by Pogue, Aaron
Reed nodded briefly and slipped past her into the medical lab. Katie went more slowly and held Meg's eyes instead of checking out the room. "That's...that's got to be something of an overstatement, Miss Ginney."
The research assistant shook her head furiously. "Gevia represents the end to human aging. It's...they're still billing it as experimental, but it works. It works, and it's safe, and we know enough now to get it to everyone." She blinked, suddenly hesitant, and shrugged her shoulders. "Everyone in America, anyway."
Katie made a mental note of the girl's resentment, but changed tacks. "How much of a setback is it losing Barnes, though? It's my understanding that he's the brains behind Gevia—"
"Oh, he is," Meg nodded, eyes wide, "but we'll carry on. You have no idea how much he's done, how much he's accomplished, with his work. We can't let that go away, Miss Pratt. We can never allow that to happen." As she trailed off, her eyes drifted down the length of the huge, open lab to a far corner. The lights were dimmer there, and thin hospital curtains concealed the whole corner of the room. The shadows there danced with the electric green flicker of monitoring equipment, and Katie heard or imagined the soft hiss and whine, the idle beeps tracking a weak pulse behind the curtains. Some of the color fled from her face.
"He's here?"
Meg must have heard the horror in her voice, because her eyes snapped to Katie's with a burning intensity. "It's the only place he's safe," she said. "He's famous. You probably can't understand, but when I studied him in medical school they talked of him like a god. The man unraveled the secrets of death, Miss Pratt. Nothing in medical science rivals that. Not refrigeration, not penicillin, not even the cancer vaccine."
Katie frowned. "I thought he worked on the cancer vaccine."
"He did," Meg said. "And even that doesn't compare to what he's doing here." She took a deep breath, worshipful, and then squared her shoulders and turned toward the corner that kept drawing her eyes. "Come with me," she said. "I'll introduce you."
They headed across the pristine tiled floor. Everything was white—the floor, the ceiling, the massive filing cabinets that lined all four walls, broken only by the two doors out into the lobby and another two opposite, that probably led to a bathroom, maybe a storage closet. The floor of the lab was broken regularly by islands, tall lab tables eight feet long and four feet across, each of them bisected by a long row of connections for the myriad heaters and burners and meters and miscellaneous research apparatus stored in the cabinets beneath. Katie thought back to the chemistry lab she'd used in high school class, and she could recognize the setup, but this was far more sophisticated.
The tabletops were clearly interactive desktops, and the ghostly holographic projection of a white rat hovering over the second desk to her left suggested they might all be 3-D desktops. She couldn't fathom the expense of setting up this many stations with that level of technology, especially for a staff of, apparently, two.
As soon as that thought crossed her mind, she asked the question. "You said you're the research assistant here. How many researchers work in this facility?"
"In this facility?" Meg tossed Katie a look of incredulity. "One. Two. Uhh...look, we're the only ones allowed in here. It's just Eric and me." She frowned. "And Cohn."
"Cohn is a scientist?"
Meg snorted. "Hardly. Ellie Cohn is our military liaison. The army put her here. She's got full access to Eric, and she's always here. All she does is interfere."
Katie watched Meg out of the corner of her eye. "Does the military involvement corrupt Eric's research?"
"No," she shook her head slowly. "Umm...no. No. He's too careful for that. You can compensate for external factors—" She took a deep breath. "Sorry. No, they just make everything complicated. They get in the way. Gevia..." she trailed off, her eyes on her hands, then suddenly met Katie's gaze with eyes begging for understanding. "Gevia shouldn't be a national resource, Miss Pratt. The army shouldn't be involved at all. We should have dispensaries set up in every cul-de-sac and dirty little village across the world." She sighed. "Eric could've done that. He was working on logistics for it for a while, but Ellie put a stop to that."
She stopped in front of the curtain and took another deep breath. She looked over at Katie. "They've got their own plans, Miss Pratt, that have nothing to do with medicine. I don't trust them." She reached up, eerily slowly, and then flipped the curtains back with an almost casual gesture. "He trusted them, though."
