The Green Trap (34 page)

That takes care of everything, Gould thought as he walked to his plane. Everything and everyone. Except for that man Cochrane. He laid hands on me. He threatened me at knifepoint. In front of the Sandoval woman, he made me look like a humiliated fool.

I'll find him. Wherever he's hiding, I'll find him and kill him.

And her, too. She betrayed me. She played up to me only to protect him. I'll find them both. They'll be together, without doubt. He sighed deeply, remembering. It will be a shame to get rid of her, but what else can I do? They'll both have to go.

I
t was a busy morning for Jason Tulius. Promptly at nine
A.M
. his assistant tapped gently on his office door and informed him that a team of security specialists employed by the Gould Trust had arrived in the lobby. Tulius wasted no time having all six of them brought to his office. After more than an hour's conversation with them, he felt grateful and relieved.

“We already have a team watching your house,” said their leader as he rose to leave. He was a tall, lanky, silver-haired man with a hawk's beak for a nose and piercing dark eyes. “We'll do a sweep of your building here and the grounds beyond. If they've got the place staked out, we'll nab them.”

“And my son?”

“In Berkeley. We're on it.”

The other five men, standing behind their leader, nodded somberly.

Getting to his feet, Tulius said, “Mr. Gould said something about the FBI.”

“We often work with the Bureau. I have a meeting scheduled for this afternoon with the chief of the San Francisco office.”

“That's fine,” said Tulius. “Fine.” He went around his desk and shook hands with each of the six men. They certainly seemed professional and utterly competent.

Once they left his office, Tulius went back to his desk and sat down, feeling that his situation had improved enormously. He was in good hands. Shamil and his thugs would be taken care of, as they deserved.

He unlocked the top right drawer of his desk, pulled it open, and gazed at the three small cases of brushed aluminum. They're worth a considerable fortune, Tulius said to himself. I wonder how much Gould will be willing to pay me for them.

Glancing at his desktop clock, he saw that Gould would arrive within a couple of hours. He'll pay handsomely to acquire this center, Tulius thought, but he ought to pay me a special bonus for delivering these hard drives to him. Enough to allow me to retire. Enough to set me up for life.

His intercom buzzed.

Slightly annoyed at the interruption, Tulius poked the keyboard. “Yes?”

“Dr. Cochrane is in the lobby, sir, asking to see you.”

“Cochrane?”

“Mike's brother,” his assistant's voice said. “You remember, he was here right after Mike was murdered.”

All of Tulius's pleasant feelings of safety and a comfortable future drained out of him.

“Shall I tell the receptionist to send him up here?” his assistant asked.

Tugging at his beard, Tulius answered unhappily, “Yes, yes, send him in.”

“There's a woman with him. Elena Sandoval.”

“Of course,” Tulius croaked. “Of course.”

 

C
ochrane had made up his mind by the time they'd finished breakfast.

As he carried their cereal bowls to the kitchen sink, he said, to himself as much as to Sandoval, “The Calvin Center. We've got to see Dr. Tulius.”

Still sitting at the kitchen table, Sandoval asked, “Tulius? Why him?”

“Who else is there? Senator Bardarson's sold out to Gould. Nobody in
the government is going to lift a finger for us, Gould's got them all under his control.”

“But why Tulius?” she repeated.

“He's a scientist. He understands what's at stake.” He turned from the sink to face her. “He's the only guy I can think of who might be able to help us.”

“What about the scientist you were working with from the National Science Foundation?”

“Esterbrook?” Cochrane thought it over briefly. “Yeah, maybe. But he's in Washington and Tulius is just a car ride away, in Palo Alto.”

Sandoval got up from the table and carried her juice glass to the sink.

“Paul,” she asked softly, “just what is it that you think Tulius can do for us?”

“Get Mike's work published,” he replied. “Get it out into the open so Gould can't keep it to himself.”

“What good would that do?”

He stared at her. “Don't you get it? Don't you understand? Gould wants to keep Mike's work secret, you told me so yourself. He wants to hold it in his own hands while oil prices keep heading for the stars and he makes all those profits. He wants to be the one who decides when and how the hydrogen process is brought out into the open. He wants to be the one who controls the shift from oil to hydrogen.”

