Prophet of Bones (24 page)

Right-left-right-left-right-left.

The lights from shore slid by. He tried to mark the distance but soon gave up. He would know the spine of land when he came to it. It would be the last jut of rock before the bay opened up into a broad curve. If he saw the lights of Baltimore on the water, he’d have gone too far.

Water dripped onto his head as he paddled—flung from the upper paddle as he brought it forward in a high, quick arc. Moving on the water required muscles Paul didn’t often use. It had been months since he’d taken the boat out for a swim. After ten minutes, his shoulders started aching. Then his back. Then the thick trapezius muscles tightened across the tops of his shoulders and up his neck. He paused, letting the kayak coast. The silence of the bay was suddenly astounding. He was thirty yards from shore in one of the most densely populated places in the country, but in that moment the solitude was complete.

He started paddling again.

Right-left-right-left.

Paddling was digging, was the forceful displacement of water.

Up ahead, the curl of rock revealed itself as blackness. Flat black against the dark shine of the water. He pulled harder with his right arm, easing gradually closer to shore.

In ten minutes he was there, the black shore looming above him now—reeds and mud and rising gravel. He sensed the water shallowing beneath him and gave a last powerful thrust, then coasted.

The boat scraped bottom, its nose easing upward onto the muddy bank. Paul climbed out and slid the paddle into the hollow of the kayak. He dragged the boat into the bushes.

He crouched, breathing hard—the enormity of what he was doing sinking in. He was here. He was really going to do this.

He stood and checked his backpack, then made his way upward away from the water. He wore dark clothes: black sweatpants and a black hooded sweatshirt.

He moved quickly up the slope, out of the reeds and brush, and there was suddenly grass under his feet. He ran. The darkness was not absolute. There was a quarter moon out, and it lit the way toward the building, across an expanse of manicured landscape.

Breaking into an unfamiliar building was difficult. Breaking into a building you’d worked in for four years was substantially easier. Particularly if you’d made the right preparations.

He ran toward the building and didn’t stop until he was against it. He stood, breathing, listening, his back pressed against the cold steel structure. The building rose above him. There was no sound.

He made his way around to the far corner and then slid toward the lower window. He sat. He leaned forward and pressed on the window. It swung inward. A hundred-thousand-dollar security system won’t help if somebody purposely disconnects the alarm on one window.

Paul dropped his backpack through the open window. The point of no return.

“Well, this is it,” he whispered to himself. He began to lower himself through the window and into the building. It was a tight fit; he squeezed through one shoulder at a time and dropped to the floor. He was in a storage room that contained paper towels, gloves, cleaning supplies, and a sink.

Standing upright, he took the flashlight from his backpack and slung the pack over one shoulder. He moved through the darkness. Here, like no time since the hospital, he felt the loss of his vision. He stopped. He calmed himself and started walking again. Once he was out of the storage room and away from the window, he dared the flashlight. White light made a circle on the floor.

He’d done some checking, and as far as he knew there were no motion detectors inside the main hallways. If there were, then he was fucked, and there was nothing he could do about it.

He didn’t trust the elevators, so he climbed the stairs.

Buildings seemed to have a different life at night. A secret life. Things are transformed by context. Like himself. During the day, he was a researcher. A respected scientist. But here, now, he was a criminal. A man in a hood who was trespassing on private property. If he was caught, then all the years of school—all the education, and the money, and his status as a scientist—it was all over.

He thought of James. He knew it could be worse. There were worse things to lose than your career.

He pushed out of the stairwell and onto the fourth floor. At the door, he pulled out Makato’s card. The door said
GENE FREQ LAB
in bold block letters.

Paul glanced at his watch. It was five forty-five
A.M.
—earlier than Makato usually arrived, but not unheard of. Makato was often the first person to arrive at the lab. If somebody looked at the entry logs several weeks from now, this five forty-five swipe might not jump out of the data set. It might not raise interest, might not present itself as a mystery that required an answer. Makato himself, if later asked, might not remember what time he’d come in on this particular day. He might not remember which day he’d gotten a flat tire and arrived late. He might not remember which day, exactly, his card had broken.

