The Adamas Blueprint (10 page)

The fact that he didn’t know Robley might not mean anything, but she was still wary. “He said it had something to do with Dr. Ward, but I don’t know what.”

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“Then I’m sure you can understand why I have to speak with him. I’m going to have to ask you to come with me. I’d like you to help me locate Mr. Hamilton. As I said, it’s very urgent.”

Again, he motioned toward the west end of the campus.

She started to slowly walk in that direction with Detective Watson beside her. She decided she had to be convinced.

“Detective Watson, there was one other thing that might help. Kevin said he was talking to two police officers. I can’t quite remember their names. I think one was Barnett. You might try one of them. He might even be with them.”

Watson seemed to think for a second. Then he said, “You must be talking about Detectives Barnett and Kaplan. We could try contacting them when...”

Erica whipped her hand up and blasted him in the eyes with the mace. He sank to his knees, his hands went to his face, and he began screaming. As she ran, she could hear him yelling after her.

“Goddam bitch!”

No one was in the quad anymore. She bolted for the nearest building, passing a sign that said

“Cooper Physics Building.” She pulled furiously on the door, but it wouldn’t budge. Locked.

She ran down to the next door. This one was wedged open with a piece of wood. She yanked it open, pausing only to look back at the police impersonator, who was now on his feet just forty yards behind her.

The literature that came with the mace said a full-grown man would be incapacitated for twenty minutes. Either the claims were exaggerated or her aim must have been off and she didn’t spray the chemical right in his face.

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She kicked the wedge out and ran down the hallway. Turning, she was horrified to see that, instead of slamming shut, the door had hydraulic hinges. It was closing, but excruciatingly slowly.

Ahead, she saw a stairway and decided to take it. Over her footsteps echoing on the stone floor, she could hear Watson slam the door open, sputtering as he did so. It sounded like he tripped and fell as he crossed the door’s threshold, but she didn’t dare turn to look. She took the steps two at a time.

The second floor hallway was dark, but some sunlight filtered through the office transoms.

The stairway was about midway between the ends of the hall and topped out on this floor. She randomly chose left and started twisting knobs in an effort to find an unlocked door.

After trying three doors unsuccessfully, she came to the last room in the hall, whose massive metal door was equipped with a lever instead of a knob. She pushed down on it and the latch clicked. Someone had left it unlocked. She pushed in and slammed the door behind her. She scrabbled for the deadbolt switch and then realized it needed a key to lock from this side as well.

Two wooden wedges were on the floor, probably used to prop the door open. She jammed them under the door. They’d hold for a minute, but not against sustained pounding.

Looking around the room, she now knew why it had a door different from the others on the floor. Surrounding her was thousands of dollars worth of complex machinery and gadgets, the purpose of which she couldn’t hope to decipher. Along one wall, storage cabinets stretched from floor to ceiling, and a huge metal box took up a quarter of the 30 foot by 20 foot room. Jumbles of cable connected many of the devices together, and she almost tripped on one as she searched for a telephone. Because there was so much electronic equipment, it took her several seconds to realize that there wasn’t even a desk in this laboratory, let alone a phone.

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As she frantically hunted for a hiding place, she noticed that a door on the metal box was slightly open. On a table next to it sat a heavy-duty padlock with the key still in it. The box’s door had three steps leading up to it, putting the bottom of the door at mid-thigh level. She examined the door’s handle mechanism, trying to ignore the fact that Watson was going to be pounding at the laboratory door any second. The thick steel handle had an eyelet that lined up with a similar eyelet in the door when the handle was closed. The padlock was big enough to go through both eyelets and lock the door. Erica opened the door wider and climbed the steps to look inside.

She’d seen a room like it once before, while she was taking introductory physics. It was called an anechoic chamber, used to study sound in an environment which was almost completely free of any echo. Large foam wedges covered the floor three feet below. A wire mesh was suspended above the wedges for walking and mounting equipment. Only some of the wall and none of ceiling was covered by the sound-absorbing wedges. In the far corner, construction materials and a sheet of plywood leaned against the wall. Apparently, the chamber wasn’t finished.

Erica examined the inside of the door, hoping she could lock herself in the chamber until whoever was using the room returned. The door was actually composed of two sections, one that swung into the outer room, and a second insulating door that swung into the chamber. It was covered on the inside by more of the foam wedges. Both doors had handles on the inside, but neither had eyelets for a padlock. She could close the doors, but there was no way to lock them from the inside.

Faintly, she heard pounding outside the chamber.

