“Yes.” Viascola paused. “But I think you know that stress has a way of altering perceived reality. Starvation, fatigue, sleep deprivation, anxiety—all can induce hallucinations, foster paranoia, even blot out previous memories. . . .”
Frowning, Lacey clasped her fingers in her lap.
Blot out previous
memories?
For a moment she struggled to take a breath. Then she said, “You’re saying I’ve had this scar all along, I just forgot I had it?”
Viascola grimaced at the distress in Lacey’s voice. “Dear, I’m afraid I don’t just think so—your preadmission records clearly note it.”
“What?”
Lacey lurched forward in surprise, straining to see what Viascola was reading.
Dr. Viascola reversed the folder where it lay open on the desk between them and pushed it toward her, pointing out the pertinent line of text. It was as Viascola said—notation of a fine scar on her left inner forearm, one in a list of the many other scars she had on her body.
Viascola looked pained but sympathetic. “Please do not feel that I will think less of you because of this incident. As I said, I
do
understand. And it’s not unusual, as I’m sure you will soon find out. I want you to know that we consider ourselves one united organism here. A body, if you will. If one member hurts, we all hurt. So it is to our advantage to see that all members are well cared for—physically, mentally, and emotionally. Please know you can come to me with anything troubling you, and I will do my utmost to put it to right. Will you do that?”
After a moment of silence, Lacey nodded.
The smile returned. “Good. Now, you’re no doubt aware that Director Swain will be presenting his vision for our operation in the Institute’s Black Box Theater tomorrow night. I want you to attend. It will go a long way toward giving you the inspiration you need to survive here. It’s ticket-only entrance, so I’ll have one for you at this afternoon’s unity meeting.
“I also strongly urge you attend one of our stress-management workshops. I believe one’s coming up next Wednesday at lunch. We also have group meditation sessions in the Zen Garden every morning before breakfast. No need to sign up, and mats are available on-site. I think you will find both immensely helpful in your efforts to acclimate to the environment here.
“In fact, we’ll be experimenting with some of the techniques at today’s unity meeting, which will be focusing on stress management.” She smiled at Lacey’s surprise. “Yes, I changed it because of what happened to you last night, but only so you will know you are not alone in this. We have all struggled with the pressure here, and many continue to do so. We’d like to share with you some of the coping strategies we’ve discovered. Please, make sure you are present today.”
Lacey felt a twinge. Already she’ d lost so much time away from the autoclave with this appointment, she’ d planned to skip the unity meeting to make up for it. . . . But if Viascola had changed the agenda just for her, she couldn’t very well miss it.
“Of course, ma’am.”
Cam watched with chagrin as Lacey McHenry nearly ran over the maintenance man in her haste to escape. As she dodged around the elderly man and his cart and hurried away, Cam was already regretting the things he’d said to her and the inevitable reaction they’d caused. She’d taken him by surprise, barging into his office like that, and while he admired her chutzpah, he was also annoyed by it. And dismayed by how easily subterfuge and evasion had returned to him, despite his declaration in Swain’s ninth-floor office/museum that he would be entirely truthful with her should they meet again.
His reflections were cut short by the sudden intrusion of the maintenance man’s cart trundling through the open doorway of his cluttered office. As the man pulled his cart to a stop, Cam stood and came around his desk.
“Can I help you with something?” he asked.
“I’m here to fix the light, señor,” the man said, a strong accent making his speech difficult to decipher. He pointed upward at the pair of rectangular ceiling fixtures whose steady white glow illuminated Cam’s office.
Cam shook his head. “There must be some mistake. I didn’t call for maintenance. And as you can see, my lights are fine.” He thought the man looked an awful lot like the white-ponytailed night janitor who regularly cleaned his lab space in the animal facility but couldn’t be sure. The name stitched in red on the left breast pocket of the man’s niform said Juan, but he’ d never looked at the night janitor long enough or close enough to note his name.
“It’s right here on my list.” Juan pointed to his clipboard and read, “ ‘Fifth floor, Lab 500, room 501. Intermittent flickering.’ ”
“Well, none of my lights have been flickering.”