This five forty-five swipe was the kind of thing that might, just maybe, slide under the radar. But once Paul swiped through, there’d be no going back. He would have to hurry.

Paul took a deep breath, put the card into the reader, and swiped downward. The door beeped and opened.

He rushed inside, following the dark hall around the corner and sprinting past the door to the type lab where he and Janus worked. The lab he needed now was a little farther down the hall. Paul stopped at the door.
ASSAYS
was written on it in black letters. Paul placed the card in the reader and swiped downward. The light turned green and the door clicked open. He stepped inside and the lights came on automatically.

The room was large. Larger than the type lab by a dozen feet, with several broad desks and a stockpile of bulky equipment lining one wall. Gone was the wet lab setup—the sinks and the glassware and the centrifuge. Here the samples being studied were data. A pure data set. This was a math lab.

One wide window faced the parking lot. On the opposite wall were maps of chromosomes—large blowups of karyotypes and complex three-dimensional graphs that he didn’t understand. There were computers and filing cabinets and a single oversized photocopy machine. In the corner sat a circular computer terminus with four big flat-screen monitors arrayed in surround to a black leather swivel chair. This was where Makato sat.

Paul stepped over to the desk and sank into the leather. He looked at the screens. It was like sitting at a drum set, everything within reach. He ran his hand along the central keyboard.

He turned on the machine and the screen flashed to life. Blue light.

After a moment, the screen prompt:

Username:

Password:

Passwords had to be changed weekly, and the last user had to pick the new word. Tradition in the lab required you to sticky note the password to the side of the monitor, so that the next user could find it. The username was always the name of the instrument.

Paul felt along the side. There. He pulled the sticky note off the monitor. He stared at it. He stared at it for a long, long time.

He typed “assay” for the username.

For the password, he keyed in what was written on the sticky note. He typed the word “Flores.”

The screen flashed, went dark, and then an input screen popped up. The system had been designed by the same people who’d designed the type lab’s system, so Paul knew what to do.

Paul took the flash drive from his pocket and uploaded the file.

The screen changed.

Run analysis?

Paul typed “Yes.”

The screen flashed again, and a white box popped up. Paul hesitated. He wasn’t sure what to type. Finally, he typed “all.” Then he hit Enter.

The computer chirped, running the cross-reference.

Outside the window, dawn was breaking. There was a sudden wash of light. The first headlights came into the parking lot. Paul was out of time.

The computer continued to chirp for several seconds, and the screen changed.

No matches. Run bootstrap comparison?

Paul hit Yes.

The machine chirped.

Security pass required.

Paul’s hands bunched into fists. Why was there another security code?

He typed “Flores” again and then hit Enter.

Password fail.

Another car pulled into the parking lot. And, with it, Paul knew, another employee, who would soon climb out of his vehicle and head up to the building. Paul imagined the men entering the building. Imagined them taking the elevator up to the fourth floor. He had two minutes, maybe three.

He typed “Flores” in again, being sure to hit every letter perfectly.

Password fail.

“Fuck,” Paul muttered.

Three failures would lock the system down, triggering a series of security protocols that would lead directly into deep shit. This was not the time to be playing the password guessing game.

He stood and reached his arm around the side of the computer, feeling for more sticky notes. There were none. He opened the desk drawer. Again nothing.

“Fuck,” he said again.

Paul hit No, then Exit, then Log off.

The machine groaned as the hard drive worked.

Paul pulled the black sweatshirt over his head and stuffed it into his backpack. Underneath he wore a white shirt and tie, his usual laboratory attire. He tugged his sweatpants down and pulled them off over his shoes, revealing gray slacks.

The computer chirped again.

Log off complete.

Paul yanked the flashdrive from the port and clicked Shut down.

