Now, peering around the corner, he realized that the base had come alive. In the distance he could hear cars arriving, doors slamming, voices calling out. People were moving about; they were entering what seemed to be a large assembly hall. Some of them looked over in his direction, toward the hospital. One figure — dressed in a doctor's scrubs, he realized with a spasm of fear — was walking toward him.
He didn't have much time. And he was feeling none too good.
Skyler took a deep breath and ran across the gap to the hospital. When he reached the wall of the building, he leaned against it to catch his breath. He stayed like that for some time, recovering. Finally, through sheer will, he pushed forward. He was shaky, but feeling a little better.
He told himself he had to do this.
You must.
He walked around the building, leaning against the wall, until he came to the rear. There he found what he was looking for — a large picture window. Inside were chairs and tables — it appeared to be a sun room — and looking through the room and through an open doorway, he could see the ward.
And what he saw there jolted him. He felt his senses spring to alert, the blood coursing through his veins.
Upon the beds, one next to another, he saw his Age Group, his fellow Gemini. He recognized them, each and every one of them. And his heart went out to them. They were strapped down on their beds, lying there looking at the ceiling and at each other, in poses of barely controlled panic.
Jude was relieved that Tizzie's file substantiated her story. It was all there — the childhood disease, the transplant of the kidney, her family's departure from Arizona, and finally the death of her clone, Julia. This latter event was noted in a rare bit of bureaucratic poetry: GEMINI DEMISE.
What was reassuring was that Tizzie's file had terminated in the same phrase as his — INACTIVE.
He hated to admit it, but his relief told him something. Since their meeting at the mine outside Jerome, he had trusted her, but only up to a point. He had been badly burned by her initially, and although he had held his suspicions at bay, he had been unable to banish them altogether. Now, he could. That single word — INACTIVE — spoke volumes.
As Jude scrolled through the records, reading hungrily, he was too excited to be afraid. He heard people assembling in the hall above — the sounds of their shoes thudding and scuffing against the floorboards was magnified by the concrete walls of the basement office. He knew he could be caught at any time. All it would take was one person who decided to come downstairs. He played the scene over in his mind: the sight of him typing away at the keyboard, a shrill cry, those footsteps turning back and thundering down the steps, the crowd grabbing him and hustling him off. Still, he could not stop. What he was turning up was too valuable. It was worth the risk.
Those two passwords had opened the cave, like an open sesame. They had enabled him to tap into the mother lode of information. Almost everything was recorded in the computer: how the Lab operated, its original membership, the scientific breakthroughs, the births of its children and their clones, the financial records, the outside contacts. There was even a narrative; it told how the early researchers, including his father, had come together. It told how they had stepped over the line of what was permissible at their medical schools, how they'd become obsessed with cloning and gone underground in Arizona, and finally how they'd transformed themselves from a cult of brilliant scientists into a conspiratorial web that used the lure of immortality to reach into the power centers of the country. What the records did not tell — and the omission was conspicuous — was anything about the spider at the vortex of the web, Dr. Rincon.
It was like a puzzle with a single piece missing — a piece right smack in the center.
Still, there was more than enough for the FBI to go on and for prosecutors to break up the Lab. Most important was a listing of the outside conspirators who had agreed to join the Group. Jude wanted to whistle as he read through the list of names, twenty-four in all. There was Tibbett. And Eagleton. And the Georgia congressman. And others equally prominent. They represented people at the height of the professions, movers and shakers in politics, finance, the media, commerce, and retailing. Raymond had been right: they'd paid ten million bucks a head for the right to participate. In return, they got a regime of gene therapy — weekly injections of DNA inside enucleated viruses, targeted at the bone marrow, where blood is manufactured. They also got a clone. In a backup file Jude found their names and addresses — foster children who had been placed in homes around the country. The oldest, he noted with disgust, was seven.
In another file, Jude found the account of what had gone wrong, how the complicated medical process had backfired and actually triggered off premature aging. For those who had received gene therapy — including most in the Lab and the Group — it was most severe, leading to illness and a painful death. But even those who had received only the early experimental injections — like Skyler, he thought — were susceptible.
The solution was a desperate one. The prototypes of the clones, the children of the original scientists, were to undergo radical surgery. With a sense of dread, Jude saw that the operations — spelled out in bold uppercase letters, ORGAN BLOCK TRANSPLANTS — had been already scheduled. He looked at the times and dates, then at the clock. Was it possible? According to this file, the first block transplant was about to begin.
Jude left the computer and searched through the cabinets and desk drawers. Behind a stack of stationery and yellow legal pads, he found what he was looking for — a plastic container filled with disks. He chose one, shoved it into the computer and began copying. He watched as, with horrible slowness, the tiny symbols of a file copying itself floated across the screen. He hit the keys, did it again, then hit them again and again. He could not copy everything — that would take too long — just the basic files on the Lab and the Group.
Seven long, agonizing minutes later, he was through. He ejected the disk and put it in his pocket.
He had one more thing to do.
Hurriedly, he called up the Eagleton file. From somewhere behind him, or maybe up above, he thought heard something, footsteps perhaps. Undoubtedly Tizzie coming back to join him.
He couldn't break off, for this was more important than anything else. He had to locate the backup files. He had to see who else in the FBI was named as a conspirator or who was working for them. He had to know whom he could trust.
The sound got closer. It seemed right behind him, and he was preparing to turn around just as he found the one file he was looking for, and started to read it…
He jumped as the hands landed on his shoulders and his arms, roughly. The hands lifted him out of the chair and twisted one arm behind his back until it hurt. They grabbed his cell phone. Then they trundled him away.
Tizzie slumped down in a chair near the back of the auditorium. She was not in the very last row — that, she thought, might draw attention to herself — and she hoped she was far enough from the front to be hard to spot from the stage. She wanted to blend in, and wished that someone would sit next to her or talk to her so that she would seem to belong. But no one did. She'd also put on a pair of sunglasses she'd had in the pocket of her coat. She didn't know who would be here, but the last thing she wanted was to be recognized.