Replica (Replica #1)(64)
She kept toggling through results, increasingly confused. If Fine & Ives hadn’t contracted Haven for its research until well after her father left, why were there so many photos of him getting chummy with Richard Haven? She found an interview with Haven himself for the Scientific Medical Association, crediting her father for his “tireless support of medical research and advances in stem-cell technology.”
She resumed her search, this time typing in Haven Institute. The official website was one of those bland templates that all research facilities seemed to share, filled with yawningly boring terminology like neurobiological resolution and cutting-edge biotech services. She found nothing listed on the website to indicate what kind of research Haven did, exactly—at least nothing she could understand. The institute, she noted, had been opened the year before she was born. Whatever her father felt about Haven now, Haven couldn’t have been the reason he’d left Fine & Ives. The timing wasn’t right.
More interesting were the websites about Haven: millions of results, half of them blogs, conspiracy websites, and speculative articles about what really went on there, what kind of research was performed, and whether any of it was legal. Some articles were straight-up sci-fi, and claimed that the island was a place where hybrid animals were being manufactured for military use, or where aliens were being studied and even trained. Other bloggers speculated that at Haven scientists performed illegal stem-cell research.
One of the websites cited most frequently was called HavenFiles.com. When she clicked over to it, a bright-orange warning, exuberantly punctuated and capitalized, flashed at the top of the screen.
Don’t be fooled by phony websites and reports!! it said. HavenFiles.com is the NUMBER ONE source for TRUTHFUL and VERIFIED reporting on the Haven Institute!!
Half-amused, half-curious, she began to read. The website was, as far as she could tell, operated by some guy down in Florida named Jacob Witz, who had, for whatever reason, dedicated his life to reporting on various theories, rumors, and phenomena pertaining to Haven. His bio showed a picture of a gap-toothed middle-aged guy squinting into the sun, wearing a fishing hat feathered with different lures. He looked exactly like the kind of person you’d expect to see tipsy and railing about the time he was abducted by aliens. In his bio, half treatise, half manifesto, he revealed that he’d been a journalism major at the University of Miami and that he was devoted to “integrity,” “uncovering the facts about one of the military’s best-kept SECRETS,” and “delivering KNOWLEDGE to the AMERICAN PUBLIC in accordance with the tenets of FREE SPEECH.” This last sentence was punctuated with about forty exclamation points.
“All right, crazy,” Gemma said out loud. “Let’s see what you got.”
His website was like one of those all-you-can-eat buffets where food keeps getting replenished, no matter how much you load up: every page led to more and more pages, every link to more and more links. Gemma felt as if she were falling down a well. There were detailed maps of Haven as imagined from above, and blurry pictures of the buildings taken from a distance and obviously from some sort of boat. (Reading between the lines, Gemma felt sure that Witz had never actually set foot on the island, which was guarded by troops and enclosed within a jail-style fence. He had pictures of this, too, dreary chain-link fitted with barbed wire that Gemma estimated to be about sixteen feet high.) Dozens of pages were devoted to the various theories about the experimentation done at Haven, and Witz argued carefully, in great detail, against the idea that Haven was manufacturing monsters or performing tests on aliens—although he was quick to say that he was an “expert” in military cover-ups of alien landings and had even written a self-published book on the subject (The Secret Others: What the US Government Doesn’t Want You to Know!).
Several whole pages were devoted to something called the “Nurse M controversy”: Nurse M, real name unknown, who supposedly committed suicide after working at Haven, the day before Witz, who had tracked her down but at least on the site refused to reveal her real name, was supposed to interview her. She found a link to a three-year-old news story in which Haven was named, supposedly because a nationwide hospital system was illegally selling off embryonic and fetal cells to research facilities. An embedded video showed one of the hospital execs leaving a courtroom, swarmed by reporters and right-to-life protesters holding graphic handmade signs.
Gemma’s back was sore and her eyes burned from staring at the screen. She was shocked to see she’d been at it for three hours already. Still, she had more questions than she had answers. Her father’s company had contracted Haven to do research and development for them. So what? Fine & Ives was one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the country. They contracted plenty of research facilities—and besides, her father had already left by that point, after a protracted court battle with his former partner.
Why did the man in the parking lot think she’d know anything about Haven? And why was it important in the first place? What did go on at Haven? Why all the secrecy, and the guards, and that fence?
There was something she was missing, something obvious and yet hidden, like one of those visual riddles where a picture can be viewed two different ways. She wished she could get into her father’s office, but he of course kept the door locked. Besides, she didn’t even know what she was supposed to be looking for.
She stood up, did a clumsy approximation of a yoga stretch, and nearly fell over. Rufus raised his head and blinked at her.