She waited half an hour before setting out for the north corridor, pausing only to exchange a few words with her new friend, the guard. “Well, down to the salt mines,” she said, winking at him before pushing her way through the double doors and walking purposefully toward the elevator. It took all her self-control not to look back and glance up at the security camera she suspected was trained on her. When she took the card from her pocket and held it over the gray sensor plate, she prayed the trembling of her hand was not visible.
The light turned green. A moment later the elevator doors slid open. She stepped in and pressed the Down button, then tried to judge how far the car traveled. The ride was so smooth, though, that she had almost no sensation of movement; when the doors slid open fifteen seconds later, she could have been fifteen feet down, or fifty.
Or a hundred.
The corridor was deserted. Katharine walked along it as purposefully as she’d strode down the hallway above a moment ago, though she had no idea of precisely what she was looking for.
First, of course, she wanted to find the object that had been delivered last night. In her mind’s eye she summoned up the floor plan of the lower level as it had appeared on the security monitor, and tried to remember in which room she’d seen the coffinlike box being opened.
Third door on the right, she was almost certain.
When she came to the third door, she paused, resisted an overpowering urge to glance back at the camera above the elevator door, then twisted the doorknob. To her vast relief, the door opened.
She recognized the room the instant she stepped inside: immaculately clean, its floor was covered with white tile, a white-enameled metal examination table stood in its center, and there was a large lab bench against one wall. Another wall was lined with three rows of large drawers.
Drawers she immediately recognized from the morgue scenes in countless television shows.
Steeling herself, Katharine crossed the room and stood before the bank of drawers.
She was wrong, of course. She had to be wrong! It couldn’t possibly be a morgue.
Unsettling thoughts were tumbling through her mind. What if someone came in?
What if the guard was watching?
What if the room was alarmed?
Get out, a voice inside her head whispered. Get out, and go back upstairs, and mind your own business. All you have to do is work on one skeleton. One skeleton that Rob found two miles away. Whatever is in here is none of your business.
Get out.
Get out!
But even as the voice kept whispering to her, she reached out with a trembling hand and pulled one of the drawers open.
Empty.
The tension in her body easing only a fraction, she moved her hand to a second drawer.
Empty.
So was the third, and the fourth.
Now her hand was no longer trembling, and she was starting to feel a little foolish. Whatever she’d seen last night, it couldn’t have been a—
The thought shattered in her mind as she pulled open the fifth drawer and found herself staring into the face of a boy.
A boy of seventeen or eighteen, perhaps, with strong features, blond hair, and a cleft chin.
And dead blue eyes that stared unblinkingly up at her from sockets that were sunk deep into his gray, expressionless face.
Katharine stood rock still, fighting the nausea that had risen in her belly. Don’t react, she told herself. If they’re watching you, you mustn’t react at all. You must act like you belong here.
Pulling the drawer all the way open, she gazed into the great Y-shaped incision that had been cut in the boy’s torso. What few organs remained were in a chaotic jumble, as if having been hastily put back after an autopsy. His lungs, though, had been completely removed.
His lungs?
Suddenly the description of the single file she’d been able to read in the Serinus directory came back to her.
Pollution? Could this boy have died from pollution poisoning?
She pulled the drawer farther open, looking for something — anything — that would identify the corpse. And then, as the drawer reached the limits of its extension hardware, she saw it.
A tag was attached to the big toe of the boy’s right foot. Tearing the tag loose, she dropped it into her pocket, closed the drawer, and was about to leave the room when she noticed a door in the left-hand wall, toward the back of the room. Moving close to it, she listened for a moment and heard a humming noise. She hesitated, then tried the knob.
It turned, and she eased the door open enough to see inside.
It was some kind of equipment room, filled with tanks of varying sizes, all of which seemed to be connected to a central tank with a series of hoses and valves. From the central tank a series of large ducts ran in several directions, passing through two of the walls.
Then she saw the source of the humming sound: a pump next to the large tank, apparently moving the tank’s contents through the ducts.
Both the wall opposite Katharine and the one at the far end of the room were pierced by doors as well as by the large ducts, and she quickly moved to the closest one, listened, and tried the knob.
Locked.
She moved to the other door, only to find it locked, too.
Frustrated, she rattled the knob hard. She searched for a card scanner, but there was no sign of one. Should she try to find a key? What if one of the cameras was watching?
She twisted the doorknob one more time, then gave up and went back to the autopsy room. She was tempted to return to the elevator right then — to press her luck no further — but when she stepped out into the corridor, its row of closed doors drew her like a magnet.
Deciding, she turned away from the elevator and moved slowly toward the far end of the hallway. Thirty feet farther on she saw a door that bore a plaque:
The Serinus Project
She stared at the sign, the realization slowly sinking in: she no longer needed the password to the protected directory that had so utterly frustrated her yesterday afternoon. Steeling herself, she reached for the knob, all but certain that this door, like those inside the morgue, would be locked.
It wasn’t; apparently, Takeo Yoshihara considered the elevator’s security system sufficient, for this area of the facility, at least.
She stepped into a wood-paneled anteroom, empty but for a deserted desk and a display case. As she realized what was in the cabinet, Katharine’s heart began to beat faster.
The skull?
Could it be the same skull she’d glimpsed on the monitor in Rob’s office? Katharine moved closer to the case, a sealed Plexiglas box fixed to the top of a black lacquered pedestal. As she studied the skull from every angle, her excitement grew. It was the one she’d seen! It had to be! And it appeared to be exactly like the skull she’d found in the ravine, in every aspect. Tearing her eyes away from it, she searched for something that would identify its provenance. For a moment there seemed to be nothing, but then she found it: a small plaque very much like the one affixed to the door through which she’d come in a moment ago. It identified the skull only as having been discovered in a village in the Philippines on a date two months earlier. Committing the name of the village to memory, Katharine studied the skull once more, then moved on.
And stopped in shock as she came to the next room. For a split second she had the strange sensation that she’d stepped into a veterinarian’s office, since one entire wall was lined with animal cages. Except they weren’t quite cages at all: rather, they were boxes made of Plexiglas. She moved farther into the room, her eyes rapidly taking in the details of its equipment. The cells — the word popped into Katharine’s mind out of nowhere, but even
