After a few minutes, he stood upright again. Drawing a deep breath, he set his folders on the floor and with shaking fingers pulled one of two long, narrow manila collection envelopes from the breast pocket of his lab coat. He squeezed it open, reached into his side pocket and, using only two fingers, pulled the fork gingerly out of the bigger pocket and dropped the implement tines-first into the envelope. The fork was just a bit too long for him to seal the flap, so he had to leave it open as he dropped it back into the front side pocket.
When he returned to the corridor outside the dining hall, he ran into Gen Viascola coming out of the women’s room, the front of her white blouse wet and faintly stained with coffee. She glared at him. “Cameron, you are such a klutz! Don’t you
ever
pay attention to what you’re doing?”
He stared at her, the fork in its envelope seeming to quiver and bulge from his lab-coat pocket so that he was certain her gaze would be drawn to it any moment.
But it was not. And when he only stared at her blankly, she rolled her eyes and huffed exasperation. “Well, I’m glad I’ve run into you, anyway. We need to talk about Friday’s unity meeting.”
Relieved and feeling silly for his unwarranted paranoia, he couldn’t help but wonder why she’d not simply talked to him at the breakfast table. “You really think I’ll still be here Friday?” he asked quietly.
Her gaze shifted to someone walking past them in the corridor, and she stepped toward the wall, tugging him with her, out of the way. “Why would you not be? Do you have plans otherwise?”
“No. But if that resignation letter doesn’t show up soon, the police’ll come back. I hear Espinosa’s parents are pushing them to search the campus and surroundings for a grave.”
She tossed her hair, which she’ d worn down today in a tumble of loose red curls. “Parker would never allow that. Not without some shred of evidence there would be anything to find. And there isn’t.” She paused, then said, “Now, for Friday: I want to explore an issue that has been perplexing many of your co-workers of late—how you can be a working geneticist and yet hold to an archaic belief system that not only defies reason but rejects the foundational concepts of our discipline.”
Cam chuckled his incredulity. “Come on, Gen. You can’t really expect me to believe that my view of evolution is the curiosity of the day. Right now the only thing anyone wants to know is how I killed Manny and why.”
She shifted the shoulder strap of her large red bag and made a face. “Oh, come on. No one really believes Manny’s dead. We all know that sooner or later he’ll send that resignation letter—we’ve e-mailed, texted, and called him repeatedly. It’s not like he can ignore us forever.”
She spoke her assurances with such conviction, he wondered if she might not know the truth. If Swain really had kept the incident close as he’ d promised. Cam hadn’t seen any of the guards who’d been involved since Monday, either, and he’ d been looking. . . .
“Are you listening to me, Doctor?”
Gen’s words broke into his thoughts. “Yes, of course. You were speaking of Friday’s meeting.”
She frowned and smoothed a curl of red hair behind one ear. “Do you have
no
idea of the power I hold over your advancement in this institution, Cameron? Can you possibly be that obtuse?”
He blinked at her.
“Parker would’ve brought you into his Inner Circle months ago if not for me. Do you know why?”
Cam took her question as rhetorical, but when it seemed she’ d not go on unless he answered, he finally said, “No. I don’t.”
“Because I don’t think you’re worthy of us. Because I don’t trust you. Because to be one with us, your highest allegiance must be to Parker and to his vision, as ours is. He doesn’t take your religious beliefs seriously. I do. He thinks you’ll abandon them in the end. I think you’ll abandon us first.”
He said nothing, surprised by the depth and accuracy of her perception, but having no idea what to say.
“You see, I don’t think you can reconcile your views with the vision we have here,” she went on. “But Parker believes you should be given the opportunity to explain yourself, so I’m giving it to you.”
He cocked a brow at her, thinking surely she wasn’t serious.
“Come now,” she prodded. “Doesn’t your Bible command you to be ready to answer anyone who asks why you believe? Doesn’t it order you to witness to the atheist evolutionists all around you? Isn’t it your duty to warn us? To save us from our sinful ways?”
