The greatest threat to our national security is perversely the foundation of our national stability. Any weapon we use to maintain our freedom can be used against us.
~ Quote from a confidential source within the Ministry of Defense I1–2074
Monday May 20, 2069
Alabama District 3
Commonwealth of North America
Jane Doe: age undetermined, hair black, eyes brown, race possibly Hispanic, age somewhere between twenty-five and forty, cause of death . . . Sam sighed. The description fit 80 percent of Commonwealth citizens living between the Panama Canal and the Arctic Circle, and the firsthand account of a middle-aged trucker didn’t help.
There were a couple of dozen missing persons in a five-hundred-mile radius who fit Jane’s description, but the cranial damage hadn’t left enough of her face to try a visual or retinal match.
Sam growled at the computer. In the academy, she’d learned protocol, that you followed the steps to the right conclusion every time. In the eight weeks she’d had at her first assignment, the agents she’d mentored with seemed to solve their cases by magic. Granted, they all knew the area well, and all the homicides were related to either drugs, gangs, or clones, but it was still done so intuitively that she feared she’d never close a case herself. Moving to District 3 after the debacle with her father hadn’t offered her much opportunity to develop those skills.
And now Agent Marrins wanted a report by lunchtime, and no one down in the coroner’s office had even fingerprinted the Jane yet. At least that was something she could follow up on herself. The county coroner’s office was in the building next door, and no one would notice her missing for a few minutes.
The phone rang.
“Agent Rose,” she answered, “how may I help you sir or ma’am?”
“Agent Rose, this is Agent Anan, senior agent over in Birmingham. I heard you found a clone.”
“That’s the rumor. No confirmation yet.”
He sighed. “We’ve got a major clone-ring case I’m trying to close up here. The guy in charge took all the clones out and burned the bodies before we could get proof-positive tests on them. I know for a fact one of the clones got away. She’s four, but age-advanced to look twentysomething, and Hispanic.”
“That matches my Jane. I’ll get the coroner to test for the clone markers first thing.”
“Can you get it to me by Wednesday? I need something solid to push for a court date, and that clone would really lock this up for me.”
“Can I get my name on the report?” If she wanted the job in D.C., she needed another good case under her belt to look competitive.
“Done.”
“You’ll have the test results by Wednesday.” Sam looked out her window to the county mortuary next door. It was an easy stroll if you didn’t mind walking four meters feeling like you’d gone for a swim. Apparently, an air-conditioned hall hadn’t fit in the district’s expenditure forecast. No surprise there, nothing fit in the bureau budget unless you greased it down and squeezed.
The secretary nodded as Sam hurried past. She hit the door, but ducked back out of habit, scanning the lawn. The sprinklers had a habit of turning on without warning. Today, no black sprinkler heads popped up to soak her. She took a deep breath, counted to ten to be sure, and stepped out into the baking, sticky heat of the Alabama summer.
“Wait!”
Hot, rotten-egg water shot up at her.
The maintenance man peeked around the corner of the building. His grin turned to a leer. “Sorry, we’re still working on getting the system right.”
Sam plucked at the white shirt that clung to her like a bad boyfriend. “Of course you are. It’s not like you would wait to turn the water on as I stepped outside. That would be silly.” Of course he’d done it on purpose. Going back in to file a complaint would mean letting Marrins see her soaking wet, going home meant losing time, going to the morgue meant letting another woman see her bra. The complaint paperwork could wait until her shirt had at least dried.
“Uh . . . right. Silly.”
“Good morning to you.” Her heels clicked a satisfying rebuke as she crossed the damp sidewalk to the morgue. Monday, you loathsome bastard, what else do you have in store for me? The morgue door was warm but not hot enough to burn flesh just yet, so her escape wasn’t hampered further. Next time she took the side door, she’d ditch her heels and run for it.
Sam pulled her bedraggled hair back, spun it around, and tied it in a bun as she kicked the door shut. It was a test, of course. All of it: the case, of course, but her current situation as a whole. The bureau wanted to see if she was really committed. She’d taken emergency family leave less than eight weeks into her rookie assignment, so they’d retaliated and assigned her to the worst district in the Commonwealth to prove she wouldn’t flake out again. They were going to learn that nothing could scare her.
She glanced at the paperwork to double-check the coroner’s, Harley’s, office number . . . MACKENZIE.
Who on Earth was Linsey MacKenzie?
