Tom Hyman Read Online Free Page A

decade he had lost his way. Others thought him simply power-mad—a man who had let his ego and his greed for renown get in the way of his responsibilities as a scientist.
    Stewart’s file showed Goth’s problems becoming serious in 1992. He had publicly condemned a new law passed that year by Congress banning genetic experimentation with the genes of the human reproductive system—the so-called germ line. His defiance cost him his university teaching post and all the funding for his research. He moved his laboratory to Switzerland and raised enough money there to continue his work. But two years later controversy caught up with him again, and Switzerland sent him packing.
    So here he was, Stewart thought, a fugitive—cast up on an impoverished Caribbean island, flat broke and desperate for help.
    Under the circumstances, Stewart reflected, it was a tribute to Goth’s still-powerful reputation that he had been able to command the presence of the five individuals who now sat in the stale tropical heat of his grubby little lab, waiting to hear what he had on his mind. Like Stewart, the other visitors were all enormously successful international financiers and industrialists, and all were heavily invested in biotechnology, one of the more cutthroat areas of modern business competition.
    Stewart glanced down the row of chairs. His four companions wore varying expressions of boredom and discomfort. It amused him to see them in such modest surroundings, stripped of their usual protective layers of advisors, assistants, and bodyguards.
    Goth had been adamant—he would allow no one inside his laboratory or his office except the five principals. To make the humiliation complete, he had hired two local department-store guards to search each of them for weapons and recording devices.
    In the chair next to Stewart sat the Kuwaiti prince Bandar, clad in a floor-length white dishdas7a and a white kufiyya, held on his head by a twisted length of black cord. He had a nervous habit of pushing back the edge of the cloth with his fingers, like a woman brushing back long tresses.
    Bandar was easily the richest of the five. His worth was stupendous—in excess of $100 billion. But the prince’s wealth, derived from the huge oil reserves under his country’s desert, was an accident of birth and geography, not the results of risk, intelligence, or hard work. The prince was childish, vain, and selfindulgent. He knew or cared little about business affairs. He hired others to do his work for him.
    Goth had been smart to invite the prince, Stewart reflected.
    Bandar controlled a fortune so vast that even his sybaritic excesses could not deplete it. Underwriting Goth’s research would be as insignificant an expense to him as throwing loose change to a beggar.
    And the prince’s requirements for what he got in return would probably not be demanding.
    In the next chair over from Bandar was Harry Fairfield, the British pharmaceuticals tycoon. Redheaded and ruddy-faced, Fairfield was a cockney from the London docks who had started his business career at sixteen as a drug runner for an East End gang.
    He punched and kicked and shot his way to the top of the drug trade, and by the early 1970s he was making millions wholesaling heroin and cocaine. In the eighties, weary of the building pressures from both the police and his rivals, he elected to get out of crime before he was either sent to prison or killed. He invested his profits in legitimate drug companies and eventually made himself respectable.
    Despite his new image, Fairfield’s business tactics remained something of a holdover from his drug-dealing days. If the normal strategies didn’t work, he didn’t hesitate to use muscle or threats to intimidate his competitors. Beneath a veneer of British working-class respectability, Fairfield was a shrewd and primitive brute, the English equivalent of a Mafia don. He was disliked and feared throughout the industry.
    Next to Fairfield sat Yuichiro