by Scott Powers
Eve watched him carefully. He wasn’t telling all.
“But you weren’t a bit surprised."
Meln stood perfectly still.
“You weren’t surprised,”Eve repeated,“because you’d seen it before.”
Eve was waiting for Meln to respond, but Ted got to him first. He was looking for some equipment and asked Meln to help. Melnwent across the lab. Jen, who was webcasting Ted’s tests to scientists in Boston, New York, and Akron, kept Meln out of the frame. Meln led them around the corner of the U-shaped room to another machine. Eve made sure Melnknew he was being watched, but she stayed back with the college student. Val seemed fascinated by everything. She watched on the laptop Ted had left on the counter near them. Every now and then, she commented on what they were doing. Eve didn’t really understand and wasn’t particularly interested. This was Ted’s show. All that mattered was that it succeeded. And it was.
“Tell me about yourself,”Eve said.
"I'm a first-year graduate student in materials engineering," Val said. "Dr. Meln is my advisor."
She was from a small town in north-central Ohio. Her father was a powerful state senator, in line to become Senate president next term, provided Republicans kept control. That worried Eve. Val saw that it did.
“What about you? Your grandmother was killed? That’s why we’re here?”
“Yeah, that’s why. I have to learn why she had to die.”
“And Dr. Melnhad something to do with it?”
“No. Not directly. It happened a long time ago. But he’s working with some of the people who were behind it.”
Eve told Val some of Grandpa Joe’s story. She told her about Max, the first lab, Max's kidnapping, and what the old reporter had said.
Val took it all in with wonder. She no longer sounded scared, just intrigued.
“And if these tests prove this material is, um, unworldly, what?”Val asked.
Eve shook her head.“I don’t know‘what?’When I knew my grandpa, nothing mattered to him.”
She laughed an angry little "ha."
“You’d think a guy would give a shit about something, anything. Family, religion, football. With him, it was nothing. Yet, he held onto this. He wanted me to have it. And I believe he wanted me to find out what happened.”
Val touched Eve’s arm.
“I hope you find whatever you’re looking for,”she said.“You know, Dr. Melnreally is a jerk. He’s hit on me. He did. I threatened to tell the chair, and you know what he said? He laughed at me, like he was untouchable. SoI told him, if he did it again, I’d tell daddy. He didn’t laugh at that. But I still don’t trust him.”
Eve offered her a fist bump, and she took it.
Despite Jen’s effort to keep Melnoff-camera, he couldn’t resist the allure, especially as the questions began coming in and he seemed annoyed at how Ted answered them. Finally, Melnbutted in, taking one of Yen’s questions. Eve startled and walked around the corner to see if she could shoo him back but it was too late.
“The crystalline pattern’s not entirely uniform, Dr. Yen,”he said.“Density runs 85, 86 microns at the low end, to 110, 112, tops. But there’s an overall consistency within that range across the entire surface. I’m thinking this material was rolled as it hardened.”
“Ian? Ian Meln? Is that you? Are you there?”Bollinger called out from the computer window. "Are you part of this?"
“Yes, Sue,”Melnsaid.“I’m working on this with Dr. Lee. We came across this, uh, together.”
“Let us see you,”she said.
Though Eve mouthed,“No!”Jen turned the camera on Meln.
“Let me show you what we’ve found,”Melnsaid.“Ted, remove the sample and follow me.”
Eve scrambled out of the way, and out of range of Jen’s video shot, as the trio came back around the corner, to another machine. Ted seemed to know immediately what it was and why they went there. Eve slipped back down the wall to rejoin Val.
While Jen webcast Ted and Melnexposing the swatch’s spectral properties for their online audience, something else was going on.
Four floors above, and a few yards down the main corridor, someone called for the elevator.
Dr. Ann Nash was fastidious. When she stepped into the elevator, she couldn’t ignore a dirty napkin on the floor, so she picked it up. It was bloody. She almost dropped it in disgust, but her instinct for tidy outweighed her germ phobia. She tweezered one corner, away from the blood stains with her thumb and forefinger.