She’d never seen her at the biweekly staff meetings. Even the interns managed to stop by and grab donuts, but nowhere in her memory could she find a MacKenzie.
Room b593 . . . down in the basement. Whoever designed the morgue thought narrow halls, poor lighting, and mazes added ambience. Even the stairwell was designed for maximum moodiness. A single bare bulb swayed over a dark shaft of concrete stairs, and a metal railing with peeling paint led the way down.
It’s all a test . . .
The door creaked on its hinges, opening into a dark hall lined with battered hospital lockers. “Dr. MacKenzie?” The words bounced, echoed, and mutated into something sinister.
Budget cuts were all well and good, but how much did a lightbulb cost? No one should have to walk down a dark hall on a sunny day. Especially not people who still slept with a night-light.
Which she didn’t want to think about at the moment.
Muted shafts of light cut across the side hall from windows in the offices. At the very far end, a less natural light illuminated a window. She slid her ID across the reader and stepped inside. “MacKenzie?”
A gangly ectomorph in blue scrubs covered in red up to the elbows hovered over an opened body dripping blood onto the cement floor.
Sam gagged, covered her mouth, and backed out of the room to lean against the cold wall, shivering in her wet clothes. She thought about flowers, daffodils, and jonquils, and dandelions. Anything other than corpses.
The man in scrubs followed her out into the hall.
With a hard swallow, she forced her stomach to settle. “Is Miss MacKenzie here?”
“M-miss?” The voice was strangled.
“Records said Linsey MacKenzie. Does she go by Doctor?”
“No. I’m . . . I’m Linsey. Just-just give me a minute,” the man stuttered. He stared at her chest.
Sam glanced down: white shirt, black bra, back arched . . . Way to make an impression. Saint Samantha, protect your namesake from her own stupidity. “I’m Agent Rose. If you can pull yourself away from the massacre in there, I need the results from all the tests you’ve run and your signature ASAP. Birmingham has an illegal-clone case, and we’re going to hand Jane off to them as evidence.”
He stripped gore-covered gloves off and rubbed his hands on his scrubs in a nervous gesture. “Can’t. I’m operating on a clone. It’s already prepped with the transplant and anticlotting proteins. I need to . . . to harvest the organs.” He took a deep breath. “The owner wants the organs frozen.”
Sam raised an eyebrow. “This is a county morgue, and you’re an agent with the bureau. What are you doing freelancing as a chop-shop doc?”
“It’s evidence,” he whispered. “Police have a . . . a case.” MacKenzie slumped back, leaning his shoulder on the wall. His vacant gaze wandered to the ceiling. After a minute, he said, “I need to go back.” He wiped a hand across his mask and blinked at Sam as if he had forgotten she was standing there. “I’m sorry. Can . . . can this wait?”
She stared. She knew there were bad agents in the bureau—her training officer at the academy had loved toting out the old “crazy agent” stories—but she’d never expected to see one. Have to love District 3. . .
She grimaced, and went on, “Look, I just need the Jane Doe report. Tell me where the test results are, and I can get your signature before you go home.”
He looked at her, hazel eyes swimming in his pale face. “Test results?”
“Standard procedure for a case like this: you find the body, you run all the general blood tests, and you check the little box on page three that says clone marker found. Then we call the case closed and all move on with our lives.” She gave him an encouraging nod.
“It . . .” He swallowed, “it wasn’t—” He shook his head, eyes down. He was doing a very good impression of a drunk about to lose his dinner. “She was dismembered. Abused.”
“And I find that sickening, but a clone isn’t a person. If it has a clone marker, the killer might need professional therapy, but it won’t be funded by the prison system.”
“She . . . she . . .” MacKenzie shook his head.
“She what?”
“No test results!” he shouted, his voice echoing through the drafty corridors.
Sam rocked back on her heels. Marrins should be the one dealing with this, but if she ran to him, he’d use it as an excuse to end her career. If she couldn’t handle one crazed coworker, what kind of agent was she? Sam forced herself to smile politely . . . and not punch MacKenzie right in the face. Wouldn’t mother be proud? “Agent MacKenzie, it takes less than a minute to run a basic gene scan for the clone marker. Don’t we have interns to do that sort of thing?”
The medical examiner took a deep breath. His fist started tapping the wall behind him in an uneven rhythm. “The specimen is o-over twenty. Too old for the rapid clone test. I need to check for Verville traces.” He squeezed his eyes tight and lifted his head so he was at least facing Sam, even if he wasn’t looking at her. “She might be a person. Someone . . . Someone might love her.”