“None of them?” The man looked up at the ceiling fixtures. After a moment, Cam followed suit. As if deliberately giving the lie to Cam’s words, the tube closest to the door flickered.
Grimacing, Cam held up both hands. “I stand corrected. Go right ahead.”
“Si, señor.” Juan pulled a stepladder from the shelf on the bottom of his cart and set it up, almost knocking over a stack of binders in the process.
“You didn’t happen to be cleaning floors last night in the animal facility, did you?” Cam asked as he watched.
Juan turned from the stepladder and grinned at him. “Si, señor doctor. They called me in at one. For half day. A lot of things went out last night, so they’re needing many repairmen.”
A lot of things went out last night? Now, that was interesting. “What kind of things?”
“Oh, door locks, video feeds, electrical circuits.” He pulled open a drawer from the cart’s middle portion and withdrew a screwdriver.
“They know what caused it?”
“Some kind of power surge.” He climbed the stepladder and popped loose one end of the plastic cover on the ceiling fixture with the screwdriver, then shoved the latter into his back pants pocket.
Power surge?
A shiver zinged up Cam’s back as he recalled the gale-blown look of Poe’s lab. “It must have done a number if they’re having to pull in the janitors to do the electrical work.”
“Oh, I’ve been an electrician for twenty years. That’s what they hired me to do. I’m only in the animal facility because they can’t get anyone else.” He twisted the flickering tube, trying to work it free of the socket, and it went dark. “Because of the rumors.”
“There are rumors about the animal facility?” Cam asked in genuine surprise.
“Some say it is haunted by the young woman who disappeared. Others fear Chupacabra. . . .”
“Chupacabra?”
“He comes in the night and sucks the blood of his victims. . . .”
“A sort of Spanish vampire.”
“Not a vampire, señor.”
“Does he eat frogs, too?”
“Frogs? No. Chupacabra feeds mostly on cows and goats. They’ve found drained bodies in the hills around here the last few months. One lady even saw him.”
“Really?” Cam didn’t have to feign his interest. “What did he look like?”
“Tall, thin, green skin, long sharp teeth, big eyes. A bony ridge on the top of his head.”
“Sounds scary. But you’re not afraid of him?”
“They pay me double not to be.” Juan grinned at him, but something in the expression drove an inexplicable blade of shock into Cam’s heart. For a moment he was certain he knew the man from somewhere else.
Juan turned back to the fixture, changing his position as he twisted the bulb and inadvertently brushing his shoulder and elbow against the dangling plastic cover. It swayed alarmingly back and forth for a moment, then twisted free and fell to the floor with a crash. Cam leapt back out of its way as the old man swiped forward with his arms trying to catch it. He only succeeded in toppling off his stepladder, which went flying in the opposite direction.
Juan fell into several three-foot stacks of manila folders stuffed with documents, sending them spilling across the floor under his cart and up against the bookshelf, which was surrounded by stacks of books and boxes.
Cam hurried to his side, concerned he had injured himself, but the man seemed more embarrassed than anything and brushed off Cam’s inquiries gruffly. Then seeing the stacks of folders he’ d disrupted, he apologized profusely and would have dropped to his knees to begin gathering them had Cam not stopped him.
“I’ll take care of them.”
“But, señor, it is my fault—”
“Or perhaps I distracted you from your work with my questions,” Cam suggested with a smile. “In any case, they’re my files, and Institute policy dictates I alone can handle them. You just take care of the light.” He picked up several documents and inserted them into their correct folder, wondering if clumsiness rather than widespread fears of Chupacabra was the real reason Juan was mopping floors in the animal facility.
“Of course, señor.”
The old man righted his ladder, then picked up the plastic light cover, now broken into three pieces. Tossing them into the plastic trash bag hanging from the end of his cart, he pulled out a dustpan and whisk broom and knelt to sweep up the smaller pieces. By the time he was done, Cam had collected all the folders. Rather than stay in the line of fire, he stacked the folders hit or miss and retreated to the relative safety of his desk, hoping the fellow could complete his task without further mishap and leave.
