The Enclave (6 page)
Polite applause echoed through the dining hall as Dr. Reinhardt rose from his spot at the table in front of Swain. Unfortunately, he took the edge of the tablecloth with him for a moment, giving all the place settings a good lurch—even as he tipped his chair backward out of control. It would have fallen to the floor had Dr. Viascola not caught it.
No one laughed nor spoke because it was so typically Reinhardt.
“The brilliant man in his bubble, wreaking havoc as he advances,”
as Aaron liked to say. Nothing like the man she’ d seen last night who had carried her easily to the prep room and so swiftly and competently doctored the bleeding cut on her arm.
Reinhardt ascended the stage without further mishap and stopped at Swain’s side, half a head shorter and dressed in jeans and a blue flannel shirt. Appearing bemused and embarrassed, he shook Swain’s hand and accepted the plaque, mumbled an inarticulate response into the microphone, and looked as if he’ d give anything to get off the stage. Instead of releasing him, however, Swain spoke again into the mike, going on about Reinhardt’s educational past and his road to this moment.
Lacey hardly heard him as it became clear there would be no report about last night’s intruder, and thus no exoneration for her from the nasty rumor someone had set into circulation. The realization brought tears to her eyes, and she spent a few moments blinking them back and fighting for emotional control.
After a moment, Swain’s words registered again. “And now he’s here with us.” He turned to Reinhardt. “It’s an honor, Doctor. You are an outstanding scientist and a brilliant mind, despite your archaic and irrational belief system.”
Reinhardt smiled sheepishly, and a number of the audience tittered. Cameron Reinhardt, as Swain made sure everyone knew, was a Christian. A born-again, evangelical, Bible-believing Creationist. Aaron liked to mock that in him, too.
Swain’s voice blared over the speakers: “We forgive you for it, though. Mere temporary insanity.”
The director grinned good-naturedly, though Lacey did not think Reinhardt appreciated the jab nearly so much as Swain had enjoyed giving it. With that the director held out a hand toward Reinhardt. “Friends and colleagues, may I present our newest Black Box Fellow.”
The audience supplied a round of dutiful applause, and Reinhardt was released with his plaque to return to his seat. Swain finished up his remarks with a few administrative details, a reminder of the coming review and open house for which they all needed to be ready, and nothing at all about the incident in the animal facility last night.
Though Lacey had accepted by then that he wasn’t going to mention it, the reality of having her expectations fulfilled still hit her like a blow. As the others stood and headed over to congratulate Reinhardt, she sat unmoving, struggling once more to regain her composure and trying to ignore the glances of amusement, pity, and curiosity that came her way.
Later, as she passed through the congratulations line herself, it occurred to her that Dr. Reinhardt might be able to straighten all this out. If nothing else, he could explain to her what was going on. Thus, on her morning break she went to his office in Lab 500, only to learn he was down at the clinic gathering project data.
That took the wind out of her sails for a moment. Then she realized she could go down to the clinic herself and have a look at the records from her admittance last night. Nestled halfway across the bowl-shaped desert park planted at the center of the Institute’s campus, it was only a five-minute walk from the zig.
At ten in the morning in June, it was already 103 degrees outside, and when she stepped out of the air-conditioned building, the sun’s heat hit her like a cosmic pile driver. Heat waves shimmered off the asphalt path and wrapped her in an embrace that felt good after the chill of the Institute’s excellent air-conditioning system. By the time she reached her destination, though, she was dripping with sweat.
Sliding glass doors bracketed an airlock that kept the clinic’s cool air from escaping as people entered and exited. Inside, she crossed the spacious lobby and waited at the main desk while the two receptionists helped those who had preceded her.
The clinic was part of the Fountains of Eternal Life Health Resort, whose buildings occupied the western side of the Institute’s campus. Though some said the resort and clinic paid a good portion of the Institute’s expenses, many of the researchers considered it an embarrassment of commercialization that compromised their reputations as scientists. Even worse was the infamous Vault, also operated by the resort, which held the cryonically preserved remains of those who believed that one day the Institute’s scientists would find a way to revive the dead and grant eternal life to the living. Membership numbered close to one thousand and was available to any willing to pay the two-hundred-dollar fee and sign over their life insurance to the clinic.
