Seven Wonders (7 page)
“Why me?”
“The chem analysis seems to indicate that this ivory is older than anything I’ve ever seen in my lab before. Too old for me to even date with anything available to me here. I’m going to send it out for analysis—but I was hoping you might have some idea where it came from.”
“You’re saying that my brother was killed by a spear made out of extremely old ivory.”
The use of ivory dated back to prehistoric times; nearly every ancient culture had utilized the tusks of elephants in art, religious artifacts, and in weaponry. But the idea that some sort of ivory weapon had been used to kill his brother—it was beyond conception.
Jack shook his head.
“My brother was a computer scientist. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to kill him—or where this ivory came from.”
The doctor thanked him for his time and offered his condolences. Jack was barely listening as the man retrieved the evidence bag and headed back across the lab. A mixture of emotions was rising inside of Jack. Sadness at the loss of a brother, guilt that he’d never had the chance to fix their relationship—and most powerful of all, anger that Jeremy had died in such a violent, terrible way.
There was nothing Jack could do about the first two emotions—but the anger was something he intended to use.
Clambering two stories down a steel-framed emergency ladder in an elevator shaft on the MIT campus was a hell of a lot easier than rappelling down an aluminum thread in a nearly bottomless pit beneath a dig site in Turkey. For one thing, Jack didn’t have to worry about Andy Chen braying in his ear. Instead of a crash helmet, Jack was fogging up the transparent plastic face shield of a Level B hazmat suit. And Andy was safely camped out in the utility closet in the Infinite Corridor with the floppy-haired sophomore who’d led them to the ventilation access point to the shaft and loaned Jack the biohazard suit.
Even in the cramped quarters of the elevator shaft, the suit was surprisingly comfortable. The thick white material covered his entire body, sealed at the wrists, neck, and ankles beneath his boots. The oxygen tank on his back, hanging from an oversize black backpack, was only a quarter full, but Jack wasn’t worried about suffocating; he’d opened the valve on the suit’s respirator. It was one thing to stay in character, but there was no need to go overboard.
The kid with the floppy hair hadn’t had any trouble lifting the suit from the biology lab where he was working on a master’s that had something to
do with a modified form of smallpox—though Jack didn’t really want to know anymore, since he was now breathing the guy’s recycled air. Jack didn’t love that they were relying on the help of a nineteen-year-old, no matter how smart he was, or how many proteins he’d named in just his second year at MIT. Like Andy, he was just a kid. But he’d also known about the utility closet that had shared a wall with the elevator shaft, and how to get through the ventilation panel that bypassed the elevator’s security desk, which had been taken over by a pair of officers from the Boston Police Department.
Jack took the last three rungs on the ladder, then dropped to the cement floor, directly across the shaft from the interior of the doors that led to the basement hallway. Then he glanced up again to make sure the elevator was still fully perched on the top floor. He doubted anyone would be making the trip down to the underground security labs at four in the morning, but getting crushed by an elevator while attempting to commit a felony was not high on Jack’s list of ways he wanted to die.
When Jack left the pathology lab, he had come to the sudden conclusion that getting into the crime scene was his necessary next step. The police had already given him the impression that they had very little to go on, and Jack didn’t have the kind of personality where he could sit on the sidelines and wait for someone else to do the hard work.
Once he’d made the decision, it had seemed natural to involve Andy. Jack trusted his prized grad student with his life—had literally done so more times than he could count. But when Andy had first suggested they reach out to some of his contacts in the graduate community, Jack had balked at the idea. He was willing to take the risk, but he didn’t want to involve a bunch of college kids in something that could them all arrested.
Eventually, Andy had convinced him that it was their best option, and besides, MIT had a tradition of flouting authority; campus pranks were legendary, like the time a group of seniors had taken the Dean of Students’ car apart and rebuilt it on top of the big dome, a hundred feet above the student
center. Or the time a group of engineering students had rewired the windows in the physics building to play an enormous game of Tetris that the entire city of Boston could watch.
Once he’d given the okay, Jack had been amazed at how fast Andy had been able to find what they were looking for. Although Andy had done his undergraduate work in Princeton, he had been a fixture at the Academic Decathlon championships that were held at MIT every fall. You didn’t forget losing to a wiseass genius like Andy Chen every year.
The floppy-haired sophomore hadn’t been the only undergrad on Andy’s e-mail chain to respond to Andy’s request for help, but he’d been the most creative. He’d known exactly where to go to get past the security at the elevator; and he’d also had access to the hazmat suit. Jack was a little terrified about a kid with such ready answers to the task at hand, but he certainly wasn’t in the position to judge anyone. He’d been a bit creative as an undergrad at Princeton, too; the local police station had a cell unofficially dedicated to him when he’d graduated—only to see him return as a professor.
Confident that the elevator wasn’t going to come down on him, Jack turned his attention to the double elevator doors. He crossed the shaft in three steps, then placed his gloved hands on the seam between the doors. On the second try, he managed to get the toe of one of his boots into the seam along with his fingers, and with a burst of effort, forced the doors wide enough to slide his body through.
The hallway was dark, the only light coming from a pair of pale blue emergency signals attached to police call boxes a few feet from the elevator, and Jack waited a few seconds for his eyes to adjust. Then he was moving forward.
He spotted the uniformed police officer the minute he took the first corner in the hallway; the man couldn’t have looked more bored, leaning back as best he could in a metal folding chair, a school newspaper open on his lap. Directly behind him was a closed lab door, covered in bright yellow
police tape.
Jack didn’t even pause. He took the corner at full pace, then pulled a small Geiger counter out of the backpack that held his oxygen tank, flicked it on, and headed directly toward the officer.
