Vox(82)

“Can you help? You’re a doctor, right?”

I nod. Sort of.

“Can you help?” He stops, looks down at the triple stripes on his sleeve, and says, “I took an oath, you know. Maybe we should ride it out. This Pure thing can’t last forever.”

Time to throw a log on the fire. “You’re right. It can’t. It probably won’t. Another few years and Reverend Carl will be another footnote in a history book. Of course, he might stick around longer.”

“Yeah.” Petroski’s on the fence.

“You know, Sergeant,” I say, making it up as I go, hating myself a little as I stoke the flames, “I read an article a few years back. We used to think kids had until thirteen or fourteen to—you know, for that bang thing to happen. But I’ll tell you, as an expert, they have a lot less time than that. Three, four years, maybe. Afterward, their brains sort of”—I search for the right word—“click off.”

His face pales, and I wince despite the fact that it’s the reaction I’m going for.

“Well, I’d better get back to work,” I say. Better, I think, to give him a few minutes to mull things over while I work out the details with Lorenzo.

Leaving him, and the key to the Honda, at his desk, I walk back to my corner of the lab, this time along a different route. Half the ID cards are turned the wrong way, but I read a dozen of them, keeping in mind Lorenzo’s advice to worry about the titles and nothing else.





SIXTY-NINE




Approximately two percent of the population holds a doctorate. If you ignore the PhDs in English, the percentage is less. Much less.

“I count nine,” I say. “Out of about twelve.”

Lorenzo must have been luckier than I with the ID cards. “I got fifteen out of twenty.”

Two-thirds, three-quarters, it doesn’t matter. We’re sitting in a lab filled with experts. Given enough time, you could get a monkey to type out Shakespeare. In a lab like this, you could build a rocket to Mars in a hell of a lot less time. A brain-scrambling neurotoxin? I’d estimate overnight.

Which is just in time for the morning meeting Patrick will be attending tomorrow.

I check the room again. Eyes are exhausted, but busy. Lorenzo gives them until morning to come up with something that might satisfy Morgan.

“I think I’ve found us an ally,” I say.

“Yeah?”

“Over there. At the security desk.”

Lorenzo stretches his neck to see over the rest of the crowd. “You’re kidding.”

Petroski might not be the brightest bulb in the box, but he’s got two qualities I want: he’s scared as shit for his daughter, and he’s strong. That he wears a uniform and carries a ring of keys on his belt doesn’t hurt.

“Take a look around, Enzo,” I say. “These guys have been working around the clock. They’re dead tired.” As I say this, three men, each of them looking to be in his forties, file out of the lab, escorted by a single soldier.

“Haven’t seen my kids in a week,” one complains.

“Kids?” another says. “My kids are okay with it. My wife, on the other hand—”

“If I don’t get some food and some z’s, I’m gonna be toast tomorrow.” The third man looks as if he’s about to fall asleep on his feet.

“See what I mean?” I say, as another five worker bees signal they’re ready to hit the hay. “All we need to do is wait.”

“Wrong, Gianna.” Lorenzo looks me over. “What you need to do is get some sleep. At least for a couple of hours.”

I have as much chance of sleeping as I do of winning a Nobel Prize, but he’s right. I’ve run into the fatigue wall at full speed, and my next lab task requires absolute alertness. “Two hours. Max. Assuming Morgan is staying the night.”

“He will be. Check with your new pal on the way out.” Lorenzo cracks a smile. “And don’t flirt too much. I’m the jealous type.” From the shelf behind him, he takes one of the tablets, swipes and taps a few times with those absurdly long, but elegant, fingers, and hands it to me. “A little light reading for you.”

I read the title on the screen. “Comparative Neuroanatomy of Primates? You call this light?”

“In the literal sense. The iPad weighs less than a pound.”

“How much does the book weigh?”

“It’s about five hundred pages. You want chapters seven and eight.” He must see the unspoken questions in my eyes, because he keeps going. “Look, I’d do it, but I’d be starting from zero. Besides, I can’t read that shit and set up everything down here at the same time. So brush up on your brain science, okay?” He turns to the computer behind him, pulls out the keyboard, and starts filling in a lab animal requisition form after consulting a chart of available subjects. In the space for the identification number, he types 413, then moves down the page to an empty block and starts hunting and pecking again. I watch him type Sedation, trepanation, and intracranial injection of experimental serum Wernicke 5.2.

“Oh man,” I say, picturing myself with a drill in one hand and an iPad open to a set of step-by-step instructions in the other. This is so not what I signed up for. “I’m not really the hands-on type, Enzo.”