“So?”

“So publishing Mike's work will make it public,” Cochrane said, with growing fervor. “It'll make his process common knowledge. Nobody will be able to monopolize it. Nobody will be able to take out a patent on it. Ten thousand little guys will start tinkering with the idea, start producing hydrogen cars that really
work!
They'll start a new industry, hydrogen fuels. Cheap, easy hydrogen-fueled cars. Trucks. Planes. Nobody'll need oil anymore!”

“That's what you want to do?”

“That's it. Mike's work can be the basis for a whole new industry. Getting the whole friggin' world off the oil teat and into clean, cheap hydrogen.”

Sandoval shook her head sorrowfully. “Paul, all you'd be doing is giving Gould another reason to have you murdered.”

“So what?” he snapped, full of his own vision. “He already wants to kill me. This'll make it worth the risk.”

She started to reply, but saw that it would be useless. With a heavy sigh, she said, “All right. Let's drive out to the Calvin Center.”

•  •  •

 

D
r. Tulius did his best to appear calm and welcoming as Sandoval and Cochrane were ushered into his office. He got up from his desk, shook hands with them both, and guided them to the round conference table in the far corner of the room.

But only after he had closed the desk drawer containing the three hard drives. And locked it again.

“Now, then,” he said once they were all seated around the table, “what brings you here this morning? Have you learned anything about Michael's murder? I must confess the police haven't spoken a word to me since the funeral. I was beginning to think they'd just dropped the case altogether.”

Cochrane could see that Tulius was edgy. The man was tugging unconsciously at his beard, glancing nervously all around his office as he chattered, looking back at his desk and the digital clock that sat next to his computer keyboard. He wouldn't meet Cochrane's eyes.

Deciding to cut directly to the heart of the matter, Cochrane said, “Dr. Tulius, I have Mike's data.”

“You do?” Tulius's white eyebrows rose so high his forehead wrinkled.

“All of it.”

“But I thought—” Tulius stopped himself.

“You thought what?” Sandoval asked.

Before Tulius could think of a reply, Cochrane leaned forward intently and said, “Mike's work shows how to bioengineer a strain of cyanobacteria so they'll produce gaseous hydrogen. Lots of hydrogen. Put a sheet of those bugs in your car and they'll make hydrogen fuel for you. All you need to do is fill your tank with water and let the bugs split the water into hydrogen and oxygen. Cheap and easy.”

“That's…” Tulius groped for a word. “Interesting.”

“It's more than interesting,” Cochrane snapped. “It can move the world off oil, off fossil fuels altogether.”

“If it works in the real world, Dr. Cochrane. After all, laboratory data is one thing, but that doesn't mean—”

Sandoval interrupted, “Michael Cochrane was killed over this. You know that as well as we do.”

“Still…”

Earnestly, Cochrane explained, “We've got to publish this work, Dr. Tulius. We've got to get it out into the open scientific literature so that no one can claim possession of it, no one can bottle it up, suppress it.”

“We?”

“I'm not a biologist,” Cochrane said. “You are. You can get this work published by the top journal in your field. You can call an international news conference, even.”

Tulius licked his lips. “I… I suppose I could.”

“This could make you famous,” Cochrane urged. “Calvin Research Center would become a world-class organization.”

“I would like to think that we already are.”

“You know what I mean. Your lab would be the center of world attention. You could write your own ticket.”

“The oil industry would not be pleased,” Tulius muttered.

Sandoval replied, “The oil industry would have to get on the bandwagon. They'd have to! And the auto industry, too.”

“Perhaps.”

“No ‘perhaps' about it,” Cochrane insisted. “This will be the biggest thing to hit the energy industry since they sank the first oil wells in Pennsylvania.”

Tulius turned from Cochrane to Sandoval, all the while tugging nervously at his beard. Then he pushed his chair away and rose to his feet. Walking slowly back to his desk, he glanced again at the clock.