He did however keep an eye on him, as much out of a sense of self-preservation as from the nagging sense of familiarity the man provoked in him. Had he actually seen Juan somewhere besides in his adjunct lab, or did he simply remind Cam of someone else? A former co-worker or student? A long-forgotten friend? A movie star? Some political figure?
He groped after the memory, but it continued to elude him as Juan resumed his attempts to remove the faulty bulb. It came loose quickly this time, and he set it in his cart, then picked up a long, narrow cardboard box with a drawing of a fluorescent light tube on it. A sprig of fresh green cottonwood leaves sprouted from one end. How that had gotten stuck in the fluorescent tube box, Cam could only imagine, but it did not speak well for Juan’s cart-manipulating skills.
Too distracted to concentrate on his work, Cam checked his e-mail. There were two from Gen. The first was a departmental reminder of today’s 5:00 unity meeting to be held in the Desert Vista room on the third floor. It included the revised agenda, whose title, “Stress Management,” made him grimace. Her second e-mail was a private missive requesting he make sure he was present at that meeting today—he’ d missed the last three—and reminding him of the importance of bonding among team members.
The weekly unity meetings were one of the eccentricities of working at Kendall-Jakes. Devised by Director Swain to promote unity and cooperation, they were not explicitly mandatory, but nonattendance was frowned upon. They provided team members the opportunity to get to know one another outside the work environment, to play games, and have discussions both weighty and light. Once, they’d been called upon to cite five random things about themselves, four items of which had to be of a different category than anything anyone had said before you. Another time they’d shared the worst day of their lives, which for many of them was shortly after having arrived at Kendall-Jakes.
Cam had always felt they did more to undermine unity than promote it and, especially for those in upper management, were more a reminder of Swain’s power than anything else.
He could hardly fault Gen for her frontal approach, but given his mental and emotional state today, the last thing he wanted to do was participate in one of their touchy-feely, reveal all and embarrass everyone, psychobabble meetings. He wished he’d never opened the e-mail, because now if he missed, it would be in direct violation of a superior’s order.
“Señor?”
Cam looked up into Juan’s swarthy, wrinkled face, framed with a halo of frizzy white hairs come loose of the ponytail. He stood before Cam’s desk, his face clearly illuminated in the light of the overhead fluorescents, its familiar cast so compelling Cam could hardly stand it.
Where have I seen you before, Juan?
He was on the verge of voicing the question when he realized Juan was speaking.
“ . . . must have slid under my cart to the other side where you didn’t see them.” He waggled the manila folders in his calloused hands, then laid them on Cam’s desk. “I just shoved everything together without looking, so maybe you’ll want to go through and make sure everything’s right.”
Cam stared up at him, something in the voice finally triggering the door to his lost memory:
He looks like Rudy!
Lieutenant Rudolpho Aguilar was the man who’d led a twenty-one-year-old new Army Ranger to Christ deep in the heart of Afghanistan. The two of them had worked together for almost six years, and Cam had come to trust him as he had no one else.
Until that final mission.
“Señor?”
“Oh. Yes,” Cam replied belatedly to his question. “Yes, I’ll go through them.”
The maintenance man gave him a nod, then pushed his cart out of the office, heading left at the door and on toward the eastern exit.
Cam sat unmoving, transfixed by his realization. The man wasn’t Rudy, of course. He couldn’t be Rudy. Juan was easily in his sixties, whereas Rudy Aguilar would only be in his late forties now, his hair no doubt as raven black as ever. Besides, what would Rudy be doing at Kendall-Jakes working as a janitor-electrician?
A suggestion floated through his mind, but he rejected it soundly and, laughing off the resemblance as an oddity, counted the mystery solved.
But as the afternoon passed he found himself repeatedly contemplating the possibility that the janitor-electrician might actually
be
Rudy, despite the wrinkles, white ponytail, and mustache. Lieutenant Aguilar had, after all, been a specialist in covert operations. Colleagues even hinted his true employer was the CIA. If so, it was entirely possible he was in disguise.
Swain himself had mentioned the suspicion among some of the Inner Circle that one of their employees was a spy—the inside hack job on the Developmental Bio computers, the encrypted transmissions they’d intercepted . . .