“Right.” Sam dumped a body’s worth of doubt into the word. They listened to the sigh of the air conditioner. “I for one would love for someone to run those tests on her,” she finally said.
He managed a feeble, defiant glare.
“Have you ever tried sorting through all of the missing persons reports in the Commonwealth when all you have is the description ‘female, dark hair, age fifteen-plus’?” Sam asked. “It’s not fun. While you’re in there playing police intern, I’m trying to sort through over three thousand possible Janes. Until you do your job, I’m spinning my wheels and getting nowhere. I need those test results. Or fingerprints at least. Can we get someone down here to fingerprint her? I understand weekend delays, but Senior Agent Marrins expects timely results.”
MacKenzie’s jaw locked, jutting out.
Apparently, invoking a higher power didn’t have the desired result.
Sam tapped the folder on her thigh and raised his pout with a full-on glare.
Hazel eyes narrowed. “I need time. Three days. Maybe four.”
“Three days?” She shook her head. “Why can’t you do it today?” He shivered and held up a shaking hand. “Okay, fine, you need some downtime. Why can’t you do it tomorrow?”
“Blood . . . blood work takes time.”
“Not that long.” She pursed her lips in disapproval but realized there wasn’t much she could do to make him finish the tests any quicker. “Fine. When you’re done playing Dr. Grim, I need this case to be top priority. Can you make that happen?”
He nodded slowly.
“Great. I’ll follow up on Wednesday.” There, parameters and expectations defined. Deadline set. Textbook leadership.
Let Marrins put that in her evaluation.
Sam’s shirt was just beginning to dry when Marrins yelled her name down the hall. One day, she’d have an office with a door and a minion to turn away all the people who thought they needed to talk to her. Today was not that day.
“Sir?” She pulled her jacket on. It didn’t pay to look sloppy. “Yes, sir?”
“Detective Altin has a robbery he wants a bureau assist on. Go chase stolen barrettes across the district lines with him.” Marrins slid an efile across his desk.
“Thank you, sir.” She tried to sound like she meant it.
“You wanted something more than clones. Altin is good for that. Can’t find his pants without a map and permission written in triplicate, but that’s what you get from his sort of people. Take care of it.”
She wasn’t sure if Marrins meant people of color, people who worked hard for justice, or people who had more than two brain cells to rub together. Whatever the senior agent meant, it put her firmly on Altin’s side of the line and well outside her comfort zone.
She skimmed through the notes. “Sir, do you have any further information? This report is . . .” a scrawl—Altin wants bureau asst.—“ . . . not complete.”
“Theresa downstairs took the call. She might have something more. Do you have Jane’s paperwork yet?”
Her smile froze. “Not yet, sir. I’m waiting on blood tests and the fingerprints. I should have it to you in the next few days. Agent Anan from Birmingham thinks Jane might be tied to a case he’s working, so I’m trying to make sure everything is court ready.”
Marrins grunted, whether in approval or disgust she couldn’t tell. “Fine. But anything you send to Anan needs to get cleared through me first. I’m not letting some rookie embarrass me.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll send a report on the robbery as soon as I’ve talked to Altin, sir.”
He waved a hand, and she slunk out of sight. A year ago, she’d been the office hotshot, the girl with the high-speed career. Now she was the embarrassment of an old man who’d never risen in the ranks past senior agent of a backwater nowhere. She shook her head, gathered her things, and made her way to Marrins’s secretary.
Theresa scowled at her through pink cat’s-eye glasses as Sam crossed the polished lobby floor to stop at the secretary’s great round fortress in the lobby.
“Stolen hair clips? Marrins says you have all the details.” Sam smiled winningly.
The secretary rolled her eyes with the grace of someone who had put up with the antics of rookies for decades. “Novikov-Veltman Nova Laboratory is a private physics and astronomy lab on the south end of the district. They had a break-in over the weekend. Detective Altin sent a call for assistance because one of the scientists is demanding bureau involvement. Technically, since some of the research is government-funded, we could call it our jurisdiction, but it’s just property damage. There’s broken glass in the atrium, but none of the labs were touched.”
“Sounds like a thrill ride,” Sam said. The address was on “her” side of the district, which meant she could stop to change before going to the lab. And let the dog out.
At least this won’t be a complete waste, then. Any chance to spend some time with my “roommate.”
