KYOTO, JAPAN It happened in the blink of an eye. One instant everything was fine, considering the fact that Benjamin Corey was breaking into a foreign biological laboratory; the next instant it was a disaster in the making, and Ben Corey went from reasonably relaxed to simply terrified. Within seconds of the overhead lights flashing on, flooding the entire floor with raw fluorescent light, a cold sweat rose on his forehead, his heart began pounding in his chest, and, of all things, the tips of his fingers became numb, a fight-or-flight symptom he’d never experienced previously. What was supposed to be a walk in the park, as described the previous evening in Tokyo by his Japanese Yakuza contact, was now threatening to be anything but. An elderly uniformed guard approached down the lab’s central corridor, his visored hat tipped back from his forehead, a flashlight held high in his right hand near the side of his head. As he advanced he swung both his head and the flashlight beam down the aisles between the rows of laboratory benches.
