Читать книгу Eagle Squad - James C Glass - Страница 5

PROLOGUE

A snarling wharf rat, mouth flecked with foam, came out of the darkness. Jacob Bauer cowered in one corner of an empty room as the dog-sized animal lunged towards him. There was a fleeting instant of panic. Something was amiss; it was the wrong kind of rat. It should be small, white and cute, with little pink eyes. Bauer glared at the rat, and it fell over on its side. Bauer watched the death throes curiously, feeling detached yet somehow responsible, and then a telephone was ringing, but that wasn’t right either because he didn’t allow telephones in this part of the laboratory. He tried to find it, and it kept on ringing.

He awoke when a fumbling hand struck something sharp on the nightstand. Ester grumbled in her sleep and turned over beside him, pushing her buttocks against his back. He fumbled until he had the telephone in hand, and he was wide awake.

“Yes, this is Bauer,” he whispered, then listened quietly for a long minute, frowning.

“Don’t touch anything at all, and stay out of the room. I’ll be over in a few minutes, Len, but are you okay? No cramps, or dizziness? I hardly recognize your voice.” He listened again.

“Relax, and put some coffee on. See you.”

He swung out of bed, shuffled to the bathroom and splashed water on his face. A balding, middle-aged man with sagging jowls and stomach watched him sleepily from the mirror as he performed his toilet rituals. He dressed in the dark, smiling when his wife began to snore. He tapped the bed sharply with his foot and the snoring stopped. I’ll call her later from the lab, he thought. He went to the kitchen, found a day old bagel, some cream cheese, and made a snack. There was an uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach.

The morning was clear and crisp, with an orange glow on the horizon as he peddled his bicycle through empty streets towards the nearby campus. The hill loomed ahead of him, bristling with silhouettes of buildings housing classrooms and laboratories that were his life for much of each day. A feeling of guilt returned. The university had been so good to him, but if he had his way he might soon bring it all down. Why couldn’t he just do his work like the others? Because the others didn’t care about consequences, he thought. They only wanted the power and prestige that came with heavily funded research programs, and they would do anything for that. He had wanted it too, and had played the game well, but now he wanted out as soon as the project was finished. The way things were going that might be never. The string of failed experiments was both discouraging and mysterious, and his masters were not pleased.

Bauer leaned over the handlebars, pumped hard up the winding narrow road towards the hilltop campus. He raced past the darkened library and administration building, circled a wide grassy quadrangle in the center of campus and sweated a staggering path up a dark walkway towards the glowing beacon of the Robert F. Gordon Science Center at the very top of the hill. The white marble building, a windowless four story rectangular box, glowed softly in yellow light from dozens of powerful lamps pointing upwards from the flower gardens at its base. He parked his bicycle with three others in a rack near the front entrance. One he recognized as Len’s, the others he hadn’t seen before. At a wide door of thick glass he inserted a plastic card in a slot below a speaker and television screen. The PROCEED appeared on the screen.

“Jacob Bauer, analytical chemistry,” he said slowly.

Somewhere in the bowels of the security system, a voiceprint identity comparison was made. CLEAR appeared on the screen. Bauer pushed on the door and entered the building, crossed the dimly lit empty lobby to the elevators and pressed a button, looking up at the floor indicators to see that both elevators were at the third floor where his laboratory was located. He waited impatiently while one descended, and then rode it up to his floor. He stepped out into a brightly lit corridor stretching far in both directions. A uniformed guard sat at a desk near the elevator, watching several television monitors and eating a sandwich. He grinned as Bauer approached him. The man had dark circles under his eyes, his face a ruin of old acne scars.

“Getting an early start today?”

“Not really. Len called, and I’ve got some troubleshooting to do.” Bauer signed his name in the security record book. Len had signed in at dinnertime the previous evening, had not yet signed out.

The guard chewed thoughtfully. “Haven’t seen Len all night. Haven’t seen anybody all night,” he said.

“He called from the lab, and his bike is downstairs. I won’t be long.” Try staying awake, he felt like saying, but didn’t.

The man wrote something on a pad in front of him and yawned. “Have a good day, Doctor Bauer,” he said cheerfully.

“Sure,” said Bauer, and he started down the corridor to his right. Behind him the guard returned to watching the television monitors, but his eyelids fluttered and he was soon dozing as he did for much of his shift each night.

The laboratory was at the far end of the corridor, and Bauer found the door unlocked. Don’t students ever use their keys? Irritated, he pushed the door inwards and stared into a dark room. He flicked the light switch on and off, but darkness remained. Across the room, light shimmered beneath a closed door. The synthesis lab. He left the hall door open and felt his way across the room past benches covered with animal cages. The animals were excited by his presence; he could hear the scratching of their tiny feet as they scuttled back and forth in their prisons.

“Hey, Len,” he called loudly, “give me some light out here before I knock something over.”

There was a sound of metal sliding on metal in the room beyond the door. It sounded like Len was working in the fume hood, but couldn’t he at least answer?

“What happened to the lights in here?” he shouted, and reached for the door. Behind him, the door to the hallway slowly closed as if pushed from the inside. He heard a click in the other room as the light there suddenly disappeared, and he was in total darkness. His breathing quickened. He pushed the door open wide, saw a single red light glowing dimly ahead of him and shuffled towards it, keeping his arms out to avoid collisions with the benches he knew were there.

“Len, are you all right?” His voice was trembling, and he wondered if the red light was on the timer. His foot struck something soft, he stumbled and looked down.

Len was on the floor, face contorted in agony, staring at the ceiling.

Bauer’s first instinct was to turn towards the fume hood, sniffing the air for escaped gases or fumes that could kill him in seconds, and then his hands found the open hood and began to close it.

He heard a single step before gloved hands seized him by the arms and neck, slammed him hard into the fume hood until he was sprawled in it from the waist up. The grip on his neck was so strong his voice was paralyzed, and bright colors flashed before his eyes. The sliding door to the fume hood came down painfully across his shoulder blades simultaneously with the sound of a glass ampoule shattering, and he took one musty breath. Gasping, then vomiting, his brain was dead before the convulsions began and his feet drummed a random tattoo on the floor. The following silence was broken by the gurgle of a freshly dead man evacuating his bowels.

Strong hands lowered him gently to the floor as the light in the fume hood suddenly came on, revealing two hooded figures clothed in black. One turned on the blower in the hood for a moment, then rearranged the positions of beakers and a broken ampoule while the other changed a bulb in the red light on one wall. The fume hood door was lowered halfway. The two people looked around the room silently, nodded to each other, then left, turning the room light on before closing the door. They walked quickly to the hall door and locked it behind them before moving along one wall down the hallway. The guard slept lightly, head nodding as one black figure, an aerosol can in one hand, stepped up lightly behind him and sprayed his head with a fine mist. The guard’s chin flopped against his chest, and he moaned softly. Both people moved to a waiting elevator and entered, pulling off their hoods with difficulty over the gas masks they wore beneath them. A moment later two students, wearing jeans and sweaters, left the building, loaded book packs on their backs. They mounted bicycles and coasted out of sight down the hill towards the awakening town as Ester Bauer arose to make morning coffee before the expected return of her husband.