Eric Barnes looked peaceful. He lay at rest on a narrow but luxurious bed, nothing like the mechanical monsters still in use in Argentina hospitals, Katie thought. Her lips twisted into a sardonic grimace. There weren't any of the garish monitors she'd imagined, either, but a single computer monitor suspended on the wall above him with readouts for each of dozens of monitors on him. His IV fed from a pressurized supply hidden somewhere in the bed, and there was no sign of breathing machinery. She recognized the electrodes hooked up to his arms and legs, intended to stimulate muscle action, and she shook her head.
"How much does this cost?"
"It doesn't matter," Meg said, and her tone brooked no further discussion. The sheets on his bed bunched around his waist, revealing a trim upper torso, surprisingly fit for someone in an office job. He was strikingly handsome, distinguished, and the whole setup gave the appearance of a man who'd just dozed off while reading. A plush armchair stood nearby, with a bedstand, and Katie got the feeling he had pretty regular company. She glanced at Meg and saw her eyes fixed on Eric's face.
It was a good face, still and serene, high cheekbones and good thick brown hair—almost black. She knew that couldn't last, no matter how expensive the setup. He would wither. His cheeks would sink, his strong arms would shrivel down to twigs. He would lose his color, and eventually he would lose his hair. Medical science had come a long way in the years of Barnes's research, but they still couldn't fake humanity in a piece of warm meat. She knew that all too well.
She had to fight down an angry emptiness at the thought, at the images that swam up with it, and she turned on her heel and darted away just as a surprised Reed stepped up past her. She heard him take over the interview, asking Meg probing questions about Eric's contacts, his most recent projects, and the political pressure he was under. Katie couldn't linger long enough to learn the answers. She almost stumbled in her haste and caught herself on the edge of one of the lab tables. Trying to think of anything but the man behind the curtain, she examined the table, but it was covered in notes that meant nothing to her.
She moved to the next table, where Reed had somehow activated the controls for the holograph projector. There, three human models hung suspended in the air above it. One was clearly a muscle-mass frame, with skin and bone stripped away, and another showed only organs, and the third...she considered it for some time before guessing it was a graphic representation of an immune system, but she couldn't be sure of that. She looked for some notes on the table's surface, but again it was incomprehensible to her.
Katie turned away, and her eyes fell on the long rows of cabinets along the wall. Her head tilted as curiosity took over, and she approached the white steel doors with a look of interest. Something in her expression must have concerned the young research assistant, because she rushed across the room to intercept Katie. The girl was three steps too slow.
"What's this?" Katie asked, pulling open the nearest cabinet door.
"It's nothing," Meg said, a touch breathless. She reached out to push the door closed, but Katie held it open with one rigid finger. She bent forward to look more closely, even as Meg repeated herself. "It's nothing!"
The cabinet she'd picked had five shelves filled with identical black leather-bound books. Their spines were empty of any titles or other identifying text, but they showed varying ages and use, a progression of decay from left to right, top to bottom. The spines of the books on the top shelf were cracked and worn, almost gray with use. The whole set looked more expensive than any lab notebooks Katie had ev
er seen, but everything about this clinic astonished her.
She reached for a random book on the shelf, but Meg physically intervened, squeezing awkwardly into the narrow gap between Katie and the books. "What are you doing? These have nothing to do with—"
"What are they?" Katie asked. She took a step back, which clearly put the girl more at ease. Meg glanced toward the researcher's resting place, then visibly relented.
She knelt, sinking down on her heels, and plucked a book off the second shelf from the bottom. She flipped open the heavy cover and passed it to Katie, who found a scrawled, barely legible script on the slightly yellowed, lined pages. Halfway down the first page in an oversized curl, she read a title. "Teleos, a novel by Eric Barnes." Three lines farther down, the novel started with a cramped ten-line paragraph that was entirely marked out. Meg glanced over the top of the book and blushed.
