Blind Eye (22 page)

Nuclear Fusion Test Facility

R
ung
is definitely a four-letter word, Marion thought without humor.

She didn't know if she was a tenth of the way or half the way to the top. What she did know was that she could no longer ignore the pain in her head, her back, her legs, her arms. Her muscles were screaming and her head was hurting so badly that her vision was beginning to blur. With every metal rung of the ladder she was climbing, she felt the burn on her fingers and palms where blisters had long ago formed, only to be rubbed raw.

At the start of the climb, she'd tried to keep track of the number of rungs as she went up. The climb, though, was harder than she could ever have imagined. The bag she was carrying across her shoulders was so much heavier than it was at the bottom. Before she'd climbed a hundred rungs, the fatigue had begun to set in and her brain lost the ability to keep count. Looping one arm through the metal and resting her feet on another rung below, all she could see was darkness above and below.

The beam of the flashlight shone on electrical cables that ran up along the wall to her right. For a fleeting
second, Marion thought she saw a small creature running down it.

She shivered. “Please…no rats.”

She turned her back to the cables, thinking how stupid it would be to let go of her hold because of a fear of rats.

Her throat was raw. She moved the flashlight hooked through the rope to the side. Trying to balance her weight on both feet and one arm, she shifted the bag on her shoulder. It was a struggle, but Marion was determined to get a bottle of water.

Feeling like a high-rise construction worker, she pulled the bag around slightly and tugged a plastic water bottle out of the bag. Twisting the top open was another story, but she was finally able to do it with the help of her teeth.

She gulped the water as if she'd been stranded on a desert isle for weeks. She dropped the empty bottle into the hollow darkness below. The bottle disappeared almost instantly, but if there was a sound to the soft plastic hitting the bottom, she didn't hear it.

Since she had access to the shoulder bag, she decided to take another bottle of water out and tuck it into a more convenient spot for later.

Realizing she had nowhere to put it, Marion decided to simply slide it inside her shirt. Holding the top of the bottle in her teeth, she began to unbutton her top buttons with her free hand.

No sooner had she begun, however, than the arm she had hooked around the rung slipped and her body swung outward. The bottle fell, striking the flashlight clipped to the rope. Grabbing for it only made things worse. In an instant, Marion was looking helplessly down the shaft as the flashlight fell end over end to the bottom.

This time she saw and heard it. Unfortunately, the bottom wasn't as far away as she'd hoped. And the flashlight went out when it hit the cement.

Marion was too angry with herself to cry over the loss of the light. She had never been a star athlete in her youngest and brightest days. She considered exercise a punishment. She'd always aspired to be an academic. What was she thinking, to assume she could climb almost three thousand feet…and in the condition she was in now!

She wasn't going to make it.

Marion leaned her forehead against the cool metal of the ladder, trying to rethink her decision. Opening the doors to the Test Drift area now seemed like a vacation. Getting exposed to radioactive waste didn't sound too bad at all. The risk of death suddenly seemed less certain than the death that a fall from this ladder would produce. She reminded herself that people cleaned toxic spills every day in power plants and research facilities. Besides, there was no saying what the radiation levels were in the Test Drift tunnel. And she had protective clothing in her bag to boot. If she'd had the courage to go back to her desk in the control room and get her radiation exposure dosimeter, they'd know exactly how to treat her when she got to the surface.

The ringing in her ears came over her like a wave. Marion knew what it was before she even lifted her head.

“Electricity,” she said excitedly.

She looked over her shoulder into the darkness. There was a soft buzzing sound from the wall where the electrical cables ran.

They're powering up the station, she realized.

“I'm down here,” she yelled up the elevator shaft without thinking. “Please…
help!
”

And then she stopped cold.

Waterbury Long-Term Care Facility
Connecticut

M
ark Shaw was relieved when Sid sent one of the nurses to get him.

Questioning the night nurse was absolutely useless. The young woman was as upset as everyone else about what could have happened to Amelia if the medication had been administered. Besides, every staff member working that shift—as well as the newly arrived director of the care facility—was defending the woman. She'd been set up. It could have happened to any of them.

