“Oh, I’ve been an electrician for twenty years. That’s what they hired me to do. I’m only in the animal facility because they can’t get anyone else.” He twisted the flickering tube, trying to work it free of the socket, and it went dark. “Because of the rumors.”
“There are rumors about the animal facility?” Cam asked in genuine surprise.
“Some say it is haunted by the young woman who disappeared. Others fear Chupacabra. . . .”
“Chupacabra?”
“He comes in the night and sucks the blood of his victims. . . .”
“A sort of Spanish vampire.”
“Not a vampire, señor.”
“Does he eat frogs, too?”
“Frogs? No. Chupacabra feeds mostly on cows and goats. They’ve found drained bodies in the hills around here the last few months. One lady even saw him.”
“Really?” Cam didn’t have to feign his interest. “What did he look like?”
“Tall, thin, green skin, long sharp teeth, big eyes. A bony ridge on the top of his head.”
“Sounds scary. But you’re not afraid of him?”
“They pay me double not to be.” Juan grinned at him, but something in the expression drove an inexplicable blade of shock into Cam’s heart. For a moment he was certain he knew the man from somewhere else.
Juan turned back to the fixture, changing his position as he twisted the bulb and inadvertently brushing his shoulder and elbow against the dangling plastic cover. It swayed alarmingly back and forth for a moment, then twisted free and fell to the floor with a crash. Cam leapt back out of its way as the old man swiped forward with his arms trying to catch it. He only succeeded in toppling off his stepladder, which went flying in the opposite direction.
Juan fell into several three-foot stacks of manila folders stuffed with documents, sending them spilling across the floor under his cart and up against the bookshelf, which was surrounded by stacks of books and boxes.
Cam hurried to his side, concerned he had injured himself, but the man seemed more embarrassed than anything and brushed off Cam’s inquiries gruffly. Then seeing the stacks of folders he’ d disrupted, he apologized profusely and would have dropped to his knees to begin gathering them had Cam not stopped him.
“I’ll take care of them.”
“But, señor, it is my fault—”
“Or perhaps I distracted you from your work with my questions,” Cam suggested with a smile. “In any case, they’re my files, and Institute policy dictates I alone can handle them. You just take care of the light.” He picked up several documents and inserted them into their correct folder, wondering if clumsiness rather than widespread fears of Chupacabra was the real reason Juan was mopping floors in the animal facility.
“Of course, señor.”
The old man righted his ladder, then picked up the plastic light cover, now broken into three pieces. Tossing them into the plastic trash bag hanging from the end of his cart, he pulled out a dustpan and whisk broom and knelt to sweep up the smaller pieces. By the time he was done, Cam had collected all the folders. Rather than stay in the line of fire, he stacked the folders hit or miss and retreated to the relative safety of his desk, hoping the fellow could complete his task without further mishap and leave.
He did however keep an eye on him, as much out of a sense of self-preservation as from the nagging sense of familiarity the man provoked in him. Had he actually seen Juan somewhere besides in his adjunct lab, or did he simply remind Cam of someone else? A former co-worker or student? A long-forgotten friend? A movie star? Some political figure?
He groped after the memory, but it continued to elude him as Juan resumed his attempts to remove the faulty bulb. It came loose quickly this time, and he set it in his cart, then picked up a long, narrow cardboard box with a drawing of a fluorescent light tube on it. A sprig of fresh green cottonwood leaves sprouted from one end. How that had gotten stuck in the fluorescent tube box, Cam could only imagine, but it did not speak well for Juan’s cart-manipulating skills.
Too distracted to concentrate on his work, Cam checked his e-mail. There were two from Gen. The first was a departmental reminder of today’s 5:00 unity meeting to be held in the Desert Vista room on the third floor. It included the revised agenda, whose title, “Stress Management,” made him grimace. Her second e-mail was a private missive requesting he make sure he was present at that meeting today—he’ d missed the last three—and reminding him of the importance of bonding among team members.
