

  “I’m fine, Pa
ul. Now that you’re here, I’m fine.”

  He kissed her, then took a close look at her face. She wasn’t smiling. Her eyes looked haunted.

  Gould cleared his throat noisily. “You two will want some privacy. I’ll go change my shirt.”

  Once Gould had left the dining room Cochrane clasped Sandoval by her bare shoulders. “Are you really okay? Did—”

  “I’m perfectly all right,” she said. “Really.” But her voice was low, listless.

  “Kensington’s disappeared with all three of the computers,” Cochrane told her. “Gould intends to hold us both here until he finds out what’s going on.”

  “And once he does, he’ll kill us.”

  Cochrane realized that she was right. It makes sense, he said to himself. We’re loose ends. He’ll want to wind us up.

  “Then we’ve got to get out of here, away from him.”

  “Where?” she said, her tone hopeless. “How?”

  Before Cochrane could answer, Gould came back into the dining room wearing a loose flowered Hawaiian shirt that hung on him like a ridiculous gaudy tent. His face was set in a jowly grimace.

  “Mr. Kensington has been found,” he said grimly. “Dead.”

  “Dead?” Sandoval gasped.

  “In a rented car at a JFK parking lot. No sign of the computers, however.”

  “Whoever killed him took the computers,” Cochrane said.

  “Yes,” said Gould. “Which is bad. Very bad.”

  A crack of thunder punctuated his words.

  MANHATTAN:

  GOULD TRUST HEADQUARTERS

  It was a desultory dinner. Cochrane ate without tasting the mint-garnished New Zealand lamb chops on his plate, watching Sandoval picking listlessly at her food while Gould alternately stuffed his mouth and talked—sometimes shouted—into a cell phone. They paid scant attention to the lightning strobing outside, or the rumbles of accompanying thunder.

  Courses were served, wines poured. No conversation among the three of them. Only Gould’s increasingly irritated yammering into the phone, his face growing redder by the moment, perspiration trickling down his face, wilting the collar of his colorful shirt.

  At last, as multihued sherbets were being placed before them, Gould carefully folded the phone and then threw it against the wall, narrowly missing a Velasquez oil.

  “Apparently Mr. Kensington was ambushed as he picked up his rental car at the airport,” he said, jabbing his spoon into the sherbet. “The police say there must have been several assailants. He was beaten to death. His luggage was in the car’s trunk, but there is no sign of the confounded computers!”

  “Where does that leave us?” Cochrane asked.

  “In the same place I am myself,” replied Gould. “Way up in the middle of the air.”

  Cochrane looked across the table at Elena. She caught his glance, then looked away.

  Gould hefted a golden spoonful of sherbet, but plopped it back into its gold-rimmed glass. “Bah! The police are treating this as a mugging.”

  “They don’t know about the computers?” Cochrane asked.

  “I certainly haven’t told them!”

  Gould pushed his chair away from the table and got to his feet. He extended a hand toward Sandoval. “Come, Elena.”

  Cochrane jumped up from his chair. “What do you mean?”

  Sandoval remained seated, her eyes shifting from Cochrane to Gould and back again.

  “I said come, Elena,” Gould repeated, more demandingly.

  She stayed in her chair, frozen, unmoving. Cochrane saw that her eyes looked frightened.

  Gould reached for her, saying, “Don’t be bashful because your former lover is here. You’re mine now. To the victor go the spoils.”

  Without thinking, without even realizing he was doing it, Cochrane swung a left that connected solidly with Gould’s fleshy jaw. He fell back into his chair, arms flailing, blood spurting from his mouth. The chair tumbled over, spilling Gould into a fleshy heap on the carpeting.

  “Paul!” Sandoval screamed.

  Cochrane stepped over and hauled Gould to his knees by the scruff of his neck.

  “You’re a dead man, Cochrane,” Gould snarled through bloody teeth.

  “Am I?” Cochrane reached with his free hand and yanked a steak knife off the table.

  “Paul, we can’t get out of the building!” Sandoval was saying, pleading almost. “We’re trapped in here!”

  Hauling Gould to his feet, Cochrane jabbed the point of the knife at Gould’s throat hard enough to make the man flinch.

  “He’s got us buttoned up in here,” Cochrane muttered, “but we’ve got him.”

  “What good—”

  “Move, you sonofabitch,” Cochrane commanded, pushing Gould roughly. “If you want to live, you walk us out of here.”

  Gould’s face was white, Sandoval’s almost the same.

