Vox(38)

I slide my white key card into the reader, wondering if Lorenzo realizes how like Pandora I feel as the doors swing open and we’re momentarily blinded by the fluorescent lights that come alive inside the lab. There can’t be any evil here, I think, only the hope that also hid inside Pandora’s ancient box.

Still, something about Poe’s slip of the tongue about our part of the team—if it was a slip of the tongue—makes me uneasy. For that matter, Poe himself makes me uneasy. He’s built like a refrigerator and silent as a grave. And he has the look of a man who’s killed for God or country. Or money.

Morgan beams as if the lab were his own firstborn son and motions us to follow him inside. Once again, Lorenzo waits for Lin and me to enter before walking through the double doors.

The squeaks of a few hundred mice fly out of the cages lining the left wall. On the right, there are rabbits, sniffing silently, their pink noses twitching at the intrusion into their space. We’ve never had rabbits before, and I know Lin will have to take care of the injections when we get around to the larger animals. No way I could plug an Easter bunny with anything unless I was damned sure.

But I am sure, and that’s the hell of it. If I want to draw out the project as long as possible, I’ll need to kill a few mice and bunnies.

Lab tables, ten of them, each with its own workstation, fill the empty area between the rows of cages. Like the offices and cubicles in our department of three, they’re unoccupied.

At the end of the room is another door, also with a key-card reader. This time, it’s Lin’s turn, and once again, Morgan walks past us, into the belly of the lab.

“Holy shit,” Lin says.

Morgan twitches at this. Good.

Lorenzo utters a single Italian word, as ubiquitous and productive as English’s “fuck.” “Cazzo.”

They’re both right. This space is like nothing I’ve ever seen.

On my right are three doors, marked with the sign PATIENT PREP ROOM: PLEASE KNOCK BEFORE ENTERING. Beyond these is an open area with a bank of computers and cabinetry to hold smaller equipment. PORTABLE ULTRASOUND, TMS, and TDCS are printed on neat labels below each cabinet.

“Nice,” Lorenzo says. “Transcranial magnetic stimulation and direct-current stimulation. How many units?”

“Five of each,” Morgan says, opening the cabinets one at a time. “And three portable ultrasound kits, all with various transducers.” He reads the labels. “Linear, sector, convex, neonatal, transvaginal.” There’s a pause before the last item, as if he’s put off by the mention of female anatomy, even though Morgan should know we need the transvaginal probes for our smaller subjects. I’ve said before, he’s a shitty scientist.

Lorenzo winks at me.

“There’s more over here,” Morgan says, and leads our tiny parade past the open area and toward the back of the lab. Here, two doors lead to the MRI rooms.

“You’ve got two magnetic resonance imaging setups?” I ask, nudging Lin, who is almost drooling. Back at Georgetown, we had to beg for the use of one MRI in the hospital—a twenty-minute walk away. And that was when we were allowed the time, which wasn’t often.

Morgan beams. “Two Tesla MRIs. And here’s the PET facility.” He opens another door and lets us peek inside.

We had to wait months for access to the hospital’s positron-emission tomography, or PET, equipment.

“What about EEGs?” Lorenzo asks. “And the biochem lab?”

“All here. The electrocephalography stuff is over in the small-equipment area.”

“Electroencephalography,” I correct. “That’s why they call it EEG and not ECG.”

Morgan’s eyes scrunch together. “Whatever. Anyway, I forgot to mention it, but you’ll find the electrodes and the printer in the far right cabinet. The biochem lab is through these doors.” He motions to Lorenzo’s key card. “Go ahead. You’ll probably be most interested in the protein expression module. It’s just here, to your right.”

Morgan points, but Lorenzo is still scanning the room, which could hold five high school chem labs.

There are only three of us. Four, if we count Morgan, but I don’t think any of us is counting him. And only one biochemist.

“Okay, people.” Morgan checks his watch. “Got a meeting with the big guys, so I’ll leave you to it.”

“You do that,” Lorenzo says, and slides his key card into the biochem lab door. “We’ll be fine.”

“Internet?” I say, pointing to a bank of computers with monitors the size of flat-screen televisions in the main lab.

“No way, Jean.” Morgan fires up one of the workstations. “Excel, Word, SPSS in case you need to run statistics. MatLab. Whatever you need.”

All I need if I want to work in a vacuum, I think. “How about access to the world of periodicals, Morgan? I don’t carry the past five years of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience around in my purse.”

“Oh, that. Right.” He moves toward a rack filled with tablets. “All plugged into the academic databases. If you can’t find what you want, call up on the intercom. I’ll make it happen.” Morgan smiles, showing two neat rows of small teeth. They remind me of a hamster. Or a lab rat. “Gotta buzz now, people,” he says, and disappears through the rodent room and out the main doors.