by Kira Peikoff
He pushed himself up to his hands, twisting his cramped neck from side to side. His stomach was growling, his bladder straining, his head pounding. He really needed to go home, even though Cylon might slow down without him there, and they couldn’t afford to lose a minute, not with those crazy scientists running loose—
“Sixty-seven dot fifty-four dot one four four dot zero,” Cylon announced.
It took Les a second to recognize the format—but then he sucked in a breath. It was an IP address.
“You did it?”
“Yep. Haven’t slept in two days.”
“Amazing. You’re a master.”
“I know.”
“So where is this place?”
Cylon squinted at the screen, reading out the latitude: “Thirty-six dot—”
“In plain English, for God’s sake!”
“Pueblo Peak Mountain, New Mexico.” He expanded the satellite map and tilted the screen toward Les. “Looks like it’s in Indian country, tucked behind some casino.”
Multiple to-do tasks barreled through Les’s mind at once. Notify Pinter and the FBI and the President, deploy a local SWAT team, prep a jet and a helicopter for immediate transportation, direct his staff to hold the media at bay until the operation was complete, dispatch the rest of the committee, including Benjamin Barrow . . . In spite of their annoying rivalry, Barrow was the other person who wanted this just as badly, so he deserved to be the first to know—and the first to acknowledge Les’s triumph.
He dialed his partner, his hands trembling with excitement. After two rings, Barrow answered in a clipped tone.
“Is it important? I’m rushing into a meeting—”
“Drop everything. We’re going to New Mexico. I found the compound.”
CHAPTER 39
If Zoe ever saw Gramps again, she wanted to set the record straight. She owed him an apology that was seven years overdue. He’d never asked for one, but she’d hurt him once, during a vulnerable time in his life. Apparently he was better at forgiving her than she was at forgiving herself, because the niggling guilt had stayed with her. Now she realized that if you didn’t say what needed to be said at the time, who knew if you would ever get another chance?
It happened when she was fourteen—really fourteen, the summer after eighth grade—during a family vacation, an Alaskan cruise. Her mom had billed it as a fun getaway for them all, but Zoe hated the cold and knew the trip was also not enjoyable for Gramps, who was fighting a losing battle with grief over his late wife. On the ship, her parents turned in early every night, leaving her to find entertainment. She was too young to be accepted by the cliquey teenagers and too old to play with the kids. So she and Gramps, the two night owls, were stuck with each other.
She learned that playing gin rummy on the deck with a cigar-puffing old man was not the way to impress the teens she yearned to join. To this day, she cringed when she recalled how she had rolled her eyes at his jokes when they passed by, even though his lighthearted manner must have taken monumental effort. That whole trip she blamed age for her predicament—he was too old to be cool, she wasn’t old enough—and not her own misplaced priorities.
But now, thanks to Natalie and Theo and Galileo, she knew better. Age was never the problem. She didn’t need a drug to make her the adult she wanted to be.
All she’d ever needed was perspective.
The things that mattered had nothing to do with whether you were fourteen or eighty-four. A number couldn’t reveal how independent your mind, how empathic your soul, how deep your love. No wonder soul mates didn’t ask for ID. To judge others on age was to be more shallow than a paper cut. To judge her own value that way was to ignore herself as she had once ignored Gramps. She was too old to make that mistake again.
Even if she still looked like half a woman, inside she felt for the first time more whole than she had ever been. If only she had another week with him to share what she had learned. Wasn’t it what he had been trying to tell her all along?
She needed to find him here and now in the only way she could—on the page. So what if no one could deliver her letters? She would write another one, and the words would summon a meeting of their spirits, even if only in her mind.
She was fishing around for paper and a pen when a voice burst through the intercom into her room:
“Everyone report to the quad immediately. This is not a drill. I repeat, immediately.”
