“Holy shit,” Jack breathed into a chorus of similar exclamations being made around the room.
“What was on it?” Renee asked after shushing the others.
“He...he wouldn’t say,” Ellen told them, shaking her head. “I tried to get him to tell me, but all he said after he found out that it was Kempf’s machine and had checked through a few files was that he had to concentrate and to leave him alone until he was finished. He acted very strange about it; it was very unlike him.”
“Then what happened?” Jack asked. Naomi had told him to let her lead the debrief, but he didn’t care. He needed to know.
Ellen shrugged. “After he’d finished downloading the files we were after from the standalone machine, he took his thumb drive and put it into the laptop to retrieve more files.” She looked at Naomi. “I was getting worried by then: he’d been in there too long. Then he took Kempf’s laptop over to one of the networked machines, pulled out the network cable, and plugged Kempf’s laptop into the university network.”
“What?” Renee gasped, her face a mask of horror. The system administrators would be able to trace whatever he did on the network. “In God’s name, why?”
“He wouldn’t tell me!” Ellen cried. “I could see what he was doing on the video monitor, even though he wasn’t telling me that he was doing it. I told him not to, that he had to finish what he’d come for and get out of there, but he just ignored me.” She shook her head. “While the laptop was connected to the network, he went to one of the freezers and got the samples, then started trashing the place.”
Jack glanced at Naomi, and she nodded. “That was part of the plan,” she told him. “We were hoping to put off New Horizons at least a little while by trying to conceal what we were doing as an act of vandalism. We knew they’d immediately suspect what had happened, but they wouldn’t know until they’d sorted through the mess and found certain samples missing.”
“After that, he took out the hard drives from the standalone machine and smashed them,” Ellen continued. “Then he watched whatever the laptop was doing until it must have finished, because he unplugged the network cable and replaced it in the machine he’d taken it from, then went to work taking the laptop apart.” She looked up at Naomi with terrified eyes. “He had just finished destroying the hard drive when Kempf came into the lab.”
“Wait a minute,” Jack said, confused. “I know that Kempf was supposed to be on vacation in Italy. The special agent in charge at Lincoln told me so. The FBI liaisons in Italy were trying to track her down, because she didn’t carry a cell phone and could only be contacted through her travel service.”
“It was Kempf,” she told him firmly. “I’ve worked at LRU since it opened, and everyone knows the dean. It was her. She’s one of them, isn’t she?”
Naomi nodded.
“One of what?” Jack asked angrily. “Stop speaking in goddamn riddles!”
Naomi told him, “You’ll find out just as soon as we’re done here.” Then, turning her attention back to Ellen, she said gently, “Go on, Ellen.”
“Sheldon tried to bluff his way out, telling her that she was being investigated for a long list of crimes,” Ellen told them, “but she wasn’t having any of it. She said she wanted what he’d taken, that if he gave it to her she’d...give him a quick, painless death.”
“He’d never give in,” Jack thought aloud, and Ellen nodded, her eyes filling with tears.
“She came at him,” she went on. “He pulled out his weapon and warned her off, but it didn’t matter. He shot her, but it hardly slowed her down.”
“He didn’t remember the stun baton, did he?” Tan asked quietly.
“He did, but only after it was too late. He managed to keep his distance from her, trying to work his way back toward the door. He was almost there when she began to change.”
Jack looked at Naomi and saw her close her eyes and bow her head, a pained, horrified expression on her face.
“That’s when Sheldon remembered the stun baton,” Ellen whispered into the deathly silent room. “I don’t think he really, truly believed until then, even after all we showed him here. He got close enough to stun it, but not before it...lanced him.” She was sobbing now, shivering with fear, and Tan wrapped an arm around her shoulders, his normally expressionless face now reflecting a look of tender compassion.