“Name, please?” The receptionist’s voice brought Lacey back to the moment.
She gave her name, the woman typed it in, then said, “I’m sorry, but your appointment’s not till 2:00 p.m. . . .”
“My appointment?”
“A follow-up on your admittance last night.”
“Oh. Well, I’m not here for that. I was hoping I could see my records from that admittance, though.”
“You want to look at your records?”
“Just from last night.”
“That’s a bit irregular. I’m not sure we can—”
“Lacey McHenry?” said the other receptionist. “I just gave that file to Dr. Reinhardt less than ten minutes ago.” She looked at Lacey. “He stood over there by the door for a while and read it. You must’ve passed him on your way in.”
Lacey was already turning away, for once appreciating the fact that Reinhardt was one of the few at Kendall-Jakes who did not rush around in a frenzy. She spotted him right off, some ways up the southernmost of the two paths leading to the Institute, walking slowly, reading as he went. It didn’t take her long to catch him.
“Dr. Reinhardt!” she gasped as she came abreast of him, breathless from climbing the hill.
He looked up, the small photo-gray lenses of his glasses turned dark by the sunlight. “Ah, the frog girl.”
“You
do
remember last night!” she cried.
When he said nothing, she added, “In the lab? You sutured my cut with butterfly bandages?” She showed him her arm, though of course there was only the mysterious scar. Behind her, a man called his name, but he seemed not to notice. She couldn’t see his eyes because of the dark glasses but thought they might be fixed upon her arm and that any moment he might exclaim with surprise.
Instead he shifted backward and closed the folder. “That looks like a well-healed scar to me, miss.”
She stared at him in astonishment. “It was bleeding all over the prep room floor. There was an intruder in Dr. Poe’s lab.” She paused. “Surely you remember, Doctor. Why else would you have asked for my records?”
Whoever was behind them called again, closer now. She began to feel hurried, even as Reinhardt grew stiff and tense.
He looked down at the folder in his hands. “I didn’t ask. Gen asked me to bring back your file when I picked up the results of the blood tests we ran for the A-7 Project.”
Gen?
“You mean Dr. Viascola?” she guessed. “Why would she—”
“It says in here you have a history of mental illness in your family,” he cut in, opening the file and thumbing through the pages.
“What?”
“Your mother, I think it said, had a . . .” He fumbled with the folder.
“Nervous breakdown,” Lacey supplied. “Five years ago.”
“You have a brother in prison for drug dealing and assault. And you yourself have been the victim of an abusive marriage that ended in your husband’s death.”
“Ex-husband. We divorced before he died. And what is all that doing in there?”
“K-J researches all prospective staff members thoroughly before they’re hired. The security problem, you know.”
She frowned, realizing he’ d drawn her off the subject, and started anew. “Are you telling me, Dr. Reinhardt, that you remember nothing of the events from last night that I just described to you? The intruder, the bleeding glass cut on my arm, being locked in the prep room . . .” She heard the other man approaching behind them, huffing and puffing up the hill, his footsteps gritting on the path.
Suddenly Reinhardt grasped her forearm, rotated it palm upward, and rubbed the scar gently with his thumb. “This could hardly have healed overnight,” he pointed out.
“Sure it could have,” she countered. “If they used some sort of ATR process.”
He looked up at her as if she’ d startled him, then past her as the footsteps closed upon them. It was as if she had winked out of existence. Dropping her arm, he stepped around her to meet the man coming up the hill.
It was Frederick Slattery, carrying a folded, plastic-wrapped lab coat. “I’ve been looking all over for you, Doctor!” he said to Reinhardt as he seized the geneticist’s elbow and hurried him up the path. They fell at once into a discussion of administrative nature, leaving her beside a mesquite tree, the sun beating down on her bare head.
Slattery dropped his talk of requisition protocols as soon as Lacey McHenry was out of sight and earshot and took Cam to task, first for talking to McHenry at all, and second, for having put on her lab coat last night instead of his own, then letting Slattery take Cam’s in the belief it was Lacey’s. Even worse, he’ d thrown what Slattery had really wanted into the biohazard bin.