The man didn’t notice his approach until he was about two feet away. Then the cop looked up, saw the hazmat suit—and his eyes nearly bugged out of his head. He got up from the chair so fast the metal seat folded up into the frame, the entire thing clattering to the hallway floor.
“What the hell?”
Jack kept his attention on the Geiger counter, which was now chirping away, louder by the second as his finger shifted against the volume control.
“Nothing to worry about, officer. Just a little spill in one of the labs upstairs, happens all the time. They got me down here looking for runoff—whoops, that’s odd.”
Jack hit the volume again, causing the counter to chirp loud enough to send a piercing echo up and down the hall. Then he looked up toward the ceiling and held the Geiger in the air, just a few inches from the policeman’s face.
“Getting a little reading here. You might want to move your chair to the other side of the hallway while I check this out.”
The police officer was staring at the Geiger counter with eyes as wide as saucers. Then he looked at Jack’s fogged up face mask. Jack could see the terror in the poor man’s features.
“What kind of spill?”
Jack was running the Geiger counter along the wall, just to the left of the police tape, completely ignoring the officer.
“These damned hard elements, they get out of your controlled system, no telling where they’re going to end up. Seep right on through the floor tiles, into the piping, get into the airflow—and then I’m up all night mopping up. Some freaking grad student overturns a beaker, we’ve got a
radioactive incident on our hands, am I right?”
The officer nearly choked on his tongue. He took a step back.
“Radioactive?”
Jack glanced at him through the faceplate.
“Like I said, you probably want to move your chair over to the other side of the hallway. I’m going to have to get some scrubbers down here and deal with this.”
The officer shook his head, backing away down the hallway, toward the elevators.
“Fuck that. I’ll be upstairs by the security desk.”
Jack shrugged.
“Suit yourself.” Then he glanced down at the school newspaper, on the floor by the collapsed folding chair. “Probably going to have to burn the newspaper. Maybe the chair, too.”
The man was almost jogging now. As he disappeared around the corner, Jack could hear the officer’s radio coughing to life. Jack knew he would call it in to his superiors—but at four in the morning, Jack figured it would take some time for them to sort out what to do. This was a scientific institution, with plenty of labs and storage rooms filled with dangerous materials. And hazmat suits were like the modern-day version of medieval plague masks; you showed up in a hazmat suit, nobody stuck around very long to ask questions.
When he was sure the officer was far enough away, he exchanged the Geiger counter for a small pocketknife and turned to the lab door covered in police tape.
He made short work of the tape, then turned his attention to the door’s magnetic lock, attached shoulder-high to the doorframe. It was a simple keycard system; Jack knew that Dashia and Andy would have been able to come up with a sophisticated hack to get through the lock, but Jack had never been one for subtleties. He jammed the sharp edge of the knife into the crease
where the magnetic lock attached to the door, then pulled as hard as he could. There was a spray of sparks, and then the magnetic lock tore free. He stepped back and put his boot to the door, four inches from the doorknob.
The door crashed inward, the doorknob and part of the frame clattering to the floor. If the place was alarmed, Jack knew his “me” time was about to get much shorter. He quickly found the light switch, and two oversized fluorescent panels flickered across the low ceiling, illuminating a sophisticated, if somewhat sparse, computer lab. Corrugated steel shelves, counters filled with servers, routers, spaghetti curls of fiber-optic wires. Even some beakers and testtubes, though Jack had no idea what programmers needed with glassware.
Then his attention was drawn to the glass desk on the far side of the room—and the overturned leather chair beneath it, resting on the paneled floor beside a white chalk outline.
Jack’s mouth went dry as he crossed toward the outline. He tried to control the thoughts jamming through his head. It was just chalk, a picture, nothing real, not flesh and blood and bones. Except as he got closer, he could see the dark stain emanating from the chest area of the outline, spreading out under the desk, lapping at the leather of the overturned chair. Jeremy’s blood. Jeremy’s life.
That outline was Jeremy, his last, brutal moment, as he collapsed onto the floor, some sort of ivory spear jutting from his chest. Jack could see from the drawing that he’d landed forward, angled slightly to the side, one arm outstretched, the other clutching at the thing between his ribs.
Jack dropped to one knee, just inches from the chalk. His face was cold, and he fought to stay in control. He only had a few minutes, and he needed all of his senses. The crime scene specialists had already gone through this lab a dozen times. He could see, glancing around the room, pieces of colored tape attached to various objects, some already tagged and wrapped in plastic evidence bags, logged and ready for transport to the CSI labs. Other
pieces of tape near spots on the floor and the nearby wall marked areas of blood splatter. Jack couldn’t be sure, but he guessed from the placement of the tags that the crime scene specialists had been working in a spiral pattern, starting at the door, ending at the chalk outline in front of him.
If the specialists had missed anything, it wasn’t going to be something simple or obvious. Jack looked up toward the glass desk, just a few feet away. The desk was empty; the oversize computer flat-screen and the shattered remains of his brother’s laptop had already been bagged, cataloged, and brought to the CSI labs. The detectives who’d questioned Jack had told him that both computers had been professionally erased before they’d gotten to them. A thorough job; both hard drives had been magnetically wiped, and then a virus had been implanted to make any sort of data recovery impossible.
Which begged the question: Was it possible that Jeremy had been working on something using the computers that had gotten him killed? Or did the computers somehow contain evidence that would lead to the killer—something as simple as an appointment calendar or a contacts list? The police had already gone through Jeremy’s cell phone, and the only number that had come up over the past six months was Jack’s. Four calls in total, all of them incoming.
The detectives had been shocked at the idea that Jeremy hadn’t made a single outgoing call; Jack only felt embarrassment. Four calls in six months, and none of them lasting over ten minutes. Mostly just logistics surrounding his most recent visit to Boston.