She stiffened, recognizing the throaty bass of Ted, the tech guy. He sounded terrified. Through the window, she could see people streaming outside, emerging from the underground laboratories, the cafeteria, the hospital, gravitating to the quad like iron filings to a magnet.
Someone pounded on her door. She dashed to open it. Theo was standing there, wearing black running shorts, a sweaty shirt, and gym shoes. With a no-nonsense look, he grabbed her hand and pulled her outside.
“Come on!”
“What’s happening?”
“No idea.”
He ran without letting go of her hand. She sprinted to keep up, running down the hallway and turning the corner a step behind him. Outside in the quad, several dozen people were gathered in a tight cluster of white coats in front of Ted, who was standing on a bench and motioning to the remaining stragglers to hurry.
Natalie called to Theo and they rushed over to her, pushing through the buzzing crowd. She embraced each of them, her face pale and drawn.
“What if something happened to Galileo?”
“No,” Theo said. “I’m sure that’s not it.”
“Why hasn’t he come back? It’s been weeks.”
“We’d hear about it,” Zoe reassured her. “It would be in the news.”
“Maybe not right away.”
A blanket of silence descended over the crowd. They looked up at Ted. He was holding his palms out to summon everyone’s attention. Despite the warmth of the afternoon breeze, Zoe found herself shivering.
“There’s been a major breach,” he announced. “Our server was hacked. The feds are on their way. We have to evacuate, Galileo’s orders.”
A ripple of panicked gasps tore through the crowd. Zoe tried to repeat the words in her head to comprehend them, but they didn’t make sense.
“Is he in trouble?” Natalie shouted.
“He’s not, but we are. Any minute we could be facing a SWAT team. Everyone follow me through the evacuation tunnel in the Brain. The RVs are waiting for us on the other end to take us to safe houses. Forget your things, we go now.”
“What about the hospital patients?” a doctor called out. “How can we bring them, if they’re attached to oxygen machines—?”
“It’s safer for them to stay. They’ll be found and transferred to other hospitals. They’re not the perps here. All of us are.”
He hopped off the bench, ran toward the Brain, and disappeared into the building. Everyone else lost no time stampeding after him. Order devolved faster than Zoe could believe, with the bustling mob of white coats swallowing her into its frantic center and dragging her ahead. Somewhere along the way she was forced to let go of Theo, but fighting her way backward was like trying to oppose a blizzard.
“Just go!” he shouted at her, falling behind.
Zoe saw Natalie back there with him, so at least they were together. They didn’t need her to wait. She let the tide steer her into the building and up the three narrow flights of stairs to the Brain, trying to ward off the elbows and knees flying near her face. She made it to the packed control room without injury. At the edge of the room was a wooden floorboard that had been moved aside to reveal the evacuation tunnel. At its mouth, which led underground via a steep metal ladder, a bottleneck of people had formed. Only one person at a time could climb down, as the rest of the anxious group shouted to hurry.
Zoe glanced behind her, where more people were pushing their way into the small room, and felt the rising tide of claustrophobia choke her. There was no way out, except into the bowels of the earth. She marched up t
o the front of the frenzied line, where Helen had one foot on the first rung. Helen, whom she thought of as a friend.
“Let me go!” she pleaded. “I’ll be quick.”
Helen took one look at her desperation and moved aside. “Go, dear. Careful now.”
She hopped onto the ladder and climbed down, as the air around her grew colder and the light dimmed. The dank muddy scent of earth filled her nostrils. Far below, she could hear the voices of those who had gone first, echoing off the walls and fading away. Around fifty steps down, she hit solid ground and followed the sound of the voices. Though just as dark, this tunnel was wider than the other one that led to the casino. Several people could walk here side by side. Soon, she thought, Theo and Natalie would reach her and they could head together to safety.
Any second they would be coming up behind her if she stopped to wait. She thought of Les Mahler and shuddered, but no one bad was going to find her now that she was hidden. Just then Helen came barreling past her, followed by a blur of other researchers who were difficult to identify in the darkness.
