Cam stared at him, struggling to believe he was serious.
Slattery stood up, Nevins punched in the code to open the door, and the two men departed, leaving Cam alone with whomever was on the other side of the glass.
He sat rigidly, fighting down the incipient panic with long, slow breaths. Of course, that was Slattery’s intent. They didn’t have a case. Their surveillance records were admittedly compromised, unreliable.
If the intruder had been able to disrupt transmission, who knows what else he was able to do? Slattery might pretend to believe Cam was guilty of murdering Manny, but Cam was nearly certain he knew the truth. Probably knew exactly who the intruder was and was covering, as he had been covering from the beginning.
The question was, what was he covering? And why?
Presently Captain Jablonsky returned to escort Cam through a maze of corridors to a small elevator lobby. Jablonsky swiped his card through the adjacent slot, opening the elevator’s doors. Cam entered the wood-paneled car alone. The doors closed and the car lifted, gathering speed quickly. Cam barely had time to realize that there were no observable internal controls, when the elevator slowed and came to a gentle stop.
As he stepped out into another small, shadowed lobby, he realized he’d just ridden the director’s private express elevator.
An unlit paneled corridor led him past several closed doors to one that stood open, light gleaming off its polished wooden surfaces, inviting him into a modest-sized meeting room with a long window along its outer wall. It was furnished with several overstuffed chairs ranged in a U-shape around a low rectangular table. A huge abstract painting of a stern-faced Native American warrior swathed in a robe of watery colors hung on the wall at the end of the table, lit by a recessed ceiling lamp.
Other Native American art forms graced the adjacent walls—flat baskets, black pottery plates, war hammers. A tall cabinet of roughhewn mesquite hulked on the wall opposite the painting. Swain himself, as before, stood at the window, awaiting the arrival of his guest. As Cameron drew up beside him, he did not speak nor glance aside, but continued staring at the quiet campus and the bright stars overhead. The low light of the various table lamps scattered about the room cast enough illumination that Cam could clearly see the director’s face, which was calm and placid.
Below them the Institute’s inner park lay in a well of darkness scattered with pools of warm light from the security lamps. Above, the dark bulk of the Santa Catalinas loomed beneath a vast star-spangled sky in which Cam easily picked out the three-star belt of Orion hanging directly over the mountains.
“They tell me you claim not to be the murderer,” Swain said, “but to have chased him down a stairway.”
Cam eyed him, certain Swain had seen the interview himself, if not from the other side of the one-way glass, then from monitors in the room.
“I chased him right up to a door he went through easily, but to which I was denied access.”
“So of course you couldn’t capture him. A convenient excuse.” He paused. “Do you think you could have held him had you caught up with him?”
“I knew the guards were behind me.”
Swain turned to look at him, eyes piercing, expression inscrutable. Then he stepped from the window and gestured toward the chairs and table. “Please, sit down. I’ve something to show you.”
As Cam went to the chairs, Swain strode to the mesquite cabinet and opened its doors to reveal shelves of liquor in exotic bottles. He pulled a squat-bellied red one from his collection and set it on a tray, added two small glasses, a silver bowl of some sort of crackers, and what appeared to be a remote. Closing the doors with a faint snick, he brought the tray to the table, then sat in the chair at the table’s end, kitty-corner to the seat Cam had chosen. “I suppose your theory is that he found his way in through one of the service access ports,” he said, using a napkin to pull the glass stopper out of the liquor bottle.
“Why would he need to do that when he has security clearance beyond mine?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say he has that.” He poured deep amber liquid into one of the glasses, then glanced up. “Brandy?”
“No, thank you,” Cameron told him.
He smiled. “I knew you’d say that.” He set the carafe back on the tray, replaced the stopper, then picked up his drink and settled back in the chair. “The door you reference leads only to one of the physical plant floors—electrical tunnels, drains, fans, vents, that sort of thing. Your card isn’t coded for that floor because you’re not one of our maintenance personnel. Coding is always on a need-to-access basis.”
“So this man has a keycard that admits him to the animal facility and to the physical plant.”
Swain shrugged. “It’s your story, Cameron.”
“It is not a story. It’s the truth. There was a thumb-pad device by the door. Why would that be on a stairwell entrance to the physical plant?”
“A thumb-pad device?”
“I jammed my thumb into it.”
“Most likely some sort of electrical housing. You’re lucky you didn’t get electrocuted. . . .” He smiled and sipped his drink, watching Cameron sharply.
After a moment he said, “Actually, I do believe you.”
“You know who he is, then.”
“Not specifically, no. None of our cameras has yet been able to capture his image. What we’re trying to understand here is why he’s suddenly resorted to murder. As you must have guessed, professional technology thieves do not develop sudden, irrational crushes on random lab technicians they happen to run into.”
“You think the messages on the walls are meaningless, then?”
“Diversions, yes.”
“That still doesn’t explain why he’d resort to murder.”
“Manny must have seen him doing something compromising.”
“The audio tape certainly doesn’t indicate that.”
Swain cocked a brow at him. “So then, what? You think he’s a lovesick vandal?”
“I do think he’s sick. He certainly didn’t look well.”
