The Ninth Day (20 page)

“I go, or you don’t,” Mono repeated.

“Listen, I saw an entrance with a ramp on that side of the building.” Emma pointed to her left. Let me work my way past the guards and I’ll head over there and let you in. Deal?”

Mono thought for a moment.

“Come on, Mono, you know they won’t let the two of us in, we look like drug dealers,” Oz said.

Mono laughed. After a moment, Oz did too. Emma thought it was forced on Oz’s part, but he gave it his best shot.

Mono pointed the gun at her. “Remember, you tip them off, and Carlos starts.”

Emma just nodded.

Mono jerked the gun to Oz, who gave her a worried look and climbed out of the car. Emma waited until they disappeared around the corner, then took a deep breath. She stepped into the cool evening. Crickets chirped all around her and a soft breeze blew through the trees. She looked up. Stars filled the sky. It was as if nothing bad had happened, would happen, or could happen. How wrong the universe was.

Chapter 24

“I
need to see John Raynor,” Emma said to the female security guard behind the reception desk.

“You’ll need a pass. Can I tell him your name?” The guard wore a name tag that said S
ULLIVAN
.

“Emma Caldridge of Pure Chemistry, Miami, Florida.” The guard walked to the back of the desk and picked up the phone. Emma heard the woman talk as a low murmuring. She couldn’t make out the words. The guard turned to her.

“He says he’s sorry, but he thinks you have the wrong person. He wasn’t expecting anyone tonight.”

Emma smiled. “Tell him I
do
have the wrong person. Seems as though the right one has left for the day. I was hoping to talk to him so that tomorrow he could distribute some information that another team needs. I’m just passing through. This is my only chance.”

The guard relayed Emma’s response. After a moment, the guard put the phone down and typed on a keyboard. She walked over to Emma with a printed name tag.

“Go through those doors and down the hallway. He’s working in Lab Four.”

“Thanks!” Emma said brightly. She stuck the badge on her shirt and walked to the glass partition doors that led to a hallway in the back of the lobby. “Here?” she pointed to the partition.

“After I buzz you through go to the next set of doors.”

The buzzing sound of the glass doors made Emma jump. Get hold of yourself, she thought. Her heart was racing and her palms were getting sweaty. She slowed her pace and swung through the first set of doors, headed to the second. When she passed through those, she entered a long, wide hallway with doors on either side. To her immediate left was another hall. At the end of that, she saw the doors marked E
XIT
.

She jogged to it and pushed the bar. A beeping noise indicated that the door was breached. She pushed the metal panel wide and found Oz and Mono standing before her. Oz looked as nervous as hell, but Mono appeared excited. To Emma he looked like the loose cannon that he was. She waved them into the hall.

“Let’s go. I suspect that the beep you heard was the security system notifying the guards that the door was opened.”

She spun and ran back down to the main hall. Here she moved a bit more slowly, checking the doors. The first few were marked sterile and when she tried the door handles they didn’t move. Each had a passkey box on the panel. The third sign merely said
LAB
. This door swung open. Emma fumbled around on the wall to the right of the entranceway. Her fingers found a light switch and she threw it on.

Fluorescent lights hummed to life, revealing a narrow room with counters running the length of it. Various types of equipment sat on the counters, ranging from test tubes to micro-centrifuges.

“My God. A real lab,” Emma said. She breathed in the air, with its light scent of alcohol and a mint smell that she couldn’t place. “Oz, let’s get those sores scraped and analyzed under a microscope.” She waved him over to a wheeled stool and rummaged around in the cabinets for a scalpel and a slide. She found both and got to work.

Mono flopped into a chair at a desk in the front of the room to the right of the door. A computer sat on the desk in front of him. He tapped on the keyboard and the monitor sprang to life. He didn’t try to use it, but instead just looked around with a bored expression on his face.

Oz’s sores had spread to cover the first three fingers of his left hand, and the pinky and fourth of his right. Emma scraped at them, careful to add the pieces to the slide.

