The Enclave, Page 2

  In his mid-thirties, he had close-cropped auburn hair and gray eyes, which were almost hidden behind smeared wire-rim glasses. He had a pleasant face, open and almost boyish, despite its unshaven grizzle and a smudge—likely printer ink—across one cheekbone. His jeans bore similar smudges, though darker and wider, as did his tennis shoes— worn, run over, and gray with use and age. The rumpled red flannel shirt was both smudged and wet, the latter likely thanks to her.

  He was blinking at her as if he had just awakened, as if recent events had transpired far too rapidly for him to follow. Likely they had. She supposed he’ d come out of his lab all unawares and walked right into Poe and Slattery helping her to the prep room. Having drafted him to assist, they’d left him locked in the room without a word of explanation, and he was obviously still trying to free himself of his nucleic acids and attend to reality.

  “You’re Miss McHenry, aren’t you? The frog girl.”

  Frog girl. Yes, that’s all I am here, isn’t it? She nodded.

  Concern creased his brow as he knelt beside her, plucking at the bloodied sleeve of her lab coat. “This doesn’t look good. Can you sit up?”

  “There was an intruder,” she said. “He knocked me into Dr. Poe’s shelving units.”

  “Yes, I gathered that. Here, let me help you.” He lifted her to a sitting position, the action making her gasp at the pain it triggered. Gently he stripped off her wet lab coat, tossing it onto the wad of his own dry coat with no thought, apparently, of the consequences. His focus was on her wound now: a six-inch, straight-edged glass cut running along the inside of her left forearm, still bleeding profusely.

  “It’ll need stitches,” he said, stepping to one of the cabinets. He pulled out a first-aid kit and set it on the floor beside her, then turned to the sink of soapy water Lacey had prepared earlier. “This intruder,” he said as he plunged his hands into the bubbles, “what did he look like?”

  She told him all she could recall, realizing as she did that the youth had seemed somehow familiar, though she couldn’t imagine where she might have seen him before.

  Hands washed and rinsed, Reinhardt was drying them off when two distant echoing booms halted the flow of her words. “What was that?” she whispered.

  “Sounded like gunshots,” Dr. Reinhardt said. He stood listening for a moment, then set about cleaning and butterfly-bandaging her wound, a service he performed with a swift and practiced competence that surprised her. As he worked he pressed her to continue her story, interrupting occasionally to question her more closely about the young man. Did he speak? Had she seen him before? Did she think he was truly unbalanced, or one of Director Swain’s feared corporate spies putting on a show?

  He was taping the last bandage to the slash in her arm when the door crashed open and Slattery burst in. A short, swarthy, vigorous man with a pocked complexion, he had straight black hair brushed back from a high forehead, bushy black brows, and piercing blue eyes. For a moment he paused as if surprised to find them as they were, then said to Reinhardt, “You’ve tended her, then.”

  “Only temporarily. She’ll need stitches.”

  “Probably has a mild concussion, too.” Slattery turned to the man who’d followed him into the room and gestured at Lacey. “Take her to the clinic.”

  A second man now angled a gurney through the door as Lacey tottered to her feet. “Oh, I won’t need that, Dr. Slattery,” she said. “I’m fine, really.”

  He scowled at her. “You could hardly walk a few minutes ago, miss.”

  “I just had the breath knocked out of me.”

  “And took a good knock to the head, too, from the look of that goose egg behind your ear. A concussion’s nothing to take lightly. And there’s the cut to stitch, as well. I won’t risk any lawsuits. Now, hop aboard like a good girl.”

  Reluctantly she obeyed. “Did you find him? The man who attacked me?”

  “Not yet,” Slattery said, his scowl deepening. Irritably he motioned for the men to wheel her away, and immediately they complied.

  As they lifted the gurney over the raised threshold of the prep room floor, the pain of her cut finally began to override the pain of the cramps in her back. Maybe a visit to the clinic wouldn’t be so bad after all. She didn’t have to walk, and they might have some Tylenol they could give her and maybe a compress for her back. In fact, she wouldn’t even object if they wanted to take some X rays, just to make sure she’ d not broken something.