The machine chirped.

Shutting down.

Three seconds passed. Five seconds. “Jesus. Seriously?” Paul glanced at the doorway. “Come on.”

Nothing was happening.

“Fuck it,” Paul said and hit the power button. Cold shutdown.

He sprinted across the room and out the door. He crossed the hall in five long strides and was at his own door, card in hand. He swiped into the type lab just as the elevator doors dinged.

Janus stepped into the hall.

27

That night, Paul walked inside his apartment building with the flash drive in his pocket.

He took the stairs up and on the third floor passed two men in the short hall leading up to his apartment. This seemed strange to him, two large men he did not recognize. Men who didn’t make eye contact as he passed. Paul turned and watched them disappear down the stairs. When they were gone, he continued to his apartment. There were only two doors at the end of the hall. There wasn’t a lot of places they could have been coming from. Paranoia, he told himself.

Still, he knocked on his neighbor’s door. The old woman, Mrs. Anderson, answered.

“Did you just get visited by two men?” he asked her.

“What two men?”

“Visitors. Did you just receive visitors?”

“I have visitors? She stuck her head out into the hall.

“No, I was asking if you’d just had visitors.”

“No, no visitors in a while.”

“Thank you,” Paul said.

The old woman eyed him suspiciously and shut her door.

He opened his apartment door and stepped inside. Nothing looked different. The same random chaos. Papers on the table. A few dishes in the sink. A cup sitting out on the counter. If they’d been inside, they’d left no evidence.

The next day, Paul arrived early to work. He nodded to the guard and took the elevator up.

He smiled when he realized that he’d beaten the secretaries in. On impulse, as he reached Charles’s empty office, Paul looked both ways, then slipped inside.

This time the room looked different.

The office had been ransacked. Gone were the stacks of papers and neatly ordered binders. The desk drawers were open, their contents gutted, scattered across the floor. Anything resembling a work in progress had been taken away. Paul stared at the whiteboard where the formulas had been. Everything had been erased.

There were so many Charles stories.

The time Paul had overheard him talking to Leonard, the two of them in the hall, arguing like an old married couple.

“Don’t you remember?” Charles asked.

“No,” Leonard said.

“You said it was slide two fifty-three.”

“I don’t remember,” Leonard said.

“I said, ‘Okay’ and walked around to the other side of the bench.”

“It was six months ago.”

“Remember, you said slide number two fifty-three was showing signs of necrotization, and then I said we’ll have to start using the two percent solution, and then Michelle walked in. Remember?”

“I remember something like that, but it was a while ago.”

“And then she said, ‘Do you have a—’”

“Jesus, Charles, was it cloudy that day? Do you remember that, too? Was there an airplane flying overhead? What was the weather like that day?”

“It was sunny.”

“Really, are you sure? What time of day did this conversation happen? Was it nine-oh-five or nine-oh-six? Was it the second Tuesday of the month?”

Paul zeroed in on one of the messiest-looking piles. He searched through the chaos of papers, hoping to get lucky. After five minutes, he found it.

He held it up in front of his face. An envelope, a bill from an insurance office. In the center was Charles’s home address.

28

Paul Google Mapped his way to Charles’s home, which turned out to be an apartment.

A small, neat walk-up, not far from the water in a quiet, gentrified part of town. A simple fourplex with a dark shingle roof and blue siding. It wasn’t at all what Paul had expected. Or maybe he wasn’t sure what he’d expected. There were always stories circulating around the lab about other companies trying to hire Charles away. Each time it happened, he’d go to the bosses, who would match the offer. Somebody must have told Charles that this was the thing to do. If Charles made a lot of money, the apartment didn’t show it. It was a humble, simple building, in a humble, simple neighborhood.

So that is what a company does when its star decides not to work anymore, Paul thought. It keeps paying him, so he won’t work anywhere else.

Paul climbed out of his car and walked up the short sidewalk to the door.