by Ann Benson
And as if Ted didn’t have enough on his mind, he still needed a P. coli-type microbe for the work he and Bruce were about to begin. Now there was none and somehow this would have to be explained. He rummaged through Frank’s drawers looking for a pen and, when he finally found one, ran to the freezer area. He flipped quickly through the list for the location where P. coli was ordinarily stored and directed the camera to the slot. It brought up a close view, close enough to read the marker. It had Frank’s name on it.
He’d have to explain where Frank put that sample if he didn’t change the marker. Carefully but clumsily manipulating the mechanical arm, wishing he had even half of the dead man’s lost skills with the robotic retriever, Ted grasped the marker and brought it out through the decontamination pass-through. On a blank marker he quickly wrote, Sample contaminated due to cracked tube. Neutralized and disposed of on … He stopped and counted back to the day before Frank’s death. He finished the note by writing in that date, then scribbled Frank’s initials on the signature line. He placed the forged marker in the pass-through, then picked it up with the mechanical arm. With a lot of maneuvering he managed to slip it into the proper slot. He grabbed the old marker and brought it out through the disinfecting pass-through, then placed it in the bag with the towels for disposal. If anyone asked why the disposal of a live microbe was not recorded in the daily log, he would explain truthfully that it was sometimes Frank’s habit to do all his weekly paperwork on Friday from personal notes kept over the course of the entire week.
He set the venting fan to high power and opened the outer door a crack to get rid of the antiseptic smell. After a few minutes the odor diminished to the undertone level that was always present in the lab, for a day never passed without an antibacterial solution being used somewhere within its walls. As he was sealing the top of the plastic bag he heard a tentative knock on the outer door of the lab. The unfamiliar voice of a woman called out softly, “Hello?”
After quickly tucking the sealed bag under a nearby table, he glanced back at the area he had just cleaned and decided it would not arouse suspicion in a casual observer. He was a bit disheveled, so he ran his hands over his hair quickly and smoothed out his rumpled lab coat before he turned to face the unexpected intruder. He wiped the sweat off his forehead with the sleeve of his lab coat, but some had trickled down to the corner of his eye, so he flicked it away with the tip of one gloved finger.
Ted turned around and put on his warmest smile when he saw that the interloper was not Big Bad Bruce but a lovely red-haired woman who looked to be about thirty—probably the same woman the security guard had mentioned to him. He took a deep breath before speaking in an effort to calm himself—his heart was still pounding—and gave her a warm greeting.
“Good morning. May I help you?”
“Maybe you can. I’m looking for the director, Dr. Cummings.”
“Well, fortunately, you’ve found him,” he said, gratified to see how happy this seemed to make her.
She extended her hand. “I’m glad to meet you,” she said. “My name is Caroline Porter. I’m supposed to meet a colleague of mine here this morning. We have some items in this lab for analysis. But when I got here earlier the security guard told me I’d have to talk to you about it. I’ve been running around this building like a chicken with my head cut off looking for you!”
He made a show of pulling off his glove and throwing it in the proper container, then extended his bare hand to her. “Sorry about that,” he said. He glanced around to make sure again that his cleanup was not obvious. “I’ve been sort of preoccupied,” he continued, struggling to hide his nervousness.
He looked the young woman quickly up and down, taking care not to make it a leering look, and made a quick mental assessment of her threat factor. She was a little shy of average height, and of medium build, with a conventionally pretty face and a very pleasant smile. Her attire was conservative, simple and on the casual side. He decided, after a few seconds of consideration, that this young woman represented very little threat of discovery to him. She did, however, represent a serious distraction from the completion of his cleanup, and he needed to get rid of her. He would try to solve her problem and send her packing as soon as possible. “What sort of items do you have here?” he said, trying to sound eager to help.
Caroline motioned with her hands, drawing long narrow lines in the air to demonstrate the shape of the items she sought. “Big tubes of dirt. We’re completing an archaeological dig requiring soil analysis, and the chemistry work is going to be done here.” She frowned and added, “Under Frank’s direction, as luck would have it.”
“Not especially good luck, I’m afraid. You stumbled onto a rather inconvenient situation, to say the least.” For sympathetic effect he added, “What a tragedy. We’ll all miss him; he was a good worker. I’m here now trying to get a handle on some things he started for me. I don’t know what I’ll do without him.”
Caroline, feeling uncomfortable discussing someone she barely knew, politely turned the conversation back to the matter at hand, saying, “I wonder if you can help me sort out where our samples are stored. They would have to be refrigerated. They were also quite large, about a meter long and ten centimeters in diameter.”
“And how many were there?”
“Fifty-four.”
“My goodness, that’s quite a lot! I shouldn’t imagine that we have room for that much material.”
“It was all brought here, and we didn’t get any notification that it was moved elsewhere. Although Frank might have intended to send us a notice if he moved them, and just didn’t get around to it.”
“Unfortunately, that is a distinct possibility. There were a few things he left undone. But all samples for external work are stored in the refrigerated unit over there. They weren’t biorestricted for any reason, were they?”