She leaned against the cold wall and waited. People rushed past, one white coat after the next.
Every time she sensed a tall figure coming toward her, she shouted Theo’s name, but no one slowed down. The crush coming down the ladder thinned. If anyone noticed her, no one cared enough to stop.
She heard a thump far above, like something slamming. She traced her steps back to the base of the ladder and looked up. The circular hole of light marking the entrance to the tunnel was gone. The wooden floorboard had been replaced over the opening, apparently by the person who was currently climbing down the ladder. When he neared, carrying a flashlight, she recognized him as one of the hospital doctors she knew only by sight. It took another thirty seconds for him to reach her at the bottom.
“What was that?” she demanded, as he hopped onto the ground beside her.
“That’s it,” he said. “No one was behind me.”
He started to run past her but she grabbed his sleeve.
“There’s still two people left! Natalie and Theo, didn’t you see them?”
“Natalie.” He said her name with a shake of his head. “She ran back to the lab. We can’t leave the tunnel wide open while she messes around.”
“What about Theo?”
“Not my problem. The rest of us have to get out of here!”
He shook her off and jogged ahead, then stopped and turned around.
“Hey, aren’t you coming?”
She was already scrambling back up the ladder, fighting past the burn in her thighs as she climbed ten rungs, twenty, thirty. When she reached the top, she pushed hard against the wooden board and nudged it aside long enough to haul her body through the opening. She swayed as she stood up, seized with a rumbling in her bones. But it wasn’t just her. The windows were rumbling, too.
That was when she saw the grass down below in the quad lay flat, as though in surrender to the massive black shadow cast across it.
A helicopter was landing.
PART 4
A . . . mortal danger is contained in the now
popular notion that a person has a right over his
body, a right that allows him to do whatever he
wants to it or with it.
—LEON KASS, Chairman of the President’s
Council on Bioethics, 2001–2005
CHAPTER 40
“Mom!” Theo screamed. “Where are you going?” “Just go without me!” she yelled, running too fast to look back. The brisk air whipped at her face as she broke away from the mob of her colleagues charging toward the Brain. Adjacent to its windowed control tower loomed the adobe walls of the lab building, where her life’s work lay trapped.
“Stop!” he called, his voice getting closer. “Mom!”
The door to the lab was a yard away.
His footsteps pattered to a stop behind her. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
She whirled around and stared up into the face of the man who was her son.
“Just go. I’ll catch up with you.”
He lunged to grasp her arm, but didn’t anticipate her reflexes. She plowed ahead before he could touch her, pushing through the door she had entered a thousand times and never would again. For a split second, the abrupt silence was almost disorienting. The emergency seemed unreal, distant—but then he was storming in after her and she was racing down three flights to the precious room nestled in the back where the secret to aging lay captive.
The steps rippled under her feet so quickly that she barely noticed when her sandals slipped off and she was flying down the stairs barefoot, then jogging over the cold floor to the last room on the left. She arrived disheveled, panting, to find the lab in a deceptively normal state, the way she had left it before the intercom announcement. The computer monitors were lit, the mice sleeping, the microscopes on, the centrifuges spinning. Somewhere, on one of the shelves or in a supply cabinet, she knew there was an external hard drive. The team was supposed to be backing up onto it nightly but had gotten complacent, and now she couldn’t remember who had used it last or where it was. All she had to do was find it, plug it into her computer, and load up the data. Without it, the biggest breakthrough of her lifetime would be lost—seized by the feds and relegated to some gloomy evidence room, forever buried under a mountain of bureaucracy.
She bolted to the supply cabinet and flung it open as Theo rushed in, his face red with fury.
“I can’t believe you! Everyone else is gone!”
“Please, go with them,” she begged, flinging pipettes and petri dishes and slides to the floor. Where was the damn drive?
“No.”
“Don’t be a hero, just get out of here—”
“I’m not leaving you!”