"Oh," she said. "He, uh...he scrapped the prologue." She flipped forward six or seven pages, and Katie saw every line on each of those pages neatly scratched out with a single line of black ink. Meg turned to a page labeled "Chapter One" and said, "Start there."
Katie started into the first page, and lost herself more in the process of puzzling out his handwriting than in the actual storyline. She couldn't remember the last time she'd seen a full page of handwriting. It brought back memories from grade school and even earlier. She remembered her dad teaching her how to scratch her name onto a magnetic drawing board when she was tiny. She'd written him a letter from the Academy, an actual letter on paper, and he had cried when he read it, according to her mom. He'd always called it a lost art.
She snapped from her memories with a start, and her eyes flashed to the cabinet packed full of these writing books. She counted forty books on the top shelf, which put two hundred in this one cabinet, and by the looks of it he'd filled at least a hundred, hundred and twenty of them. Her eyes grew wide. "Are these all...." She trailed off, then took a step back and looked down the long row of cabinets, dozens of them, and her jaw dropped. "Are these all full of—"
"Hah! What?" Meg's face split in a smile. "No. No." She took the book from Katie's numb fingers and snapped it smartly shut, then put it away and closed the cabinet. She caught Katie's eye before she opened the next cabinet over to the right. It held shelves full of more scientific equipment. Meg gave a flourish, and shook her head, still smiling. "I thought you were some kind of super sleuth, picking that one cabinet—"
"Still," Katie said. "He writes? By hand?"
Meg shrugged. "Our recordings aren't always reliable. With all the money that goes into our equipment, they spend ten times as much keeping this place secret, and that costs us reliability. Eric just got in the habit of putting stuff on paper, and we've all sort of picked it up over the years."
That struck Katie as useful information, and the trained cop tucked it away for later consideration, but her curiosity was getting the better of her. "But he's a writer?" Katie's head tilted again, and her nose scrunched as she leaned in close and whispered, "Is he any good?"
Meg shrugged one shoulder. "He's a lot better now than when he started. But that's not the point. It was never about writing books. It's just something he does to help him think. When his research has him stumped, he'll leave it open wherever he's working, wander over here and grab his current book, then sit down at that table there and just spend some time scribbling." She leaned back against the closed cabinet doors, and her eyes were on something far away.
"The first time I saw him do it," she said with a slight shake of her head, "I was furious. I was new here. I just got thrown in while he was in the middle of a major project trying to figure out why Gevia worked better in theater than it does on leave, and some people were saying that had implications that could doom the whole project, and he put me through a crash course on operating the tables just so I could pull up fifteen different simulations for him, and then he stood and watched them run. Over, and over, and over, without explaining to me at all what was going on. Then he looked at me, held my eyes for a long moment, and said, 'I've got it. Jeri and Dianne are sisters.' And he came over here, pulled out a book." Her smile widened. "And wrote the next-to-last chapter of Georgia Falls, which is still my favorite." She trailed off, but Katie let her have the memory. When she came back around, she shook her head a little and then pushed her eyes up to Katie's.
"Then he snapped the book closed, and said, 'Of course.' He made the tiniest adjustment to half of the simulations, and bam, there was our deviation. He decided one of the inoculations they were getting on deployment was interfering positively with the Gevia effect, and six months later we had the chemical combination synthesized, refined, and integrated into our core formula." She sighed. "And Jeri married Troy beneath the Georgia moon. It was perfect."
Her eyes drifted back to Barnes's place in the corner, as Katie had known they would, and the girl's smile faded. "He's spent more time in this room than outside it for thirteen years now, Miss Pratt. It takes a special kind of man...."
Katie put a comforting hand on her shoulder. "It does," she said. "He was."
"He is," Meg corrected her firmly.
"He is." Katie looked away and made eye contact with Reed. He asked a question with his eyes, and Katie answered it with a quick nod.
He crossed the room to join them. "I think we've got everything we need, Miss Ginney. Thank you for your time."
"Of course," she said, dashing a hand at her eyes. She took a ragged breath. "Is there, umm...if there's anything I can do for you..."
