Dr Michael Kough slipped the glass phials into one of the pockets on the front of his white lab coat. He instantly felt his heart rate spurt. He had never stolen anything before.
And soon realised, he had stolen too much. The dozen glass phials bulged conspicuously from the single pocket. Worse, they clinked against each other when he moved.
He nervously transferred half of the phials into his second pocket.
He felt his hands shaking slightly, but he was happier with the new balance of contraband.
He turned away from the refrigerated laboratory cabinet and did his best to look casual as he walked back to his workstation. The big open-plan room was quiet and dimly lit by concealed light tubes, while each workstation was an oasis of light from low individual desk lamps.
His desk was cluttered with the usual array of microscopes, technical measuring instruments and computer screens that a busy virologic researcher would use. Today was the last time he would sit there.
His co-researchers took no notice of him; their heads were studiously down, as they beavered on with the laboratory’s mission of enhancing the deadliness of natural viruses.
Kough watched them tentatively for a moment. His Big Brain warned him, there was no going back after his next act. He took a breath, pulled his research files up on the screen and began deleting them.
The data files seemed to spin before his tired eyes and then vanish. They were deleted, not forwarded, so there were no easy footprints left for a later forensic search. A search that was inevitable when the laboratory bosses realised what he had stolen.
Kough had a freakishly high, one hundred and forty-eight IQ, so he routinely relied on Big Brain to memorise screeds of data, as it had done with the contents of the research files he had just deleted.
As a further protection, he had altered essential parts of the work he was deleting. Any forensic genius who did uncover his sensational discovery would eventually come to the conclusion his work was only a jumble of tangled calculations and hopeful speculations.
He looked at his cheap plastic watch, a symbol of his economic misfortune. He knew the time had come to transfer the phials to the ice packs in his briefcase. The move posed another danger: they would momentarily be in the sight of any colleague walking past his station. His stomach cramped. He had a sudden urge to rush for the john. Stealing was a harder business than he had imagined.
He resolutely grabbed the briefcase from beneath the desk and snapped it open. He reached into a lab-coat pocket and held three phials tightly together to avoid them clinking.
His peripheral vision showed no one was near him. He unloaded them three at a time and placed them among the mini ice packs in an inner zip-up pocket deep in the briefcase.
It seemed to take forever. When he finished, he glanced around the laboratory again and was sure no one had seen anything. But his nerves were still jangling when he closed the case.
It was now twelve minutes to five, and the official end of his final day. The next and most dangerous challenge still lay ahead – staff were searched by Marine guards each time they arrived or left the germ-warfare laboratory.
There was safety in numbers, he believed. So he would join the queue when most of the staff left at five. Which they would, as there would be no normal after-work drinks to mark his departure.
Why would there be? He had been sacked after several warnings. The bosses believed his work was not advancing the lab’s mission to find the world’s most lethal killer germs.
His experiments had all failed. His hire had been a mistake. He had turned out, despite elite qualifications, to be an awkward loner, a bankrupt with a gambling addiction whose wife had given up on him.
Kough was habitually a dishevelled figure. His clothes were rumpled, complementing his generally hang-dog appearance. The dark lines under his eyes emphasised the sleep deprivation he suffered from countless early-morning stints at the Denver casinos.
He was a mess. But he was going to do something about it, he promised himself. His discovery amid the black arts of germ enhancement would earn him impossible riches. He would no longer be a mug punter either – he would be able to buy his own casino.
Kough had got the American job because very few others wanted to work in the germ-warfare field – and that meant good staff were rare and the salaries obscenely high.
He had originally intended to use this money to repay the gambling debts he had left behind in Australia.
Then he rationalised, with the new stake money, he could hurry things along with the winnings he would make at the local casinos. But the truth was, he could not live without the thrill of a big punt on the roulette wheel, whether he was winning or losing.
Some nights he did win big: in the six figures. But on bad nights the floor manager politely intervened and took him upstairs to a complimentary room, where he crashed for a few hours’ sleep, before making another late appearance at the lab.
Now, he was heading home to Canberra, the federal capital of Australia. The city where his life had imploded two years ago and where he would now become impossibly rich.
Kough realised he looked stupid and suspicious as he sat at his desk, a leg each side of his battered briefcase, so he shoved it forward, lay it on its side and rested his feet on it. It still looked a little odd but … Big Brain said, Stop fiddling with the damned thing.
His early career in Australia had gone well professionally and he had made good money as a virologist because of his exceptional talent. But gambling had undone him, despite his certainty, as a scientist, that luck ran in cycles. That meant quitters never won. So he never quit. He stayed and stayed while the little glass marble sped around the wheel, hyping his adrenaline rush to exquisite levels. If it clattered on to the right number, he scored a thirty-six to one return.
But there were never enough big wins.
He winced inwardly each time he recalled the night his credit finally ran out. The wheel had stopped, Lady Luck had shaken her head, and his chips were raked away. He had stood rigid in shock. He had been so sure that it was not logically possible for his bad luck to continue.
After that his friends had melted away like the ice in his once-complimentary bourbons. All his friends, that is, except for John Able.