Hesitant to open the door at 8:30 a.m., Harper did so, thinking it might concern Micah. She peeked through the one-way panel inside the door. He had an Ordnance but did not wear a policeman’s uniform. She feared the worst. But dressing down might have been a psychological ruse to keep her calm. Trembling from an overdose of caffeine and sugar, she asked for identification. The officer pressed his badge against the access panel. Damario Coley, badge number 086114.
“Just have a few more questions for you, Missus James,” he said with a tint of hope. Perhaps she can shed some light on why she haunts my dreams.
She waved off her hired bodyguards and released the compound security locks on the door. “There's a sizable reward for my husband’s safe return,” she said as the door slid up. “I must screen my visitors. You understand.”
Bare-faced with her hair barely combed, Harper wore plain navy blue sweatpants and a sweatshirt. Her bloodshot eyes alerted Damario to the fact that she had not sufficiently slept in a couple of days – standard for a relative of a missing person. He entered the palatial foyer. Its gold inlaid, crystal chandelier in the vaulted ceiling provided light, while the space’s complimentary maroon and chocolate brown highlights muted the bordering-on-garish appearance of it all.
Harper escorted him to a smaller, modestly decorated receiving room. There, a service droid poured them coffee and served a series of delicate, fruit-filled pastries. The lone peculiar one, a cone-shaped golden sponge cake, looked particularly appealing to Damario, but he did not eat one. “I’d like to ask you some questions about your husband, Missus James, if you’re up to it.”
“Please, have a seat. There’s not much more I can tell you that I haven’t already, and you‘ll be better at piecing it all together.” She tapped her fingertips together like she connected a round-shaped thought with her hands.
“Let’s go over it, all of it, one more time.” He sank his long frame into the comfortable burgundy leather loveseat. “Start with everything you remember leading up to that day, please. Don’t leave out any details.”
Harper’s eyes purposefully eased to a high resolution rotating photo album displaying an image from their wedding. “We’ve been married ten years. Neither of us has ever cheated. We barely fight at all.”
“Are you sure? That he never cheated?”
“As sure as a wife can be. We‘re happy, Detective. He has a regular Sunday afternoon tee time. We vacation abroad once or twice during peak season.” She added the next comment for effect rather than fact. “Our love life is satisfying.”
“When you say ‘satisfying’. . .”
“Good. Great even.” She stopped from further description. “Satisfying.”
“What do you do for work, again?”
“I head up the applied sciences and weapons division for the west coast branch of the federal government.” She eased the recitation, so that it sounded more genial.
“And your husband?” He sipped deeply from the coffee cup.
Harper waved her hand, as if his occupation did not matter. In truth, she did not understand an apt way to describe it. “He worked at the Exodus Foundation.”
Damario choked on the contents of his mouth, almost spitting it out. He coughed heartily, to the point where Harper became concerned. “Are you alright?”
Finally, he could swallow normally. “What does he do there?”
“Mathematical physics. He reports directly to Miles Chu, the Chief Executive Officer. He’s far more hands-on, from what I‘ve heard. He’s missing too. Do you think the two are connected?”
Maybe. The detective found the lack of explanation curious. “Were they working on a project? Something where Micah and Chu could have made enemies, maybe ticked off a rival?”
Harper sipped some tea. “I’m sorry. . .again?”
“Your husband: did he have corporate enemies?”
“The economy, you mean?” She faked disgust. “It’s a non-profit. The foundation lost its solvency a few months ago – rather abruptly, in fact. Congress passed that bill removing its public funding and it didn’t take long after that.”
He would stop skirting the issue soon. “Again, how did your husband react to being let go?”
“He isolated himself,” she said, mentioning e-mail messages they had exchanged where he claimed being “lost” and “without purpose.” “As you can see, he loved his job and there’s not much work out there – much less for a mathematical physicist – outside of the educational sector. Mass-produced droids occupy many of those positions at a fraction of the long-range cost.”
“What did he do, then?”
“I took a short sabbatical and we traveled.”
The police had surveyed the James’ credit records. The couple had spent hundreds of thousands traipsing the Caribbean in the past year. “When we got back, he spent a lot of time in his study during the day, and some nights.” She paused. “I started to worry, so I started recording his movement down there, in his study.”
“What did you see?” he asked with intrigue. “Did you turn over the recordings?”
“No, but they don’t show anything I didn’t already tell you. He left around seven o’ clock last Wednesday night. You know how they found it,” she said about her husband’s favorite transport; a gold Casper. “I don’t know where he went.”
“Mind taking a ride with me there?”
Harper agreed and notified her head bodyguard that they need not be followed. Damario opened the passenger door of his Jupiter station wagon for her. Though a passenger riding in the front seat with a policeman violated official protocol, she entered without a second thought.
Their animated rapport ceased during the drive. This suited Harper, as she did not wish to talk. But why aren’t we slowing down? They neared the crime scene location where her husband’s stripped vehicle had turned up, but Damario passed it without stopping.
“We should have turned back there,” she said, also noticing the navigation service locked on to the Exodus Foundation site. “Why are we going to an abandoned building? I’m not sure that it’s even safe for us to go in there.”
“It’s safe,” he reassured her. “I’d like to see his office.”
“The security might not let us in there. But you can override that, can’t you?”
I hope so. “Yes.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The duo ducked past the warning signs and postings, and entered the high-rise through an open door on the west side. During the daytime, the structure looked far less imposing than the beam-and-girder tombstone it resembled at night. Small wildlife scampered across the wooden floors, littered with dead leaves and branches. Harper led the charge to the elevator tubes. In front of them, a glowing marquee directory indicated Micah’s division, Mathematical Physics, 77th floor.
She fingered the display. “That’s odd. The electric is off, but this thing isn’t?”
“Elevator tubes work on a battery-like power source.”
“These things make me squeamish. If it wasn’t on the top floor, I’d walk.”
Damario offered his hand. “Here. Take my hand.”
They entered the center tube large enough to transport them both. A solid platform of forced air formed beneath their feet and they instinctively clenched fingers. Within two minutes, they were transported to the building’s top floor. Unlike the bottom floor, which had been left to the dogs, the level looked to be completely intact, including an active security system.
Damario applied his right hand to the handprint security panel. After scanning him, it turned red. He attempted twice more. The handprints of emergency personnel were supposed to open all manufactured doors. Is my blood alcohol level too high?
Curious, Harper laid her hand onto the plate and the panel turned green. It worked! “Voice recognition required. Please state your full name.”
“Harper Charlotte James.”
“Harper Charlotte James, access granted.” She held up her hands in wonderment as the door opened to them.
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“Have you been here before?” Damario asked as they walked inside.
“Never.” Her voice wavered. Not that I remember.
The massive backlog of information Damario possessed on the James couple faded away. All that mattered now was the connection he felt to Harper and the information she did not share.
He repeated the question, while activating the room‘s backup electricity source. “Have you been here before?”
Harper looked around. Damario followed her into the round room of his dreams, and the door automatically closed. He lingered around the dark impressions on the metal floor, where machinery must have been.
She counted the chairs facing one of the curved walls. Patting the dust free from one in particular, she sat down. According to her fractured dreams, in a room much like this one, a Hispanic girl named “Quinne” had been to her right with the detective just two chairs down. She clasped her hands together and tapped her foot, which attracted Damario’s attention. He stared at her feet. “Do you have to do that?”
“Sorry. Can you come here for a minute?”
Damario approached the row of chairs and chose one. The mystery grew more complex. He placed a private call to medical examiner, Justin Rochester, the lone human among the forensic droids.
“Rochester.” Justin looked up from his desk. “Coley? Shenk warned me you‘d be calling. I shouldn’t be surprised. What can I do for you?”
“Missing technology from the Exodus Foundation. Do you have it?”
“Had it. We seized it on one twenty-one. They took it on one twenty-two.”
Damario turned his back to Harper, who attentively eavesdropped. “They?” he whispered. “How? Who?”
Justin smiled. “Both answers higher than our pay grade, Coley. They swiped it so fast that I can‘t even tell you what it was.”
“Thanks.” Damario ended the call. Who took the machines?
Madison placed a hand on his shoulder. “What are you thinking, Detective?”
“Whatever he and Chu were working on, it was serious.”
Urged by her unsettled stomach, Harper cleared her throat and confessed. “I have not been totally honest with your superiors. What I’m about to say sounds insane, even to me, and they‘re my thoughts.”
He suspected some duplicity, but braced himself. “What do you know?”
“I’ve been to a place like this before. So have you.”
The revelation rocked him, as he closed the distance between the two of them. “I don’t understand. . .you and me?”
“We were here, or in a room exactly like it, together. Once before. . .you and I.”
He experienced a degree of recognition regarding her name and face, but not much else. “You’re confused.”
“I’m sure of it,” she protested. “You and I were here; us, and at least three other people. One of them sat here between you and me; a cute Hispanic girl, named Quinne.”
The name stopped both of them in their tracks. He had no idea as to his connection to Quinne.
“Maybe you should tell me what you know.”
Damario weighed the benefits of doing so. She could not do much with what he could tell her because it would necessitate her telling others what else she knew. “I have this recurring dream, where I wake up here, or somewhere like here, in the dark.” He pointed out the particular one. “I had these tubes in me, and I don’t know how I got here or what I was doing.”
His story would have sounded crazy to anyone but Harper.
“The other people you mentioned. . .could one of them have been Micah?”
She ventured to the most familiar ergonomic chair and laid down on it. “Definitely not. You think Micah’s disappearance is connected to this.”
“I don’t know. Why can’t we remember?”
Harper stared at the ceiling. Everything in her life felt disjointed and dislocated. The master bed in her house, her designer clothes – both were almost too perfect. The huge bed and 1,000 square foot walk-in closet full of designer outfits and shoes may as well have been rented. The antiseptic house made her itch inside her own skin. The only things granting her comfort were snippets of blurred dreams. Verbalizing this discomfort fell short of her vocabulary, so she did not try. She had told no one and was fairly positive the detective had not either.
