The odor grew stronger, and he felt a heat spread through his body.
Frowning, Michael studied the label. Something had replaced the familiar acrid ammonia odor he would ordinarily have recognized.
All the label contained was the usual list of warnings against using the product in an enclosed area, inhaling its fumes, or ingesting it.
Picking up the bottle’s cap to screw it back on, he hesitated. His frown deepening, Michael held the bottle to his nose and took another sniff, breathing more deeply this time. The warmth spread through him, setting his whole body tingling.
Was this what Josh had felt yesterday? Glancing around the rest room as furtively as if he were about to shoot heroin into his veins, Michael sucked the fumes in again, and then yet again. With each breath he felt more strength surge into his body, and the last of the fatigue and pain he’d been feeling all day evaporated. He drew a dozen more breaths, and was still holding the bottle in his hand when the rest room door slammed open.
“Jesus! It stinks in here!”
Quickly putting the cap back on the bottle, Michael stepped out of the closet to find himself facing the janitor. “Someone left the cap off the ammonia bottle,” he said.
“Musta been Joe,” the janitor said, so quickly that Michael was sure that Joe — whoever he was — got the blame for anything that went wrong in the maintenance department. “Christ! How can you stand to even be in here?” Obviously neither expecting nor wanting an answer to his question, the janitor propped the door open to let the fumes out of the rest room and started pulling supplies out of the closet.
“See you later,” Michael offered as he walked back out into the locker room. The janitor barely grunted a reply.
Ten minutes later, the wondrous effects of the ammonia fumes still infusing his body with a strength he’d never felt before, Michael ran his first timed one-hundred-meter sprint of the afternoon.
He beat his own best time by nearly three-fifths of a second, and the school record by thirty-eight hundredths.
CHAPTER 25
The French doors to the garden outside Rob’s office were wide open, but Katharine felt as if the walls were closing in around her. All day — ever since she’d arrived at the estate’s gate that morning — she’d been unable to rid herself of the feeling of being watched. Indeed, the creepy sense that unseen eyes were following her every movement had grown stronger with each hour that passed, until finally she’d found herself suspecting that even the gardener, who appeared after lunch with a rake and a broom and proceeded to remove every fallen leaf and blossom from every square inch of garden she could see, was there solely to spy on her. That she had never once been able to catch him even looking at her, let alone snapping pictures of her, or aiming something that could be an amplifying microphone in her direction, had done nothing to dissuade her. Not that she had any idea what an amplifying microphone would look like, even if she tripped over one. She had been unable to bring herself to make any more phone calls for fear that the instrument was bugged, and before lunch, she had actually unscrewed the handset of Rob’s phone, examining the inner parts for something that might be a tiny extra microphone, but had given that up, too.
The day had turned into an eternity, and if she hadn’t also convinced herself that leaving early would be considered suspect, she would have fled right after talking to Elaine Reynolds and Keith Shelby.
Instead, she had stayed in Rob’s office, her paranoia in full bloom, attempting to appear to whoever might be watching her as if she were proceeding with her normal work, establishing an identification for the skeleton from the site near the fumarole. But what she had actually been thinking about for the last three hours was what she’d seen in the Serinus Project laboratory.
And what Rob had said yesterday about canaries being lowered into mine shafts. The more she thought about it, the more certain she had become that the animals in the cages were precisely that. They were being used to test the levels of toxins that oxygen-breathing creatures could withstand in the atmosphere.
But there was a question that kept haunting her:
Given what they were breathing, and the levels at which they were breathing it, how were any of the animals surviving at all?
In mid-afternoon she’d gone onto the Internet, where she spent some time hunting for information about the effects on animals of the various chemicals being circulated through the Plexiglas boxes. The conclusions she came to were inescapable: given the levels of poisonous gases she’d seen on the gauges, every one of the animals should have been dead.
But they weren’t.
The only logical conclusion, then, was that the Serinus Project was far more than simply a study of the effects of pollution on various life-forms.
There must be experiments going on, as well. Experiments in which the animals were being treated to make them resistant to pollutants in the atmosphere.
Her thoughts kept returning to the strange object she’d seen in the last room she explored, and the odd thing the technician had said: “I thought maybe a new face might have a new idea.”
It hadn’t taken her long to figure out that the technicians in the lab knew only as much as they needed to know in order to do their jobs, and obviously Yoshihara had decided they did not need to know the precise nature of the spherical object or its contents. Yet he’d made no attempt to conceal the sphere.
Their job was to tend the animals, and, she suspected, administer doses to them of whatever substance was being obtained from the tube protruding from the sphere.
A gas? Possibly. Both the object’s spherical form and its heavy-looking metallic composition seemed designed to withstand tremendous pressures. Such as those that would emanate from a liquefied gas.
Though it seemed almost impossible to her, the logical conclusion appeared to be that whatever was being given to the animals was intended to counteract the effects of the poisonous gases they were breathing. And, since some of them were still living, it must be working, at least to some extent.
But if the gaseous contents of the sphere could change the metabolism of the animals, enabling them to survive in a poisonous atmosphere, what might the side effects be?
She stared at the strange skeleton she’d unearthed. Could it be some kind of anthropoid that had been altered right here in Takeo Yoshihara’s research pavilion, and simply been buried after it died?
But as she gazed at the skeleton, noting yet again that it was far more humanoid than anthropoid, and remembered Mark Reynolds’s body lying in the drawer downstairs, and the protected files on the computer, an insidious idea began to form:
Was it possible that it wasn’t simply animal experiments that were protected in the files of the Serinus directory?
What if the research was being carried out on people as well?
What if Mark Reynolds’s body hadn’t been brought to Maui because he had died from the effects of prolonged inhalation of carbon monoxide?
Her mind raced. More and more of the pieces of the puzzle began to fall into place:
If you wanted to administer a gas to someone, how could it be done?
Tanks, of course.
There was certainly no reason that air tanks couldn’t be filled with something other than air, and both Mark Reynolds and Shane Shelby had been scuba diving when they’d been on Maui.
What if Mark Reynolds and Shane Shelby weren’t the only ones?
The files! The damned protected files that she had no way of getting into! But surely she knew someone—
Phil Howell!
He was on the computer all the time!
She reached for the phone to call him, but instantly changed her mind as paranoid thoughts of cameras and