She held the napkin up. It had what looked like numbers, scrawled in blood. At the top, what looked like 961. Below that: 2. Then: 116. Across the bottom: 1160.
Ann thought it very odd. And some of the numbers were oddly drawn, as if they maybe were something else. She studied the pattern trying to clarify what she saw. Finally, she inverted the napkin. The scrawl became clearer. Most of the characters weren’t numbers at all. They were letters. It was a message.
“Call 911 2 lab.”
Ann got off on the second floor and fished her cell phone out of her purse.
Outside a black Mercedes pulled up next to a fire hydrant and parked.
Back in the lab, Meln was taking over the show. He defended the swatch to the journal editor, Freidrich. Ted was miffed, uncertain whether Melnhad a plan to sabotage the analysis seminar, or simply couldn’t resist taking credit for this remarkable find. Ted also held onto his growing hope Meln was playing along. He had signaled Jen to be ready to shut down the video if Meln showed any sign of deviating from what they were doing, and she nodded. She was way ahead of him.
With Meln’s help, things were going well. Yen asked very few questions, but stayed focused. Bollinger asked the most questions and seemed to be doing so in a way that suggested she was anticipating the answers, and they were satisfying her. Her infamous wall of skepticism seemingly had fallen. Freidrich’s latest comments were signaling his emerging excitement about a potential new discovery.
Outside someone rattled the locked hall doorknob and everything stopped.
Meln and Ted looked away from the camera, and their faces erupted in concern.
“Dr. Meln?”Freidrich squawked on the screen.
Jen turned the camera on Ted as Melnwent to see who was at the door. Eve followed him with her gun.“One moment,”Ted announced.“It appears our request to not be disturbed is being ignored by someone.”
Eve looked out the door’s small window.
With a bang, Max’s face smashed against it, pressed cheek first.
“Max!”she cried.
Then his face slid slightly, and a gun barrel appeared, pressed against his neck.
“Open the Goddamn door!”a deep-voiced man outside commanded.
Max yelled,“No! Don’t do it!”
“Oh God!”Meln declared, backing away.
“Who is it?”Val asked.
“It’s them! They found us,”Ted screamed.
“We’ve got to get out of here! Follow me!”Melnsaid, running around the lab’s interior wall. Val went too.“Take Ted!”Jen told her.
Eve wasn't moving though.
Val pushed Ted’s wheelchair to where Meln stood. Jen took the video camera, still webcasting, around to capture Eve standing her ground at the door, gun ready.
Jen set the camera down on the lab counter, pointed at the door. She pulled her own gun, a .38 snub-nose, from a holster beneath her blouse. Jen had held a Florida concealed weapons permit for many years, and state reciprocity made it good in Ohio. God, she loved Florida’s loose gun laws. She cocked it, aimed it at the floor, and then took cover behind a machine as Eve unlocked the door. The door swung in. Eve squatted low and small, her legs like springs and her arms outstretched, taking aim, ready to fire.
Max stood among four men in the corridor, all dressed in black. At least two held handguns. Max looked paler, thinner, and sicker than he had a week ago. His face was bruised and scabbed. In fact, he was having trouble keeping his legs under him.
For just
a moment, Eve’s heart sank when she saw him like this, and she wondered what he’d survived. But that didn’t last. She held her gun fast.
“We’ve come to make a trade,”said the stocky man with the gun at Max’s face. Max knew him as Sal.“This man’s life for your little souvenir.”
“Really?”Eve said, buying a moment.“You guys are dressed in black? Men in black? For real?”
Somewhere behind Eve, the voice of Freidrichsquawked from the laptop that Ted had left behind:“What’s going on there? Do those men have guns?”
The man behind Sal, a standard issue thug with a plain face and dark hair, looked past Eve and saw the camera. He nudged Sal and pointed at it.
Sal lifted and fired his gun and the video camera exploded. He took aim again, and with a bang, the laptop jumped and flopped over.