  “I said move!”

  Haltingly, Gould shuffled through the dining room and out into the foyer. Cochrane saw the elevator door and a small keypad mounted on the wall beside it.

  “Get the elevator here.”

  Wordlessly Gould reached for the keypad.

  “And if any of your goons arrive on the elevator, I’m going to stick this knife through your fucking neck,” Cochrane said. “You’ll spatter blood all over them. You’ll bleed out before they can get a medic here.”

  His hand trembling, Gould tapped out a code on the keypad. The elevator doors opened instantly. No one was in the elevator.

  With Cochrane grasping Gould’s arm and walking just behind him, concealing the knife that he pointed at Gould’s kidney, they went down to the street floor and walked slowly past the two uniformed security guards in the lobby. Out on the street it was raining softly, the last remnants of the thunderstorm that had passed by.

  “There are cars down in the garage level,” Gould said as Cochrane pushed him into the drizzling rain.

  “And have you tell the cops we stole one of your cars?” Cochrane snapped. “Forget it.”

  Cochrane led them across the avenue, past six lanes of taxis and limousines waiting for the stoplight to turn green, and onto the sidewalk beyond, shining in the street lamps reflected by the puddles of rain. The rain felt cold. Cochrane could see that Sandoval was shivering in her bare-shouldered gown; the dress was getting soaked and her hair was unraveling. Gould looked like a soggy mess.

  “What now?” Gould asked.

  “We get a taxi and you can walk back home.”

  Recovering some of his composure, Gould said, “Do you think there’s anyplace on earth that you can hide from me?”

  Cochrane felt like slugging him again. Instead he simply replied tightly, “We’ll see.”

  MANHATTAN:

  GRAMERCY PARK HOTEL

  You were sleeping with him,” Cochrane said.

  “I didn’t have much choice in the matter,” Sandoval replied, her face a tight, hard mask.

  They hadn’t spoken more than a few words to each other since leaving Gould in the drizzle by Central Park. Cochrane had watched the pudgy, squelching, completely disheveled industrialist shamble back across the avenue toward his building. Only when Gould had entered its lobby did he hail a taxi and bundle Sandoval into it.

  “We need a hotel,” Cochrane said to the driver as he climbed in behind her and slammed the cab’s door shut.

  “You sure as hell look it,” the driver called back over his shoulder, “if you don’t mind my sayin’ so.”

  “Someplace not too expensive,” Cochrane added.

  “Downtown,” said Sandoval.

  Grateful that they’d found a driver whose native tongue was English, Cochrane sank back onto the leather seat, cold and dripping wet. He had the driver stop at half a dozen ATMs on their way downtown. He used every credit card he had to draw a total of four thousand dollars in cash. Gould might be able to trace the card transactions, he told himself, but we’ll use cash from now on.

  The taxi driver took them to the G
ramercy Park Hotel, at the foot of Lexington Avenue. “Ain’t the cheapest place in town, but you won’t have any roaches, at least.”

  The hotel clerk looked at them with a mixture of disdain and disbelief: a bedraggled couple with no luggage.

  “We got caught in the rain,” Cochrane muttered, tugging the wad of fifties he’d accumulated. Whether it was the cash or the excuse, the clerk found them a small room with twin beds.

  “That’s all that’s available at present,” he said.

  “We’ll take it,” Cochrane agreed gratefully.

  As he locked the door and slipped on the security chain, Sandoval went straight to the bathroom. He heard the shower turn on, fidgeted for a moment, wondering whether he should go in and join her. He decided not to. Instead he stripped off his wet clothes and wrapped himself in a blanket from the closet.

  Sandoval came out at last, a bath towel tucked around her like a sarong. He brushed past her and entered the steamy bathroom. When he came out she was sitting up in one of the beds, the sheet and blanket pulled up to her armpits.

  “Yes, I was sleeping with Gould,” she said, her voice flat, unapologetic, almost defiant. “As I said, I didn’t have much choice.”

  Cochrane sat on the edge of the other bed. “You were trying to protect me, is that it?”

  “Whether you believe it or not.”

  “I want to believe it.”

  “But you don’t. Not completely.”

  “No,” he admitted. “I can’t.”

  “I decided that Gould was a better choice than Kensington,” she said.

  “Kensington was in Boston, burglarizing my friends’ houses.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “I guess you didn’t,” Cochrane said. He looked into her sea-green eyes and saw no trace of sorrow, no hint of regret or remorse. Nothing but a cold, hard anger.