Читать книгу Dark Matter - Greg Iles - Страница 15

I stood speechless in my office doorway. Relief had turned to paralyzing anxiety in less than a second, and the fact that Geli Bauer was a woman did nothing to slow my racing pulse. Like her handpicked subordinates, she was lean and hard, with a predatory gleam in her eyes. She radiated the icy confidence of a world-class alpinist. I could imagine her hanging for hours from a precipice, her body supported only by her fingertips. Her intelligence was difficult to judge in an incubator filled with geniuses, but I knew from previous conversations that she was quick as mercury. She treated all but the top Trinity scientists like prisoners working under duress, and I attributed this to her being the daughter of a powerful army general. Ravi Nara had crudely called her “a terminator with tits,” but I thought of her as a terminator with brains.

“What can I do for you?” I said finally.

“I need to ask you a couple of questions,” she said. “Routine stuff.”

Routine? Geli Bauer had visited my office a half dozen times in two years. I mostly saw her through a sheet of glass, observing the polygraph tests to which I was randomly subjected.

“Godin just gave us three days off,” I told her. “Why don’t we do this when I get back?”

“I’m afraid it can’t wait.” She had the stateless accent of elite overseas schools.

“You said it was routine.”

A plastic smile. “Why don’t you have a seat, Doctor?”

“You’re in my chair.”

Geli didn’t get up. She thrived on conflict.

“You don’t usually handle this kind of thing personally,” I said. “To what do I owe the honor?”

“Dr. Fielding’s death has created an unusual situation. We need to be sure we know as much as possible about the circumstances surrounding it.”

“Dr. Fielding died of a stroke.”

She studied me for a while without speaking. The scar on her left cheek reminded me of some I’d seen on some Vietnam vets during physicals. The vets described how shrapnel from a phosphorous grenade burned itself deep into the skin and then self-cauterized, only to reignite in the air and wound the operating surgeons when they attempted to remove the fragments. Soldiers lived in terror of them, and Geli Bauer looked as though she’d suffered intimate contact with one. I had been predisposed to like her because of that scar. A beautiful woman marked by such a thing might have earned some insight about life that few of her sisters possessed. But my interactions with Geli had convinced me that whatever hell she had survived, she’d learned only bitterness.

“I’m concerned about your relationship with Dr. Fielding,” she said.

Always I with Geli, never the bureaucratic we, as though she felt personal responsibility for the security of the entire project.

“Really?” I said, as though shocked.

“How would you characterize your relationship?”

“He was my friend.”

“You saw him and spoke to him outside this facility.”

To concede this was to admit a violation of Trinity security regulations. But Geli probably had videotape. “Yes.”

“That’s a direct violation of security protocol.”

I rolled my eyes. “Sue me.”

“We could jail you.”

Shit. “That’ll really help keep this place secret.”