She paused for a moment, trying to regain her composure. When she was able, she went on with the tale. “He made it out of the lab, and I was able to follow him to the ground level. I don’t know why he didn’t try to just leave that way and get back to his car. Instead he went to the basement where the service tunnel entrance is. That’s where I lost him.” She looked around helplessly. “There aren’t any security monitors in the tunnels.” With a shuddering breath, she said, “The thing...Kempf followed him after it recovered from the stun. That bought Sheldon a minute or two. After it went into the service tunnel after him, I destroyed all the security recordings and the lab access records to cover Sheldon’s entry. Then...then I followed my escape plan to get back here, renting cars with my bogus credit cards until I was picked up by an inbound truck that Gregg sent. I heard on the news while I was on my way back that Sheldon was killed. It...Kempf would have gotten the samples back. And his thumb drive with all the data on it.” She turned an anguished gaze on Naomi. “It was all for nothing,” she whispered. “For nothing!”
“No,” Naomi told her, looking at Jack. “It wasn’t for nothing. Thanks to Jack, we got it all: samples of the corn and all the data that Sheldon downloaded from those machines.”
Ellen said, “But that’s–”
In the brief moment before her next words, Jack saw something the others didn’t: shocked disbelief. Maybe it was from his time in Afghanistan, or the FBI, or both, but he’d had a lot of experience at picking up on lies and deceit. He knew that she had been about to say: But that’s impossible. His gut was telling him that Ellen somehow knew that Kempf had retrieved the corn samples and Sheldon’s thumb drive. The only way she could know that is if she’d talked to Kempf after Sheldon had been killed. He knew he couldn’t say anything about it now, but he wanted to know more about Ellen Bienkowski. A lot more.
“–wonderful news!” Ellen blurted. She put on a smile that seemed to put everyone at ease. Jack pasted one on his own face that he knew was just as fake as hers.
“That’s what he was doing,” Renee muttered, inadvertently diverting attention away from Ellen’s act.
“What?” Naomi asked her.
“That’s why he connected Kempf’s laptop to the network,” Renee mused, nodding to herself. “He must have found something on her machine that he didn’t expect. Something so important that he didn’t feel he could even trust Ellen with knowing about it. The sneaky bastard used Kempf’s own laptop to encrypt the gene maps and other information that we expected to find, then super-encrypted the data he found on Kempf’s laptop. Then he connected it to the university network so he could get the data to a safe location that even we didn’t know about.” She looked at Jack. “That fancy little photo frame he gave you.”
“So...” Ellen began uncertainly, a sudden flush creeping up her neck to her face, “you got all the data? Everything that Sheldon found?”
Renee nodded. “Everything, if my assumptions about what he was doing are right.”
“I think they are,” Jack said woodenly. Sheldon didn’t tell Ellen what he’d found because it had somehow implicated her, he thought, and he was afraid the data and the corn samples would never get back to us. A chill ran through him at the realization that Sheldon must have known then that he was being set up, and he had gotten the data out the only way he could. Jack knew the others around the table would consider that nothing more than ridiculous speculation, but the theory fit all the facts, and his gut told him he was right. Unable to help himself, he stared at Ellen.
She glanced at him before asking Renee, “And what was in the data from Kempf’s laptop?”
“We don’t know,” Renee said with unbridled frustration. “He never left anyone, even Jack, with a password or pass phrase. I’m trying to crack the password with brute force, but I have no idea how long it is. It could take years.”
“We don’t have years, Renee,” Naomi said. She wasn’t scolding, simply stating a fact. “Sheldon sacrificed his life for whatever is in that file, otherwise he probably would have made it out before Kempf cornered him.” She shivered. “I had always suspected she was one of them, but was never sure until now. God, I worked right next to her for a year!”
“I’m doing what I can, Naomi,” Renee said levelly. “I can’t change the laws of mathematics.” She looked again at Jack. “The only thing other than luck that’ll get us into those files is for someone to come up with Sheldon’s pass phrase.”
“There’s something else you should know,” Tan told Ellen, ignoring the others. “We have another prisoner.”
