Genocide of One: A Thriller (10 page)

This wasn’t the information that Kento had expected. The disease was unrelated to
viral infection and occurred when a person inherited a spontaneously mutated gene
from his parents.

He felt like he’d swung at and missed a big fat pitch down the middle. A total miscalculation.
It happened a lot in the lab, though. Whenever it did, his mentor, Dr. Sonoda, would
invariably say the same thing: put away your preconceptions and see what actually
occurred.

In other words, understand unexpected phenomena. Kento stood up from the desk and
thought for a minute. What in the world could his father have been up to? Not that
he had to think about it much, for the answer was clear.

I want you to design an agonist for an orphan receptor and synthesize it.

Kento realized he’d overlooked the most important part of the research his father
had left behind. This involved knowledge that was out of his field, so he went over
it many times to determine whether his conclusion was correct.

The function of GPR769 was not clear, but it was a receptor on the membrane of pulmonary
alveolar epithelial cells. When GPR769 was dysfunctional it could lead to death, so
the receptor served some function necessary to normal respiration. But for this receptor
to function as intended, a ligand was needed.

Receptor ligands are molecules with physical and chemical properties that match perfectly
those of the receptor’s ligand binding site, and so they bind to the receptor and
thereby activate it. Ligands are typically produced elsewhere in the body and are
transported to the receptor by the blood. Once bound to the receptor on the outer
surface of the cell membrane, the receptor-ligand complex is pulled into the cell
interior through a coordinated sequence of events. In the cell interior the active
tip of the receptor acts on many other proteins within the cell, thereby activating
these proteins. These activated proteins in turn activate other proteins. In this
way chemical signals are amplified and sent throughout the cell interior to act on
diverse targets that modify the cell’s overall function. In other words, binding of
the ligand by the receptor works as a switch to get the cell operating in a certain
way.

In the case of mutant GPR769, the substitution of serine for leucine at position 117
of the receptor results in a binding site that cannot bind the native ligand, and
so the switch isn’t turned on. Thus the lungs fail to function correctly, and you
have the onset of disease. One way to regain normal lung function is to create a drug
that can bind the mutant site and thus can serve as a ligand specific for mutant GPR769.
Such a ligand would be an agonist, since it behaves in much the same way as the native
ligand when bound to the nonmutant GPR769—that is, it activates certain cell functions
as opposed to inhibiting them, as an antagonist would. This was precisely the agonist
that Kento’s father had been trying to create.

An agonist that would activate mutant GPR769.

Kento stood stock-still in front of the desk, mouth open.

It was a simple theory with no room for doubt. This agonist was none other than a
remedy that would treat pulmonary alveolar epithelial cell sclerosis, an incurable
disease that took the lives of children.

Kento was breathing hard. He followed the image on the computer screen and did some
mental calculations. There were approximately one hundred thousand children on earth
suffering from pulmonary alveolar epithelial cell sclerosis. Successfully creating
this drug meant saving that many children around the world.

“A hundred thousand?” Kento yelled out, and looked around the cramped apartment. A
grad student living in a tiny apartment in Kinshi-cho was going to save a hundred
thousand children?

Was this what his father was doing? Using all his money to save dying children?

An American will show up at some point. Give this person the compound you’ve synthesized
.

Kento imagined this American must be someone whose child suffered from the disease.
This person would come, full of hope that his precious child could be saved from this
terrible disease.

Hold on, Kento thought. The hurdles to pulling this off are too great. Even if a huge
pharmaceuticals company put all its resources into it, producing a new drug like this
would be extremely difficult. And all he had was this plan that his friend Doi had
dubbed amateurish. Once the drug was synthesized, without clinical trials you wouldn’t
even know whether it was safe or not.

Why was a virologist like his father working so far out of his area? And what odds
did he think he had of succeeding?

Kento knew he had as much of a chance of succeeding as a spider did in catching a
huge fish in its web. But he decided that, for the time being, he’d give it a shot.
He mentally ran down the list of his friends from his undergraduate days, trying to
remember if he knew anyone who’d gone to med school.

