“We’re going to have to put in a requisition to have the mass spectrometer recalibrated,” Al’awwal said out of nowhere, his voice raised in agitation.
I almost jumped before it dawned on me what he was doing. “Yeah,” I muttered, and let my own voice sound resigned. “But I seriously doubt it’s in the budget. You know how the department’s been with that this year.”
“I’m tired of having to justify every single repair,” Al complained. “They should know by now that it’s completely necessary to do our jobs.” He nodded to the other pair as they passed. I kept my head down, as if in dejection, since I couldn’t risk them recognizing my face from the newscasts.
“Yeah, yeah. Preaching to the choir, here.”
The employees moved past us, and apart from a slightly confused glance, didn’t seem to think anything untoward was happening. “Nicely done,” I said.
“Corporations are corporations,” Al’awwal said fatalistically. “Even the most evil of conglomerates deals with the same red tape and bullshit as all the rest.”
I thought about my days in the Army, and then on the force. “True in the government sector as well.”
“Next left,” Silas interjected as we continued to traverse the halls.
We took the indicated turn. “Third door on the right.”
Most of the office doors had been closed, and the door we reached was no exception. It was too much to hope that it would be an unused and unoccupied office. There was light visible around the door frame, and while there were no voices coming through, I heard the clicking of a keyboard. The placard next to the door read, “Dr. Delores Larkin.”
“Damn,” I muttered.
“Problem?” Silas asked.
“Office is occupied. We’re going to have to do this fast. I’m not going to drop any bodies unless we have to.” Particularly female bodies, though I knew the age-old proscription didn’t make a whole lot of sense in this day and age. Dr. Larkin was as much a part of Walton as any male employee—she had just as much blood on her hands. Didn’t change the fact that the only way I was dropping the hammer on a woman was if she was about to do the same to me.
“Ready?” I whispered to Al’awwal. He nodded. At his nod, I simply opened the door and stepped into the office, as if I owned the place.
“Excuse me?” the woman seated behind a functional, if cheap, desk said as we entered. She looked up from her desktop screen, brown eyes wide at the intrusion. The office was small, maybe ten feet on a side, with barely enough space for the desk, a couple of visitors’ chairs, and a credenza with a hutch set behind the desk. As it was an interior office, there were no windows. Just the bare taupe walls with a single motivational picture—an eagle in flight with something about leadership written below—hanging in a dark wood frame.
The woman wore an expensive-looking suit in a dark brown that complemented her mocha skin. The expression on her face was still firmly in the realm of surprise rather than alarm. That changed as I put one finger over my lips and drew my forty-five. “Please, ma’am,” I said in a low and calm voice. “We’re not here to cause you any harm, but it’s important that you stay quiet. Or we may have to take drastic measures.”
I hated threatening her. I just hated it less than the thought of having to shoot my way out of the building through Walton’s security force.
“You,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “You’re the one from the vids.”
“That’s right,” I agreed. “So you know that I don’t have a whole lot to lose. All we need you to do is stay quiet. We’re just here to retrieve something.”
“Something to help you spread your vile lies?” she demanded. She hadn’t raised her voice, but there was real passion in her tone.
“They are not lies!” Al’awwal snapped. “Synthetics are as much people as you are.”
“Bullshit,” she replied. “I’ve worked here for ten years. I’d know.”
I shook my head. Willful ignorance and complacency. I couldn’t fault her for it. I’d been guilty of it myself. “Keep her covered while I look for the safe,” I said. Al’awwal nodded, pulling his own pistol from its place of concealment.
“There’s no safe here,” she said scornfully. “If you’re looking for money, you’ve come to the wrong place.”
“Just keep quiet,” Al’awwal snapped, gesturing with his gun. I ignored the woman and moved behind her desk. If the map had been accurate, it looked like Dr. Kaphiri’s cache would be in the floor, right around where the credenza was now sitting. I kept an eye on the office worker, not out of any real fear of harm to myself, but if she did make a move, I had little doubt Al would pull the trigger. I didn’t want to be in the line of fire if that happened.
