He hasn’t been here since the day he drove eighteen-year-old Elisa to her interview. Nothing has changed. Thick woods on either side of the road still look to hide trolls, and the illuminated clock on Occam’s sign still glows like a second moon. He’s long regretted having had a role in Elisa taking this job. But not today. Today she has a purpose, and it is a beautiful thing to see. He tries to remember that as he follows the LOADING signs, passing through an empty parking lot. Well, not totally empty: He notices a giant green Cadillac Coupe de Ville before the Pug’s headlights strike a checkpoint guard holding up a hand for Giles to stop, while his other hand comes to rest upon the handle of a holstered gun.
29
THE GRAY LIGHT of the security monitors are all the sunrise Strickland needs. He climbs from the floor, his bed on nights he can’t bear to look at Lainie, and into his chair. His guts squelch, the sound of digesting painkillers. Must be hard work, because when he coughs there’s blood. It dots the white envelope on his desk. He wipes it. It smears, but that’s all right. Makes the envelope pulsate with importance. And it is important. It’s the paperwork for today’s dissection of the asset. He removes the document. It’s clean, beautiful—not a word is redacted. He doesn’t bother to read it, signs his name on a few dashes. He does linger over the diagrams. The autopsy looks pretty standard for a beast of such alleged scarcity. Y-shaped incision. Cracking the ribs in half. Scooping out the organs. The serrated-saw scalping. Brain plopped onto a pan. He can’t fucking wait.
Footsteps outside his door. Strickland looks up from the schema. This early, he expects Mr. Clipboard. But it’s not Fleming. It’s Bob Hoffstetler. He looks like shit. Sweaty, pale, skittish. Looks like Raúl Romo Zavala Henríquez, way over his head. Strickland leans back in his chair. Laces his fingers behind the head. It hurts, but the posture is worth it. This should be fun.
30
ZELDA KNEELS TO pick up the punch card. Yolanda’s going wild behind her. But all Zelda hears is Brewster carrying on about how she shouldn’t trust anyone. He doesn’t know Elisa, though, does he? Of course he doesn’t. Despite their long years of friendship, Elisa’s never been to Zelda’s home, not once. But Zelda knows the girl. She knows she knows the girl. And this is not the Elisa she knows.
Elisa’s card waits in its slot, unpunched despite Elisa’s rapid exit from the locker room. A small detail, maybe, until you add it to everything that’s been going on at Occam over the past several days. Equipment under dust covers being wheeled out of F-1. Scientists shaking hands at coffee-and-doughnut farewells. A mixed mood that feels like the last week of senior year: excited, but fearful, and sad, too. Zelda can feel the whole building clenching as if for impact. Something big is happening today, and Elisa, it seems abruptly clear, has gotten herself entwined. And how does Zelda know this? It’d been right there in front of her all night, squeaking across the floors.
Elisa’s shoes. She’d been wearing ugly, gray, rubber-soled sneakers, built for running.
Zelda swipes up her card, punches it, and then, in an act that makes Yolanda spit acid, finds Elisa’s card and punches that, too. Punch cards, after all, are the first evidence to which Fleming will look to find out who is here and who’s not if something goes wrong. Zelda wheels around, bumping past Yolanda without apology, and hustles back in the direction of the labs. Go wrong? Her hunch is that a lot is going to go wrong, a whole lot, and very quickly.
31
HOFFSTETLER TILTS TOWARD Strickland’s desk. He’s holding the syringe inside his pocket. Mihalkov will never find out. He’ll never need to know. Half the solution for Strickland. Half for the Devonian. The first needs to be killed to ensure the second can be killed cleanly. Hoffstetler tells himself that the wicked, hateful mudak deserves it. The glass of the syringe is oily, slipping from his grip. He wipes his fingers on the inside of his pocket, takes a drier hold. He’s nearly to the desk. Don’t stop moving.
“Go back and knock first,” Strickland says.
They are senseless words, and Hoffstetler, his brain hardwired for sense, rejects it like a computer fed defective data, and does the worst thing, he stops moving, right in front of a wall of monitors that blind him with sixteen screens of gray light. He raises a hand to shield his eyes, the hand that, one second ago, had held the syringe. It’s empty now, a soft, flabby, harmless thing.
“Knock…?”
“Protocol, Bob,” Strickland says. “I know how you value protocol.”
“I wanted… to give you one more chance…”
“Me? Give me? Bob, I don’t follow. You’re free to tell me about it, of course. Just go back to the door and knock first.”
32
NOT A SENSITIVE vehicle, the Pug, but the naked tires feel part of Giles’s flesh, and pulling away from the checkpoint, he feels every pebble that passes beneath. Sure, the guard had waved him through without checking ID, duped by the van’s paint job. But the checkpoint was always going to be the easy part, wasn’t it? Giles slows to a creep as he rounds the back of the facility. A figure leans on a wall, smoking between two lights. Giles wipes the fogged windshield. Yes, that has to be it: the loading dock. He tries to swallow his fear, but his throat is sandpaper.
He begins to pull in between painted yellow lines. The guard snaps awake, lifting both palms as one does to question an imbecile. He spins a finger, and Giles flinches at his error. He’s supposed to back in. Of course he is. You don’t load a van through the front. He wipes sweat from his face, shifts to reverse, and pulls back into the first leg of a three-point turn. This is bad. Oh, this is very bad. He’ll go a mile out of his way to avoid the public debasement of parallel parking. Now here, in the predawn dark, he’s got to back into a narrow slot while a wary guard observes? Giles checks the rearview mirror and sees the suspicious red eye of the guard’s lit cigarette. Giles shifts into reverse, grasps the wheel, and prays to the General Motors gods for a vehicular miracle.
33
“WELL, HOWDY, BOB. Come on in. What can I do for you this morning?”
Hoffstetler feels every inch the scolded child Strickland intended him to feel. Ten or twelve times he knocked on the door, while Strickland grinned, far too much time being lost. He lurches back before the strobing security screens. He’s baffled with fear, off-kilter enough that, thrusting his hand into his pocket, his index finger grazes the tip of the needle. Too close—he hisses panic into the bared teeth of his artificial smile.
“I just… wanted to make sure you… wished to go through with this.”