Tom Hyman Read Online Free Page B

Yamamoto, a Japanese industrialist whose companies were involved in a broad range of hightech ventures, from computers to cybernetics to space vehicles.
    Yamamoto was probably the most cultured and urbane of the group. A handsome, diminutive man in his early forties, he spoke fluent, accentless English, dressed elegantly, and displayed a connoisseur’s taste in everything from food and wine to art and music. He had been educated in the United States and England, and unlike many of his Japanese counterparts, he understood the Western mentality—and knew how to take advantage of it. Yamamoto was married to a relative of the Japanese royal family and had many powerful friends in that country’s top business, social, and governmental circles. It was expected that he might one day run for prime minister.
    Genetic engineering was a subject of interest not only to Yamamoto, who owned a company that manufactured human insulin and other genetics-based drugs, but also to the Japanese government, who saw it as the next great technology frontier-one in which they were determined to grab the lead. Yamamoto’s presence here, Stewart suspected, represented not only his own interests but his government’s as well.
    On the far end, her straight ash-blond hair falling so perfectly that it looked as if it had been ironed in place, sat the Gerrr.an baroness Gerta von Hauser.
    The baroness was dressed, rather incongruously, in a white tennis outfit, complete with eyeshade, sneakers, and ankle socks.
    Stewart suspected that the baroness was the kind of person who left nothing to chance, so he supposed the tennis togs were a tactic on her part to demonstrate that she didn’t take this meeting very seriously.
    It was just a diversion for hen-something she was managing to squeeze in between matches on the groomed grass courts at the National Palace, where she was staying as a guest of the island’s president, Antoine Despres. Stewart was not fooled. The baroness would not have traveled all the way to Coronado for a game of tennis, even with the president of the country. She was here for business.
    Gerta von Hauser was in her mid-forties but looked younger.
    Vigorous exercise, careful diet, and the energetic attentions of an army of stylists, masseuses, pill doctors, and cosmetic surgeons had seemingly frozen her aging process in place. There were a few furtive wrinkles around her eyes and throat that betrayed her true age, but few people ever got close enough to her to see them.
    She had acquired the title of baroness eighteen years earlier through a brief marriage to the Baron von Holwegg, a doddering Junker aristocrat more than three times her age. He slipped in the bathtub and killed himself two months after their marriage. One of his servants claimed he was roaring drunk at the time; others swore that the baroness had arranged it. In any case, she reverted to her maiden name, von Hauser, but kept her dead husband’s title. This violated both German law and custom, but no one ever challenged her on the matter.
     
    Dalton Stewart gazed at her long, tanned, well-muscled legs and wondered if the sexual aura she projected wasn’t also a facade.
    The woman was so totally immersed in her business interests that he doubted she had time for anything else. Among her legendary triumphs was her bargain-basement buy-up of major oil, chemical, and nuclear industries throughout Eastern Europe in the wake of the communist collapse. In the space of less than a year (and amid unsubstantiated rumors of bribes and blackmail) she had made Hauser Industrie, A.G the dominant economic force in Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and the Balkan states. In the years since, the financial benefits of that conquest had been enormous.
    The baroness’s formidable position in the international business community had an interesting history. She had inherited a dark legacy.
    Like the Krupps, the Hausers had been for many generations one of the most