For Yeager and
the team communication with the outside was strictly controlled. They couldn’t use
e-mail, and when they wanted to call their families they had to use the one phone
in their room. Further, a clause in the contract they signed strictly forbade them
from revealing where they were.

“This phone is routed through several lines,” Garrett said. “If somebody monitored
it they’d have a tough time tracing the call.”

The phone in their room also served to strengthen team cohesion. Even if you didn’t
try to eavesdrop, you couldn’t help picking up on private details of your roommates’
lives. They all soon knew that Yeager’s son was suffering from an incurable disease,
that Meyers had become a private defense contractor to help out his parents, who’d
lost money investing in real estate, that Garrett was saving his money to become an
entrepreneur, and that Mick wasn’t close enough to anyone to want to make any calls.

Yeager got more depressed with each call from Lydia. Justin’s condition was worsening
by the day. They’d been counting on Dr. Garrado to help extend his life at the end,
but it wasn’t working out that way. At this rate Justin might die before Yeager could
finish this assignment.

“Why do you always have to be away on work when we need you here?” The two of them
had made the decision together for him to take on this extra duty, but still Lydia
berated her husband. “Can’t you just quit and come here?”

That was impossible—he’d signed the agreement. Resigning now meant being hit with
a massive penalty for breach of contract. Yeager was probably not the only one who
was feeling the weight of having signed. It seemed to be weighing heavily on Meyers
as well. Starting the day after their nighttime drill, the cutout targets on the firing
range were changed to small figures the size of children. It was clear what this signified.
Yeager and his team were to kill a group of children. At night they continued to visit
that practice field and those tentlike structures and spray the mannequins of children
with bullets.

On the fifth day, after morning physical workouts and shooting practice, the whole
afternoon was set aside for classroom training. The team members expected they’d finally
learn more details about the mission.

After blasting the small human targets to shreds on the firing range, the four of
them were heading back to headquarters when Meyers spoke up.

“I never heard anything about something like this. Same with you guys, right?” Meyers,
always cheerful, looked uncharacteristically disgusted. “What are you going to do
if our mission really is to kill a bunch of children? Are you going to go through
with it?”

Yeager, who felt like vomiting every night they ran through the drill, wanted to side
with him. Justin’s death was inevitable now. Was he taking the lives of so many children
just to extend his own child’s life by a few days?

Garrett and Mick were silent. “But all of us signed the agreement,” Yeager said. “What
else can we do?”

“This is our last chance. We can quit before we hear what the mission is. If we don’t
know the target, maybe they’ll let us quit.”

“I doubt it. If they were going to be that easy on us they wouldn’t have made us sign
the agreements.”

“I doubt that agreement’s even legal. If it came to a trial, I don’t think the employer
could say anything. You think they could testify that they ordered us to kill children
but we refused?”

“I don’t think defying them’s the best strategy,” Garrett said.

“Why not?” Meyers asked.

“Private defense contractors are all connected up through the Pentagon. If we break
our contract, they’d drum us out of the industry. We’d be lucky to get a job in the
parking lot at Walmart.”

As professionals whose only skill was killing, the men felt utterly powerless and
fell silent. Yeager was able to take down a person at five hundred meters with a single
shot. Stab a man in the kidney from behind and kill him so quickly he didn’t make
a sound. This was the father Justin was so proud of. His son saw him as a hero fighting
for peace, this father who had no place in a peaceful society. Every time he felt
Justin’s innocent respect for him, Yeager felt wretched, like a cheap impostor in
a uniform.

“Besides,” Garrett went on, “we’ve gotten ourselves into something heavy here. For
all we know this is a White House–authorized assassination. A special access program,
maybe. If it is, who knows what’ll happen to anybody who tries to bail?”

“You’re saying we might be murdered?”

