out for fifteen minutes. With the lid to the sample case left open, the damage had already begun.
Her footsteps echoed in the empty hall. She knew Rand would hear her coming. He should hear her, anyway, but he’d been distracted recently, and he was used to having Elaine in the outer office to catch what he didn’t have time to pay attention to.
Brin stopped in the doorway and peered around the corner. The outer office was empty. A single desk light illuminated Elaine’s desktop, which was bare and clean. Too clean. Had he gotten rid of her, too? Were there too many secrets floating around the office to for an efficient secretary? Brin hoped, suddenly, that Elaine had just been let go, or that she was taking vacation time. She hoped Rand hadn’t accidentally left data lying on his desk or an e-mail on screen from someone that could raise curiosity.
The hairs on the back of Brin’s neck rose. Everything was moving too fast. It didn’t make any sense. They had her under control, or at least they believed that they did. They had shown her Alex, so if there had been an attempt on the Chinese facility, that had failed, as well. The research they’d brought her to complete hadn’t come with a short timeline, but Rand had shortened it anyway.
Had something gone wrong with their plan?
Brin stepped through Elaine’s office and stood in the doorway leading to Rand’s inner chamber.
He sat in his big leather chair, staring out the window into the darkness. It was a moonless night.
All that was visible was a solid wall of darkness, and pinpoints of fuzzy light from below. She stood and watched the back of his head for a moment.
She had the eerie impression that he was dead, that it had become a scene from a very bad movie and that she’d walk around in front of him to find his chin on his chest and blood leaking from the corners of his mouth. Then he spoke.
“I hope you have good news for me, Brin,” he said softly. “I hope for your sake, for my sake, for everyone’s sake, that you have good news.”
She considered lying. None of it mattered anymore, but it might placate him for a few moments. Then she shook off the last of her fear and stepped into the room. She remembered an old quote and almost smiled. She whispered it to herself for strength. “When you’re on thin ice, you might as well dance.”
“I’m afraid I don’t, Hershel,” she said. She dropped the file folder onto his desk, not waiting for him to turn around. “Not good at all, really, though I suppose it’s all relative in the world of biochemical warfare and terrorism, don’t you think?”
He spun to face her and she had to fight the urge to take a quick step back. His eyes were sunken pits. His mouth was a flat, emotionless slit across a pale, too-thin face. He looked as if he hadn’t eaten or slept in days. Where he clutched the arms of his chair, his knuckles were white.
He glanced down at the folder on the desktop, but he didn’t move to open it or look at the contents.
“What the hell is it?” he asked.
“The results of the research you asked for,” Brin answered calmly. “You wanted your nanoagents tested and I tested them. I even ran some extras, if you find the time to check the results. They don’t work.”
“What are you talking about?” he growled. He spun the folder to face him, but didn’t open it immediately. He glared at it, then swung his gaze back to hers. “I have seen the results. I know that they work—I’ve seen the results. What kind of crap are you trying to pull?”
“No crap at all,” she said. “They don’t work like you think they do. Your boys in China aren’t as thorough as we are over here—they don’t have the same restrictions keeping them from juicing up human guinea pigs. Did you know that they ran their results on only twelve-day cultures? All of them! They sent us the mature samples, but they did no research beyond the moment they deemed the cells healthy. What would you do if I turned in work like that, Hershel? I don’t think I’d have been working here long.”
“Stop screwing around and tell me what you found,” he said, his voice suddenly dull with fatigue. She was surprised to hear the spark gone from his voice so quickly, and again she wondered what it was she didn’t know. She glanced quickly at his computer monitor, but the screen saver was flipping and rolling in on itself, a psychedelic pattern covering whatever he’d been reading or doing before Brin arrived.
“They don’t stop when the cells are healthy,”
she said. “Not every time. I’d need months, maybe years to know if they ever really stop. They mutate.
When the cells are all healthy, the nanoagents in-corporate minute differences from their host cells.
They start wars. I don’t know what happens next, not all of it, but I know the cells start attacking one another, trying to become the dominant program.”
Rand started laughing and Brin fell silent, watching him as if he’d lost his mind—wondering if maybe he had.
“Did you hear what I said?” she asked.
Rand tried to speak, choked on the laughter, then got himself under control. “What you’re telling me the problem is, then,” he managed to say at last, “is that my weapon will kill people?”
His laughter fueled her anger. “What I’m telling you, you idiot, is that if you let this crap out into the atmosphere to kill a few thousand or a few hundred thousand people, it isn’t going to stop there. The people will die—the nanoagents may not. They might move on to healthier hosts. They might enter the cell walls of plants, animals, get into the water supply. The end result of it, if you just let it go, is that you, your bosses back in China, or wherever the hell this crazy mess started, are going to die. Everyone will die, and the possibility exists that the world, as we know it, will cease to exist. How am I doing? Am I talking slowly enough?”
Rand’s face darkened.
“Maybe you’d like to rethink your attitude,” he said. “Or did you forget where your precious husband is? You may have noticed I’m not in a great mood. My sense of humor has suffered.”
“If you’re still considering using the nanoagents after what I just told you, your sense of humor isn’t the only thing that has suffered,” she retorted.
“Hershel, what happened to you? I remember when I first came here—the work you were doing was brilliant. It’s part of why I wanted to work for MRIS. Why this?”
“Things change,” Rand replied. “Not always, or usually, for the better. Everything I needed to know, you’ve just given me.”
“Why?” she asked. She leaned closer, putting her hands on his desk and catching his gaze. “Why would you do this? I have a right to know what I’ve been part of, whose cause my work has been warped to serve.”
“You don’t have a right in the world,” Rand snapped. “I need the samples ready to be shipped out in the morning, before sunrise. Include all your research, particularly this last part. What’s in the folder?”
“Cell models,” she replied. “Cell models that I thought you’d look at. They may be the model of the end of the world.”
“It isn’t such a great world to start with,” Rand replied. “Maybe a little genetic shake-up is in order, don’t you think? Maybe it’s time we did a quick reshuffle of the cards. We sure managed to screw the world up the first time around, why not give some three-eyed, green-skinned lizard man a shot?”
He turned back to stare out his window. “Close the door on your way out. Get those samples ready to travel, Brin. Seal them as they were when they arrived, and back up the data on that laptop. And don’t think there won’t be someone watching you.
There have been complications. We’re going to need those cultures intact.”
“And then I can go?” she asked. “I can go home?”
Rand was silent for a long moment, so long Brin almost thought she heard his heartbeat.
“Just do what you’re told,” he said at last. “We’ll sort out the rest soon enough. If what you told me is the truth, getting out of here is only a temporary parole anyway.”
Brin stared at the back of his head a moment longer, and then turned toward the outer office.
She felt calm, but she still needed a plan. She knew she couldn’t return to the lab below—there was no way she was ever opening that door again. She wished she’d paid more attention to the exits and entrances to the building. There was a map on the wall behind Elaine’s desk, and she hesitated, then stepped over and began scanning it quickly, hoping Rand was still staring out the window and that the lack of footsteps in the hall wouldn’t catch his attention. Somehow, she didn’t think he would notice.
The man acted as if he were already dead.
Maybe inside his mind, he already was.
Alex chose the maintenance entrance. He knew he could get past the main locks on the front of the building,