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***

Franco had stopped at the top of the stairs, seeing the door slam on the room at the end of the hall. He removed the walkie-talkie while wiping his eyes with the sleeve of his jacket and repeatedly pressed the button calling Wilson.

“Wilson here. Go ahead.”

“It’s her. Goddammit! The bitch maced me!”

“What! You idiot! I told you not to contact her without me.”

“She made me when she came out of the library,” Franco had lied. “She started to run. I had to go after her.”

“Did she get away?”

“No, I’m in the physics building. I’ve got her trapped in one of the rooms on the second floor, but it’s going to be tougher getting her to the car now. Get over here and help me out.”

“On my way.”

Franco had run down to the room, pulling out his Glock 19. With the automatic raised, he gently pushed down on the lever. He heard the click of the latch disengaging and pushed the door slightly. No deadbolt.

He threw the full weight of his body against it, ready to crouch and duck another mace attack.

He’d shoot her, but not to kill, much as he’d like to. Expecting to hit a yielding door, he wasn’t ready for the sudden stop almost immediately after the door had begun to open. His head smacked against the steel with a resounding thud, and he almost fell to his knees again.

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Holding his head, he shook out the stars. Maybe his aim would be off just this once, and there would be a fatal accident. Lobec wouldn’t like it, but tough shit. Franco had had just about enough of Erica Jensen.

He threw his shoulder against the door, this time anticipating the shock. On the third try, the door gave slightly. Three more times and it flew open.

He crouched as he’d originally intended, but no mace came. A quick look around the room.

She wasn’t in sight.

Then he heard it. A faint, almost nonexistent, beeping. It was coming from the direction of the open door of a large metal chamber in the opposite corner of the room. The sound of a doctor’s pager. It abruptly stopped, and he realized the hospital must have paged the med student. Tough luck for her. It didn’t matter, though. He would have found her anyway.

He eased over to the door and opened it wider. He peeked around the corner. The chamber was faintly lit, but he could tell that the Jensen woman was not in view. He crept up the stairs, his back to the door, the Glock held at arm’s length.

As he stepped onto the wire mesh, he still couldn’t see her. But he knew where she was. A 4

by 8 sheet of plywood leaned against the far corner, plenty of room for someone to hide behind.

“Miss Jensen, why don’t you come out? I don’t want to hurt you, but I will if I have to. And if you spray me again, I
will
hurt you.”

No response. This bitch was tougher than he thought. He slowly walked over to the plywood, then hooked his foot under it and kicked it aside.

The woman wasn’t there. Only two things sat on the wire mesh: a pager and a key.

Shit!

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He whipped around to see the door swinging shut.

***

Erica pulled on the chamber’s outer door as hard as she could, but the enormous metal frame was as heavy as it looked and only with effort started to shut. She didn’t dare look into the chamber, but she heard the police impersonator curse as he realized what happened. The lock in her hand poked her skin, but she pulled harder.

The door was almost closed, traveling at a tremendous rate, when a hand shot through the opening. The man’s weight fell against the other side of the door, but it wasn’t enough to halt the inertia of the door’s massive bulk. His hand was crushed as the door slammed it against the jamb.

He let out a scream, and the weight momentarily lifted. The hand disappeared into the chamber.

Erica used the opportunity to latch the door. As she tried to thread the lock through the handle mechanism, gunshots rang out, and she almost fell from the stairs in surprise. She looked down and saw with relief that the bullets, unable to penetrate the thick door, only made small protrusions on her side. Her fumbling hands finally got the lock in place just as the man began pounding on the other side, and she closed it with a satisfying click.

Suspecting that she didn’t have much time before his friends arrived, she collected her purse and headed for the exit. The impersonator’s muted curses faded quickly as she ran down the hall.

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CHAPTER 12

Clay Tarnwell leaned into the drive, never taking his eyes off the ball, following through with the form he’d learned at Pinehurst. As soon as the ball left the tee, he knew he’d sliced it. The ball curved gracefully away from the center of the fairway and toward the stand of ashes lining the right side of the rough. It bounced once and then came to rest a good 200 yards from the green.

He’d be lucky to make a bogey on this hole, let alone par. It was a perfect shot, exactly where he’d wanted it.

A white-haired gentleman sporting a straw hat, lime green pants, and a well-rounded paunch started laughing as soon as the ball hit the ground.

“If I didn’t know you any better, Clay,” said the sweating man as he took his driver from the bag in the back of the golf cart, “I’d say you shanked that one on purpose.”

