"These people are scientists, right? Methodical. Organized. The records are very important to them. We saw their last headquarters, and there they kept them in the basement of the Big House. Chances are, they would do the same here. So I say we go to the main building and look there."
They all agreed it made sense. She insisted on going first. After all, she said, she knew the base somewhat, having parked the car near the front entrance and walked across it. And she was wearing the lab coat, which she felt served as a sort of protective coloring — it and a lot of bluff had been enough to get her inside the place. Jude and Skyler could follow behind and keep out of sight. She would let them know when the coast was clear.
Jude didn't like it, but before he could think of an objection, she had opened the door and slipped outside. They watched her through the quartermaster's window, striding boldly away on the pavement as if she had every right to be there.
If anyone can carry it off, she can, he thought admiringly. It's all a question of attitude.
He was about to open the door, when he felt Skyler's hand on his shoulder.
"Listen. You go after her. You two get the records. I can't. I've got something to do."
Jude knew what it was. He had seen Skyler examining the plans, memorizing the layout of the barracks and the hospital. He knew also that he did not have a chance in hell of dissuading him.
"Okay."
Then they did something neither expected — they embraced each other, tightly, and drew back and looked at each other squarely in the face, and wished each other luck. Abruptly, Skyler turned and stole out the door and disappeared behind the building across the way. When he was gone, Jude left and hurried in the direction Tizzie had taken.
He went around a corner and saw her up ahead, now turning casually to make sure he was there. She continued on, and he followed, trying to look inconspicuous. He did not dodge from building to building — that would have looked absurd and caught somebody's attention — but he tried to stay in the shadows and walk slowly and shrink into the landscape. Tizzie was right: there were not many people around, thank God.
First they tried the general offices, which dominated a cluster of buildings set around an oval driveway. They entered by a side door, and Jude waited in a basement stairwell while Tizzie went from floor to floor. No luck. On the way out, she asked Jude where Skyler was, and when he explained that he had gone off on his own, she frowned and shook her head. Next they tried the supply center, kitchen and the mess hall — four cavernous rooms now unused, marked with falling plaster and white dust on the long tables bearing the delicate footprints of rats.
Then they came to the assembly hall. Three or four people were congregating on the front steps and inside the vestibule, so they slunk around to the rear. They found a pair of double doors — but they were locked. Jude took a credit card from his wallet, slipped it between the two doors so that it hit the catch, and rocked them slowly until it slid open.
"One advantage of a wasted youth," he said.
Instinctively, they went down the stairs to the basement and knew at once that they had found what they were looking for. Through the window of a door, they saw neatly arranged desks and cabinets — the only clean room they had seen so far — and four computers lined up side by side upon a long oak table. The door was unlocked.
Jude sat down at a computer and switched it on. The screen jumped to life, casting a ghostly glow over his chest and forearms. He punched a few keys, and the screen responded instantly in a one-word demand: PASSWORD. Carefully, his fingers almost shaking, he typed in the word that he had learned on the island, the word that Julia had given her life for: B-A-C-O-N. The screen blinked and flipped, turned blank and flashed again with a second request: 2ND PASSWORD. Jude typed the second name: N-E-W-T-O-N. And in no time, a file menu came up. Jude quickly read the items: medical, match-up, doctors, Group members, Lab research, child placement, experiments, births, deaths, journals, history.
He tabbed down to MATCH UP and clicked the mouse. A few more blips, a second of hesitation and there it was — two lists. One to the left, headed Prototypes, consisting of names, addresses, professions, families, blood types, capsule medical histories. One to the right, marked Geminis, with names, dates of implantation, dates of birth and medical information. Here the address under each name was the same: Crab Island.
Tizzie was standing watch at the door.
"I'll be damned," he said. "Look at this!"
She rushed over and bent down over his left shoulder.
"God."
That one word said it all. It was uttered with a sense of awe. They knew the master list existed, they had traveled hundreds of miles to find it and endured hardship to attain it, but still, once it was there in black-and-white, they were amazed.
It was like taking a course in theoretical physics and then watching an atom bomb explode.
Tizzie resumed her post at the door. Jude scrolled down to his own name and saw a notation: INACTIVE. See individual file. Across the screen he saw the match-up with Skyler. Underneath it said: Escaped from Crab Island. Marked for retirement. See individual file.
"Jude."
She was calling to him softly from across the room.
"Listen. A lot of people are coming. I think they're coming into the building."
He was too engrossed in the file to pay much attention. She opened the door and left, and a few minutes later, she was back.
"Jude, listen to me. People are gathering upstairs. Cars are pulling up. They're all coming here — from all over, all of them. The Young Leaders, the prototypes. There's some kind of big meeting about to happen — right upstairs."
He had pulled up on the screen a name on the left that meant nothing to him. But on the right, under the Gemini, the lengthy medical record ended with a date and three words: ORGAN BLOCK TRANSPLANT. That was one who had run away from the island and was killed, he thought.
"I hear you," he said. "But we can't leave this. We've got to copy it. Look around for a disk."
"I'm not saying you should stop," she insisted. "I'm saying we've got to know what they're up to. I'm going to the meeting."
She opened the door and she was gone.
A second later, what she said sank in, and Jude knew that it was a mistake, that he should have stopped her. But having finally found what he was looking for, having finally found the fountain of knowledge and imbibed, he was loath to break off.
He scrolled down until he came to her name: ELIZABETH TIERNEY…
Skyler peeked around the corner of the building and saw the hospital about twenty yards away. It was off by itself in one corner of the base, which made sense — the patients would have a view of the woods to soothe their convalescence, and in case they bore infectious diseases, they would be isolated from the general population.
The isolation suited his purposes, too.
He had already searched the barracks. There were ten of them, low-slung buildings of concrete floors and bunk beds in various states of disarray. It was obvious that they had not been occupied for some time, and as he inspected them, walking as quickly as he could, considering the weakness that was overtaking him, in one door and out the other, he felt an unbridled sense of anxiety. He knew at once the source of the anxiety — the barracks aroused memories of his own past, waking and sleeping years on end in a similar structure, growing up with the Age Group in a solitary world.
But one of the barracks, closest to the hospital, he could not examine because people were inside. He had heard the voices just as he was about to turn the doorknob, and he stole around the corner just as the door opened. A nurse stepped out, carrying a tray of implements to the hospital. A minute later, out came another, carrying blankets. He found a window and looked inside. Far from being dirty, it was clean and sterile. Hospital beds were made with crisp new sheets. There were stanchions for IVs, bedpans, call buttons on cords and all kinds of medical monitoring machines. It looked like a recovery ward.