“Or else labeled as terrorists and shipped off to someplace like Syria or Uzbekistan,
where they have no qualms about torturing people.” Garrett lowered his voice. “I can
see the Burns administration doing that.”

A cold wave of apprehension swept over the team. Meyers had brought up this topic
before they went inside the building because he knew they were under close surveillance
in their dorm room.

Yeager stood at the rear entrance to the headquarters building and thought of someone
back in his hometown, a Vietnam vet named Jack Riley. Riley had sat on the porch of
his broken-down old house on the edge of town, drinking beer all day. He didn’t appear
to have a job. To his neighbors he wasn’t a hero back from battle but an eyesore.

On the day when the army recruiter had talked to him at high school, Yeager stopped
by Riley’s place on the way home. “I’m thinking of joining the army,” he told him.

Riley stared at him with his rheumy yellow eyes. “It’s up to you,” he said.

Yeager didn’t think so. It felt like the only choice he had.

“Let me tell you one thing about being a soldier,” Riley said. “You go off to fight
for your country. You kill the enemy. And only the good people carry around the guilt.
Only the good people.”

Seventeen-year-old Yeager didn’t follow. “What do you mean?”

“There are people who have no problem hurting others and people who do.”

The pile of beer cans at Riley’s feet told him which type he was. So was this broken-down
soldier, shunned by those around him, a good person?

If he slaughtered twenty children, Yeager thought, would he end up like Riley?

Once they were back in their room, Meyers said to the Japanese team member, “Mick,
what do you think about this mission?”

“I’ll do my duty,” Mick replied. From day one he’d shown no compunction about blasting
the mannequins to pieces. “They tell me to do it, I do it. That’s my job. That’s
our
job.”

“You don’t mind killing children?” Meyers asked, his voice carrying a trace of contempt.

Normally Mick was expressionless, but now a cold smile rose to his lips, as if he
were on the verge of calling Meyers a coward. A change swept over Meyers’s expression
and Yeager, sensing danger, stepped in. “Hold on. We don’t know yet that we’re supposed
to kill children. Let’s not jump to any conclusions until we hear what this mission’s
all about.”

Meyers looked disgusted. Just then the door opened and Singleton came in. The tall
director of operations stared down at them and asked suspiciously, “What are you men
up to?”

“We’re going over tactics,” Garrett replied. “Our backgrounds are all different, so
we have some differences of opinion.”

“Go have lunch. The afternoon briefing will give you all the details you’ll need.”

The four team members exchanged glances.

“Did you all understand the tactics I was talking about?” Yeager asked. “There’s an
optimum time to check out the enemy’s moves.”

“I get it,” Meyers said. “It’s too early to decide to withdraw.”

“Exactly.”

At 1:00 p.m., after lunch, the four men filed into the briefing room. Singleton was
there ahead of them, alone as usual. Until they began their mission he was likely
the only other person they would meet.

They sat down and Singleton began using his laptop to project a PowerPoint presentation
on the screen at the front of the room.

“All right, take a look at this,” he said. “Do you notice anything odd about this
man?”

The screen showed a photo of an African man. He looked about thirty. Or maybe older,
since he had some gray hair. He was wearing a worn-out shirt too big for him, and
he faced the camera, a gentle look on his face. His neck was muscular, but his shoulders
were narrow, so he didn’t come across as especially brawny. His skin color was fairly
light, and Yeager figured he must be from either the northernmost or southernmost
region of Africa.

“Look at this one now,” Singleton said, moving to a second photo. A giant was standing
next to the African man from the first slide. He was a white man, so much larger than
the African that they looked like an adult and a child standing together. The black
man’s head didn’t even come up to the white man’s chest.

“Remember this white man’s face. His name is Nigel Pierce, and he’s a professor of
anthropology at a university on the East Coast of the United States.”

Nigel Pierce was extremely slim. He was quite tan and had a beard. He looked to be
in his forties and appeared more like an exhausted explorer than a scholar.

“By the way, Pierce is only one hundred and eighty-seven centimeters tall, about six
feet one, the same as I am. The African man beside him is only one hundred and forty
centimeters tall.”

