It took a moment, but Hawker smiled. “I do like to break things.”
“Yes, you do,” she said. “Let me go in. I can do it quietly and you can watch my back.”
He hesitated and then nodded. “Keep your line open. You go silent I’m coming in.”
She nodded, opened the door, and stepped out.
Striding casually across the street, Danielle secured the speaker of her headphone to her right ear. She climbed the steps and made her way to the front door. Holding out a small handheld device, she checked for any alarms. None present, she went to pick the lock. It took a moment, as it was not her most often used skill.
She heard Hawker’s voice over the line. “Sure you don’t want me to come up and break the door down?”
“I got it,” she whispered.
The lock popped. She slipped inside.
Her footsteps echoed on hardwood floors. The large open room in front of her was all but empty. A single overstuffed chair sat in one corner, draped in a dust cover beside a bookshelf devoid of titles.
She went through this room to the kitchen and then a den or bedroom. Little to see, as if someone had recently moved out.
Finally, she entered what might have been a living room. There she found a desk and chair, a large throw rug on the floor, and stacks of high-tech equipment, including a bank of computers and a wall lined with incubators as well as industrial refrigerators whose clear doors were now covered with frost and condensation. To the left of all that was a Plexiglas-enclosed workstation. It looked to be hermetically sealed, complete with a set of powerful microscopes and the armholes with long rubber gloves attached for manipulating things inside it.
The living room was a makeshift lab.
She stepped over toward the incubators. The first two were warm but appeared to be empty. She could see no sample trays or glass slides inside, only what looked like irrigated soil and wet, muddy clay. A second incubator had a layer of water two inches deep on top of the soil but nothing growing inside. Not even mold.
The refrigerators were next. Condensation on the Plexiglas made it impossible to see inside. She wiped the glass.
Empty.
Each one of them.
A smaller incubator had something moving inside. She looked closer. Rats, some dead, others looking withered and aged, shaking as they tried to move around. The containment habitat was sealed and a thick length of tape covered the seal as if to remind someone not to break it.
“What the hell is all this?” she whispered.
She wondered if Ranga had cleaned the place out or if someone had beaten them to it. Most likely he would have given up the address while being tortured.
She moved to the enclosed workstation and realized the main scope was a scanning electron microscope, an extremely expensive medical device.
She turned it on and looked through. Nothing to see. But the device had an electronic readout and a small keypad. She pressed the power switch and then found a menu to cycle through the most recent images.
Genetic material in the midst of some examination. There was no way for her to tell what it was. She looked around. The computer was her best bet.
She moved to the desk, sat down at the computer, and hit enter.
An encryption screen came up. Not the standard operating software that could easily be breached but a heavy-duty, industrial-grade system. Whatever the computer held, it was well protected.
She pulled a specialized USB drive out of her pocket. It had a program that could auto-launch through most encryption firewalls.
She plugged it in; the green LED lit up and it went to work. If that didn’t work, there was the possibility of opening the computer and stealing the hard drive itself. She located the tower under the desk and turned it her way. It didn’t move easily. The normal bundle of wires connected to the back of the box was a bad enough tangle, but it seemed to have been augmented by something.
A thin locking cable and a plain red wire held it in place. The cable could be breached easily, but the red wire was suspicious. It terminated in some kind of magnetic switch attached to the back of the computer.
She followed the wire through a hastily drilled hole into one of the desk drawers. There it connected to a brick of what looked like C-4.
Who needs an alarm, she thought, when you can just blow the whole place to hell.
A second length of wire ran from the C-4. It led out behind the desk, under the rug, and across the room. Other wires ran to the incubators and refrigeration units.
She followed one to a credenza against the far wall.
Cautiously she opened the drawer. A stash of binders lay inside. She eased one out. The red wire ran through its binding, but there seemed to be enough slack.
She opened the binder to find handwritten notes. If they were Ranga’s notes — and they did look like a sample of his handwriting that she’d seen — it seemed unlikely they’d be left here unless they were no longer needed. Perhaps whatever samples he had created were enough.
She studied the writing. Tabular entries recording test results. She leafed through the pages, careful not to pull on the wire.
Page after page of numbered experiments, all with failed results. She understood that too.
Despite the incredible things that modern genetic science was capable of, somewhere around 99 percent of experiments were failures. At the big pharmaceutical labs around the world, incredibly gifted men and women often toiled for years with nothing to show for it. One study she recalled stated that a geneticist at a top biotech lab had a fifty-fifty chance of working his or her entire career without ever producing a usable drug.
Part of it was the safety precautions and protocols that purposefully slowed the work to a crawl, but for the most part it was just an incredibly difficult task. Nature had spent five billion years coming up with life in its myriad forms. Five billion years of trial and error. Genetic engineers were desperately trying to take a shortcut in that process.
Outside, half a block down on rue des Jardins-St.-Paul, Hawker sat in the rented Peugeot, watching for trouble. So far the quiet streets of this Paris neighborhood had remained just that, quiet.
A few cars had rolled by. A white Isuzu delivery truck had come down the road and gone around the block and a few pedestrians had strolled by, but none of them had stopped or lingered near the building.
The street was quiet, the neighborhood was quiet, and Danielle had also been quiet for several minutes.
He grabbed the phone and clicked the push-to-talk button. “You finding anything?”
It took a few seconds before the reply came.
“Some kind of lab in here,” she said. “Computers, incubators, microscopes. Everything rigged to explosives.”
“Wonderful,” he said, thinking maybe they should get the French police and the bomb squad involved.
“Any trouble out there?”
“The coast seems clear for now, but …”
Hawker’s voice trailed off. The Isuzu truck had returned. It pulled up in front of the town house and stopped.
When was he going to learn to keep his mouth shut?
“Hold on a second,” he said. “You might have company.”
“From where?”
“Front door,” Hawker said.
“How many?”
The Isuzu had parked directly in front of the town house, blocking Hawker’s view of the entrance. Three men jumped out, dressed like movers. One guy milled around near the back of the van and the other two moved toward the front and the entrance to the town home.
“Two at least,” he said. “A third out here.”
“I need to know if they’re coming in,” she said.
Hawker could hear the frustration in Danielle’s voice. He knew she would wait until the last second, maybe even push it too far. That was her way. He thought of telling her the men were headed in now, just to get her moving.