  Chapter Two

  As the gurney carried Ms. McHenry out of his sight, whatever had held Cam Reinhardt together was loosed. A wave of trembling overtook him and he found himself staring at the shockingly large puddle of blood pooled on the floor at his feet. The deep red surface reflected the fluorescent lights overhead and stirred up dangerous memories that made his stomach flutter and light flicker at the edges of his vision.

  A rumpled, bloodstained lab coat lay in a heap beside the puddle, so close it was almost touching. Fearful at any moment it would, he stooped, picked it up, and slid it on, struggling a bit to work the damp garment over his flannel shirt. It bound across the shoulders as he stooped to pick up the other coat, which was also damp. And bloodstained. He started to put that one on, too, then stopped himself, bemused.

  Out in the corridor, the elevator pinged, and its doors rumbled open. He heard the rattling of the gurney as the attendants wheeled Ms. McHenry aboard, then another rumbling as the doors closed.

  Slattery stepped back into the room, his sharp blue eyes fastening at once on the coat in Cam’s hands. In three strides, he snatched it away as if Cam were a child who had picked up a valuable antique.

  “How is it you happen to be here, Doctor?” the assistant director demanded.

  “I was working in my lab, sir.” The trembling had not yet left his fingers, and he kept getting flashes of other wounds he’ d bandaged. Many wounds. Many times.

  “Working in your lab,” Slattery repeated, glance dropping to Cam’s hands. “So you must have heard the shelving collapse. Why did you only emerge when we were helping Ms. McHenry to the prep room?”

  “I . . .” Cam blinked at him. “I had my earphones on, Doctor. And I didn’t think anything of it at the time.”

  “You didn’t think anything of a crash and a woman screaming?”

  “I didn’t hear any screaming, sir. Only the crash, and then you and Dr. Poe talking in the hallway later. Even then I didn’t pay much attention. I was focused on my work.”

  Slattery narrowed his eyes. “Why did you leave at all, then, if you’d heard nothing to concern you?”

  “I was finished.” Cam lifted the teal flash drive hanging on its lanyard about his neck and waved it at Slattery. “I was going up to my office to collate this data set with the others.”

  The assistant director regarded him suspiciously. What he thought Cam really might have been doing in the lab, or the real reason for his unseemly delay in coming to Ms. McHenry’s aid, Cam couldn’t begin to guess. But Slattery took his position as assistant director seriously, regarding everyone not part of the Inner Circle as likely spies or saboteurs.

  “And Ms. McHenry?” Slattery asked finally. “Did she say anything to you of what happened?”

  Cam let the flash drive slip through his fingers. It knocked against his chest as he shrugged. “She said she was attacked by an intruder who’d apparently broken in through the outside door in Poe’s lab.” Poe’s was the only lab on this ground floor with such a door, which, given all the paranoia at Kendall-Jakes about corporate spying, seemed a gaping weak point in the Institute’s otherwise prodigious security measures.

  “Security searched the courtyard outside the door and the grounds beyond the courtyard walls,” Slattery said. “They found nothing to corroborate her story.”

  “What about video surveillance?”

  “I’ll have to check the recordings, but I doubt there’ll be anything.”

  Recordings, Cam thought, with another chill. So the labs are under surv
eillance. He didn’t know why confirmation of what he’ d already suspected should unsettle him so. Swain made no bones about the fact that he had every inch of this place under constant watch. Still, it set up the hairs on the back of his neck and made him feel strangely violated. Do they have cameras in our apartments, too? he wondered.

  Slattery continued. “It was dark,” he said, “and the girl was down here alone after a long day. She’s a new hire, you know. Still getting used to things. They’ve already had to relocate her to new quarters on account of her complaints about the generator interrupting her sleep. I think she made an intruder out of a shadow and blundered into the shelves in her panic.”

  Cam did not know Ms. McHenry very well—these last weeks he’ d been only vaguely aware of her as the new animal caretaker—but he did not think she had imagined the incident. For one thing, if there had been no intruder, not even one security man would have appeared at this hour, let alone five—plus doctors Poe and Slattery. If anyone was panicking, it was Slattery. The question was, why?