“Why so small?” Garrett asked.

“He’s a Pygmy.”

Seeing that they understood, Singleton continued. “The word
Pygmy
has negative connotations, but as you can see, Pygmies are just like normal people
except smaller. Their skin color is light, similar to that of Asians, and anthropologists
classify them differently from other Africans.”

Singleton put on reading glasses and picked up a notebook. “What I’m going to tell
you now is based on anthropology. I’m just telling you things I heard from others,
so no pointed questions, if you don’t mind.”

Singleton smiled, as if this were some amusing joke, but the team members, none of
whom had much affection for him, couldn’t even manage an insincere smile.

Unperturbed, Singleton continued. “I doubt any of you in this room is typically conscious
of this, but we belong to an agricultural people. We depend mainly for our staples
on agricultural products. The Pygmies, on the other hand, are hunters. They live in
the jungle and hunt animals to get the food they need.”

Singleton advanced the PowerPoint presentation to the third slide: a map of Africa
that had a special colored section running from east to west along the equator.

“This is the region the Pygmies inhabit. It overlaps the African tropical rain forest.
No one knows why they evolved to be so small, but according to one theory it’s an
adaptation to their environment. Being so small allows them to move about unfettered,
among thick, low-hanging branches. Until the age of about ten they grow just as we
do, but then their growth stops. They live the rest of their lives with bodies the
size of children.”

Yeager suddenly realized something hidden behind this lecture on anthropology. The
child-size targets they’d been using must be modeled on Pygmies. The thought lifted
some of the depression he’d been feeling, but at the same time raised a new question.
These people living deep in the jungle, far from civilization, are light-years away
from the kind of work he did. Why did they have to kill them?

Garrett raised a hand. “What nationality are the Pygmies?”

“Nominally they belong to the country where they live, though actually they haven’t
been granted citizenship. Instead of citizenship they’re divided into several tribes.
The man in the first photo is from the Mbuti tribe. They live in the eastern Congo,
in the jungles of the Ituri Forest.”

The eastern Congo was where Yeager and the team were to be inserted. The briefing
was finally getting down to essentials. “Is the Ituri Forest part of the Great War
in Africa battle zone?”

Singleton smiled knowingly. “It is,” he said. “It’s not regular warfare but a guerrilla
war. Nearby villages are ransacked, and there’s genocide—one people murdering another.
But that’s not all. The troops fighting here, including the regular Congolese army,
go into the jungle, hunt down Pygmies, and eat them.”

“
What?!”
Meyers shouted.

“Cannibalism. The people in the region view Pygmies as subhuman. They also believe
that if you eat their flesh the mysterious power of the jungle will come to reside
within you. So they hunt them, slice them up, and cook them in pots. Add a little
salt, apparently, and eat them. UN observation teams have confirmed this.” The only
one in the briefing room who didn’t seem to find this disgusting was the person telling
the story. “White colonists in Australia, too, used to love to hunt down the Aborigines.
In Tasmania there’s not a single Aborigine left. The whites wiped them out.”

Singleton looked like one of the devil’s own, apparently enjoying thoughts of how
depraved humans could be. Yeager was growing worried about what would be revealed
now about their mission.

“Okay, back to the Mbuti Pygmies.”

Singleton clicked forward, and the screen showed an enlarged map of the eastern Democratic
Republic of the Congo. A road about a hundred kilometers long stretched from north
to south, with villages dotting the area alongside it. Beyond that was nothing else
to indicate the presence of people. Most of the map was covered in green.

“Here’s the Ituri Forest, where they live. The Mbuti live in so-called bands of several
dozen people each. In the rainy season they live near farming villages, but now, in
the dry season, they go into the jungle to hunt. They set up hunting camps, stay there
for a set time, then move a few kilometers to the next camp. Moving around like that
ensures they don’t run out of food.”

Eight spots were highlighted on the map, running east to west.