She headed for her car, unplugged it from the charger, and turned the key. The water engine bubbled to life.
Once upon a time, in some fairy utopia that existed before she was born, there was no such thing as a bedroom tax. Now, having more than one room per person resulted in a luxury tax, and, legally, a single person could only rent a single-bedroom apartment. She got around that by listing her landlady’s mastiff as her animal companion. At 180 pounds, Hoss more than qualified for his own room. It meant she got to live in a beautiful old house where there was no risk of having a meth lab next door, but it also meant getting home in time to let the dog out because her landlady wouldn’t walk over after dark.
Driving down the country road, she sighed.
When she’d decided to join the bureau for a paycheck that wasn’t considered a living wage, it had been in a fit of pique and the belief that she’d be promoted quickly. The bureau was her escape from her life as an ambassador’s daughter and the threats of marriage to one of her mother’s cronies. A meritocracy where she would be rewarded for her brains and talent while she helped build a new nation.
So far, the meritocracy she’d signed up for was her mother’s world of glittering favoritism done on a budget.
A faun-colored dog lay in the crabgrass wagging its nub of a tail as Sam parked on the lawn outside a stately white house with a wraparound porch shaded by oak trees. A withered old woman with skin the color of roast chestnuts and a Smith & Wesson rifle stood in the doorway.
“Hello, Miss Azalea. Hello, Hoss!” Sam waved as she stepped out of the car. Hoss leapt to his feet. A foot-long trail of saliva dragged behind the dog like the tail of a comet as he bounded toward her.
“Hoss!” the woman shouted. The dog sat, skidding on the remnants of a gravel driveway until he bumped into Sam’s knee and looked up with unabashed adoration. His giant head nudged her hip, looking for a treat. Black eyes lost in a black mask of fur watched her expectantly.
Sam patted him affectionately. “You’re hungry, aren’t you?”
“He’s always hungry.” Miss Azalea eyed her, and Sam knew the woman was weighing her against the Southern standard for beauty as she walked up to the house. “Jus’ looking at you makes me want to eat fried chicken. Child, you need to put some meat on those bones. What are you doing home this time o’ day?”
“Changing my shirt and going to see Detective Altin about something.” Hoss’s nails clicked on the wooden floor as he followed her inside. “I have some lemonade in the fridge if you’d like some.”
Miss Azalea waved her hand. “I jus’ come up to water the plants in the nursery, hon. Let Hoss run for a few minutes. Can’t imagine how he stands it in this heat. Jus’ looking outside gots me sweatin’ like a sinner at a prayer meetin’. I’m fixin’ to melt.” The door snapped shut behind her.
Sam left her landlady in the empty living room, hurrying to change into dry clothes. When she got back downstairs, Miss Azalea and Hoss were both in the kitchen at the big wooden table that didn’t fit in Miss Azalea’s little house by the creek. “I made us sandwiches. You want me to bring up some supper for you?”
Baloney sandwiches on white bread. Nothing special, but a chance for Miss Azalea to spend some time with her. Sam didn’t really have the time, and besides, Sam ate hers in three bites anyway. But she liked her landlady and appreciated the food. “I can’t do dinner with you tonight, I’m sorry. I’m meeting Brileigh at the gym, and she’ll holler if I’m not there to spot her.”
Miss Azalea nodded. “I’ll come up tomorrow to let Hoss out. Leave some fried chicken in the fridge for you. You’ll have the rent check? I’m fixin’ to leave for Florida by Friday. Gotta see my grandbabies.”
“I’ll leave it on the fridge,” Sam promised. Hoss stole some crumbs off her plate. “Poor baby, you’re going to be stuck in the house all day all alone. I wonder if I could smuggle him into work.” Hoss’s nubbin of a tail wagged hopefully, and she almost felt bad for bringing it up. “I don’t think he’d even fit in my office.”
“Honey, he wouldn’t fit in your car!” Miss Azalea laughed. “I’d take him with me, but my boy has two dogs. Little things. They’d be snacks.”
“It won’t be a problem. I can come home during lunch.”
Hoss licked her face. He wouldn’t care what happened as long as he got cookies out of the deal.
“Agent Rose, we’ve got to stop meeting like this,” Detective Altin said, as she got out of her car. He was a trim, older man with wiry, steel-gray hair who often had the thankless task of smoothing out wrinkles when the police chief and Marrins butted heads. “People are going to start talking.”