Swain went suddenly still and alert. “You mean, ill? Like sweating, chills . . .”
“Flushed, dripping sweat, rank odor, wheezing . . .” He fell silent as it occurred to him that one of the symptoms of genetic therapy gone awry was the sudden onset of flulike symptoms. Fever, body aches, vomiting, diarrhea. . . . He looked at Swain in horror. By all that’s holy, Director, what have you done?
Swain shook free of his paralysis. “Well, I guess we can find that out once we capture him.”
“Capture him? Don’t you think you should wait until the police get here? I mean, you’re going to mess up evidence, and they may have this guy’s profile in their database.”
Swain regarded him steadily. “You know what I think about calling the police, son. We’ve already had this discussion.”
“That was when the subject was a relatively harmless vandalism. This is murder.”
“The police aren’t going to do anything we can’t. And they’d bring those jackal reporters. Then we’d have another Andrea Stopping mess on our hands, and—”
“But it’s murder.”
“Indeed it is. Which means you, of all people, do not want the police here.”
“What?”
“Think it through, son. . . . Who will be their most likely suspect?”
A chill crawled up Cam’s spine as he stared at the other man. “I didn’t do it, sir. And you just said you believed me.”
“I do, but given the available evidence, it appears as if you are guilty. You had motive and opportunity. We have all the records of your many arguments with Manuel Espinosa, which they would request and we would have to supply them with.” He paused. “I’m sure you can imagine what the reporters would do with that: the white German star scientist versus the poor minority student.”
“Manny was as much a star as I am, and you well know he wasn’t remotely poverty-stricken.” His parents owned a vast ranch in Argentina.
“Furthermore, I’m not German—I’m American!”
“Your name is all they’d need.” Swain hesitated. “Then, of course, they’d uncover your military background—your knowledge of how to penetrate a facility like this, short-circuit cameras, even provide false visuals. Not to mention your mental health issues.”
Cam stared at him, cold to the core. How can he know I have that knowledge? That information is classified. But then, so was the matter of his “mental health issues” which both Swain and Gen apparently knew about. Which meant Swain somehow had access to government files, even those the government had supposedly destroyed. And he wanted Cam to know it. . . .
His coming up here alone, the lack of guards, the relaxed meeting with Swain had eased somewhat the sense of being regarded as a criminal that he’ d experienced when escorted handcuffed into the lower security level. Stepping into the familiar meeting room, eerie as it was in the semidarkness, had implied that he was an equal—valued, free, and innocent. And that was exactly what Swain had intended, he realized now. To relax him, then drive in this knifepoint of potential disaster.
Swain smiled. “Still think we should call the police?”
“But you have his body. You can’t just dump it somewhere in the desert and hope no one will find it.”
Swain sipped his brandy. “We do have on-site facilities for taking care of the dead, you know.”
The Vault. He meant to put him in the Vault. There were over two hundred bodies frozen in their cryogenic canisters, four to each canister. To demand an inspection would be like opening a score of graves at the local cemetery.
“You can’t just make him disappear.”
Swain shrugged. “He was distraught. He took a hike into the mountains. The terrain is treacherous there. People get lost all the time. Most are never found.”
Cameron shivered. This was the story of Andrea Stopping.
“On the other hand, many here will testify that Manuel was an irresponsible person, egotistical and easily angered. No one would be surprised if, in a fit of pique over his unjustified—in his eyes—demotion he might decide to simply walk away. It would be an easy matter to hitch a ride back to Tucson.”
Cam swallowed the nausea crawling up the back of his throat.
“We’ve deliberately restricted knowledge of this incident to a handful of people,” Swain went on. “You, myself, Frederick, Paul Nevins, and the three men who arrested you are the only ones who know. The guards know only what you claimed and they saw, which unfortunately is significant enough to create a security risk for us, so we’ll be sending them off to our South American facility before week’s end.”
Swain finished off the rest of his brandy, set the glass on the tray, then raised his eyes to meet Cam’s. “Thus we can leave things . . . for as long as you like.”
Cam could hardly breathe, Swain’s cobralike gaze holding him spellbound—horrified, helpless, waiting for the fatal strike. At length, when it did not come, Cam swallowed and pulled his eyes away, staring out at the three stars of Orion’s belt lowering now behind the mountains. Other stars, brighter than those in the dark sky swam across his vision.
“There is another bit from our surveillance videos you should see,” Swain said, picking up the remote off the tray. He pressed a button and the painting of the Indian warrior rotated clockwise to horizontal aspect and became a flat-screen monitor.
He pressed the remote again, and the screen lit with a frozen, fuzzy night shot of a loading dock dimly lit by a light source offscreen to the right. As they watched, one of the campus’s service carts appeared out of the shadows and backed up to the dock. The driver had Cam’s build and wore a baseball cap, sweatshirt, and jeans very much like ones Cam owned. His face obscured by shadows, the man leapt onto the dock and disappeared through the door. Shortly he returned with a gurney, which he collapsed at the dock’s edge. Then he stepped into the back of his cart and wrestled what appeared to be a corpse wrapped in black plastic onto the gurney’s bed, then extended the stretcher’s legs and wheeled it into the Vault.