“You’re right, Rex,” said Tarnwell, trying to sound disgusted. “And the next one is going in the left sand trap if I can make it. What do think? Would a 3 iron do it?”

Rex Hanson laughed again, and then lined up at the tee. After taking sufficient time to level his swing, he drove a beautiful shot at least fifty yards past Tarnwell’s directly down the fairway.

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Tarnwell shook his head as if to curse his luck, but he could have easily beaten his companion, probably by at least eight strokes. He played a four handicap but he had intentionally been missing the harder shots on the previous 12 holes. Now he was coming even with Hanson again and saw a good chance to stay behind for a while, so he took it.

Not that Tarnwell wasn’t competitive. He was. Very. But only at one thing. Making money. All this he-man stuff was bullshit. Sure, he was good at it. A natural athlete all his life, Tarnwell had been gifted enough to play linebacker at the University of Michigan until a knee injury ended his career. He’d gotten a lot of sympathy at the time, but one thing nobody seemed to realize was that he didn’t really care.

Football was a means to an end, the method of putting himself through school, his major in both business and chemistry. That was the ticket out of his father’s shadow, the way to make even more than the vaunted Bernard Tarnwell ever dreamed of having. All his life, Clayton Tarnwell saw the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, and he couldn’t care less how beautiful that rainbow was. If it could lead him to the pot, fine. Otherwise, it was just in the way.

And losing to this shithead was just another means to that end. If he had to lose a few rounds of golf, so be it. As long as it made Rex Hanson happy and ready to close a deal, he’d piss into the wind for all he cared.

They climbed into the cart with Tarnwell driving. Another of Hanson’s little ways of attempting to show who was in control. He never drove his own cars, preferring to leave that menial chore to his underlings.

Tarnwell was glad to drive, owning six vintage Ferraris himself, often driving one of them to work. Besides, he knew it would make Hanson happy.

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“So, Clay,” said Hanson as they drove, “you really think you can pull this merger off? If you don’t, there’s no way I could help save you or your company. Your credit would be ruined. You wouldn’t be able to get a five dollar loan with ten dollars collateral.”

Tarnwell thought he would get this response, which is exactly why he was trying to butter the old man up by losing.

“Rex, I know what I’m doing. I’ve given this a lot of thought, and there’s just no way I can lose. Not with my ace. When the banks realize what this new invention means, they’ll be throwing money at me.”

“Clay, the only reason I’m here, letting you pretend you’re losing to me, is that your father was a good friend of mine. You were always a suck-up and a cheat. But you were also loyal to your father and extremely good at making money. I never understood why Bernie didn’t leave you his company. I suppose it was his attempt to teach you some values, late as it was, most likely the same reason he made you pay for your own education, but I was probably as surprised as you were. Now you’ve built up your own company, almost as successful as your father’s. I just don’t want to see you blow it, son.”

The line about being almost as successful as his father grated on Tarnwell, but he managed to hold back a sneer. His father had built up a mining company from scratch and then sold it for $200 million. When his father died in Clayton Tarnwell’s senior year of college, the will left him with a pittance, less than $500,000, with the rest going to charity. Tarnwell was furious, betrayed by his own father to whom he had shown unwavering devotion. He had used that money to start his own company, Tarnwell Mining and Chemical, just to show the world he was even better at making money than Bernard Tarnwell. Now he was a week away from proving that point.

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“This buyout is important,” Tarnwell said. “If it doesn’t come through, it’ll take me two years to get up to full production on Adamas. Forrestal Chemical has the facilities I need now. I’ve been trying to buy those facilities, but they won’t sell. If I had them, I could be producing in two months. The only other choice is to buy the company. And without your support, I’ll never get the loans I need for the leveraged buyout.”

“You’re sure this Adamas process works? How has testing been?”

Tarnwell pulled to a stop near his ball. “Final validation is taking place as we speak. We should know the results by Tuesday. But I’ve seen the process myself. It works. Tarnwell Mining and Chemical already has an invention disclosure out, and the patent process will be well under way this week.”

“I certainly trust your business sense if nothing else. I know you wouldn’t do anything to con me.” Hanson looked at Tarnwell as if posing a question.

“Of course not. This is the wisest investment you’ll ever make.”

Hanson paused and then nodded. “I leave on a business trip Monday afternoon. Come to my office first thing Monday morning. We’ll talk to Wayne Haddam over at First Texas. I’m sure we’ll be able to work out a favorable agreement.”

“Thanks, Rex,” Tarnwell said as he climbed out of the cart. “You won’t be disappointed.”

“I better not be.”

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