“Hardy-har-har. You should try stand-up comedy, Detective, you’re a natural,” Sam said, as they walked toward the nondescript building. “What’s all the fuss about?”
“Oh, just your standard weekend vandalism with a side order of fried electronics. The local hooligans decided we were getting too much experience raiding drug labs, so they added breaking and entering to their repertoire. Now I get to teach a class about tracking down stolen property to all our new recruits.”
“What was stolen?”
“Nothing that we know of yet. I have Officer Holt leading the team checking the inventory lists, but a refresher course never hurt anyone.”
“Lovely.” As they stepped inside, the lab’s glass atrium was a cool respite from the rising heat and humidity. A large black desk stood guard at the far end of the space, looking over a sea of gray marble and white-barked beeches and gardenias planted in raised beds, reaching for the skylights. “I like the yellow police tape. It adds a touch of roguish punkery.”
“Good use of taxpayer dollars. To the left we have the government-sponsored labs run by a Dr. Esther Vergeet. To the right of the guard desk you have the workshop where the team keeps older research displays, abandoned ideas, and Dr. Abdul Emir’s modern projects lab.” Yellow police tape hung over the second door, which had been warped and crumpled into a mass of rippled metal.
“Walk me through this. I see two main entrances. The front door”—Sam pointed behind her to the door she’d come in—“and the doors over there.” She nodded to an identical set of wide glass doors that looked out over a courtyard with picnic tables. “The labs are to the left, with six cameras I can see, a security desk, and ID locks. Over to the right is?” Sam looked at the double doors leading to the brick addition.
“The green door on the right leads to the lecture and conference hall. Next door is a multimedia room for greeting the press and holding high-school career fairs and such.”
“So the thief came in through a back door? Fire escape? Down through the roof maybe?” Sam guessed.
“That, we don’t know.” Detective Altin led her to door number two. “On Sunday nights, two human guards man the desks. Robotic security with heat sensors patrols the back rooms. The lab is closed at noon Sunday and doesn’t open to general staff until ten Monday morning. Weekends, the lab is open only to staff with level-four security clearance or higher, plus the designated security guards, who never go past the atrium. Dr. Vergeet came in at five this morning to this mess. There were no phone calls, nothing from security, and all the electronics in the building are fried. She isn’t happy.”
Sam nodded and started taking notes. “I wouldn’t be happy either. Cameras in all the halls and standard perimeter security?”
“The latest and greatest, before the incident. Sunday night, one of the security guards logged out early, claimed he was sick. His name is Mordicai Robbins.”
“Where’s he now?”
“Unknown. He’s a weekend-only guy. Records from HR say he’s single. The morning security guard says Robbins likes to take off at random—fishing trips, that sort of thing. We’re trying to reach him, but he’s got his phone turned off.
“The logs for security that night show both Mr. Robbins and”—he consulted his notes—“Melody Chimes worked Sunday night. We have the phone record of Mr. Robbins calling in to the main office asking permission to leave. Miss Chimes is on the recording, too, confirming that she would contact the on-call backup officer, Leandra Kinsley. We sent an officer out to talk to Kinsley, who says she went to bed at eleven Sunday night. She reported to her day job in Edmond at eight the next morning, and didn’t hear a thing about the break-in until the police called at three.”
“Chimes?” Sam looked at Altin, expecting a laugh. “Melody Chimes? Really?”
“It’s legal.”
“Some parents are cruel,” she said with a shake of her head. “Where is Miss Chimes?”
Altin frowned. “Also missing.”
“Miss Chimes called a friend and broke into the lab? Is that the theory?”
“That’s a theory.”
“I hear a ‘but’ coming.”
Altin nodded as he said, “Miss Chimes is a nineteen-year-old college student working on an art and marketing degree. She hired on as a part-time night-shift employee with the Wannervan Security Firm last fall to earn some money on the side. Good family, no financial problems, she’s passed every drug test. There’s nothing in her profile that’s a red flag for a destructive crime like this.”
Sam nodded. “So work it the other way: what’s missing and who would want it?”
“Nothing obvious is missing,” Altin said with a tired sigh. “We did a check of the high-end, easy-to-move stuff first. Computers, monitors, the break-room television, that’s all here. All the data is here, all the lab reports are here. All we have is the fried electronics and the broken windows. Dr. Vergeet called as soon as she pulled up and has her teams going over the computers to see if anything was uploaded or downloaded. So far, there isn’t a keystroke out of place.” He spread his hands in defeat. “It looks like careless vandalism, maybe a crime of opportunity although I want to find Robbins and Chimes before I write it all off. Also, there’s this.” Altin handed her a set of forensic gloves. “Check this door out.”