"We'll be in touch," Katie said, and offered her a comforting smile. "Thank you."
Meg walked them to the door. She stood there, silhouetted in the clinic's sterile white light, while Katie and Reed made their way out onto the chilly grounds.
5. Mrs. Barnes
Katie and Reed walked in silence, lost in their own thoughts, until they passed through the outer gates. Immediately their headsets went off, emitting a loud twin buzzing that startled them both. Reed reacted first, fishing the revived headset from his pocket and hooking it on his ear even as he started speaking. "Hathor, connect me to Chief Hart. Thanks."
Katie pulled out her handheld and checked the time—quarter to midnight—and tried to catch Reed's attention with a wave of her hand, but the police chief was already on the line. "Chief Hart! Hi. We're done at De Grey. Is your offer for a ride still good?" He chuckled at her answer and said, "Sure. Meet you there. Goodbye." When he finally looked at Katie, he caught her disappointed expression. "What?"
"Couldn't we have put that off to tomorrow?" She shivered and rubbed her arms briskly against the cold. "I just want to get under some thick blankets and get some rest."
He smiled ruefully. "Sorry, Katie. No rest for the weary." He turned her north and pointed to a cafe half a mile down, dim glow within the deep night. "She's meeting us there. Come on."
The walk warmed her some, but it did nothing for her attitude. She checked her handheld more than once, plotting a course from the police station to their position, and it was easily a fifteen-minute drive. "You should have called her before we left," she grumbled.
"Couldn't," Reed said. "That place is locked down tight."
"It's weird." Katie glanced through the steel bars of the fence on her left, into the eerie silver sparkle of the clinic's grounds. It seemed far away, though she could have reached out and touched the fence. "Hard to believe stepping through a gate can cut you off so completely."
He threw a glance at her that she probably wasn't meant to catch, but it was inspired by the same thought that crossed her mind. Velez's lair. She shook her head. "That was different, though. That was an underground bunker cut off from the world. This is a research lab in plain sight." She waved toward the yard they were trudging past. "It's famous. How can it be so isolated."
"It was, though." His voice was grim, and she nodded.
"I felt it," she said. "Inside there...I can only imagine what it must have been like for him."
/> Reed was looking back over his shoulder as they walked, his eyes on the strange building, and he nodded toward it. "Did you get a look upstairs? That was some fancy equipment."
Katie frowned and shook her head. "More lab tables?"
He laughed. "No, he had a running track. Probably how he kept in such great shape. Dynamic relational floor tiles, and WorldWindows on both sides, so he could recreate any jogging path in the world. Unless I miss my guess, he had Yellowstone on up there, and I found a pad where he'd scribbled down the codes for the Redwood Forests and the Champs-Élysées." He trailed off. "I wonder if they do people." After a moment he shook his head. "Do you have any idea what a setup like that costs?"
"It kept him in his cage," Katie said. "Have you looked over his location history? The man practically lives here. He looked happy enough with his wife, the few minutes I got to see of his home life, but he gets up before the sun and rushes in to work on his research, then he pops into existence on his front doorstep after dark." She bit her lower lip, her forehead creasing at a memory. "The assistant said they would spend ungodly amounts of money to keep their secret safe. I suppose a jogging track that keeps him in their purview would probably fit into that."
"That tells us this guy knows his way around a negotiation, then. I don't care how outlandish the budget is, it takes a savvy guy to get personal amenities out of a government administrator."
"It tells us more than that," she said. "It tells us he wasn't expecting to take a fall. And neither were his handlers, or they wouldn't have approved it."
Reed frowned. "Katie, I don't know how much you looked at his monitors—"
"Not much at all," she said, hoping he hadn't noticed how quickly she'd fled.
"Well I got a good look, while you and the girl were holding your little book club, and I dug up his medical chart, too." He sucked in a cold breath through his teeth. "Everything I see makes it look like an accident. A tragedy, sure, but I don't see anything to make me suspicious."