“Are you as hungry as I am?” Daniel called out.
“Probably,” Stephanie responded. She glanced at her watch. It was no wonder. It was almost twelve. The last time she’d had anything to eat was at six that morning, and it was only a continental breakfast of toast and coffee. “We can head over to the cafeteria once I get this egg into an incubator. It’s got only another four minutes in this medium.”
“Sounds good,” Daniel said. He slid off his stool and disappeared into their office to get out of his lab coat.
As Stephanie prepared the next activation medium for the reconstructed egg, she tried to think of some excuse to return by herself to the lab during their lunch. It would be a good time for a bit of sleuthing, since most everyone ate lunch between twelve and one, including the egg room technician, Cindy Drexler. Lunch hour was a major socialization time for the clinic staff. Stephanie’s first thought was to blame her need to return on the activation process of the eleventh egg, but she quickly discarded the idea; Daniel would be suspicious. He knew that once the egg was in the second activation medium, it was to sit undisturbed in the incubator for six hours.
Stephanie needed some other excuse and seemed to be coming up blank until she thought of her cell phone. Particularly after Daniel’s beating, she’d been compulsive about keeping it on her person, and Daniel knew it. There were several reasons for her compulsiveness, not least of which was that she’d told her mother to use the cell number rather than the hotel’s. But having just talked with her mother that morning and hence being assured of no imminent emergency with her health status, Stephanie wasn’t concerned about missing a call over the next half hour. After glancing back toward their tiny office to be certain Daniel wasn’t watching, Stephanie pulled the tiny Motorola phone from her pocket, switched it off, and placed it on the reagent shelf over the lab bench.
Satisfied with her plan, Stephanie returned her attention to the activation process. In another thirty seconds, it would be time to move the egg from the first medium to the next.
“What do you say?” Daniel questioned, as he reappeared without his lab coat. “Are you ready?”
“Give me another couple of minutes. I’m about to transfer the egg and put it into the incubator, and then we can be on our way.”
“Sounds good,” Daniel responded. While he waited, he stepped over to the incubator and looked in at the other containers, a few of which had been in there for five days. “Some of these might be ready to harvest stem cells this afternoon.”
“I was just thinking the same thing,” Stephanie responded. Gingerly, she carried the newly suspended reconstructed egg over to the incubator to join the others.
Kurt Hermann let his feet fall to the floor in an uncharacteristically sudden, uncontrolled movement. They had been perched on the countertop in the video room. At the same time, he sat bolt upright, causing the desk chair to roll backward a short distance. Regaining the serenity developed over many years of martial arts training, he scooted himself forward in a slow, deliberate fashion to get closer to the screen he’d been watching for the last hour. He couldn’t believe his eyes. It had happened so quickly, but it appeared as if Stephanie D’Agostino had just taken the cell phone Kurt had been trying to get his hands on over the previous week and a half out of her pocket and had deliberately placed it behind some reagent bottles on the shelf over the laboratory bench. It was like she was hiding it.
With the button on top of the joystick that was currently connected to operate the minicam he was watching, Kurt zoomed in. Using the joystick itself, he kept the camera directed at what he hoped was the phone. It was! Its black, molded plastic tip was just visible as it protruded from behind a bottle of hydrochloric acid.
Confused at this unexpected but promising development, Kurt zoomed back out, only to realize that Stephanie had disappeared from the camera’s angle. Using the joystick again, Kurt panned the room and quickly found both Stephanie and Daniel in front of one of the incubators. Increasing the gain on the volume control, he strained to listen in case she mentioned the phone, but she didn’t. They were continuing their talk about going to lunch, and within minutes they left the laboratory.
Kurt’s eyes rose to the screen just above the one he’d been watching. He saw the couple emerge from building number one and start across the central courtyard, toward building number three.
During the construction of the clinic, Paul Saunders had given his head of security carte blanche to make it secure, in hopes of avoiding a catastrophe similar to what had happened to the clinic in Massachusetts, when a couple whistle-blowers had penetrated the clinic’s database. Because they managed to gain unauthorized access to the computer server room and avoid apprehension after their trespass, Kurt had made sure the entire new complex was bugged with audio and video. Both the cameras and the microphones were the latest stealth technology, integrated by computer and completely unobstrusive. Unbeknownst to Paul, Kurt had had them included in the restrooms, the guest apartments, and most of the staff living quarters, where they were concealed in various and sundry electrical fixtures. Everything could be viewed from the monitors in the video room off Kurt’s office, and in the evenings, Kurt found watching some of them entertaining, even when security wasn’t necessarily an issue. Of course, Kurt could make an argument to the contrary, for it was important in an organization like the Wingate Clinic to know who was sleeping with whom.
Kurt continued observing Daniel and Stephanie until they entered building number three, although his eyes were mostly on Stephanie. Over the last week and a half, he’d become addicted to watching her, despite the ambivalence she evoked. He was both attracted and repulsed by her innate sensuality. As with women in general, he appreciated her beauty yet at the same time he recognized her Eve-like qualities. Kurt had watched her make and receive calls in the laboratory, and although he could frequently hear her side of the conversation, he was unable to hear the caller. Consequently, he’d not been able to provide Paul Saunders with the name of the patient as Kurt had promised, and Kurt liked to keep his promises.
Kurt’s attitude toward women had been set in stone by his ultimate betrayer, his mother. She and he had had an intimate relationship fostered by long absences of his undemonstrative strict disciplinarian father who had demanded perfection from both wife and son but who only acknowledged failure. His father had preceded Kurt into the Army’s Special Forces, and like Kurt, who had ultimately followed in his footsteps, he had been a trained covert-operations killer. But when Kurt was thirteen, his father had been killed in a classified operation in Cambodia during the final weeks of the Vietnam War. His mother’s reaction was like a lovebird released from a cage. Ignoring Kurt’s emotional confusion of grief and relief, she indulged a flurry of affairs, the intimacies of which Kurt had to endure audibly through the thin drywall of their army-base house. Within months, Kurt’s mother consummated her frantic dating by marrying a prissy insurance salesman whom Kurt despised. Kurt felt that all women, particularly the attractive ones, were like the mythologized mother of his youth, plotting to lure him in by seduction, sap him of his strength, and then abandon him.
As soon as Daniel and Stephanie had disappeared inside building number three, Kurt’s eyes moved automatically to monitor twelve and waited for them to appear in the cafeteria. When they joined the line at the steam table, Kurt got to his feet and walked out into his office. From the back of his desk chair, he took his lightweight, black silk jacket and slipped it on over his black T-shirt. He wore the jacket to conceal the holstered pistol he always carried in the small of his back. He pushed the sleeves up above his elbows. From the corner of his desk, he picked up the box containing the tiny cell phone bug he’d been eager to implant in Stephanie’s phone as well as its monitoring device. He also grabbed his jeweler’s tool kit, which included a delicate soldering iron and a binocular watchmaker’s loupe.