Wake Up Missing (8 page)

“Look at this one.” She clicked the Current file; it held only six folders: Enriquez, Grayson, Hayes, Jacobs, McCain, and Perkins. Sarah clicked on hers.

“It's the same as the one in the hallway,” I said. “Can we go now?” My headache was coming back, and every time I thought about Dr. Ames or Dr. Gunther walking in on us, I felt nauseous.

“Five minutes. I want to read his e-mail.” She pointed to Dr. Gunther's mail icon. “I used to read my brother's all the time. I got some great dirt on him until he password-protected it.”

Dr. Gunther didn't have a password. His in-box opened right up.

I sank down in a chair as Sarah skimmed the e-mail. “There's a bunch of news alerts on some terrorist group.”

“Why would he get alerts on that?”

Sarah shrugged. “Maybe he's paranoid terrorists will attack the clinic.”

“Out here in the middle of nowhere?” I sighed. “Maybe back when it was a military base, but not now.”

“Hmm . . .” Sarah scrolled down. “There's a neurology society newsletter, some Team Phoenix thing—maybe he's in a fantasy football league. My brother does that. There's a note from Andrei somebody about lab preparations . . . another one from some reporter who wants to do an interview about poachers in the area.”

“Molly talked about that,” I said.

“. . . and he bought something on eBay.” Sarah went on. She clicked the mouse. “A butterfly, for . . . four hundred and twenty-eight dollars? It's not even that pretty.”

I stood up to look.

The butterfly in the image wasn't as striking as the blue morpho or Queen Alexandra's Birdwing on Dr. Gunther's wall. This one was mostly black-brown, with some pale-yellow markings and a few touches of orange and blue near its tail.

“What about that one?” I pointed to another e-mail.

“It's from Dr. Ames . . . about plane tickets. Looks like they're taking a trip to Moscow next month.”

I felt like my brain had some kind of switch flipping back and forth.

Everything's fine.

No, it's not.

Everything's fine.

Something's not right.

“Moscow?”
Something's not right.

Sarah scrolled through the e-mail. “Yeah. I wonder who's going to be here with us. Substitute doctors? I hope they're not leaving us with Olga. She's always grumpy.”

“Maybe we'll be home by then.”

“None of this is very interesting.” Sarah closed the e-mail program.

“What's this folder?” I pointed to the corner of the screen, to the folder labeled Research. The word made me think about experiments. Last spring, Lucy's mom had taken us on a tour of the lab where she works at Stanford. There were rows and rows of cages along one wall, most full of white mice and rats, but a few rabbits, too.

“Those are our research animals,” she'd told us. “They're used to test medicines so we can make sure they're safe for people.”

I remembered feeling awful for the rabbits in those little cages.

Research.

What kind of research was Dr. Ames doing?

I clicked on the folder, but there were no mice or rats or rabbits inside—just more folders labeled with names.

Curie

Da Vinci

Edison

Einstein

Gunther

Meitner

Newton

Oppenheimer

Shilling

“I don't recognize all of them, but some of these names are scientists and inventors,” I said. “Da Vinci . . . Einstein . . . Edison . . .”

“Gunther?” Sarah raised her eyebrows.

“Yeah . . . he's not exactly in the same league.”

“Maybe
he
thinks he's famous,” Sarah said.

She clicked on the Edison folder. Inside were a dozen or so files—Early Life, Education, Phonograph, Electric Light, Laboratory Notes, Menlo Park, Fort Myers Estate, Botanical Research, Relationship with Ford. “This looks like stuff you'd collect for a research paper. Why would Dr. Gunther need it? He hasn't been in school for, like, a million years.”

“Some weird hobby?” I guessed. “Like his thing with butterflies?” The switch in my head flipped.
Everything's fine.
My headache was getting worse; I wanted to sleep. “If you want to stay, you can, but I'm going to my room.”

“Come on, Cat. Those MRIs take forever. We have time.” And she went back to the video files.

“I'm leaving.” I headed for the door, but a deep voice that came from the computer stopped me.

“No! Not when we're so close!”

I shivered, even though the room was warm. I'd overheard those words hours ago; now I turned to the screen and saw the fierce look on Dr. Ames's face that went with them.

“Let it play.” I rushed back to Sarah's side. “This is what I heard earlier, standing outside the office.”

Dr. Gunther stood next to Dr. Ames in the video, at the same desk Sarah and I hovered over now.

Dr. Gunther was pointing down at images in a manila folder. “It's clear Kaylee Enriquez's tumor is growing. We have to contact her parents, Mark. We can't justify—”

“I said no!”

I looked at Sarah. Her eyes were huge as she stared at the video.

Dr. Gunther put a hand to his temple and rubbed in small circles. “I can't,” he said, then mumbled something. I turned the video feed up louder to hear. “This has gone far enough. Think what could happen.”

Dr. Ames put both hands flat on the desk then and leaned across, so far that Dr. Gunther pulled away and sank back in his leather chair. I would have done that, too.

“
You
think what could happen, Rudolph. Have you forgotten how we came to work together?”

Now I remembered. Dr. Ames had threatened Dr. Gunther while I was standing outside his door.