The weekly unity meetings were one of the eccentricities of working at Kendall-Jakes. Devised by Director Swain to promote unity and cooperation, they were not explicitly mandatory, but nonattendance was frowned upon. They provided team members the opportunity to get to know one another outside the work environment, to play games, and have discussions both weighty and light. Once, they’d been called upon to cite five random things about themselves, four items of which had to be of a different category than anything anyone had said before you. Another time they’d shared the worst day of their lives, which for many of them was shortly after having arrived at Kendall-Jakes.
Cam had always felt they did more to undermine unity than promote it and, especially for those in upper management, were more a reminder of Swain’s power than anything else.
He could hardly fault Gen for her frontal approach, but given his mental and emotional state today, the last thing he wanted to do was participate in one of their touchy-feely, reveal all and embarrass everyone, psychobabble meetings. He wished he’d never opened the e-mail, because now if he missed, it would be in direct violation of a superior’s order.
“Señor?”
Cam looked up into Juan’s swarthy, wrinkled face, framed with a halo of frizzy white hairs come loose of the ponytail. He stood before Cam’s desk, his face clearly illuminated in the light of the overhead fluorescents, its familiar cast so compelling Cam could hardly stand it. Where have I seen you before, Juan?
He was on the verge of voicing the question when he realized Juan was speaking.
“ . . . must have slid under my cart to the other side where you didn’t see them.” He waggled the manila folders in his calloused hands, then laid them on Cam’s desk. “I just shoved everything together without looking, so maybe you’ll want to go through and make sure everything’s right.”
Cam stared up at him, something in the voice finally triggering the door to his lost memory: He looks like Rudy!
Lieutenant Rudolpho Aguilar was the man who’d led a twenty-one-year-old new Army Ranger to Christ deep in the heart of Afghanistan. The two of them had worked together for almost six years, and Cam had come to trust him as he had no one else.
Until that final mission.
“Señor?”
“Oh. Yes,” Cam replied belatedly to his question. “Yes, I’ll go through them.”
The maintenance man gave him a nod, then pushed his cart out of the office, heading left at the door and on toward the eastern exit.
Cam sat unmoving, transfixed by his realization. The man wasn’t Rudy, of course. He couldn’t be Rudy. Juan was easily in his sixties, whereas Rudy Aguilar would only be in his late forties now, his hair no doubt as raven black as ever. Besides, what would Rudy be doing at Kendall-Jakes working as a janitor-electrician?
A suggestion floated through his mind, but he rejected it soundly and, laughing off the resemblance as an oddity, counted the mystery solved.
But as the afternoon passed he found himself repeatedly contemplating the possibility that the janitor-electrician might actually be Rudy, despite the wrinkles, white ponytail, and mustache. Lieutenant Aguilar had, after all, been a specialist in covert operations. Colleagues even hinted his true employer was the CIA. If so, it was entirely possible he was in disguise.
Swain himself had mentioned the suspicion among some of the Inner Circle that one of their employees was a spy—the inside hack job on the Developmental Bio computers, the encrypted transmissions they’d intercepted . .
.
And was it just coincidence that the man would have been serving as janitor in Cam’s basement lab for weeks and, now, right after the events of last night, suddenly show up as an electrician changing light bulbs in Cam’s fifth-floor office? Was it coincidence that a light that never flickered had suddenly flickered, almost on command, so that “Juan” would have reason to stay and do his work?
And what about all that clumsiness: knocking the light cover free, falling off the ladder into the files, even the man’s chattiness? In retrospect it all began to seem staged, as if Juan had been trying to get his attention, especially there at the end, when he’ d set the folders on Cam’s desk. Why hadn’t he simply called Cam’s attention to them where they lay and let him take care of them? Especially after Cam had taken pains to explain Institute policy to him? Because he’ d wanted a glimpse at them?