The credenza looked like it was made of the same cheap plastic and laminate as every other office I’d ever been in. Whoever Dr. Larkin was, judging by her furniture, she wasn’t up in the rarified air of the corporate bigwigs. I took a good grip on the base of the credenza and lifted, just enough to pull the feet up from the carpet. Then I half-twisted, half-crab-walked to the side, grunting with the effort as I moved the piece of furniture about eighteen inches. That had the added benefit of boxing Dr. Larkin in as well. If she decided to go lunging for me, she’d have to do it across the desk.
The floor beneath the credenza bore the same cheap carpet as the rest of the office. I pulled my tactical folder from my pocket and snapped it open. The tanto point made short work of the carpet and the pad beneath. I kept pushing until I felt the scrape of steel on concrete and then, wincing a little on the inside at the damage I was about to do to one of my favorite knives, I dragged the blade in a wide, circular pattern. The edged steel tore through the fibers, producing a low scraping sound as the steel ground against the poured concrete of the floor. I didn’t know exactly where Dr. Kaphiri had hidden his cache, not down to the inches, so I cut as wide a swath as I could.
“What are you doing?” Larkin asked, craning her head to peer at my knife work. The credenza and hutch blocked most of her view, and as she came out of her seat a bit, Al’awwal shook his head and tsked. She sat back into the chair, giving the synthetic a flat, angry look.
I continued to ignore her, figuring that was the better tactic. I wasn’t here for a conversation, after all. I flicked the knife closed and dropped it back into my pocket. Then I dug my fingers underneath the carpet and pad, worming them down until I felt the coolness of the concrete. Then, I pulled.
It didn’t come up in one easy piece. Despite the sharpness of my knife and the cleanness of the cut, stubborn fibers clung to each other and the remnants of old glue resisted my pull. There was a ripping, tearing noise—not loud, but out of place enough that I worried it might draw attention. But I didn’t stop.. We were far too deep into this to turn back over a little noise. The patch of rug and padding finally tore free from the concrete.
Beneath the carpeting was…nothing.
I stared at the bare concrete, my guts twisting and churning. “You need to see this,” I said to Al’awwal. I moved back to his position at the door, drawing my forty-five as I did so. “I’ve got her.”
Larkin sneered at me. “Not what you expected? How do you plan on getting out of here? You know the second you leave, I’ll have security on your asses.”
I shook my head. The scorn in her words was as misplaced as the confidence. I didn’t point out that there were plenty of ways that we could ensure she didn’t do that, some of which didn’t even involve leaving her a corpse. I wanted her to think she had at least a little bit of the upper hand, a little bit of hope. If she saw us as bumbling intruders, all the better. I had the feeling that if she lost that bravado, lost that hope, she might very well start screaming her head off. We were already on a clock here, but that would kick it into high gear.
Al had crouched over the torn carpet patch and snapped out his own knife. I kept one eye o
n him as he probed the concrete and my other glued to Dr. Larkin.
“Do you really think people will give up their lives, the luxury that we at Walton Biogenics provide them, because of your ridiculous crusade?” Larkin asked.
“The truth will come out, doc,” I replied. “You’ve seen the protests. Do those seem like shining, happy Utopians?” I shook my head, turning more of my attention to her as I continued. “I’ve been a pretty firm subscriber to the ‘people are assholes’ theory. That we’re predetermined to treat each other like shit. That we’re better at hating each other, envying each other, disdaining each other than we are at finding reasons to like one another. Now? I look out the window, and I see hundreds of people protesting the thought that they’ve been party to a lie. That they’ve been made unwilling participants in the slave trade. You think those people are just going to go away? You think they’re going to ignore the truth? They’re out there raising hell on the chance that what they know is true has changed. Imagine their response when we give them proof, not just that synthetics are people, but that Walton Biogenics has known it all along. What do you think is going to happen to your precious company then?”