Ellen gasped with surprise. Jack, watching her more closely than the others, was certain she’d faked it. She’s good, he thought, seeing that Tan and the others had missed the subtle pause, as if she’d had to think just a fraction of a second before expressing surprise. Her facial expression was just slightly off, like a photograph that would have been perfect with just a little more exposure. He knew that he could be tainting his observations with what had become an unshakable bias, but he couldn’t help it. She already knew that Sansone was here. He looked across at Naomi, but could tell from her expression that she had no inkling that anything might be wrong here. Unlike the others, who had known Ellen for some time, Jack had no preconceptions about her, only his impressions now. And so far, they weren’t good.
Tan looked at Naomi, then Jack. “We can’t discuss anything yet, as Jack has not yet been fully briefed.”
“You should do that right away!” Ellen exclaimed, turning to Naomi. “He has to know everything.”
Naomi nodded. “I’m going to take care of that right now,” she said. “Tan, why don’t you and Ellen go get caught up on things. I’m sure she could use some rest.” Looking around the room, she asked, “Okay, people, let’s get back to work.”
As everyone began filing out, Naomi told Jack, “It’s time for you to learn what we’re really up against.”
“I can hardly wait,” he told her with grim sarcasm as they headed for the stairs to the command center’s first level.
After leaving the command center dome, she led him through the junction and into the tunnel that led to the antenna complex nearly six hundred feet away.
“You ready for a bit of a walk?”
“Sure,” he said, a chill running down his spine as they headed into the tunnel’s mouth. He felt something brush his leg: Alexander, limping, with Koshka beside him. “I’m not carrying you all that way if your leg craps out on you, you dumb cat,” he said.
Alexander ignored him, but stopped and stared down the tunnel. He suddenly laid his ears back, as did Koshka, and that really gave Jack the creeps.
“Come on,” Naomi told him, taking Jack’s arm. The cats followed along behind.
They walked in silence for a while, the cats padding quietly along behind them, before Jack asked, “So what do you use the antenna silos for now?”
“One is used for storage of our hazardous materials,” she replied. “Explosives and other things that we don’t want anywhere near the habitation and work areas. Both of the silos are seventy feet deep and thirty feet across, so there’s plenty of storage space. It’s also an auxiliary entrance of sorts, as it has an elevator where the old antenna platform used to be, so we don’t have the safety headaches of taking explosives through the rest of the complex.
“The other antenna silo,” she went on, “is where we keep our prisoners.”
“Who – what – else do you have besides Sansone?”
“Sansone is the only live one,” she said grimly. “We’ve only had two others, and both are dead.”
“One of them is the one that almost killed you and Koshka, I assume,” Jack said. Naomi looked at him sharply, and he explained, “Renee slipped a little when I asked how Koshka got the scar on her side. She forgot to use the right pronouns.”
Naomi frowned, then nodded. “Yes, that was one of them,” she told him. “He was a senior manager at New Horizons that we found out about, around four months after I came here. Tan led the team that captured him and brought him here.”
“How did he, or it, get out?”
She frowned. “We don’t really know. Someone left one of the safety interlocks off on the enclosure, and somehow the bastard managed to get out. They’re incredibly innovative and determined, Jack. They’re also utterly merciless. If you don’t believe anything else that you’re about to see, believe and remember that. We’re nothing but insects to them.”
Jack suddenly had a hunch. “Was Ellen here when this prisoner got out?”
Naomi stopped and turned toward him, her face reflecting a puzzled expression. “What does that have to do with anything?” she asked him. “Ellen has been with us since the beginning, when Gregg first formed EDS. She’s been priceless.” She shook her head. “What? Do you think she had something to do with Sheldon’s death, or that she let the thing here escape?” She looked at him more closely before angrily saying, “You do, don’t you.”
“I’ll be honest with you, Naomi,” he told her evenly, refusing to wilt or retreat under her burning gaze. “I’ve interviewed a lot of people, people who had reason to cover something up, who had reason to lie. And I’m telling you that Ellen wasn’t coming clean with us in that debrief. There’s something more that she knows, something that she’s holding back.”