“At that time, you were found to be violating federal laws that regulate genetic engineering research. At that time, you were charged with a felony. And at
that
time you were never going to set foot in a lab again. You were never going to finish your clinical research; you were never going to find your cure for Parkinson's disease. And you. Were. Going. To.
Die
.”

“Die? From what? That disease?” Sarah whispered.

I put my hands up—
no idea
—and pointed to the video.

“We gave everything back to you, Rudolph. We kept you out of jail. We kept you in the lab. We provided everything you needed for your research. We kept you alive. We kept our part of the deal, and you need to keep yours.”

On the video, Dr. Gunther reached for a file on the desk. His hands shook, and he looked up at Dr. Ames. “How much longer?”

“Not long. We're close. And things look much better with the other first-round subject, yes?”

“Perkins. Trent Perkins.”

“The procedure has taken?” Dr. Ames tapped his fingers together.

“It seems so, yes. It's early. Too early for cognitive tests to confirm, but we're already seeing personality changes that would indicate success.”

“I knew it!” Sarah couldn't stand still any longer. She swiped tears from her eyes and whirled around to face me. “They're
changing
him! They're going to—”

“Shhhh!” I whispered. “We need to hear the rest.”

Sarah's face was red, but she took a deep breath and nodded. I started the video again, in time to see Dr. Gunther take a long, shaky breath, too. “Very well. We'll proceed as planned,” he said. “But we must contact the girl's parents. The rate of tumor growth is too dramatic to be contained. She'll need surgery, and—”

“No.”

“Mark, the child is going to die if we don't—”

“Not yet.”

“When?” Dr. Gunther's hand shook as he wiped his brow.

“When our work is done.” Dr. Ames leaned over the desk again. “And not a moment before.”

“Lord, have mercy. All right.” Dr. Gunther nodded and closed his eyes. Dr. Ames stalked out of the room.

Sarah stared at the screen. Dr. Gunther wasn't talking or even moving, but she kept staring as if she could see through to his thoughts.

“Sarah, we have to go,” I said finally. There was so much to say, but I didn't know where to start. There was no denying it now, no hoping I was confused. Something was wrong. I knew what I heard, and I was struggling to hang on to the words, even as my headache threatened to swallow them up. I needed to get back to my room, lie down, and think. Or write all this down before it slipped away. “We have to go,” I said again.

But Sarah was leaning into the computer, eyes scanning the desktop. “There must be more here.”

“It's been too long. We
can't
get caught.”

She took a deep breath and bit her lip for a second. “Okay.” Sarah followed me away from the desk, but halfway to the door,
she wheeled around and rushed back to the computer. “Wait! One more. There was this other file. . . .”

I was so dizzy I gave up and sat down in the chair next to her.

“‘DNA Analysis.'” She read the folder's name, then opened it, and the same list of scientist and inventor names came up as file names. Sarah clicked on the one labeled Edison, and a river of random letters poured onto the screen.

“‘C-C-G-C-A-G-T'?” Sarah frowned. “It's a bunch of gibberish.”

“No.” I stared at the screen, willing the letters to come into focus. It wasn't gibberish. I took a couple deep breaths and tried to push the pain back in my head. It worked a little, and I could think again. I knew what those letters were.

“My friend's mom showed me something like this in the lab where she works,” I said. “That sequence of letters stands for someone's DNA—their genetic makeup, like, who they are.”

“So this is . . . ?”

“This is . . .” My mind formed the words, but they didn't make sense. DNA codes from dead scientists?
Something's not right.
“This is Thomas Edison. I guess.”

“Hasn't he been dead a while?”

“Yeah. But . . .” I scrolled through the letters. Was it possible? “DNA lasts a long time after you die. We read an article about it in school. Scientists have gotten DNA from Neanderthal fossils that are seventy thousand years old. That's kind of extreme—but it's totally possible to get some DNA from a person more than a hundred years after they die. The article said they identified the Romanov royal family from the Russian Revolution that way.”

Sarah opened the document about Edison's inventions in front of the DNA file, but the letters still filled the screen behind it. “Look at the pictures of this guy.” She scrolled through images of a young Edison in his lab, working with plants, sitting at a long table surrounded by gadgets and wires and with a look of fierce concentration from his face. “Geez, he reminds me of Trent at breakfast.”

Edison had a cot set up in his laboratory, the text said, so he wouldn't have to leave the lab to sleep. I stared at the picture on the screen. DNA sequences swam behind it.

And Dr. Ames's voice on the roof came back to me more clearly. This time, I was sure of the words I'd heard him say.

. . . by Monday, we'll have four more subjects undergoing the change.

“The change.” I whispered the words to myself, trying to make them make sense.

“What?” Sarah asked.

“The change . . . they keep using that phrase. . . . The change. What's the change?”

“Trent sure changed.”

She was right. The kid from breakfast was more like the inventor on the screen than the boy Sarah had described.

“Hello?”

We never heard footsteps, but Dr. Ames's voice was close—right down the hall.

“Oh, hey,” he went on. “Just finished doing an MRI on Quentin Hayes.”

I held a finger to my lips and pointed under the desk. My
hands shook, but I closed the files on Gunther's computer, and we scrambled under the desk, huddled in the shadows. I could feel Sarah next to me, breathing, trying to stay quiet. She smelled like chlorine and suntan lotion.