“Can’t you pick it?”
“Yeah, but it’s a mortise lock. It’ll take a little longer to play around with the cylinder.”
“I’ll cancel our dinner reservations.”
“You do that.”
It didn’t take as long as Walt had led her to believe. Maybe a minute-and-a-half. Two minutes at the most. He worked with it intensely, then suddenly whispered, “Got it!” and fought a moment longer before Teri heard the dead bolt slide back from the strike plate. The door swung out.
“I’ll see if I can get our reservations back.”
Walt pulled the flashlight out of his backpack, and they started down the stairway.
[128]
“That guy really is an asshole,” Mitch said.
“I know. Even worse, he’s a skittish asshole.” D.C. swirled the ice around the bottom of his cup of Diet Coke, then finished the drink. The cubicle where they were talking sat in the middle of a maze of cubicles on the third floor. The only light on in the room was the Luxo fluorescent lamp above the desk. “He’s going to panic and do something stupid one of these days.”
“How’d you ever hook up with him anyway?”
“It was a long time ago. I like to think I’ve grown a little wiser since then.”
Mitch let out a huff. He stood at the corner of the cubicle, leaning against a divider, his arms crossed, all business. You never had to guess with Mitch, and you rarely had to keep an eye on him, the way you had to watch Childs all the time. Some men you could trust, some you couldn’t.
“Things are getting tight,” he said, just before biting down on an ice cube.
“I know.”
“We’re going to have to do something about this mess before it gets so far out of hand we can’t bring it back under control.”
“You have something in mind?”
“I don’t know. I guess if I thought I could get away with it, I’d be tempted to try taking our asshole doctor out of the picture entirely and see what we’re left with.”
“Scrap the project?”
“The project’s already dead. The guy’s been working on this thing for twenty years and he still doesn’t have a fucking clue about what’s going on.” D.C., who had finished the last of the ice, tossed the cup aside and sat up. He felt tired, a little from stress and a little from the fact that he still hadn’t had dinner. “And with this Knight woman and her friend poking around—Christ, this thing’s a bomb waiting to go off. And we’re sitting right on top of the damn thing.”
“So?” Mitch prompted.
“So, I wish I knew what the hell to do about it.”
“I’ll take him for a ride, if you’d like.”
“Thanks, but we’d still have a room full of sleepers to worry about.” He paused, anticipating that Mitch might make an offer to take care of the kids as well. That would be the kind of tell that would worry him, D.C. thought. Because it was one thing to be all business, and quite another thing to be a fucking loon. If Mitch had mumbled a single syllable about handling the kids, he might very well have stood up and shot him right on the spot. Bang, you’re dead. One less psycho in the world to worry about.
The man, however, made no such offer.
“Are your hands dirty?” Mitch asked.
“No, of course not.”
“And the agency?”
“Everything’s clean. Why?”
“I don’t know; it just seems like maybe the easiest thing to do would be to get up and walk away. Leave the whole thing sitting in the doc’s lap.”
“He’d squeal.”
“Anything to back him up?”
“No. I’m not aware of anything.”
“Well, then.” Mitch shrugged, enjoying the scenario. “Mrs. Knight stumbles onto the scene, she finds the doc here with her kid and a whole room of other kids just like him, and who’s she gonna point her finger at? