Alien Research

by Gini Koch

  “What if we can’t get through via text?” Claudia asked.

  “Is it a perfect plan? No. And that’s what I like about it. Lots of room for initiative and on-the-fly alterations.”

  “Lots of room to fail,” Lorraine said. She shrugged. “On the other hand, it’s as well-thought-out as any plan you’ve ever had, and considering your success rate is still the envy of the rest of Centaurion Division, I say we go for it.”

  I was the envy of Centaurion Division? Decided now wasn’t the time to get the details, but it was still a nice ego boost. Chose not to ask if I was the envy because my plans were bad but we survived anyway. Figured I didn’t need any confidence de-boosting.

  “Good.” Buchanan looked quietly pleased, and it dawned on me that he’d been testing us. Again. No wonder Mom and Olga both loved him.

  He inserted the card, we opened the door, he pulled out the card, we all went through the door. Just like any other door in one of the Fortune 500 companies.

  The door let us out into an elevator lobby. That’s all that was here, a bank of elevators, floor, and walls. The walls, even the ceiling, were all murals that looked hand painted, the floor was Italian marble or I wasn’t the Chief of Mission, and the chrome detailing on the elevators gleamed. Whoever had designed this section really wanted to show they had Taste and Refinement.

  “This looks just like LaRue,” Amy said dismissively. “So now we know who had at least a hand in whatever’s going on down here.”

  “I’d figure she and your father started whatever, and the current crop are just keeping it going, Ames. But it proves we have secret rooms to find.”

  “Why so?” Naomi asked.

  “Because this is a showcase entrance, but where we just came from is not overwhelmingly impressive. It didn’t suck, but it also didn’t say ‘Top Dawgs Hang Here.’ So there’s something else down here that the Gaultier bigwigs take their special tour groups to see, and it’s not what we’ve seen so far.”

  It was a good thing we’d chosen the Take the Special Keycard With Us route, because the elevators, of course, needed a keycard to run. However, Buchanan didn’t want us using them anyway. “Nothing says ‘someone unauthorized is in the building’ like an elevator running when it’s not supposed to.” He looked around. “What facility doesn’t mark its stairwells?”

  “You mean other than every A-C base worldwide? Those who either don’t have one or want to keep it hidden.”

  Adriana checked the wall opposite the door we’d used. “There’s something here . . .” She pushed against it. Nothing. She shoved against the other side of what she felt was the door. Nothing.

  Had an odd thought and went with it. Went to the wall where Adriana had pushed the first time. Pushed hard but quickly, more like a fast slam. The wall opened a little. “Or, someone who really wanted to show off how clever they were.”

  “How did you know?” she asked me as we opened what was absolutely a door.

  “It works just like those cabinets that close magnetically. I don’t think they’re trying to hide this area so much as be arty.”

  “Yeah, again, that’s a LaRue move,” Amy agreed. She snorted. “Especially when we see what’s in here.”

  What was in here were seven unisex bathrooms along the left-hand side and the stairwell at the far right corner. This room was done up just like the lobby, but the bathroom doors were more clearly marked. However, they opened in the same way as the door to the elevator lobby did—by pressing hard and fast.

  Looked at Buchanan. “You thinking what I’m thinking?”

  CHAPTER 82

  “IF YOU’RE THINKING that we now can get upstairs without the elevators, Missus Chief, then, yes. If you’re thinking something else, then no.”

  “Wow, Malcolm, I’m shocked. These are bathrooms.”

  Everyone gave me polite looks. “Do you need to go, Kitty?” Serene asked without a trace of sarcasm.

  Resisted the urge to roll my eyes. “No. Bathrooms. What lives in bathrooms?”

  “Bacteria,” Lorraine answered promptly.

  “And other things you don’t want to know about,” Claudia added.

  “Oh, come on, you guys! Gates. Gates live in bathrooms, and Ronald Yates along with the freaking former Diplomatic Corps were best buds forever with Amy’s dad and so forth. No wonder no one could find the entrance from the main research facility to this one. It’s because no one was looking for a gate.”

  Abigail and Naomi hypersped through all seven rooms. “No gate,” Naomi said when they finished “We looked for the mark, because I have to figure any gate they’d have here is cloaked, but there’s nothing.”

  Knew exactly how Buchanan was feeling about all of our covert ops skills. “It’s likely to be a cube, like in the bedroom. Look, I’ll search for it while Malcolm helps you guys get going and start searching the other levels.”

  “I’ll stay with Kitty,” Adriana said before Buchanan could express the worry clearly written on his face.

  “Faster you go, faster you’re back,” I pointed out.

  He nodded. “I haven’t found any hidden cameras yet, and they haven’t triggered any of my trackers, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t hidden cameras, just that we haven’t found or been caught by them yet.”

  “Yeah, no one’s come to kill us. Yet.”

  “Be careful and don’t leave this area without me, Missus Chief, no matter what you find, unless it’s the choice between leaving and being captured, hurt, or killed.”

  “I promise, Malcolm.”

  He didn’t look like he believed me, and the rest of the girls didn’t, either. But they all went to the stairwell, Buchanan checked whatever he was checking, felt all was well, and the seven of them zipped off.

  “Where do you want to start searching?” Adriana asked. “And, is it an American thing to have the walls so . . . brightly and garishly colored everywhere, including in the bathroom stalls themselves?”

  “No, it’s called protective coloration or hiding in plain sight. If everything’s sparkly and garish, then the cube gate won’t stand out as odd. As for where we start, I think we want to try the end.” Because most people didn’t go to the farthest point to use the facilities. When you had to go, you grabbed the nearest stall.

  Went to the stall farthest from the elevators and therefore nearest to the stairs and started hunting.

  These were the nice kinds of individual bathrooms that had a sink and toilet and table all in one room, versus a bank of stalls, very similar to what we had on the second floor of the Zoo. However the décor wasn’t the same at all.

  While the Zoo was done up in a Tasteful Rich Person Motif, Adriana wasn’t kidding—the walls were a riot of color. This was I’m So Much Artier Than You to the max. However, I was sure much of this was being done on purpose, and not only to impress. “You try opening the hidden doors that may or may not be here and I’ll see if I can find the cube gate.”

  We were at this for several minutes. It was amazingly hard to spot something that was likely to be a glittering geometric shape within a mural of glittering geometric shapes. The tiles that made up the bathroom were all little squares, just like the little squares that made up the power cubes. Had to hand it to LaRue, who was the likely designer—the woman was good. Sneaky, sneaky good.

  “I can’t find anything that seems to be a hidden door,” Adriana said. Then she stiffened, went to the door, and opened it a crack. “Someone’s coming,” she whispered urgently. “And I think they’re coming to this stall.”

  “It so figures.” Hadn’t found a thing hiding in plain sight here, and we had nowhere to go if someone opened the door. Locking it would just give us a couple of seconds and whoever was trying to get in here a clear sign that intruders were about.

  Adriana pulled a gun from somewhere. Not that I thought anyone working here was going to fall on the Side of Right, but killing someone who just wanted to relieve themselves seemed really wrong. Plus sounds in bathrooms echoed
and we really didn’t want the entire facility alerted to our presence if we could help it.

  Looked around frantically and, as I did, I noted that the tiles on the floor were the same small squares as everything else. And no one in their right mind wanted to put their hands on a bathroom floor, no matter how clean it looked.

  Thought fast. It wouldn’t be likely to be under the sink or right by the toilet, because those areas got cleaned the most and you wouldn’t want to risk that the janitor was thinking of, say, how much he’d prefer to be on Hawaii’s sandy beaches right when he wiped up around the hidden cube.

  But it would still have to be easily accessible. The table in this room wasn’t square, it was round, and, if I looked at it clinically, totally out of place.

  Hyperspeed was good for many things and right now I was never happier that I had it available to me.

  Grabbed Adriana, squatted down, pulled my phone out and randomly looked at a section of the top level while I honestly thought about how where I really wanted to be was with Buchanan, dumped my phone back into my purse, and slammed my hand onto the floor under the table just as the door started to open.

  Half a moment later we were in a dark corridor. “Gah!” Buchanan jumped.

  Amy, who was next to him, gave a little shriek. “What the hell?”

  “Wow,” I said as Adriana and I straightened up. “I didn’t think you were a jumpy dude, Malcolm. Ames, breathe, it’s just us.”

  “Normally I’m not jumpy, but when two women who are three floors away appear out of nowhere at my feet, it tends to throw me.”

  “What Malcolm said,” Amy added.

  “Good to know. But what do you mean by three floors?”

  “The number of stairs between this floor and the one technically below it are double what they were to get from the bottom level to the next. But we found no entrance.”

  “And the blueprints don’t show a fourth floor,” Amy added. “So, how did you two find us?”

  “Well, I think I was looking at the right section of the floor you were on. But I was also thinking of Malcolm, so maybe you can think of a person and the cube gates will work the same way. Which is, hopefully, good news.” I was also hoping that, if this was the case, our enemies didn’t know about it, because if they did, I had no idea how I’d ever keep Jamie safe.

  Shoved that worry away for the moment while we brought Amy and Buchanan up to date on what had transpired. “So, what have you guys been up to?” I asked when we were done.

  He opened his mouth, but Naomi and Abigail appeared out of nowhere. They’d only used hyperspeed, though, not a power cube, so Buchanan and Amy didn’t freak out.

  “It’s the same all over,” Naomi said. “Hey Kitty, Adriana.”

  “See? They’re calm about our appearance.”

  “Yeah, nothing you do surprises me or Sis. But you all need to look at this, because it’s . . . weird,” Abigail said, as she grabbed Adriana. Naomi took Amy. They all zipped off. Decided I was obviously expected to keep up my end of the hyperspeed thing, took a hold of Buchanan, and we ran off after them.

  This floor wasn’t a maze—it was one big rectangle, at least the corridor was, and it went around the entire floor. The Gower girls zipped us around it all, presumably to ensure we’d seen all they had.

  Other than the elevator banks, the outer side of the corridor was just wall, without artwork, done up in the usual industrially approved color of Boring Taupe. The elevator area was nothing like the one on the lowest level—these elevators just let you out, with no fanfare.

  The inner side of the corridor had wall to about waist height, and the rest was smoked glass, or it was doors opening into the rooms. Smoked glass or not, these rooms were all lit by what I recognized as A-C style nightlights, and that meant we could see into them.

  The rooms were normal sized, but the walls opposite the ones we were looking through were also mostly glass. They looked out onto a larger set of rooms. There were six of these larger rooms in the middle. Their walls divided them up so that, if you were in these interior rooms, you could see out toward the corridor but not to either side or behind. But it was what was in the rooms that was, as Abigail had said, weird.

  Every room on this floor was completely empty.

  No chairs, no desks, no cubicles, no electronics, no phones, no products, nothing on the walls, and no people. It was like looking at an abandoned warehouse. An abandoned, well-lit warehouse.

  While the corridor and the rooms right off of it were lit only by low floor nightlight-style lighting, the six big interior rooms were lit like they were about to host the World Racquetball Championships. Come to think of it, they looked more like racquetball courts than anything else. However, there were no lines painted anywhere, so it seemed unlikely that Gaultier Enterprises had decided that what they really wanted for the top of their Secret Levels of Evil was a snazzy racquetball setup that didn’t allow anyone watching to sit.

  “Have you gone into any of these rooms?” I asked.

  “Not yet,” Naomi admitted. “We just got up here, really.”

  “Why? What was on the second floor?”

  “The medical stuff,” Amy said.

  “Or, as we put it, where the contraband is being created and stored,” Buchanan added.

  I resisted the impulse to say that I was glad Buchanan hadn’t left Naomi down there, but logic would have indicated that Lorraine, Claudia, and Serene do that level anyway. Plus I was sure Mom had briefed him on her concerns regarding Naomi.