“What do you think you’ll see?” he said.

Emma wasn’t sure. “I’m hoping that this will work as a crude form of a biopsy. Perhaps revealing unusual cells or signs of bacteria. Maybe a type of virulent staph infection or some sort of parasite. Scabies are small bugs that burrow in the skin, as a type of body lice.”

Oz grimaced. “That’s disgusting.”

“But more common than you’d think, and treatable for the most part,” Emma said. “Do they hurt when I scrape them?”

Oz shook his head. “Not at all.”

Emma paused. “What do you mean, ‘not at all’? ”

“Just that. They’re numb. My entire left hand is numb. I don’t feel anything.”

The door to the lab swung inward. A man in navy twill pants and blue-and-white-striped shirt with the sleeves rolled up stepped into the room. Nearing forty, he had brown hair cut short to his head and a slightly craggy face. He looked at Oz sitting on the stool and Emma standing at the microscope. The open door blocked his view of Mono.

“What’s going on here?” the man said. He had dark eyes and a low, authoritative voice, as if used to giving orders. The door swung closed, revealing Mono, who stepped up to him. The man towered over Mono, who barely stood five foot seven. Mono reached up to dig the tip of his revolver into the man’s head, behind his right ear. “What the . . . ?” The man froze.

“Don’t move,” Emma said. The man stayed still. Emma watched as his face registered first incredulity, then fear.

“Are you John Raynor?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Emma Caldridge. You remember my name?” She very much wanted him to remember it so that he could tell the authorities about her later.

“I do. The guard said that you were a chemist.”

“I am. I need to use this lab to . . .”

“Enough! Don’t tell him our business. He’ll call the police. We need to kill him,” Mono said.

Oz rose from the stool so fast that it rolled backward and hit the cabinets. “No, Mono. Don’t. We can’t afford to have the police crawling up our ass.”

Mono nodded. “That’s why I’ll kill him. He won’t talk.” Oz took a step toward Mono, who pressed the gun harder against Raynor’s head. Raynor bent away from the muzzle, but Mono kept the gun flush with the man’s skull. Emma watched Raynor swallow once, and then visibly steel himself. She wished he hadn’t gotten involved.

“Come on,” Oz’s voice held a cajoling tone, “let’s just tie him up. Throw him in a broom closet. We’ll take off. By the time they find him we’ll be miles away. No one dies, and the police don’t look as hard for a couple of burglars as they do for a murderer. Especially when all they do is use some lab equipment and leave. You understand?”

“That’s a good idea,” Emma said. She kept her tone light, as if they were discussing nothing serious. She didn’t want to trigger Mono and his wilder instincts. “Do you have the ties that Carlos uses?”

Mono nodded.

“Then you guys tie him up while I finish here. I don’t think we should linger.” She put some finality in her voice, as if the course of action was decided.

Mono appeared to hesitate, thinking.

“Get down on the ground,” Oz said to Raynor. “I’ll help you, Mono.” Oz tipped the balance, and Mono began fishing in his pockets for the ties.

Raynor lowered himself to the floor and placed his palms on the tile. He shot Emma a glance before putting his chest and forehead down.

“Here,” Emma said. She handed Oz some lab gloves from a box on the counter. “Wear these.” Oz put them on, grabbed one of Raynor’s hands and waved at Mono to grab the other.

Mono didn’t move. He kept the gun pointed at the man’s back.

Come on, Mono, just tie him up, Emma thought.

“You do have the ties, right?” Oz prompted.

Mono nodded again.

“Good,” Emma said. “Tie him, but then sit him up. I need to ask him some questions.”

Oz waved at Mono, who slowly lowered his gun. Emma busied herself at the lab station, all the while doing her best not to look at Mono. The action seemed to help decide him, because he pulled the ties out of his pocket and applied himself to shackling Raynor. When they were done, Emma indicated a chair near the station.