Cam began to search his desk for the folders, and finally found them, buried under other work he’ d been trying to do since the man had left. Pushing the other papers aside, he pulled the stack of four folders toward him. The names on the tabs showed him immediately they were obsolete and probably needed shredding. If Juan had looked through them, he’d gained nothing of import, but if Juan was Rudy he’ d have known they were useless and never bothered with them in the first place. A quick flip-through of each file’s contents showed them pretty much in order, despite Juan’s claim of just shoving them together.
Cam laid all four down flat before him and opened the folder on top again. This time instead of going right to the header at the top of the first page, his eye caught on the blue sticky note affixed in the lower right quadrant. The handwriting on the note was not Cam’s. And the information it conveyed had nothing whatever to do with the rest of the file’s contents:
“Prelim DNA eval on lab coat blood anomalous.”
He stopped breathing, staring at the words that lurched across the two-by-two-inch square, understanding their meaning at once. A preliminary DNA evaluation on the blood in the lab coat he’ d bagged and tossed into the hazmat bin last night had already come back: anomalous. Meaning it wasn’t Lacey McHenry’s blood, at the least. Meaning there had indeed been an intruder, one they hadn’t yet identified.
He swallowed hard. Why not simply say unidentified, then? Why anomalous? Suddenly he jerked his hands off the folder as if it had burned him, the front flap falling back across that first page to cover the unnerving sticky note again.
Anomalous . . .
A roaring sounded in his ears as the room melted and oozed about him. Whereas a moment before he’ d stopped breathing, now he was breathing too fast, the edges of his vision flashing as he hyperventilated. Terror dropped upon him, hard and black. Narrow roughhewn rock walls closed in about him.
No! Not another one!
He clenched his eyes shut, willing the images away. They took him anyway.
Smoke filled his nose and burned his eyes and the ground shook as he raced after Rudy out of the narrow passageway and into a dark chamber, whose walls were barely visible at the end of their head lamp beams. The others of the team crowded around them, breathing hard, saying nothing, as from somewhere in the tomb complex a lion roared; only they all knew it was no lion.
“Which way?” Rudy asked in a low voice.
The pale green light of an electronic screen washed over Woofer’s chest and face. “It’s not coming up,” he said after a moment.
Cam ejected the empty magazine from his pistol and slammed a replacement into the chamber, noting he only had five clips left.
“It’s not coming up,” said Woofer again.
“They must be jamming it,” Rudy said. “We’ll just have to—”
He was cut off by another roar, much closer, and they all looked around. The beams from their head lamps speared the smoky darkness, congregating on one of the chamber walls. A deep boom echoed around them and shook the ground, and in the light of their combined beams a crack opened in the rock wall.
“Hit the ground!” Rudy bellowed, a second before the crack exploded in a gout of rocks and smoke as they all dove for cover.
Cam came out of it to find himself crouching under his desk. Beside him, his stacked folders had sprawled across the floor at his feet. He could hardly breathe for the dust and smoke that filled his airways and thought he might vomit at any moment. He was shaking so badly his legs beat a faint staccato against the desk’s wooden back, and of course his T-shirt was drenched with sweat.
“Dr. Reinhardt?” The voice of one of his lab techs sounded quietly from somewhere near the door, startling him so badly, he slammed his head into the underside of the desk. With a muttered oath, he tumbled out of his hiding place before the young man could grasp what was going on.
“I’m here, Pecos,” Cam said as he arose from behind the desk and settled again on the padded chair. “Just looking through some of my files.”
“What’s up?” Cam asked when Pecos seemed unable to find his tongue.
The young man shifted uncomfortably. “The unity meeting has begun, sir. Dr. Viascola sent me to get you.”
“Ah.” Cam glanced at the time on his computer screen and saw that it was indeed 5:10. . . . How long was I out? “Guess I got a little distracted,” he said, with a sheepishness not altogether feigned.
As he set his computer to hibernation mode, he noted the lab outside his office was deserted and wondered if it was too much to hope no one had seen his little “episode.” Then he recalled the lab’s video surveillance cameras, and knew with dismay that it wouldn’t matter. If Swain wanted everyone to know, they would.