Her emotions surrounding her husband’s disappearance were even more disturbing to her. She refused to give voice to them, as they were unnatural and would suggest to the policeman that she may have had something to do with it. And she did love Micah. But the absence of her husband felt natural, like it should have happened. Harper believed in God granting peace in the midst of emotional storms, but she never personally experienced it. Still lying in the chair, she blinked her eyes to keep herself from falling asleep.
Damario touched the reclining chair he dreamed of lying in, hoping something might trigger a memory, a clue, or something. His surroundings were quiet enough to notice Harper’s breathing patterns shift from that of someone awake and vibrant to sound slumber. He let her sleep. She must need it. Harper looked peaceful, like a child. Her bottom lip drooped slightly, enough to reveal the crown of a bottom tooth.
The puzzle irritated him; an equation with five factors. It had three unknowns; Quinne, Micah James, and another person. The laboratory they discovered had been stripped and would only exist a while longer.
Without a forensic droid or backup collection material, he started snapping pictures with his police issue holophone. Its high resolution and settings provided enough variance for him to capture it from different perspectives. The infrared did not reveal anything he already did not suspect. The pictures would have to stay off-the-record. If his superiors found out he had gone behind them without prior authorization, they would suspend him first, and then have him psychologically evaluated. While not fragile, his psyche certainly would not pass strenuous testing at this point. At a point of stress, he might blurt out information – like he had been dreaming about his partner, too.
“Missus James,” he called out. “Harper, wake up.”
“Hmm? I fell asleep?” She propped herself up and rubbed her eyes. Damario lent her his arm for support and she used it to slide safely to the ground. “Did you find something? Anything?”
Damario’s face fell downcast. “No. I’ll take you home.”
At the room’s entrance, Harper approached the access plate. When the door opened, she and Damario barely had time to react to the young girl in front of them before she dropped to the ground. Damario carried her to a chair and laid her down; Harper followed them. When she came around, she would speak and verify what Harper had already suspected.
Damario studied the quiet face. “Is this who I think it is?”
“Quinne,” Harper responded without hesitation.
They would not understand the significance of her presence until she awakened, but Damario started postulating outcomes. If the pattern held, she would have had some memory or link to this same room and the people within it – Harper did and so had he. This laboratory allegedly belonged to Harper’s husband. Its ventures included equipment for a secret project that might have been off the official books. Micah could have instituted an experiment on all three of them.
The venture could have been of a criminal nature – the likes of which he did not want to even imagine. Experimentation on human beings dated back through the annals of time; the most recent recorded instances to increase adaptability of robotic prostheses. It did not explain why someone, or Micah, would have chosen five random people and why he would have done so in the laboratory of a not-for-profit foundation.
Gradually, after minutes of Harper fanning Quinne’s face with her hands, the girl roused. She opened her eyes and stared at the exact location of the ceiling that she dreamed. Quinne shot up into a sitting position, screaming and thrashing. Damario tried to calm her. Harper did the same.
“Take it easy.” He gently touched her arm. “You fainted.”
&nb
sp; “What?” The scenario had all the markings of a dream to Quinne, who only recently stopped breathing heavily. “Who ‘re you?”
“I’m Detective Damario Coley,” he said, “and this is Harper James. You’re in the laboratory of her husband, Micah James, in the Exodus Foundation building.”
Quinne massaged her cramping right quad; the reason why she’d stopped halfway into her four-mile run. While supporting herself on a nearby tree, she noticed Damario and Harper entering the abandoned building. Quinne’s only other recourse was a liquor store a block away. By that time, someone could have attacked her.
“They do not-for-profit work to improve the human condition,” Harper explained, reciting the company’s tagline. “Or, at least they did until a few months ago.”
Quinne stared at the familiar masculine face. “Ain’t you have dreads before?”
“What?” Damario’s brow furrowed. “Haven’t had dreadlocks since college, about 13 or 14 years ago.”
“You that old?” she asked unconvinced. “Guess you got one of them kinda faces.”
Harper moved closer. “How’d you get in here?”
Quinne held up her palm and jumped to the ground. “Like you did, I guess? I ain‘t never been up here, though.”
“You might have,” Harper assured. “How else could you get in here?”
That question remained. “I ain’t do it on purpose.” Quinne cleared the hoarse rasp from her voice. “I called out, at first. You must not’ve heard me. My leg‘s hurtin‘ real bad, so it took me a minute to get to the tubes. Found out you was up on this floor, so I followed and banged on the door.”
“But how did you get in?” Damario tried to extract the details. The door’s metal alloy would not have readily responded to the strength of a 125-pound teenager.
Quinne’s eyes rolled. “You ain’t hear me, so I banged on the door. That ain’t work, either, so I smacked the panel.”
“Why would it read her prints?” Harper turned to Damario. “Any idea?”
He signaled no. “Did you hack it?”
“I look like a hacker to you, man? No, I ain’t hack it! It asked for my name, I said it, and it opened.” When it did, two apparitions from her dreams appeared and dropped her to the ground. “Pain must’ve knocked me out.”
The Anarchists Page 15