“I need to do a Fite stain. Do you have the material for that?”

Raynor clamped his mouth shut.

“Mr. Raynor, I don’t have time to play games. Do you have the tools I need?”

Raynor jerked his chin at a high cabinet next to Emma’s shoulder. “Up there.”

Emma opened it and found what she needed.

“I don’t like the sound of a Fite stain,” Oz said, sounding nervous.

“I’ll need to cut some more of the sores, and this time I’d like to go a little deeper, but if what you say is true and they’re numb, I don’t think you’ll feel it.”

Oz sat back on his stool and rolled over to her. “Okay, but do it quick.”

Emma once again applied the knife to the sores. Oz didn’t flinch.

“You didn’t feel that?” she said.

“Not at all,” he replied.

Emma frowned at him. “The sores are numbing your nerves.” She glanced at Raynor and found him staring at Oz’s hand with a clinical expression on his face.

Emma went to a nearby microscope. It was state of the art, and she admired it for a moment.

“This equipment is fantastic.” She powered it on and slid the small piece of glass underneath the lens.

“What do you see?” Oz asked in an anxious voice. “Are there bugs?”

The sore teemed with bacilli interspersed with black hunks of decaying skin. The bacteria triggered some memory in her, as if she’d seen it before, but she couldn’t pull the idea forward. She stared at it and tried to concentrate.

“No flipping worm or parasitic beast, and no lice-type insect.”

Oz breathed a sigh of relief.

She lifted her head and looked at Raynor, who was leaning forward in his chair, an interested look on his face.

“When did the sores start?” Emma asked Oz.

“Eight hours ago,” he replied.

Raynor raised his eyebrows. “That’s a lot of growth for eight hours.”

Emma inhaled. The bacteria implied that Oz had some sort of mycobacterial infection.

“Do you see anything?” Oz sounded anxious.

She nodded. “Lots of bacteria.”

“What could that be from?”

“Tuberculosis. Meningitis.” She didn’t want to say the other possible infections out loud. “You have any gastrointestinal symptoms? Like diarrhea?” Oz gave her a sharp look, as though he could tell that she was holding something back.

“No.”

“Did you dig in the dirt near the field?”

Oz looked confused. “No. Why would I dig in the dirt?”

“Did you dig in the dirt anywhere on the compound?”

Oz shook his head. “No. Come on, tell me. What are you thinking?”

Emma didn’t reply. She waved a hand at the computer on the desk. “Does that access the Internet?” she said to Raynor.

“Don’t forget Carlos . . .” Mono said.

“None of the lab computers have web access,” Raynor said. “They contain research data, searchable reference books, copies of the
Physician’s Desk Reference
, things like that.”

A voice squawked from the cell phone in a holder attached to Raynor’s waistband. “Dr. Raynor? This is Janet Sullivan. Please check in.”

Emma, Oz, and Mono stopped moving. Emma considered then rejected the idea of having Raynor answer. She didn’t trust him not to tip off the guard.

“Mr. Raynor?” the guard said. Emma reached down and pulled the cell phone, holder and all, off his belt.

“Time’s up, let’s go,” she said. She pointed at the corner of the room behind the door. “Put him there, and let’s get the hell out.” Mono and Oz waved Raynor to the corner. He slid his back down the wall until he was seated. Mono tied his ankles together. Emma tossed Oz a roll of gauze. “Gag,” she said. Oz wrapped the gauze around Raynor’s mouth.

Through it all Raynor stared at her, as if he was memorizing her features. Emma couldn’t tell what he was thinking. She hated to let him believe the worst of her, but there was no way of telling him without putting the hostages in the back of Carlo’s ambulance at risk. She lowered her eyes while she tossed the slides and scalpels into a hazardous waste container bolted to the wall above a sink. She washed her hands and headed to the computer while she dried them. She tapped a key and the options screen opened. She clicked on the icon for a famous reference manual of diseases. In the search box she typed the words sores, tendon, contraction.