“Records, of course, will indicate which canister went online tonight,” Swain said.
Cam sagged back into the chair, swallowed hard, and finally said, “What do you want from me?”
“I want your mind, son. I want your heart and soul and strength.” He smiled at Cam’s shocked expression and shook his head. “I just want your loyalty, Cameron. I want you to believe me when I say I have your very best interests at heart and trust that I know what I’m doing. And I want you to share my vision.”
Cam could only stare at him, drowning in the depths of sudden disaster.
Finally, Swain sighed wearily and said, “Never mind. For now just go on with your plans. Head in to Tucson tomorrow. Have your day off. If you can make the security meeting, do so.” He paused. “Just make sure you do come back.”
He led Cam back to the elevator then and, as the doors opened, clapped his shoulder with a warmth that seemed utterly inappropriate. “We’re in this mess together, Cameron, but your part is by far the most precarious. I know you didn’t kill him, but my loyalty and heartfelt endorsement of your character will not go far in a court of law. Especially when they bring out the circumstances of your military discharge. . . .”
He gave Cam a quick smile, then pressed him into the car. “It’s late. You should get some sleep. It’ll all seem better in the morning, I promise.”
Cam stood in the car, facing his superior as the doors closed between them. He put a hand to the railing as once more the floor dropped sickeningly beneath his feet, almost like his life was doing right now. And he was certain that not much of anything would be better in the morning.
Chapter Twenty
At 5:00 a.m. on Sunday, Cam checked out at the reception desk in the ziggurat’s high-ceilinged main lobby, then headed down to the underground parking garage northeast of the building. It was earlier than he usually left, but despite a second night of getting to bed around 3:00, he’d found himself unable to sleep.
There was something deeply disturbing in knowing he was being framed for murder. It was the sort of thing that happened to other people—most of them on TV crime dramas—not to him. Especially not the “him” of today, the mild-mannered, absentminded but respected geneticist with several important papers published in the better journals and winner of more than one research award. Memory of his interview with Swain in that cozy theater room beneath the gaze of the stern-faced Indian seemed as much a part of some bad dream as his race through the Afghan tunnels. And yet, like the tunnels, the theater room was real, and both the race and the interview had happened.
This early on a Sunday morning, the garage was tomb-silent. His footsteps echoed eerily around him as he strode down the concrete ramp past shadowed rows of parked cars. The back of his neck prickled with the sense of being watched. And not just by security cameras, but by actual human eyes.
Despite his efforts to appear relaxed, he found his pace quickening, especially when he spied his red Jeep Cherokee in the line of cars on his right. He reached it without incident, opened the door, tossed his duffle and laptop onto the passenger seat, and got in. And immediately hit the door-lock switch.
Then he sat there, staring at the concrete wall beyond the Jeep’s hood, breathing deeply as his stomach churned and his hands trembled and lights flared across his vision with such brightness he thought he might pass out. Or fall into another flashback.
But he did neither, and the anxiety passed. When he was himself again, he unzipped the external pocket on his duffle, pulled out his iPod, hooked it to his belt, and put on the earphones. Then he switched on the ignition, fastened his seat belt, and put the Jeep in reverse. As he backed out of his parking space and headed up the ramp toward the ground-level exit, still several turns above him, his rearview mirror showed a figure standing in the lane behind him, watching him go.
So apparently his paranoia wasn’t as baseless as he’d thought. Swain had implied Cam woul
d be watched today, and Cam did not doubt for a moment that the RFID adhered to his windshield not only lifted the parking garage gates from his path but transmitted the exact location of his vehicle to that high-tech security center hidden in the ziggurat’s bowels. But with all of that, the fact they’d set an eyes-on tail after him, too, gave it all a greater reality. And confirmed his fears that Swain did indeed suspect he might bolt.
Thus, as he drove out the garage’s exit and onto the divided two-lane road that led out to Highway 92, he was not surprised to see a blue sedan slowly emerge from the parking garage in his wake.
He kept his speed moderate, noting the sedan pull out onto the blacktop behind him. It was a Honda Accord, and it matched his speed, keeping the distance between them constant. The curving blacktop rolled up and down over the hilly terrain, beneath a cloudless sky washed with the rose of the coming dawn.
It took Cam about five minutes to reach the curving stonework walls of the Institute’s main gate. He waited a bit at the stop sign, hoping his tail might pull up behind him so he could get a look at the driver, but when the car didn’t appear, he gave up and turned onto the highway, heading west. Only as he crested the first hill did one last glance in the rearview mirror show the Honda pulling up to the same stop sign. Cam was over the hill and out of sight before he saw which way it turned, but it didn’t matter. If the car was following him, he’d see it soon enough.
And so he did, not five minutes later, the Accord hanging back enough to be frequently obscured by the road’s dips and turns. Just for fun, one time when he had the tailing car in sight, he suddenly sped up as he went over a hill, hoping to trick the driver into thinking he was making a break for it. Instead he slowed on the downslope, so that he was going about half his original pace when he started up the next hill, a long, straight ascent that would keep the two of them in sight of each other for some time.
The Enclave Page 20