“Not that I’m aware of,” she said.
“Then they’d definitely be in there. All the other storage areas are for restricted materials.” He pointed to a bank of units against the far wall of the lab. “That would be the most logical place to look.”
“I’ll start looking there, then,” Caroline said with a smile. “Thanks for your help. I have one little thing to take care of before I start there, though,” she added. As she moved in the direction of the area he’d just cleaned up, Ted felt his heartbeat start to accelerate. When she pointed at the fabric circle on the microscope his knees began to weaken and his throat to constrict. She set her purse down nearby and explained, “This came up from the ground with one of our soil plugs. We were looking at it on Thursday just before Frank, uh … expired. He did a little bit of computer work on it and made us some marker files. It was probably the last work he did here.”
She was touching it, trying to remove it from the mounting tray! Why isn’t she wearing gloves? He moved toward her, frantically trying to think of ways to keep her from handling the fabric, but it was too late; her fingers were already all over it. He could barely hear his own voice when he said, “Did you find anything of interest?”
“At first, no, but then we stumbled on this big fat microbe. We didn’t get as far as figuring out what it was, but Frank said he would check into it for us. He put a dye marker on the actual microbe so we could find it more easily later on. We should have some fun with it when we get back to the States.”
Somehow Ted Cummings controlled his rising nausea, but his knees were another matter. Nevertheless Fortune smiled on him: as they buckled and he teetered, Caroline turned away and looked toward the door in response to a new voice calling her name. She didn’t see his distress. He looked up as he regained his balance and saw a tall woman enter; he heard Caroline greet her as he clutched the back of a chair to steady himself.
“I’m sorry that took so long,” the new arrival said, “but I had a devil of a time convincing the accounting department that they should use the credit exchange rate on the day they post my bill, not the day it happens to be most in their
favor. So I got to spend a few minutes with a rather annoying billing clerk explaining the concepts of math and foreign exchange.”
“Lucky you.”
“I guess! And we thought things were bad back home!”
Ted stood back, wobbling slightly. With a massive effort of will he regained his composure and came forward to introduce himself. He smiled too sweetly when he extended his hand, but the response he got from the woman who’d just entered was all brisk professionalism. “How do you do,” Janie said simply as she gave his hand a brief shake. He cleared his throat nervously and said, “Miss Porter has told me about your samples. I’ve told her where you might start looking for them. If I can be of any further assistance, please don’t hesitate to ask.” They thanked him and headed for the storage unit.
He sat down, his blood literally racing through his veins, as he waited for Bruce. What would he say when Bruce finally arrived? Sorry, old boy, I seem to be having a small fit of apoplexy.… I’ve developed a bit of a problem here, although at the present time I’m not prepared to discuss it. In the background he could hear the exchange that took place between the two visitors as they searched the refrigerated storage area. He should have been standing right behind them, making sure that procedures were being followed, but here he was, glued to a chair, the very personification of the human physical response to stress. He sweated, his heart pounded, he felt horribly nauseous. And his senses betrayed him; he could hear that they were talking, but not the actual words they said. He was in far too much of a panic to focus on anything so specific.
Soon they were back again. “Some of our materials are missing,” Janie said. “We counted the protruding ends. Our tubes are much larger than anything else you have in storage there, and we were able to locate the stack quite easily. But we counted three times, and neither one of us could come up with more than forty-eight.”
“I’m terribly sorry,” Ted said, but he was secretly glad that a distraction had presented itself.
Janie moaned. “One I could understand, but six?”
“As I told Miss Porter, it’s quite possible that they were moved,” he said. “There’s not a lot of space in there. You know, I seem to recall hearing Frank say that he was going to reorganize the storage units a few days ago—it was one of the things he was doing to get the lab ready for some rather complex research we’re about to start. One of my associates might know about the things that were moved. He’s going to be heavily involved in an experiment here and he needed additional space.”
“Can we speak with him?” Janie asked.
Ted glanced at his watch and said, with stiff courtesy, “He’s on his way, supposedly; he should be here momentarily.”
“May we wait for him?”
This is getting too complicated, he thought to himself. He finally said, somewhat stonily, “If you’d like.”
Just as he finished uttering his halfhearted assent, the lab door flew open and Bruce Ransom made a rushed, dramatic entrance, breathing heavily. His lean, narrow body looked even longer dressed in black pants and dark gray shirt, buttoned at the neck with a matching tie. As his one concession to professional attire, he had covered his street clothing with a long white lab coat, his ID tag clipped to its pocket. His unruly dark hair, falling in soft waves over the collar of his lab coat, looked almost as if he hadn’t bothered to comb it that morning. Ted always told him that he looked more like a jazz musician than the assistant director of a high-security government-operated medical research facility.
“Ah! Here he is!”