“So, you think she’s lying about the whole thing?” Naomi accused.
“No,” Jack told her. “That’s the kicker: I think most of what she told us in there was the truth. That’s what makes the lie so hard to see.”
“I don’t want to hear any more, Jack,” Naomi said, shaking her head as she turned and continued on down the tunnel.
“Naomi!” he called after her, hurrying to catch up. “Was Ellen here at the base when that thing got out or wasn’t she?”
“Yes!” Naomi nearly shouted. “Yes, she was! And so was Gregg. So was Tan and Renee, and a few dozen other people. Are they all traitors, too? You’d probably say I was, except that it tried to kill me, so I guess I have a decent alibi. Jesus.” She looked at him with a combination of anger and disappointment that made him feel like pond scum, but it didn’t change the truth of what his intuition was telling him.
“Fine,” he said, holding up his hands in supplication. “I won’t say any more.”
“Good,” she sighed, slowing down slightly, more so Alexander didn’t have to work so hard to keep up with them. “And don’t ever let Tan hear you say something like that,” she told him quietly, “or he’ll kill you.”
“Right,” Jack said quietly, thinking, Well, there goes our budding little relationship.
They continued on down the tunnel in silence. They paused about halfway through, when Jack looked down to check on Alexander’s progress and noticed that he’d stopped a few feet back, obviously in pain from his injured leg. Jack picked him up and carried him over his shoulder. Normally the big cat purred any time Jack put a finger on him, but not this time. Alexander kept his head swiveled forward, his gaze riveted on the distant end of the tunnel, his ears laid back. Koshka stayed close by Naomi’s side.
Jack was surprised to see three cats making their way back along the tunnel toward the junction. But they weren’t moving with the devil-may-care attitude typical of many cats: they were silently slinking along in the shadows under the conduits running along one side of the tunnel. Their tails held low, they frequently stopped to cast a look behind them as if they were afraid of being pursued. They spared no more than a quick glance at Jack and Naomi as they hurried toward the main junction.
“I’m sorry,” Naomi said suddenly, not long after passing by the t
rio of retreating cats.
“For what?”
“For being angry with you. I think you’re wrong, Jack, totally wrong, about Ellen. But you’re new here and don’t know the people, what they’ve done or been through.” She offered him a tentative smile. “It just made me so angry that I spoke without thinking. I don’t usually get upset so easily.”
“It’s okay,” Jack said, shifting Alexander’s weight to his other shoulder. “I have that effect on people sometimes. I’m used to it.”
“Well, it’s also hard for me to stay angry at a man who’s not too macho to carry his poor, wounded cat.”
Jack snorted. “Two-legged servant,” he muttered.
That was when Alexander began to growl.
“Christ,” Jack said. “What is it with him?”
“It’s the prisoner,” Naomi said, and Jack saw that she had wrapped her arms around herself. She was afraid to come down here, he realized. “We don’t know exactly what causes it, but cats are unusually sensitive to them. It’s not smell, because the enclosure is hermetically sealed, and if it was a scent-based reaction, certain dog breeds should be even more sensitive to them than the cats, but they’re not. So we rely on cats as part of our security system here, and in the homes of those who live topside.” She looked at Alexander, seeing how his pupils were dilated wide open in a fear/fight response. “You were lucky, Jack,” she said. “If you hadn’t had Alexander to give you some concrete proof that something was wrong with Sansone, you never would have believed anything I said before it was too late, no matter what I told you as a warning. They would’ve killed you before we could’ve intervened.”
“Yeah,” Jack said, trying to force a smile through the increasing apprehension that gripped him the closer they came to the door that was now visible ahead of them. “And I’m sure the little beast will never let me forget it.”
He saw then that there were at least a dozen cats clustered around the door in various aggressive poses. All of them were growling or hissing.
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