The police officers continued to search for intruders. Rita Ricci and another detective were interviewing everyone who had been working during the shift. There had been no visitors at all. No one believed any of the other patients would have been able to come up with anything so elaborate. Certainly, none of them had the requisite knowledge of toxicology to know what medication to prescribe and at what dosage. And what motive would any of them have?

One thing Mark knew, the attempted overdose wasn't a random act. It had been planned, and the plan had focused specifically on Amelia Kagan. What Mark
couldn't understand was why. The news of her change of condition was not supposed to leave the facility. But even if word had gotten out, who would want to kill her?

Whoever it was, Mark knew that Amelia was their best lead.

The Waterbury Police Department seemed to have the investigation under control, so Mark followed the nurse who'd been sent to get him.

Amelia was awake when Mark entered the room. Sid had his laptop open and was typing away. She looked right across the room at him, appearing very aware of her surroundings. Mark closed the door behind him.

“She's awake…you're awake,” he told her.

He walked toward the bed. “Do you think she remembers me?”

“I think you can talk to Amelia directly,” Sid told him. “She understands everything.”

“I'm a friend of your sister, Marion,” Mark told her. “I was here in your room before. I'm not sure if you remember me.”

Amelia gave no indication that she did. She continued to watch him, though, as if trying to make up her mind.

He decided to introduce himself. “My name is Mark Shaw.”

She was conscious, but this young woman was very different from the one Mark had met Saturday night when he first arrived. The immediate recognition then was not present now. Mark was convinced that was because of Marion.

Looking into Amelia's eyes, he thought he saw sadness there. Perhaps it was frustration. She wasn't studying him to remember. Behind her steady gaze, it seemed she was trying to communicate something.

Perhaps something about Marion.

Once again, he wished he had a better understanding of how the two sisters could communicate with each other.

Sid clapped his hands together. “This could be it.”

“
What
could be it?” Mark asked, looking over at the neurologist.

“The reason I sent for you is that Amelia wrote these letters down.”

Mark looked down at the pad of paper Sid handed to him.

“WIPP,” Sid told him. “That's what she wrote down.”

Mark motioned to the laptop. “Are you checking to see if it's an acronym for something?”

“I am…I did. WIPP stands for Women Impacting Public Policy or Women in Periodical Publishing. They can't be it. But this one makes sense.”

“What do you have?”

“Waste Isolation Pilot Plan. Here's their Web site,” Sid answered, starting to read from the screen. “It says ‘the Waste Isolation Pilot Plan, or WIPP, safely disposes of the nation's defense-related transuranic radioactive waste…'”

Mark moved behind Sid. “Who runs the facility?”

“The Department of Energy.”

“Who's doing the actual work?” Mark asked, crouching down so he could have a better view of the laptop screen. “I ran across this once in my police training. Private companies bid on these kinds of situations and the jobs get farmed out. We need a name…someone that I can contact directly.”

“So you're thinking what I'm thinking?” Sid asked.

“Somehow, Amelia has picked this information up from Marion,” Mark said. His gaze moved to the bed. She was watching them.

He stood up and stepped toward her. The lines on the forehead were gone. Her jaw was relaxed. There was a pronounced softening of her features. The expression on the young woman's face was the same as Mark remembered the twin sister having. Amelia was clearly relieved that they understood.

“Do you think this is where your sister is?” Mark asked. “This WIPP place?”

She blinked.

“She was telling us about WIPP yesterday, too,” Sid said. He was going through a copy of the manual they'd printed yesterday. “There are references to a Waste Isolation Pilot Plan in here.”

“I feel like an idiot. We should have had someone who understands this stuff go through it,” Mark said, shaking his head.

“I've already given a copy to Attorney Viera.” Sid put the laptop aside and stood up, too. “He was going to take care of that.”

“We've got to do this. We can't count on other people right now.”

Sid stared at him but said nothing, and Mark turned back to Amelia.

The recognition and happiness Mark had seen the first time he'd met her was back. But this time it was directed at Sid. Mark watched the neurologist put his hand on top of hers.