Sam ducked under the police tape and inspected the broken hinges. “That took a lot of force.”
“These are steel fire doors. Each one weighs over a hundred pounds, and the hinges are supposed to support over four hundred pounds each.”
“You did your research.”
“I got bored waiting for you to show up,” Altin said. “Dr. Vergeet is ready to file a vandalism claim with the insurance and be done with it, and the rest of the mess fits. But this doesn’t. You’d need a battering ram to bend the door like this, and to get it at this angle, I think you’d have to be standing inside the guarded portion of the lab. I mean, I need to run some computer scenarios to prove it, but to me it looks like the door was pushed out, not in.”
Sam frowned at the beige walls and black flooring of the rear hallway. Electric hookups for security bots hung in small alcoves every three meters waiting for their sentries to return. There were cameras, smoke detectors, sprinklers—everything a high-security building needed to handle a small war. “Did the lab lose power at any time Sunday night?”
“Not a flicker,” Altin said, as they walked slowly down the hall. “The cameras are out, the computers are down, but the electricity is still running to everything. It doesn’t look like a power surge.”
“I see the stations for the robotic-security patrols. Did you confiscate the bots, or were they stolen?” The black market for security tech was growing, but there could only be a few buyers in the area.
“We took ’em. I sent half to the district tech lab, one to the local PD techgeeks, and the rest to the bureau tech lab in Atlanta.”
“Too bad,” she said. “Stolen security bots would make life interesting.”
Sam studied the scene, trying to glean some sense from what she was seeing. Every door down the hall hung off its hinges. Black security glass littered the floor on both sides of the windows. “Does this look like an explosion to you, or is that just me?”
“No residue from a blast although the impact fractures on the wall support the theory. Dr. Vergeet assured me there is nothing in these labs that could cause an explosion. They don’t even have a flammables locker.”
Sam shook her head. “What about residue from your missing security guards? Did you get anything there?”
“Not a single hair. There are no signs of physical violence, and both cars are gone. We have an APB out for them, but anyone with half an ounce of sense stripped those cars down and left them in Atlanta, with the keys in the ignition. They’re gone and sold for parts by now.”
She moved down her checklist. Security, fried electronics, and the actual target . . . “You said this part of the lab belonged to Dr. Emir? Where is he?” Maybe the intended victim would have some insight into the whys and wherefores of the crime.
“Right this way although you may regret asking,” Altin warned. “He’s the one who demanded the bureau be called in. If Dr. Vergeet had her way, the cleaning crew would already be fixing this up.” Altin led her into a small workspace in front of a bank of broken windows. The windows looked over a curved black lecture hall with stadium-style seating focused around a teaching space at the bottom of the dell. A spotlight illuminated a single heavy table and a small box perched on top.
A thin man with a white beard and thick glasses fussed around the box, looking like Santa Claus after he discovered dieting and exercise. He blinked at Detective Altin with a scowl. “Yes, Detective? Have you found another way to ask the same question? What are we on, the third or fourth round?”
Altin went poker-faced. “Dr. Emir, this is Agent Samantha Rose of CBI. She’s here to take your complaint.”
Santa gave her a dismayed look. “You are the best the bureau has to offer?”
“Yes, sir.” Sam squared her shoulders and tried to look smart.
“Are you familiar with the work of Echeverria, Klinkhammer, and Thorne?” Emir asked, lifting his chin so he could glare down his nose at her.
“No.”
“Ah.” Emir pushed his spectacles up. “I see. I suppose it is too much to hope you read up on the work of our namesakes before traipsing out here to do your dancing-bear act?”
Altin covered his mouth to hide a smile. Sam grimaced and turned to the doctor. “The bureau’s understanding was that you wanted a trained agent on-site as soon as possible, not that you wanted to hire a new intern. Rather than insulting my intelligence, why don’t you fill me in on what I need to know?”
Emir’s eyes went wide. He turned, shouting in a language Sam didn’t understand, and went off to yell at the younger men still hovering around the box.