I didn’t add, What do you think will happen to the country, the government? I figured there was about a fifty-fifty chance that pure anarchy would reign for a while, that world governments, even that of the U.S., might fall. That pulled at the patriot in me, but then again, the nation I believed in, the nation I’d fought for, would never condone the enslavement of the synthetics.
“Your entire premise is false,” Larkin snapped. “You keep saying synthetics are people, as if it’s some foregone conclusion. But they aren’t. You’re delusional. And so are those so-called protesters.” She snorted. “Most of them are little more than teenagers looking to do some property damage and rebel against authority. They don’t care about your ‘cause.’ So a synthetic got pregnant. So what? Horses can mate with donkeys, but that doesn’t make them the same species. Lions and tigers and cattle and yaks. Oh my.” She said it with the cadence of the Wizard of Oz. “You claim proof, but all you have is an anomaly. An outlier. And that’s all you’ll ever—”
“Found it,” Al’awwal interrupted.
I leaned out enough to see around the rearranged furniture. His probing knife had, apparently, found some irregularity in the concrete, or what I had presumed was concrete. He had pried up chunks of…something. The same color as the concrete around it, but softer, more brittle, as it lay in crumbling chunks. In the rough hole he’d revealed, metal glinted.
“Clay,” Al’awwal noted. “Painted to match the concrete. My father was a tricksome man.”
“Great. Is that the safe?”
“Such as it is,” Al’awwal replied. “It appears to be a simple lockbox.” He examined the door while I kept my eyes firmly on Dr. Larkin. Surprise was writ large on her face, and she stared open-mouthed in the direction of Al’awwal. “The lock is quite advanced,” he continued, “particularly considering its age. It’s a genetic code cipher and will only unlock with the proper DNA.”
“Yours, presumably.”
“So I was told. But there’s only one way to find out for certain,” he agreed. I couldn’t make out everything he was doing, but I saw him press his hand into the gap in the concrete, and a slight wince crossed his face. Genetic lock. Probably required a drop of blood. In the newfound silence, I heard the metallic click of a lock disengaging.
“Yes,” Al’awwal hissed. His hands dipped into the floor and returned with a sheaf of papers along with several data cubes. “We have it!” he exclaimed. “At last!”
“You have what?” Dr. Larkin demanded.
“Proof,” I responded. “Collected over decades of work at this very lab.” I couldn’t keep the satisfaction from my voice. “Proof of the synthetics’ origins. Proof that Walton Biogenics has been denying invaluable medical research and treatment options to the population for years. And if we’re lucky, maybe even some documentation of the absolutely brutal methods your precious company has been using to silence people like me. As in, outright murder.”
“I… I don’t believe it.”
“Yeah, keep thinking that, sister. In the meantime, we’re getting out of Dodge. And that means we have to make sure you don’t go siccing security on us.”
“Wait… What do you mean?” A faint note of panic crept into her voice.
There was a petty little part of me that felt a thrill of satisfaction as she seemed to finally come face-to-face with the reality of her own mortality. I wasn’t proud of it, but there it was. Still, I couldn’t risk that panic turning into screaming, and I had no intention of killing her.
“We’re not going to hurt you,” I said. “Just inconvenience you a bit. Tie you up. Gag you so you can’t alert anyone. Eventually, someone will come and check on you. Then think of the stories you’ll have to tell.”
She had a bit of a wild look in her eye, but I didn’t hesitate. I still had several of the plastic restraints taken from the security guards, and I used them to secure her arms to the chair and bind her ankles together. I thought about disabling her desktop screens, but odds were, their status was monitored. That was more likely to trigger a tech support guy coming to check on the system than anything. Besides, we didn’t have time to search around for wherever she might be keeping her personal screens, and disabling the one without disabling the other seemed rather pointless.