  “The floor’s set up just like this one,” Naomi said. “Only every room is filled with laboratory equipment. And the middle rooms are filled with what we’re pretty sure are drugs.” She shook her head. “Your mother was right, Kitty. It’s more drugs than I think any of us could have conceived of.”

  “What are the girls doing there?”

  “They’re getting in and grabbing a sample from each interior room,” Buchanan replied. “And gathering what they can out of the anterior rooms as well.”

  “Are there people in there?”

  “Yes,” Amy said. “A skeleton crew. They looked like doctors or scientists, maybe lab techs. But they seem to all be humans because they didn’t see anyone moving at hyperspeed.”

  Decided not to express worry. The girls were all on Alpha Team—they could handle whatever it was they needed to do, and they were dealing with what we’d expected to find, so, really, not a problem. Chose to focus on the current weird which might indicate a problem. “Then why is this level completely empty?”

  “No idea,” Buchanan said. “Unless the latest Gaultier drugs involve invisibility, there’s no one and nothing to actually investigate.”

  “I wouldn’t put anything past them. I note there are no bathrooms on this floor. Same on the other one?”

  “Yes,” Amy confirmed. “We checked.”

  “Was the elevator area the same as this floor? Boring and nondescript?”

  “Yes,” Abigail said. “We checked that, too. Why?”

  “Because I’m trying to figure out why this building is set up this way. The elevator area makes a ton of sense if you’re bringing people down to be all awed and impressed. But since the power cube gate is in the bathroom, that means it’s likely that everyone’s entering on the lowest level.”

  “They wouldn’t need to,” Naomi said. “The power cube goes where you want to go, right? So, if there’s one in the normal Gaultier Research building, and I know you think there is, then it doesn’t have to connect to the one in the bathroom you just found.”

  “Mimi, let me mention that I can state without reservation that Chuckie loves you for your mind as well as your looks and personality. Excellent point. So, you bring your tour group in here, or on the other floor, and then you take the elevator down for the Big Reveal.”

  “I’m worried about what that could be,” Naomi said. “Because, honestly, after what we saw on the middle level, I can’t imagine what they’d be showing off as more
impressive.”

  “Sadly, I’m sure we’re going to find out. But we’re still back to the question of why this level is completely empty. Unless . . .” Studied the glass in front of us a little more. I could see our reflections. But I realized what was wrong—I could only see our reflections in the near glass. There was no corresponding reflection in the glass on the other side of the room.

  “Stay here.” Trotted around and confirmed it was the same all the way—I couldn’t see a reflection of me anywhere other than right in front of me. And, when I was perpendicular to where I knew everyone else was, couldn’t see them or the elevators.

  Rejoined the team. “What a sneaky bunch we’re dealing with. We need to get into these rooms, but carefully. There’s honestly no telling what’s inside. The glass is actually painted in some way or has some kind of movie being played against it, something—so what we’re seeing is what they want us to see. Nothing.”

  “Be ready to run,” Buchanan said, as he put his hand toward the handle. Abigail and Naomi took Amy and Adriana’s hands. I took his free hand in mine.

  Buchanan took the handle in his hand and turned it.

  CHAPTER 83

  “LOCKED.” Buchanan let go of my hand, pulled out his lock picking set, knelt down, and got to work.

  “Well, that was anticlimactic.”

  “Still be ready to run,” he said. “We could have alerted someone that we’re here.” Kept my hand hovering over his shoulder. The lock clicked and Buchanan stood up quickly, took my hand, and blocked me and the others as he slowly opened the door.

  He stopped, then opened the door a little wider. “Everyone speak very softly or not at all,” he said over his shoulder. “And move quietly.” Then he stepped inside and the rest of us followed.

  It was easy to see why Buchanan wanted us quiet—we weren’t in a room. We were on a large metal catwalk that went around the perimeter. Below us was the explanation for why there were extra stairs but no entrance to the “floor” below.