She rummaged in the back of the cabinet, feeling nothing but empty space.
“Fine. I’m not going anywhere until I find our hard drive, so you might as well help me look.”
He brushed past her to open a nearby closet of textbooks and files. “This is crazy. Do you really want to go back to jail over a science project?”
“Would I leave you trapped under the rubble?” She ducked her head into a drawer. “Don’t argue, just look!”
He slammed the closet. “It’s not in here. We really don’t have time for this.”
“Keep looking!”
The discarded contents of shelves, drawers, cabinets, and closets piled around their feet as they rushed to excavate every nook and cranny, to no avail. She was about to unbolt her computer itself from the counter when, behind the monitor, she felt a hunk of rectangular plastic and let out a cry of joy.
He rushed to her side. “You found it?”
“Yeah, someone must’ve put it there so we wouldn’t lose it.”
She swiftly located the USB jack and plugged it in. The drive’s icon popped up on the screen and she dragged over a massive folder that read “Syndrome X.” It contained every piece of knowledge from the experiments, from Zoe’s fully sequenced DNA and the chromosomal analysis of the master regulator gene to the chemical makeup of the knockouts and the day-to-day records of the ageless mice. The data was priceless—and impossible to re-create from memory.
A blue bar indicated the progress of the file transfer: 15 percent, 18 percent, 20 percent.
“Come on,” Natalie muttered. “Go, go, go.”
Theo paced, kicking around the debris on the floor—a box of rubber gloves, a spilled tub of mice food pellets, a brick-sized textbook.
“Almost thirty percent,” she said.
He stopped and frowned.
“It’s going fast,” she added. “Relax.”
“Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“That noise.”
They hurried to the doorway and peered into the hall. Though they couldn’t see anyone, there was no mistaking the heavy thud of footsteps coming down the stairs. Many footsteps.
Her breath caught i
n her throat. “Maybe they didn’t want to leave us behind?”
He blinked at her. “Everyone?”
She looked around, but they were at the end of the hallway, with no escape.
“Hide!” she whispered, running to the empty supply closet that stood against the wall opposite the door. It was just large enough to fit one of them, so she shoved him inside and slammed it shut.
There was nowhere else to go. The footsteps pounded in the hall, thundering like a pack of stampeding bulls. She knew she was about to be trampled. Her brain throbbed. Should she give up, or play dead, or try to fight?
The computer gave a cheerful ding. The file transfer was complete.
She leaped toward it as a barrage of voices reached the doorway and shouted at her to freeze. Inches from the drive, she stopped short. It was over. She closed her eyes, afraid to find out what she was up against. Her last fleeting thought was of Galileo—and how he had failed her.
She turned and opened her eyes.
Six masked men in bulletproof vests and combat boots stood facing her with their assault rifles cocked.
CHAPTER 41
The minute their helicopter landed, Les and Benjamin Barrow were ushered by an agent from the SWAT team across a strangely quiet courtyard into a stout beige building and down three flights to a room at the end of a hallway. Every step in this illicit place felt to Les like encroaching upon a spider’s nest. His skin crawled with exhilarated disgust, his muscles twitched, his pupils dilated. He yearned to slow down and inspect the web, untangle its intricacy, fumigate its crevices, but a couple of instant snags demanded their attention.
“A young man and a woman,” the agent informed them. “Neither will talk.”
Maybe not to you, Les thought. But he would grind down the captives until they pointed to the spider himself—and the little girl who was his most dangerous prey.
He noticed as they sped into the hallway that Barrow was scanning the premises, his whole face taut in revulsion and fear. Les suppressed a smirk. His partner could talk an intimidating game in the office, but he was a prissy bitch at heart. Les, on the other hand, was prepared to take on any thug the universe hurled at him. That, more than anything else, made him worthy of being chief. His hands itched for the ultimate fight. A tingling, aggressive energy coursed through his blood.