There wasn’t anything great to use as a gag, but after digging around in her desk, I found a roll of packing tape. “Sorry about this,” I said, wrapping it several times around her mouth as she glared at me in indignation. I almost admired her. All things considered, she’d handled the situation well. I wasn’t sure that I’d have been so calm had a pair of gunmen burst in on me.
She was, I realized, a true believer. Unlike me, who had harbored doubts since I’d learned the truth about Annabelle, she honestly believed the synthetics were less than human. I understood how people like Francoise Fortier could feel that way; as much as I hated the bastard, his view on synthetics, while immoral, wasn’t really his fault. Could you blame a person who had been told things were a particular way for their entire life for believing that things were that way? But I didn’t get how someone who worked in a Walton Biogenics research lab, who “saw how the sausage was made” could cling to those same beliefs. Was it willful ignorance, an intentional closing of the eyes and shuttering of the mind to what must be mountains of evidence? Or did the cover-up run so deep that even within Walton, things were highly compartmentalized?
I didn’t know what to believe, but it made me look at Dr. Larkin in a different light.
“Watch the news very closely in the days ahead, Dr. Larkin,” I told the bound woman. “You may not believe what I’ve been saying, and maybe that’s not your fault. But I assume that the ‘doctor’ in front of your name means that you’re a believer in evidentiary-based reasoning. I think you’ll be surprised.”
“If you are quite done?” Silas’s voice came over my earpiece. “You may want to hurry. I have penetrated some of the frequencies used for security communications. There is some chatter about a missing team. I suspect they are referring to my unwelcome elevator companions. It sounds like search teams are being sent out. A sense of urgency is called for, Detective.”
“You get all that, Al?” I asked.
“Working on it,” he replied, as he gathered up bundles of documents, optical discs, and data sticks. “Time to go.”
Chapter 21
We left Dr. Larkin’s office, and I slipped the door closed behind me. I wasn’t surprised to hear an immediate rattle coming from inside. No doubt the doctor was trying to escape her bonds. I wished her luck with that—she was far more likely to topple her chair then she was to snap the restraints. Of course, if she did knock herself over, she was likely to do some damage to herself. Which would be another thing tallied t
o the litany of crimes I’d eventually be charged with. I’m sure my “assault” of a poor defenseless woman would play great on the vids.
I keyed my mic. “We’re inbound, Silas. Get the elevator to the floor.”
“On the way,” Silas replied. “Be advised, security is doing a floor by floor search for their missing team. I do not, repeat, do not have eyes on all of them. Proceed with caution.”
I snorted. The warning was hardly necessary, but at the same time, it was just about time to throw caution to the wind. If security was actively looking, maybe not for us, but for some unspecified threat, speed was more valuable then stealth. “Let’s pick up the pace a bit, Al,” I said, lengthening my stride. My hand hovered close to my side, ready to pull the concealed forty-five at a moment’s notice.
We were maybe twenty-five feet from the freight elevator when I heard the sound of a heavy door closing. It wasn’t an elevator door, but rather a steel fire door, the kind that building codes required to be placed at stairwells. Stairwells like the one that ran alongside the elevator shaft we had commandeered. While it was possible—just—that an employee might be taking the stairs up to the third floor, it seemed pretty unlikely that they would be taking the back stairs, by the freight elevator.
“We’ve got company,” I said to Al’awwal.
“How do you want to play it?” he asked.
I’d already considered the problem, so the answer came fast. “We stick to the plan. Bluff, then fight. Avoid shooting if we can. But if they go to guns, we take them out.”
The synthetic nodded, his eyes gleaming with a hunger that I found more than a little disturbing. How must it have been for him to watch—no, not just watch, but effectively hide—as people just like him were systematically brutalized, enslaved, and raped, with no recourse, no hope for justice? How long had he been waiting to get a little piece of his own back?
“Remember,” I said, a warning note in my voice, “we don’t want to kill anyone if we can avoid it.”
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