The door opened.
'If you're looking for file folders, we moved them over to the file room.'
'Well, why didn't somebody say something?'
'Hell if I know.'
The door slammed; the lights went out.
'That was close.' Maria let out a deep breath.
First Dan moved two cans; then he let her slither out, unable to ignore the smooth warmth of her skin sliding on his. More concerned for Maria's safety than he cared to admit, he slowly opened the door, finding an empty hallway once again.
At the opposite end of the corridor stood the heavy wooden door, dark in color, that looked more executive than the rest. Instinctively they were drawn to it. They both hurried, imagining that at any moment the door from the laboratory might open once again. When he tried the door, he expected it would be locked. It opened.
A soft light in the corner partially illuminated the office. Inside, it had been decorated much more lavishly than the other rooms they had seen. There was a window with vertical mahogany blinds, a cherry television cabinet, custom bookcases to match, a large rosewood desk, a beige carpet overlaid with real or imitation Persian. There was a large folding-door, freestanding closet that when opened revealed various items of clothing on hangers, a lot of snack foods, rain gear, golf clubs, two rifles, and a sawed-off shotgun.
'Damn, look at that,' Dan said.
Maria flipped up the corner of the rug.
'It's real. Handmade. Let's see what we can find.' She went to another door that led into a small bathroom complete with a shower.
Dan tried the filing cabinet behind the desk. It was locked.
They both rummaged through the drawers of the desk but found no key.
'Most morons put the key in the desk,' he said.
She went to the other filing cabinets and began looking through them.
'We better do this fast,' he said.
'I'm hurrying.'
'Oh, look what I found.' She held up a flat gray box.
'What is it?'
'Box full of keys, all labeled and each key attached to the bottom with Velcro. And one says fireproof cabinet.'
'Bingo.'
Quickly they opened it and started rooting through files full of paperwork. Many pages of equations were unintelligible. They found computer printouts with chemical names and numerous spreadsheets that contained numbers and chemical symbols.
'Look,' she said, holding a stack of photos. They were pictures of dead-looking bats.
'What's that mean?' he whispered.
'What's any of it mean? Those equations look formidable,' she said. 'A lot of very fine print. Whoever wrote them must be a math or chemistry person.'
'Why do chemistry people take bat photos?' he said.
'Or write stuff about bat neurons,' she said, holding up an equation with an explanation related to brain activity and consciousness. 'We better get the hell to the other side of that wall before they find out we know about this.'
'I'd like to know what it is that we know,' Dan said. 'Let's take one bat photo and these pages of chemical equations.'
'I wish we knew what we were doing,' she said, sliding the drawer closed. Dan was still rifling through another. 'You wanna die in here? Come on.' She opened the door a crack. 'Shhh!' She closed the door quietly. 'In here, quick.'
'What? Why?' he whispered as she shoved him in the bathroom.
'We have been crapped on by the gods, that's why,' she said, opening the shower. They both stepped in and quietly closed the frosted-glass door. 'The white-haired guy is at the other end of the hallway talking to the thugs. Listen.'
The outer office door opened and closed, then silence for a moment.
''Let me talk to Hans.' There was a pause. ''Hmm. Hmm. They're in one of the supply rooms.'' After a time he cleared his throat. 'I've already called the cops. They're trespassing.' A long silence. ''You do that and they could never leave here, Hans. No way. And even if we did, we don't know for sure whether anybody knows they're here.
'I know all about the division of labor.' More silence. 'Well, you can damn well do as you please next time. But the cops will be here in half an hour.' Sounds of the chair rolling on plastic and a deep sigh punctuated the silence.
'I don't want to know. That's your deal. Your department.. ' There was a solid smack on wood, then the sound of liquid pouring and the clink of a crystal decanter. ''Yeah? Well, fuck you too, Hans.' He slammed the phone.
After a few minutes the office door closed again.
'Let's go,' Maria said.
'I don't need any encouragement.'
The hallway was empty. They rushed through the office door and down the hall to the pass-through, their bare feet whispering over the linoleum.
'Let's get back in there,' she said, prying it open.
While she was crawling through, he went to the cupboards in the hallway but was only finding more meaningless computer printouts. He wished they had found something he could understand, something in plain English.
'Will you come on?' she pleaded.
With one photo and five pages in Maria's purse, they lay on the cots and tried to look as calm and bored as possible.
8
The eighteen-foot mahogany table was inlaid with redwood burl and cherry, exquisitely made with feet capped in heavy brass and with fine carvings down the legs. There was a distinctly Asian flavor to the design in keeping with the preferences of the man who sat at its head. The Amada regional headquarters, about fifteen minutes outside of Palmer and forty-five minutes from the redwood-forest research compound, was second only to the San Francisco offices in grandeur and opulence.
Kenji Yamada had married Micha Asaka Yamada, the third daughter of Yoshinari Asaka, one of the ten wealthiest men in Japan. The Asaka family's corporate holding company, Kuru, was heavily invested in the wood- fiber industry, manufacturers of fine paper, pencils, wooden blinds, wooden windows, medium-density fiberboard, and a host of other derivative products.
Kenji had been relegated to the U.S. subsidiary, Amada, which was not a Japanese name but sounded so to the Western ear and was very pronounceable to the Western tongue. Among Amada's chief assets was one million acres of timberland in the United States and Canada. About 250,000 of those acres were located on the north coast of California not far from the Oregon border. Since it was substantially north of San Francisco, not many even knew that this wild area existed.
Kenji devoted every waking moment to furthering Amada's business. At age forty-nine he worried that life was passing him by, and that if he didn't have some outstanding success in the near future his father-in-law would die not realizing that his third son-in-law brought him the most honor. Today he stood on the brink of greatness, thwarted only by some legal technicalities and a stubborn mystery that seemed to defy resolution.
Kenji sat in an ornate chair differing from the others both in the detail of its carvings and its mass. His face