As Sal took aim, his grip on Max briefly let up, and as Sal fired the second time, Max found his moment and strength to pull away. He slipped Sal’s grasp by dropping straight down into a knee crunch and then sprang into the lab. Eve bashed the door with her shoulder. It banged on Sal’s body and he pushed it back. A few feet away, Jen grabbed the wounded laptop and ran around the corner of the room, out of sight.
Then sounds filled the corridor: a few yards away, another door banged open. There was a scramble of bodies.
Someone in the corridor yelled:“Freeze! Police! Drop your weapons! Hands up! Down on your knees! Now!”
In the hallway outside the lab, the campus police SWAT team poured in, overwhelming the men in black. Sal stepped back outside the lab to confront his new problem.
Eve slammed the lab door again, this time catching Max on the knees. The door bounced and he crawled into the lab. She slammed it again, this time catching Sal's wrist as he thrust his hand forward to try to stop her from shutting the door.
“Shit!”he swore, and his handgun clattered to the lab floor.
“Get down, I said! On your knees!”
An unarmed Sal held his hands up and shouted,“We’re federal agents!”
“On your knees!”
Eve shouldered the door again and this time it closed. She jammed the bolt.
Police and Sal were shouting more commands and protests at each other outside.
Eve assumed they were trapped inside. One group or another in the corridor would win this argument, and either winner would enter the lab and take them all away.
She turned to Max with a look of desperation. He responded with a thumbs-up, and she smiled.
Jen reappeared.
“This way! Fast!”
As the police sorted the chaos in the corridor, Eve helped Max to his feet, and they hurried around the corner in the lab. Jen was right to hurry them, wherever they were headed. She figured it would be only a moment before the men in black produced some sort of real or phony federal law enforcement ID, and all of them would be bursting in together, after the real criminals.
Them.
Jen beckoned them to a narrow door at the far end of the lab room. Eve had noticed it earlier but thought it was a closet.
“Hurry!”Jen repeated.
Eve hurried but Max still was having trouble maneuvering his feet, and she had to offer him a shoulder to hold as he ran. She realized he was drugged.
The door opened to a utility tunnel.
They stepped through to find a narrow, twenty-foot access way. It led to the underground network tunnels harboring steam and cooler lines, cables and pipes that gave the campus its pulse. The floor was poured concrete. The walls were cinderblock. The passage was lighted by caged bulbs, connected every couple dozen yards to electrical trunks running from the building.
As Eve and Max crossed into the tunnel, they heard the hall door crash. She pulled Max out of the way and pulled the door closed.
Jen already had run out of sight, following Val and Ted down the tunnel.
Meln was right there. For a moment, Eve had forgotten about him. He stepped past them but held up his hand, as if to signal all would be fine. Beside the door, he found an iron bar, and he ran it through brackets, securing the door. It would stay closed.
“Did you grab my sample?”Eve asked.
Meln turned pale. And then he turned his back on her. He started backing away, and then he broke into a run down the tunnel.
“You didn’t! You bastard! You forgot it again, didn’t you?”she yelled.
Eve swept back to the door and grabbed for the bar. Max snatched her hands away, another unexpected moment of energy from someone who looked dazed. Whatever he was on, he had quickness and strength enough to stop her.
“You can’t go back in,”he said.“It’s too late.”
CHAPTER 14
DOWN IN A HOLE
Eve was furious, pulling away from Max’s grip. She ran after Meln.
“You left that on purpose!”she screamed at him. She shoved him, which did little. He outweighed her by nearly 100 pounds. He just took it.
“Why would I do that?”Melnscreamed back.“I’m up to my ass with you on this now. Do you think those guys will leave me alone now?”
“Who called them?”Eve said.
Meln stopped and faced her down, but did not speak.
"They saw the webcast," Ted called out. "Just as I had hoped."
Ted was parked about ten yards down the tunnel with Val and Jen.
"What?" Eve said.
"We wanted them to come to us, right? I knew if we went public on the Internet, they'd pick up on it, figure out where we were webcasting from and come for us."