  The assistant director continued to eye him. “You do realize that with the open house and the review coming up, it would be better not to get anything stirred up. After the business with Ms. Stopping last winter, the press would blow this all out of proportion. I trust you will practice the utmost discretion with regard to discussing this matter with the others.”

  “Of course, Doctor.”

  Slattery’s swarthy scowl deepened. He held Cam’s gaze a little longer than was comfortable, then nodded and stepped back. “You’ll be going on up to your 501 office now, I presume?”

  “Actually, I thought I’d give my lab a once-over before I leave, just in case there really was someone here tonight.”

  The frown returned to Slattery’s brow. He could hardly forbid Cam to do precisely what their security procedures called for in such a situation, though, and the sudden vibration of the pager at the man’s waist forestalled another lecture. “Let me know personally if you find anything amiss,” he said as he pushed the response button.

  Cam followed him into the hallway, then turned up the corridor toward his lab as Slattery proceeded toward the elevator.

  The door to Dr. Poe’s lab stood ajar, and Cam couldn’t resist sticking his head in. What he saw shocked him. He’ d expected a few dislodged and shattered aquariums, maybe a fallen shelf or two—not total devastation. Ranks of sturdy wooden shelving had fallen toward the doorway in which he stood, one upon the other in domino effect and on both sides of the central aisle. A chaos of broken glass, shattered aquariums, overturned Rubbermaid tubs, and thrashing salamanders covered the floor beneath them.

  The room was lit by the harsh illumination of two freestanding electric lamps, set up in the clearer far end of the room, needed because the ceiling fixtures had been torn loose from their bolts, parts of them dangling toward the floor where lay the rest of them. It was as if a violent wind had slammed through the near half of the room. Even the small window in the lab door had been cracked by the event.

  Poe was crouched at the juncture between the main room and the entry alcove, struggling to secure a thrashing red salamander. Beside him a man in janitorial gray swept shattered glass into a dustpan. The janitor—who was not the usual stoop-shouldered, white-ponytailed night man—stood to dump his dustpan into the gray plastic garbage can between them. As the clatter of broken glass tumbling into the near-empty container filled Cam’s ears, Poe captured his salamander and flipped it into a blue storage tub nearby.

  The dustpan emptied and the salamander contained, a relative silence ensued, and for the first time Cam heard the distinctive wop-wop-wop of a helicopter out in the night beyond the open door. It was a sound that always put the hair up on the back of his neck. Again the room flickered and swayed, as a sense of imminent danger jolted through him.

  Poe stood up holding the tub and saw Cam in the hall doorway. He startled to a stop, his long, pale face furrowing into a scowl. “What are you doing here, Reinhardt?”

  The question derailed Cam from his rising fear, though it took him a moment to collect his thoughts. “I thought you might like some help getting things back in order.”

  Poe nodded at the janitor. “Thank you, but as you can see, I have help.”

  Cam hesitated, scanning the wreckage. “Those shelves will be awkward to put upright with just the two of you.”

  “We’re having new ones brought up.” Poe hurried toward him, glass crunching under his sneakers. “You needn’t concern yourself. We’re fine.”

  Cam wasn’t exactly pushed out of the lab, but the moment he had backed into the hall, Poe closed the door in his face and turned the lock.

  He stood there in surprise, thinking wryly that Slattery must not have instructed Poe about being discreet. Or perhaps he had, and the eccentric scientist thought he was obeying the injunction, even as he all but screamed, Don’t look! Don’t look! We’ve secrets to protect. . . .

  Secrets to protect . . . Again the sense of danger swept through him— so strong now he glanced over his shoulder at the empty corridor as he stepped to the door of his own lab. He swiped his ID card through the lock slot, the bolt retracted, and he pushed the door inward, stepping over the five-inch-high raised threshold as he snapped on the lights.