One of the younger men broke from the group and walked toward her and Altin, arms spread wide. “I’m so sorry about that, Agent Rose. I’m Henry Troom, one of the doctor’s assistants. You have to understand, Dr. Emir is very upset. Please don’t judge him by this . . . outburst.” The young man shook his head and smiled. “Would you let me help you?”
Sam held out her hand. “Dr. Troom—”
“Henry—I’m still working on my doctorate.” He shook her hand, smiling with obvious pride in his approaching title despite his attempt at modesty.
She gave him a curt smile. “Of course. Mr. Troom: why was I called out here?”
“Dr. Emir is worried the lab was broken into so that the perpetrator could steal a copy of his work. Only the doors on our side of the facility were damaged, and the doctor’s research is easily transportable although not easily replicable. Still, if someone made a copy, the consequences could be devastating.”
Right, earth-shattering. He’d probably lose a grant or something. “What is Dr. Emir studying?” Sam asked as she pulled out her notebook again.
“Uh.” The man ran his hand through his shaggy dark hair. “How familiar are you with theta waves and Minkowski metrics?”
“Never heard of them.”
The intern winced. “Right. Well, in that case . . . what Dr. Emir is designing is a communication form that would exploit hypothetical systems of computation involving Novikov’s self-consistency principle.” He frowned in concentration; Sam frowned in confusion. “It’s all fundamental work to test Dr. Emir’s theories at this point. If we can build an operable machine, it will be the first step to ultimately improving the entire cloning industry. In theory.” He dropped his gaze to avoid direct eye contact.
It sounded dodgy. Sam looked at Altin for help. The detective shook his head. “You lost me,” she said to Troom. “Back up—Dr. Emir is creating an improved mode of communication? With a long-term benefit to the cloning industry?” She kept the distaste out of her voice with effort.
“Yes, in the particulate sense. Consistency theory and antimatter proofs show that one thing cannot exist in two places. If you—”
“Stop!” Dr. Emir bellowed, marching toward them. Yes, she thought, stop. If Troom was hoping to become a teacher, he wasn’t doing a very good job at it. Apparently, though, that wasn’t Dr. Emir’s problem. “This man is not cleared for this information!” he shouted, stabbing a finger at Altin. “This is why I required someone from the bureau. Someone with clearance must be the one to look into this matter.” He put a hand on Sam’s shoulder and steered her away from Altin. “You must understand, Agent Rose, this is government research. I cannot trust a country cop”—he spat the words out like a profanity—“to understand the delicate nature of what I do. Nor do I trust them to keep their mouths shut.”
With a snap, Sam shut her notebook. The last thing she needed in her life was another bigoted old man. “Dr. Emir, the detective is here to help. Two security guards are missing, and you believe your research is threatened. I need to understand what is going on before I can move forward with this case. Who would want your notes badly enough to break into the lab?”
The doctor glared at her, looked over his shoulder at the machine, and turned back. “Everyone. My research could rewrite human history.”
“I’m sure it could.”
“No,” Emir said, ignoring her sarcasm. “You aren’t. You think I’m a raving madman. I’m paranoid, but not without reason.”
She gave him a cold, flat stare she’d learned at her first duty station.
Emir blinked. “In the past, I had research that was equally controversial. Adaptations of cloning techniques. Gene-therapy work that worried people with an overdeveloped sense of ethics. I have survived assassination attempts. I am no stranger to duplicitous individuals using badges and titles to steal my work before betraying me.”
Sam nodded. It wasn’t bigotry keeping Emir from trusting Altin, it was fear. Not uncommon in citizens from the old United States. “I understand, and I will do everything in my power to protect you. But I trust Detective Altin. He is going to serve as the main investigator for this case. I’ll be there for backup in case sensitive research is threatened.”
The doctor looked grim, but nodded. “You will be the one interviewing me?”
“Yes.” She nodded to Altin. “Can I speak to you a moment?”
They stepped outside and away from the oppressive atmosphere of the lab. It wasn’t until they were out of sight of the lab that Sam felt comfortable talking. “I really want to find the missing security guards. Can the PD make it a priority?”
“Sure, I’ll list them as persons of interest and hunt ’em down. No problem. What are you going to do with Emir?”
“Interview him. He says he’s received threats in the past. Who knows, I might get lucky, and this will be something unrelated to the work here at the lab. But I’m thinking if someone came to the lab looking for information, that means the person knew it existed to start with. In a tight-lipped academic community, that’s a pretty small suspect pool.”
Altin’s eyebrows crept up. “Inside job?”
“A textbook case.”