And now he saw that she was very serious, though not at all about understanding what he believed or why. This was not a chance for him to explain and be heard, but a chance for him to be humiliated. “Why not give me the podium one evening at dinner?” he asked dryly.
She snorted. “As much as you detest the limelight? No. We wanted to offer you the chance to explain yourself in a safe environment.”
Safe environment. Right.
She tilted her head at him. “You know, if I only wanted to humiliate you, I could’ve blindsided you with this Friday. But I didn’t.”
“Well, thank you for that.”
“You want to know why?” And this time, when he looked at her without response, she answered anyway. “Because I don’t think you have the guts to stand up in front of people and face me! Because when it comes down to the last hour, I think you’ll get another titration going and ‘forget’ to come. Again.”
“Maybe I should, given what you’ve told me.”
“Maybe you should indeed. If you do, you can give up any hope of ever sitting on the Circle with us.”
She shifted the shoulder strap of her bag again, then strode off, the click of her six-inch heels on the vinyl flooring echoing sharply in a corridor that finally stood empty.
He watched her go, chagrinned, though he had no idea what he could have done or said differently. When she’d disappeared around the corner, he stepped away from the wall and headed in the opposite direction, threading the maze of corridors and open spaces that would take him to the Madrona Lounge and the service elevator accessing the animal facility.
As he walked, he chewed on the implications of Gen’s challenge. He would have suspected it all her doing, except for the unmistakable marks of Swain’s hand in it. That quote from the Scriptures for one. The opportunity to speak of something so deeply important to him, for another, presented as if it would be something stimulating and pleasant when it would be anything but. Part of him
did
want to bow out. But the way she’d set him up, how could he? Besides, she was right about the command to be ready to give an answer, and if one of the reasons God had brought him here
was
to witness to these people, he could hardly bypass so obvious an opportunity to do so.
The elevator doors opened into the animal facility, and he stepped into the quiet, a now-familiar uneasiness washing over him. With Manny’s disappearance and the Institute’s continued failure to find a replacement, the task of caring for the animals had ironically fallen to Cam—likely also Gen’s doing—and every time he set foot on the floor, he wondered if Frogeater would be waiting for him.
The halls were empty, though, as was his small lab. With the door shut behind him, Cam laid the fork in its envelope atop a stack of similar envelopes, then set up a series of electrophoretic gels. On the last machine, he flipped an ancillary switch installed by one of Rudy’s team members. In two minutes it would start a video loop that would override the existing surveillance feed. The loop would run for half an hour before the normal feed resumed. In that interim, the janitor would come in to pick up the envelope.
Leaving his lab well before the two minutes was up, Cam headed for the prep room, where he washed his hands, then decided to go for broke and investigate the stairwell down which he’d chased Frogeater. He’ d been considering it as a diversion from events that would be taking place in his lab but feared jeopardizing his standing with Swain should he be caught. After Gen’s talk of how gutless he was, though, he felt the need to act in opposition to that label. Besides, the chance was great no one would even notice unless they were actively watching him 24/7. Normally places of infrequent use went unmonitored, the recording devices triggered by a motion detector, their stored images reviewed only in the event of some abnormal occurrence.
If Swain did call him on this, he figured he had a reasonably believable excuse for his curiosity and then he’ d know for sure the level of surveillance they had him under.
Entering the stairwell, he descended to the locked pump room door, where he was not surprised to find the thumb pad gone and an electrical socket installed in its place. The card-key reader remained, and he debated trying his master keycard but decided against it.
Overhead the fluorescent light flickered, pulling him from his thoughts. Realizing he’ d seen pretty much what he’ d come to see, he started back up the stairs. Behind him the light flickered again. It went out altogether as he rounded the first turn and started up the second flight of stairs, his way now lit by the landing light in front of the AnFac door. He picked up his pace, was rounding the third turn, when movement down between the railings in the darkness below caught his eye. He stopped to look more closely, but whatever it was had stopped, as well. Listening hard, he thought he heard the sough of someone breathing. Nape prickling, he started upward again, more rapidly.