Of course, Cam had done none of it with conscious intent, having been completely rattled by the events themselves and the resultant flashback they had triggered. But he could hardly explain that to Slattery, since his stint in the army was officially designated as administrative and not the sort of work that might produce post-traumatic-stress flashbacks. Besides, he was trying very hard to forget the flashback entirely.
“Here is
your
coat,” Slattery said, shoving the packaged garment into Cam’s chest as they stopped together on the path. “Thanks to you we now have nothing with which to prove there was no intruder.”
Cam looked at him in surprise. “I would think Ms. McHenry’s alleged wee-hour hysteria and hallucination has removed all need for any such proof. Not to mention the near instantaneous healing of her cut,” he added dryly.
Slattery’s dark bushy brows drew together and he seemed momentarily at a loss for words. Then he harrumphed and leaned forward to pluck Lacey McHenry’s file folder from Cam’s grasp. “The director wants you in his office at your earliest convenience. I’ll take this up to Gen for you.” He continued on toward the ziggurat without further explanation, leaving Cam to stand with the packaged lab coat and a growing uneasiness in his gut.
Being head of the Department of Applied Genetics shielded him from the general stream of gossip and rumor, so he’ d not heard of Ms. McHenry’s late-night self-admission for hallucinatory paranoia until fifteen minutes ago, when the clinic receptionist had told him. That information had prompted him to open her file, which had shown him not only the false diagnosis but a notation in her physical evaluation that she had an existing hairline scar on her left inner forearm sustained during one of her berserk ex-husband’s beatings. Barely had he read the fraudulent notation when McHenry had caught up with him and shown him the scar herself.
He’d recognized at once what they had done to her, for he’ d worked on the ATR project a bit when he’d first arrived at K-J and had seen it in action. What he couldn’t understand was why they’d done it.
The grit of her approaching footfalls on the graveled path behind him now intruded into his musings, and mindful of the AD’s warning not to speak to her further, he hurried away before she could stop him.
Since “at your convenience” meant “immediately” in Swain-speak, Cam headed straight for the main elevators in the ziggurat’s huge central atrium, stepping through a pair of sliding glass doors into the warm, moist, loam-scented air of the kidney-shaped atrium’s artificial jungle. Seventy-foot-tall trees soared above him, encircled by nine stories of vine-cloaked balconies. More vines linked balcony to balcony, balcony to tree, and tree to tree in a riot of foliage that supported a collection of exotic birds, butterflies, reptiles, and small monkeys. Where once he’ d gawked in amazement, Cam now strode briskly along the artificial stream, past the thirty-foot-tall man-made waterfall to the bank of six glass-walled elevators that served the upper floors. One of them had just arrived, its passengers disembarking, and shortly he was ascending toward the ninth floor.
Watching the atrium’s vine-cloaked balconies and tree trunks slide downward as the car glided up, he continued to chew on the rationale behind using what was certainly an unapproved medical procedure in their attempt to cover up the break-in. In light of Swain’s past procedural indiscretions, it seemed a foolish action indeed.
Though it had been thirty years since the FDA had barred him from receiving federal research money, it had all come about because he’d dared to perform unauthorized experiments on human subjects, one of whom had died. Shame and exile had been Swain’s reward, and he’d spent a decade working in various privately funded international research facilities. He’ d returned to a mostly permanent residence in Arizona some nine years ago, living on-site to direct the last stages of the Institute’s construction as he began recruiting staff and funding for its operation. It had only been five years, however, since he’d been fully exonerated by the FDA for his earlier crimes.
After all of that, why would he repeat his original sin now, when there was no need?
As the elevator stopped at the ninth floor, Cam turned from the view of the atrium, now plunging to dizzying depths below him, and stepped through the opening doors. He crossed the spacious common area and passed through another pair of glass doors into the foyer where the receptionist nodded him through. He strode past her and turned right into a busy, curving corridor.
Swain’s office stood on the opposite side of the building. He had a private express elevator for his own use, but everyone else had to walk around from the main elevators, allowing visitors—and subordinates— the opportunity to appreciate the richly paneled walls, thick carpeting, sparkling chandeliers, and expensive paintings and replicas of the ancient artifacts that were Swain’s passion—all of it a not-so-subtle reminder of the fabulous amounts of money and power it had taken to establish the Institute and to keep it running.