“I’m sorry, Ted,” he said, “I just wanted to get this entire outline on paper before we got started today.” He waved the file folder at the director. “It’s finally done.…”
He was aware of the presence of two strangers standing nearby, and thought gratefully, Ted won’t get on my case about being late in front of anyone else.…
He glanced over at the two women. They appeared to be waiting for someone, and by their expectant looks it occurred to him that they might be waiting for him. Something was familiar about the taller woman, and he wondered if he knew her from somewhere. He searched his memory for a match, but all he got in the first run-through was a few quick hits of recognition, nothing solid enough for identification. Attractive, he thought. Nice legs. But then he saw that the same woman was staring at him as well, her eyes working him over. They settled on his security pass; when she read the name, a smile crept-onto her face.
“Oh, my God. Bruce Ransom. We were in medical school together. I’ll bet you don’t remember me.”
He looked at her again and gave her a slight smile as he studied her face. He looked at the visitor’s pass clipped to the collar of her shirt. It had no name, only the date and time of entry. “Well, it would be easier if I had the advantage of knowing your name too.”
“Sorry,” she said. “Of course. Janie Crowe. You would have known me as Janie Gallagher.”
“Crowe?” he said, with a smile of amusement. “We’ve gotten about a hundred faxes from you in the last two months.”
Janie was not amused. “You guys made me jump through hoops to get authorization for this lab. You must know my shoe size by now.”
“Well, I wouldn’t be surprised, but I didn’t handle it, so I don’t know the first thing about it. Authorizations come out of my department, but I don’t look at any of them myself. One of the clerks in my office took care of your request.” He chuckled. “I don’t know if I should tell you this, but she’s taken to calling you Faxkreig. I had no idea it was you. I mean, the different name and all.”
Janie laughed. Faxkreig? “My whole being is different. Medical school was twenty years ago.”
“Don’t remind me,” he said with a smirk. “I’d rather not think about it.”
“Oh, cut it out. I happen to know how old you are, and you look terrific.”
“You do too.” He looked her up and down. “What a surprise this is! So what brings you to the Institute?”
She sighed. “It’s a very long story. Long and sad and not terribly interesting. Suffice it to say that I’ve had to change professions. I’m doing an archaeological dig to get certified in forensics and I’ve got some soil samples here for chemical analysis. Frank was going to oversee the work. We came in to see if we could get a different technician assigned, that is, we being Caroline and I.…” She gestured in the direction of her assistant, who smiled and said hello as Bruce nodded back at her. “Caroline’s working with me on this project. Anyway, when we checked our samples, we discovered some are missing. There are supposed to be fifty-four and we can find only forty-eight. We’re on a pretty tight deadline and we have to get things moving. We’re trying to find out where they might have been moved, and your colleague here”—she gestured toward Ted—“told us that someone was coming to the lab who might know where they were.”
Bruce looked at Ted. “My guess is that someone would be me.”
Ted nodded. “Since you worked with Frank regularly, I thought you might have some firsthand knowledge that I don’t. I recall Frank telling me that he was doing some reorganization of the storage units before we start our new work.”
“He was,” Bruce said, “but I don’t know specifically what he might have done or how far along he got in the project before he died. Just that he was doing it.”
Janie sighed, her frustration clear. “I just find it so odd that he never said anything to us about it when we were in here yesterday.”
“When were you supposed to start the analyses?”
“Monday.”
“Then it’s quite possible that he moved them temporarily and was planning on having them back here by then. He wouldn’t have any reason to mention moving them if that was the case. Frank could be very scatterbrained, but he had his own way of doing things. They always seemed to get done, somehow.” He looked at Ted, as if seeking confirmation of his assessment of the late lab technician’s work habits. Ted nodded his agreement.
Janie fou
nd her frustration slipping over the line into anger. Too many things are going wrong, she thought to herself. This whole project seems to be jinxed. Her tone was more snippy than the occasion might have warranted when she said, “That’s all very well and good. I’m sure he had the best of intentions in moving them, and I’ll even venture a guess that he would have had them back here bright and early Monday morning.” She glanced back and forth between Bruce and Ted. “You both seem to have had a lot of confidence in him, so I’ll have to accept your explanation.” She smiled rather sardonically. “Graciously, even. Unfortunately, your very good explanation of why the tubes aren’t here doesn’t do much to solve the problem of finding them, and then getting them back here.”
Bruce and Ted exchanged glances and performed a silent mental coin toss. Janie watched them, and thought, So which one of you gets to deal with this crank?
A midair decision took place. Bruce looked back at Janie and said, “I’d be happy to check into it for you. There are really only a few places where things that big might have been taken.”
“I’d really appreciate that, Bruce. Our schedule is already tight as it is. I’d hate to lose time over something like this.”
“It’s no problem. I’m happy to do it for you. But I might not be able to get to it for a few hours or so.” He looked at Ted briefly, then turned back to Janie and said, “Ted and I have some things to go over right now. When we’re done—”
To Bruce’s surprise Ted interrupted him. “We can postpone it for an hour or two. I’m not sure just how much of the prep work Frank managed to get done, and I could use a little while in the lab to figure it out. It doesn’t make much sense for us to proceed if we don’t know where we stand in terms of the background work.”
Bruce looked at Ted again, this time with eyebrows raised in curiosity. “Are you sure?”