"They almost got us!"
"They didn't," Ted said. "I knew these tunnels were here."
"They got my swatch!"
"We got Max."
"I ..." Eve was flabbergasted. "You and me, we have to have a little more communication. This was so close to a complete disaster. As it is, I lost my damn piece!”
"We got Max back."
“Fuck you. I lost my swatch!"
Ted showed her a middle finger.
“The police are my doing though,”Melnsaid defiantly.“And you should be glad. They stopped the silencers. Now, you must follow me.”
The main tunnel was far older than the access one that had brought them there. The tunnels dated to the earliest decades of the university, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many of the buildings they originally served were long gone, replaced, and in some cases replaced again. But the tunnels kept doing their job.
The air was heavy with humidity and the stench of mold. A few yards in, Eve felt lost underground and a little panicky. She followed Meln.
As corridors cross-connected, the wanderers turned left, then right. Meln was both leading them and trying to lose anyone who might be following. At a couple of access tunnels, he left the pack to try doors to buildings, but they were always locked.
Eve was keenly worried the men in black would catch them down here. Max, now a little less groggy from walking, tried to reassure her.
“They kept saying all they wanted was the Roswell sample, and they got that.”
“But we fucked with them with that webcast,”she said.“They’ll retaliate.”
“But we can do no more to them without the sample,”Max argued.“Right now, they can break even.”
“We’re not breaking even. We’re getting it back. At least I am.”
Unease overtook them as they walked in half circles, going nowhere underground. Jen looked scared.
Val, pushing Ted’s chair, seemed to have her sense of location though.
“I think we’re under the Oval,”she said at a junction.“The library should be that way,”she said, pointing right.
“We’re nowhere near the Oval,”Meln said.
He led them straight, into a darker corridor that sloped downward. After a while he stopped at a junction, paused, and then pointed down the new tunnel.
“If I’m not wrong, this will lead to an older trunk line they wouldn’t search,”Melnsaid.“It should get us out of here.
”
That’s when Max finally recognized him.
“Jeez,”he said.“You’re that Fake Ted who tried to kill us! You’re one of them!”
Eve pushed him back.“Easy, Max. I already shot him. And kidnapped him. We’re even.”
Melnstood his own ground.“I’m helping now.”
“Why?”Eve asked.
Ted grabbed his wheels, halting his chair, and then turned it.“I’d like to hear this too.”
Melnturned away without explanation.“We go this way.”
Max ran out in front of him.“The lady asked you a question.”
“Let’s just say, I have my own motive,”Melnsaid.“And it’s of no business to you and whatever your causes are. There’s something I want too.”
“What?”Eve asked.
Meln was a big man. He pushed past Max and kept walking. Max turned silently to follow and the others caught up.
That’s when Max took note of Val for the first time. She looked the most out of place here, striding through this foul, stinking tunnel in a designer dress and boutique heels.
“Who’s she?”
“They kidnapped me too. I’m Val.”She offered her hand.
“Anyone else I should know about?”
Max’s humor was back. Eve needed that. She put an arm around him and led him on.
As they walked, Max talked about his own hostage ordeal.
“Good thing I don’t know shit about the network. They kept saying they’d release me eventually, but wanted to hold me to see if I could lead them to the swatch sample.”
“Then about a half hour ago, they came and got me and hauled me to you guys. I think they thought they might need trade bait.”
“So they held you here in Columbus, even though they probably didn’t know we were here?”Ted said.“That’s interesting. How long a drive was it?”
“Close,”Max said.“The drive over couldn’t have been more’nfifteen minutes.”
“The King Institute,”Ted said.
“Did you say the King Institute?”Eve asked.
Ted didn’t answer her.“Did you learn anything?”he asked Max.
“They told me a lot, but I figured most of it was bullshit,”Max said.“They said the organization is worldwide. Not political, but powerful. They see themselves as protectors. They have a perverse sense that their mission is holy so their methods are justified.”
