Bishop tapped at her palmtop. "No. The patients skew across all ages, and the gender ratio of the patients is the same as for the entire population."
"Very well. At least we have something to go on." Crane examined his notes. "At first glance it seems that poison, or perhaps drugs, is most promising. Heavy metal poisoning, for example, could explain the wide variety of symptoms. Infectious disease is a distant third, but still worth checking out." He glanced at Corbett. "Who's the strongest tech in the Medical Suite?"
Corbett thought a minute. "Jane Rand."
"See if you can get her to pull together all the records we have on every patient who's come in, program a data agent to mine everything for any hidden correspondences. Have her check everything, from employment records to medical results." He paused. "Can she check the patients' cafeteria selections as well?"
Corbett tapped a few keys on his palmtop, then glanced up and nodded.
"Add that to the list. See if anything comes up. Then compare the records of the patients to the Deep Storm population that is not ilclass="underline" maybe there is an area of difference." He glanced at Bishop. "Dr. Bishop, if you could reexamine the blood work for anything that might hint at poison or drug use?"
"Okay," Bishop said.
"Please have your people take hair samples from every patient who's come by the medical suite in the last two weeks. And going forward, we should probably take blood and urine samples from all new patients-even if all they've got is a splinter. In fact, let's run a complete battery of tests, EKG, echo, EEG, the works."
"I told you before, we don't have an electroencephalograph here," said Bishop.
"Any chance we can get one?"
She shrugged. "In time."
"Well, put in the request, please. I'd hate to leave any stone un-turned. Oh, and speaking of that, you might ask your medical researchers to examine the earliest patient reports. If this is an outbreak of some sort, maybe we can isolate the index case." Crane stood up. "I think I'll have a talk with the nutritionists, learn what I can about that special diet. Let's meet in the morning to discuss our findings."
At the door, he paused. "By the way, there's something else I've been meaning to ask you. Just who is Dr. Flyte?"
Bishop and Corbett exchanged glances.
"Dr. Flyte?" Bishop asked.
"The old Greek fellow in the bib overalls. He dropped in on my cabin, uninvited, shortly after I arrived. Strange chap, seemed to enjoy talking in riddles. What's his job here?"
There was a pause.
"Sorry, Dr. Crane," Corbett said. "I'm not familiar with him."
"No?" Crane turned to Bishop. "Short, wiry, with a wild mop of white hair? Told me he did highly classified work."
"There's nobody here who fits that description," Bishop replied. "The oldest worker here is fifty-two."
"What?" Crane said. "But that's impossible. I saw the old man myself."
Bishop glanced down at her palmtop, typed in a short command, peered briefly at the tiny screen. Then she looked up again. "Like I said, Dr. Crane. There's nobody named Flyte on Deep Storm."
15
Robert Loiseau stepped back from the industrial range, removed the toque from his head, and wiped his sweaty face with the chef's towel hanging from his belt. Even though it was cool in the kitchen he was sweating like a pig. And he was only half an hour into his shift. It was shaping up to be a long, long day.
He glanced at the wall clock: half past three. The lunchtime frenzy had passed, the cleaning staff had washed the pots and pans, and the kitchen was quiet. But quiet was a relative term: he'd learned long ago that working cuisine in the Navy was nothing like on dry land. There were no set eating schedules; people came and went as they pleased. And with the Facility running on three shifts, it wasn't unusual to serve somebody breakfast at 8 P.M. or lunch at 2 in the morning.
He wiped his face again, then let the towel fall back into place. It seemed he was sweating all the time these days, and not just in the kitchen. And that was only one of the things he'd noticed, along with hands that shook a little and a heart that beat faster than he liked. He felt tired all the time, too; and yet he was unable to sleep. He wasn't sure when it had started, but one thing was certain: slowly but surely, it was getting worse.
Al Tanner, the pastry chef, walked past, whistling "Some Enchanted Evening." He had a pastry cone draped casually over one shoulder as if it were a freshly killed goose. He ceased his whistling long enough to call out, "Hey, Wazoo."
"It's Wah-zoh," Loiseau muttered under his breath. You'd think that in a gourmet kitchen, people would know how to pronounce a French name. Maybe they were all just teasing him. But the fact was only Renault, the executive chef, pronounced his name properly-and he rarely condescended to call people by name, preferring to beckon with a curt movement of his index finger.
With a sigh, he turned back to the range. No time for daydreaming. Right now he had to prepare some béchamel sauce: a whole lot of béchamel, in fact. Chef Renault was serving tournedos sauce Mornay and côtelettes d'agneau Écossais on the dinner menu, and both sauces used a béchamel base. Of course, Loiseau could practically prepare béchamel in his sleep. But he'd learned the hard way that cooking was like running a marathon: when you paused, everyone else kept going, and if you paused too long it became impossible to catch up.
Sweat the onion, incorporate the roux… As he went over his mise en place, Loiseau felt his heartbeat accelerate again and his breathing grow shallow. It was possible he was getting sick, of course. But he thought he had a better explanation for the sweaty palms and sleepless nights: anxiety. It was one thing to work on an aircraft carrier, with its cavernous hangars and endless echoing corridors. But this was different. During the protracted vetting process, with its endless interviews, he hadn't stopped to think much about actually living in Deep Storm. The pay was fantastic, and the thought of participating in a classified, cutting-edge project was a little intoxicating. He'd spent five years in the Navy, working in admirals' kitchens: how different could it be, cooking beneath the sea instead of floating on it?
As it turned out, nothing could have prepared him.
Christ, it's hot. He slowly added a pale roux to the mixture of milk, thyme, bay leaf, butter, and onion. As he bent over the pot, whisking vigorously, a brief sensation of dizziness washed over him and he had to step back, gulping for air. He was hyperventilating, that was the problem. Get your nerves under control, Bobby-boy. Shift's just starting and there's a ton of shit to do.
Now Tanner was coming back from the pantry, a large sack of cake flour in his hands. When he saw Loiseau, he stopped. "Everything okay, fellah?"
"Yeah, fine," Loiseau said. Once Tanner had moved on, he wiped his face again with the towel and went immediately back to whisking: if he stopped now, the sauce would scorch and he'd have to begin all over again.
Thing was, he hadn't counted on missing sunlight and fresh air quite so much. And at least aircraft carriers moved. Loiseau had never thought of himself as being claustrophobic, but living in a metal box, with no way to get out and all that ocean pressing down on your head…well, it got to you after a while. Whoever had designed Deep Storm had done an ingenious job of miniaturization-and at first, when he was working in Top, the galley on deck 11, he hadn't noticed it so much. But then he'd been transferred to Central, the deck 7 kitchen. And things down here were a little more cramped. When it got busy, when the flour really started to fly, so many bodies were packed in you could barely move. And that was when, these last few days, Loiseau had felt the worst. Waking up today, the first thing he'd thought about was the dinnertime crush to come. And the sweats had kicked in, right there in his own damn bunk…