“You're right, of course,” he said, turning back toward his seated visitors. “Look. It's half-past ten. Let's have some coffee and begin to write the opening paragraphs of the paper.”

Cochrane glanced at Sandoval, grinning. “Okay. Great.”

Tulius called his assistant and ordered coffee. “Bring some sweets, too. Sticky buns, if they have any in the cafeteria,” he said into his phone.

When he returned to the table, Cochrane said, “Mike's data will make up the heart of the paper. All we have to do is write an explanation of what it's about.”

“Yes,” Tulius said agreeably. “And Michael's name should be on the paper.”

“He ought to be the first name. Then yours.”

Nodding, Tulius said, “And your own.”

“Mine? I didn't do any of the work. I don't belong on the paper.”

Tulius said, “My boy, you have no idea of how many times a person's name is added to a paper even though that person didn't contribute directly to the research.”

“Department heads,” Cochrane said. “I know.”

Tulius's phone buzzed. He hurried to his desk and picked it up.

“Yes,” he said. “Come right in.”

The office door opened, but instead of the assistant bringing in coffee, Lionel Gould stepped in.

Cochrane felt his jaw drop open. Gould looked equally surprised. But he recovered quickly.

“Dr. Cochrane,” he said, with a broad, toothy smile. “What a pleasant surprise.”

T
o his shame, Akhmad Kadryov was asleep, snoring gently as he sat slumped behind the wheel of his rented Toyota Corolla.

He was rudely awakened by a hard tapping on the door window beside him. Startled, he saw a stern-faced young man wearing a dark suit staring at him. Kadryov saw the reflection of his own stubble-jawed sleepy face in the man's rimless mirror glasses.

“Roll it down,” the man demanded, through the closed window. His blond hair was cut so short he looked almost shaved bald.

Blinking sleep from his eyes, Kadryov rolled down the window.

“You work here?”

Without thinking, Kadryov nodded.

“Lemme see your ID.”

Kadryov fumbled through his pockets, stammering, “I… I must have left it home.”

“Better go home and get it, then.”

The blond didn't look like the type who brooked arguments. Kadryov touched the butt of the pistol tucked into his waistband, hidden beneath his windbreaker. He thought briefly about toughing it out with this security type, but remembered that his assignment was to watch, not fight. He was supposed to be keeping Tulius under surveillance; he'd been watching the scientist's house since midnight. When Tulius had left early that morning, Kadryov had followed him to the Calvin Research Center and parked in the employees' lot. Then he'd drifted to sleep.

Nodding wordlessly at the blond, Kadryov started his rental car with a roar and drove slowly off the parking lot. As he passed the building's front entrance he noticed a long black limousine parked in front of the main entrance. There were three bulky black SUVs parked in visitors' slots, as well, with several other men in dark suits and sunglasses standing by them. The blond who had accosted him was walking toward them.

Kadryov pulled out onto the access road, but drove less than a block before parking next to a high hedge that screened another office building. He got out of the Toyota and walked back to the end of the hedge, where he had a distant but clear view of the Calvin Center and its parking lot. He thought about phoning his cell leader, whom he knew only as Asian, but decided against it. Wait and watch, he told himself.

He went back to the car and pulled his binoculars from the glove box, then returned to survey the parking lot again. Tulius's silver Lexus was still in its slot. Good. And the limousine and those SUVs hadn't moved. I wonder who is the VIP of the limousine? Kadryov asked himself. Whoever he is, he's brought a considerable amount of security along with him.

The late morning sunshine felt warm on his shoulders, although a cooling breeze was coming in off the hills that edged the seaside. He put the binoculars down. It wouldn't do to have someone driving by wondering why a short, stocky, swarthy man with a thick dark mustache was spying on the Calvin Research Center. Instead he returned to the car and zipped up his windbreaker.

Wait and watch, he told himself. Wait and watch.

 

T
his is an unexpected pleasure,” Gould said as he sat himself beside Sandoval at Tulius's round conference table. With a smirk, he added, “Ah, there are no steak knives in sight. I suppose I'm safe, then.”