The Second Ship (The Rho Agenda #1)(103)
Fighting off her anxiety, Heather walked right up to the door and tried to peer through the black glass. It didn’t work. Whoever had painted the window had done much too thorough a job to allow her any view of what lay beyond.
Driven more by anger at her timidity than by curiosity, Heather put her ear to the pane and listened. Nothing. That, in itself, was odd. On the other side of the building she had been able to hear the rumble of Raul’s voice just by standing close to the front door.
But from here, no sound at all reached her ears, at least none from inside the house. It must be some separate room, most likely used for storage. Heather ignored the 16.283 percent probability that popped into her mind, reaching instead for the handle and giving it a slow twist.
The door opened so smoothly and silently Heather almost jumped, yet another thing that added to her growing self-anger. Taking a deep breath and then exhaling slowly, she opened the door all the way and stepped inside.
It took Heather’s eyes several seconds to adjust from the bright sunshine outside to the dimly lit room. Hardly bigger than her mother’s walk-in closet, the room was empty, except for a raised trapdoor in the very center of the floor. Through that opening, she could see a steep set of steps leading down.
“Hello?” Heather’s voice sounded oddly muffled in the room. She stepped to the edge of the opening and leaned down. “Hello? Anyone home?”
A lone switch occupied the wall just two steps down, and Heather moved to where she could reach it. At first she thought the lightbulb must be out. Then a gradual flickering, characteristic of fluorescent lamps, gave way to such brightness that she once again found herself momentarily blinded.
As her vision returned, Heather climbed down the remaining stairs into a room so white that the walls seemed to glow as brightly as the fluorescent casings that lined the ceiling.
A solitary bed occupied the center of the room, the type found in hospitals, with stainless-steel railings along both sides and adjustable sections that allowed the operator to raise or lower the back or legs. Beside the bed, a tall, stainless-steel stand held an empty intravenous fluid bag. Just beyond that, the walls were lined with a combination of instruments, a stainless-steel double sink, tables with computers and equipment, and lots of closed metal cabinets. There was also an old refrigerator with rounded corners, reminiscent of one in a fifties sitcom.
This must be the room where Dr. and Mrs. Rodriguez took care of Raul after taking him out of the hospital. But that didn’t make any sense. Raul had told her that they had cared for him in his bedroom during all those weeks after everyone else had given up hope. His mother had been determined to keep him comfortable as she placed all her faith in God to heal her only son. No, this place had some other purpose. It seemed more like a laboratory, something straight out of an old B movie.
Heather moved to the row of tables loaded with the computers and instruments. Everything was off, and she had no intention of touching anything electronic for fear of breaking something. She turned to the first set of cabinets. The lower ones held cleaning supplies and chemicals, while the topmost contained beakers, test tubes, glass stirring rods, and gas torches.
The refrigerator door opened with a slight squeal, as if reluctant to reveal its contents. Inside, a set of test tubes stood arrayed in racks, the tops plugged with rubber stoppers. Heather reached in and carefully withdrew one of the test tubes, holding it up so that the light passed through its interior.
It held a gray liquid with the consistency of thin pudding. At first she thought that the goo pulsed of its own accord, but she put this down to her hands shaking from adrenaline overload. What in the world was she thinking snooping around like this?
Returning the test tube to the refrigerator and closing the door, her gaze shifted to the computer sitting atop the small table in the corner, a swivel chair pushed back as if its last occupant had departed in a hurry. The login screen drew her attention, a familiar LANL logo along with a username “RodriguezE” and an empty slot for a password.
Heather glanced back over her shoulder. Nothing. She was completely alone in the room. Despite a growing desire to get the hell out of there, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she needed to see what was on that computer, that it held the key to what was going on in this hidden lab.
Ignoring her earlier decision not to touch the electronics, Heather took a seat in the chair and slid it up in front of the computer display. What would Dr. Rodriguez use as a password?
Heather had once browsed through a data security pamphlet her father had brought home from the lab, and it had spelled out the laboratory password requirements—a minimum of ten characters including at least one capital letter, one number, and a special character such as a period.
Her dad and Mr. Smythe had laughed about the new policy over a game of bridge, something about how the government liked to lower the cone of silence, creating policies that made it impossible for people to remember their own passwords unless they wrote them down or used memory tricks that actually made the systems less secure.
Heather focused, letting her mind play out the possibilities. The likelihood that Dr. Rodriguez had written the password down shrank in comparison to other approaches. From what she had observed, Raul dominated his thoughts.
For a harried scientist, annoyed by the new security rules, the special character would be the first one on the keyboard, “!”—or “bang,” as it was commonly known among hackers—most likely appended to the end of the sequence. As her savant mind worked the problem, a sequence of likely answers presented themselves, and the second of these got her in. Raul—birthday—bang.