It was as he came around the desk toward the office door that he saw the sprig of now curled-up cottonwood leaves, lying on the desk alongside the place where “Juan” had placed the folders he’d found.
Aware of Pecos’s eyes on him, he looked away and continued walking, but as he followed the young man out of his office, he recalled how the sprig had been tucked into the end of the fluorescent tube box. That, too, had been no accident. Because every evening after dinner, Cam strolled down to the lake overlooked by the resort’s restaurant at the other side of the campus. It offered solitude, tranquility, release, and a pleasant view of the setting sun across the water . . . and cottonwood trees. It was a habit with which Rudy was obviously familiar. The sprig testified to that, even as it served as a wordless request for a face-to-face meeting where they wouldn’t be watched or overheard.
A request Cam wished heartily he could ignore, even knowing he would not be allowed to do so.
Chapter Nine
New Eden
After Andros’s reproof in the Justorium’s dreaded Cube, everyone went to lunch in the main cafeteria just off the mall in the Enclave’s central commons. Like almost every other chamber in the Enclave, the cafeteria was a low-ceilinged, dimly lit space. Long folding aluminum tables with attached benches stood so close together there was hardly room to walk between them. They were serving sweet potato pie again today, with lentil soup and sliced cucumbers in a goat’s-yogurt sauce.
Andros’s trial and punishment was naturally the primary topic of conversation. With Terra already reassigned to crèche work and sitting at a different table with her charges, Zowan had to rely on his lifelong friends and sleepcell mates, Parthos and Erebos, for moral support. They sat to either side of him at Table 9—Parthos, tall, handsome, and dark-skinned; Erebos, shorter by a head with coarse black hair that stood up in an unruly brush from his head. Last night Andros had sat across from them.
Not in the mood to talk, they sat in silence, listening to the others prattle on about their shock and horror—not that Andros had been punished so severely, but that he’ d needed it at all.
Gaias, who had taken a seat at the table not far from Zowan, commented loudly, “It just goes to show how you never know what might be going on in someone’s head. Right, Zowan?” He looked at Zowan as he said this, and by that drew everyone ’s attention to him, as well. Before Zowan could answer, Gaias
asked what he knew of the affair. “Surely you would have reported it if Andros had spoken such blasphemies before.”
Since Zowan and Gaias had already had this conversation, Zowan said nothing. But his brother would not be put off. “You’re not answering me, Zowan.”
“What difference does it make?” Zowan asked testily. “He’s been punished, hasn’t he?”
“It makes a difference because, in point of fact, you did not report his earlier blasphemies but dismissed them as foolish talk.” The conversation at Table 9 all but ceased as nearby diners listened in.
“Is that why you didn’t pull your lever today?” Gaias’s words were met with the sudden combined hiss of indrawn breaths around them.
At Zowan’s side, Parthos turned to look at him in alarm, the whites of his eyes a stark contrast to his dark skin.
“Because your own failure led to his discipline?” Gaias let the question hang, eyes boring into Zowan. The cafeteria’s soft lights reflected off his hairless skull, casting odd shadows beneath the lidded, quivering oculus, and obscuring his natural eyes in shadow. A smile twitched his lips. “Or was it your reluctance to punish someone whose blasphemies you agree with?”
Zowan glared at him. “Whatever I did, it is a private matter. It is our right to pull the lever as we deem just, and you are remiss for even bringing it up.”
Gaias’s hairless brows lifted. “How can there be any justice in the toleration of blasphemy?”
“How is not saying the Affirmation blasphemy?” Zowan demanded. “Don’t you actually have to say something in order to blaspheme? And what meaning can any affirmation have if a person must be forced to say it?”
Powered by indignation, the words bubbled out of the deep doubts he’d long wrestled with, though he could hardly believe he was speaking them here in front of everyone. The other young men stared at him blank-faced. Except for his friends—who looked horrified.
Gaias glowed with triumph. “So you do sympathize with him!”
Zowan shot to his feet. “Andros is not a rebel. He did not deserve to be punished so severely simply because he had a few doubts.”