“Amelia, is your sister alive?” Mark asked gently.

As he watched her, she turned her gaze to the far wall. Then, unmistakably, a look of uncertainty appeared.

Nuclear Fusion Test Facility

S
he had to go down. Fast.

The realization washed over her with a dread even more powerful than that first wave of excitement. The power was being restored to the elevator shaft. Marion couldn't stay where she was or she would be peeled like a skin off the wall as the elevator descended.

She had no clue about what the clearances might be, but she doubted there was enough for her, even squeezed in against the ladder. In the darkness, she couldn't tell if there were any holes or niches in the wall that she could scramble into. She hadn't seen any while climbing up. Her mind was working at top speed. There would be no time to react if she waited. She started down as quickly as she could.

Marion couldn't hear anything overhead, yet. That was a relief.

Going down should have been a lot easier than going up, but her joints continued to protest. The muscles in her thighs felt like rubber. Within a few rungs, the stinging feeling in her hands grew even more painful…and her palms were starting to slip a little on the rungs. The
raw places that had once been blisters were now bleeding, but she couldn't worry about that.

Marion considered dropping the shoulder bag down ahead of her. But she remembered the other flashlights and the bottles of water. They could all be crushed on impact. As quickly as she could, she tugged the coil of rope over her head and dropped it into the darkness below.

She continued moving down one painful rung at a time. This was it. They were coming to rescue her. She didn't need the supplies. Her mind was a jumble. But she
might
need them. What if this was just a maintenance crew up above? In any event, she needed to get down to the bottom quickly, open the doors, and climb back inside the lab before the elevator came down the shaft…if it was coming.

Marion pushed herself to go down faster, but it was so difficult. The last thing she wanted was to lose her grip. That would be the last thing she ever did.

Questions started hammering at her brain. What happened if the elevator came down now? She'd be dead. Who was it that had restored the power to the lab? And why it had taken them so long? Could she trust whoever these people were? She didn't know the answer to any of those questions. How many days had it been since the shooting? She couldn't even remember that.

“Don't trust them,” Marion murmured to herself. She'd been fooled before. They'd all been fooled. She wasn't stepping into any traps. If someone came down, she'd have to find out who they were before showing herself…somehow. That meant she had to get back inside the lab before anyone got down here.

Another thing. With the power on, the Internet might be back, too. If she could get down there while the power was up, she could contact…

A whistling sound from far above froze Marion.

“Elevator,” she blurted out in panic. It was coming down.

Marion shrugged the bag off her shoulder, and it hit with a loud bang. She was near the bottom.

But the whirring sound of the elevator was getting closer.

She gave up her hold of the rungs and gripped the metal sides of the ladder. She began backing down two and three rungs at the time, her hands sliding down the rough painted metal. The pain in her hands shot like streaks of fire up her arms.

The sound of the elevator was becoming even louder.

She remembered how fast the ride down the elevator had been that first day. Marion looked up in panic. She could see the dim lights that framed the bottom perimeter of the elevator plummeting toward her.

She knew she wasn't going to make it.

As she glanced up, her foot missed a step. She slid, out of control now, clutching the side rails as her feet bounced off the rungs. Her chin hit a metal rung, snapping her head back.

She lost her grip entirely. As she began to fall backward through space, she glimpsed the elevator floor not fifty feet above her.

The fall was quick. She landed on her heels and felt a sharp pain shoot up through her right ankle. She fell onto her backside and immediately rolled to one side.

The elevator was almost on her. She was going to get crushed. She rolled again, pushing herself up against one of the walls. The bag she'd thrown down was right beside her head. She was going to be pressed flat. The enormous metal box continued to drop.

Marion closed her eyes and she heard the whirring
slow as the elevator neared the bottom. She felt the press of air in the shrinking space.

Marion moved her face toward the wall, thinking of her sister, wondering if anything she'd been imagining these past few days was real.

The smell of rubber brakes permeated the air. The pressure in her ears was intense. Marion squeezed shut her eyes, holding her breath.

This is the end,
she thought.