Still the sense of another presence coming up the stairs behind ate at him. He started to sweat. The edges of his vision began to flicker. He quickened his pace yet again, rounded the fifth and final turn, and stepped into the full illumination of the landing light, the AnFac door still propped ajar as he’d left it. He continued upward . . .
And found himself striding across the barren, sunbaked yard of a dusty mud-and-rock-walled compound on the other side of the world. Rudy walked at his side as they followed a man wearing bone-colored robes and a rolled-wool Massoud hat, a trio of barking mongrels dancing at their heels in protest of their passage. A few dirty sheep huddled in the lee of the building ahead: a one-story, flat-roofed structure also made of mud and stone, with a raised porch on which sat several men in robes similar to those of their guide. Beyond the building and the compound walls loomed the barren, rocky slopes of the Hindu Kush, shearing skyward at a breathtaking angle. From this vantage he was too close to see the snowy peaks of Mt. Noshaq, the landmark that had served as the orientation point for the last five days of their journey.
Rudy took the lead as they followed the man up the stair and across the porch, where the others lounged in the sun, soaking up the heat that the thin, cold air could not hold. They watched the Americans with dark, hostile eyes glazed from drug use. “Christian devils” he heard one of them murmur in Farsi as their guide pushed open the wooden door.
Then he stepped after Rudy into the building’s warm, dark interior, rank with the stench of body odor, urine, and the smoke of opium. The robed men who lay there were hardly conscious, and though a few glazed eyes watched them pass through, none said a word. At the back of the room their guide led them into a narrow stone corridor, the beam of his flashlight probing the darkness ahead.
Soon the corridor opened into a small chamber, where together they descended numerous flights of concrete steps to a heavy, steel door. Their guide turned a key in the door’s ancient lock mechanism and pulled it open. As it swung back with a squeal, Cam gasped at the sense of another mind brushing his own, at the voices murmuring on the moving air, welcoming him, praising him, demanding he come
now
and free them.
“Where’s the girl?!”
one grated.
This one was so different from the others, so grating and loud it dissolved the images around him. He stood once more in the stairwell, midway up the final flight of stairs below the AnFac landing, his hand on the railing.
“I want the girl!” the voice rasped again from somewhere in the shadows below him.
Though distorted by the roughness, it was so sharply familiar, Cam’s heart nearly stopped in recognition.
“Does
he
have her?” the croak continued.
“Who are you?” Cam demanded.
“Does Father have her?”
“Who’s Father?” Cam turned to the speaker behind him but found no one there. Through the space between the railings, he glimpsed a flicker of movement along the bottom flight of stairs. The rattle of the pump room door closing told him not to bother giving chase. As the silence flowed back around him, he stood in shocked replay of what he’d heard.
The words still made no sense. But the voice had unquestionably belonged to Parker Swain.
On Thursday, Lacey arose before dawn, put on shorts, T-shirt, and walking shoes, and set out around the asphalt path that encircled the Kendall-Jakes campus. Since this was her third day of the new walking regimen, she trusted her intent this morning of waylaying Cameron Reinhardt on his way back from his run wouldn’t be totally obvious to anyone who might be watching.
With the sun still below the horizon, the morning air was cool enough to be comfortable, fresh with the smell of the damp grass. Birds chirped and twittered in the oak and mesquite trees around her, and on the quiet, deserted walkway—except for the two black-uniformed security guards patrolling some distance behind her—she relished the time to move and to reflect. She still couldn’t believe what they’d done to Cameron Reinhardt.
After three days of working like a maniac on her proposal, due this morning in Swain’s office at 10:30, she’ d deemed it close to where she wanted it to be and had broken her self-imposed exile to go down to the dining hall for dinner last night. There, for the first time, she’ d heard how the Sunday rumors of Cameron Reinhardt’s alleged Saturday night murder of Manuel Espinosa had blossomed into a suspicion strong enough that the police had come out to question him. Even now, though there was still no body, the fact that no resignation letter had yet arrived prompted talk of implementing an air search of the surrounding desert.