  The square lab was a third the size of Poe’s, with a row of narrow clerestory windows running high up along the opposite wall. Counters cluttered with lab equipment, working pans, and several ten-gallon aquariums ran along three walls atop Formica-faced cabinets. Those to his right butted up against a full-length wooden closet. Dead center, his desk and computer station stood as an island, piled with books, papers, disks, and various lab paraphernalia, looking almost as if someone had searched through it all. When did I get to be such a slob?

  He stepped into the room, letting the door swing shut behind him, his neck crawling with the awareness that his every move was being recorded. Only when his jaw began to ache did he realize he was clenching his teeth. With a sigh, he relaxed his jaw and started around the small lab, sorting through beakers and flasks, opening cabinets and drawers, reading notes, making a show of inspecting his things, even as he wondered where exactly the camera was.

  The heap of the frog bodies lying in the tray where he’ d left them after removing their livers looked undisturbed. All still had their legs, so it didn’t appear the intruder had breached his lab. They were beginning to stink, however. . . .

  He continued around the counter, returning finally to the island computer station, where he slid out of his wet lab coat and tossed it carelessly over the back of the chair. Immediately it slid almost to the floor, and when he picked it up again and held it up to fold it properly over the chair back, his eyes caught upon the blood that stained its left sleeve and the red palm print on its shoulder. . . .

  Suddenly the distant wop-wop of a helicopter’s rotors grew loud and close. His chest constricted, and he clenched his teeth again— hard—as the bloody palm print flashed like a Vegas marquee. His hands shook and he gasped for breath as the image of another puddle of blood, much larger than what he’d seen on the prep room floor, overlaid the coat.

  Suddenly he was on his knees in another ruined lab, this one on the other side of the world. Ranks of wooden cabinets had been splintered and wrenched from their moorings, huge examining tables lay on their sides, and jagged shards of glass glittered on the floor. Blood pooled around him and coated his arms to his elbows as he strove to hold closed the severed artery in the Afghan biologist’s thigh until Rudy could get back with a med kit.

  Automatic-weapon fire rattled in the cavernous chamber beyond the lab’s shattered doorway, the sulfurous smoke of burned gunpowder acrid in his nose. He heard a chorus of screams; then all was drowned out by a lionlike roar. His trembling grew so violent he could hardly keep himself upright, his hand unable to hold the artery firmly, the Afghan’s hot blood welling up against his palm. The roar sounded again, closer now, and panic seized him.

 
Abruptly he was back in his quiet southern Arizona lab, messy but not demolished. The floor was clean and clear, the walls solid, cabinets intact. Silence replaced the gunfire, though he could still hear the choppers, somewhere off in the distance—Institute security forces searching the desert for Slattery’s nonexistent intruder.

  Suddenly the coat in Cam’s hands terrified him. He flung it away as if it were a flesh-and-blood attacker, surprised when it only crumpled to the floor about five feet away from him. He watched it warily, nonetheless, telling himself he was being utterly irrational as he breathed deeply and sought to regain control of himself.

  Slowly it dawned on him that he’ d had a flashback. His first in almost ten years.

  He sagged back against the desk, horrified. That had been another time, another life, one he’ d put firmly behind him. Why would he relapse now?

  His gaze fixed on the bloody palm print just visible on a fold of the coat.

  Please . . . help us. . . .

  “No!”

  He shoved himself away from the desk and went to the wooden cabinet, where he pulled out a clear plastic garbage bag. Weirdly unwilling to even touch the lab coat now, he picked it up with the bag, then shook the garment down into the bag’s plastic folds. Knotting the ends, he dropped the whole thing into the hazmat bin at the end of the left counter, dumped the dead frogs on top of it, and followed that with a tray of used plastic test tubes. From there he went around the counters straightening and tidying, throwing away the trash that had accumulated—as if in doing so he might purge the memories that were even now trying to creep back into his present.

  When the lab’s door lock clacked, he nearly jumped out of his skin. As he turned toward it, the regular night janitor entered, a swarthy-faced, elderly Hispanic with snow-white hair. The old man stopped in surprise to see Cam staring at him. Then he dipped his head, apologizing in a raspy, heavily accented voice for “disturbing the doctor.”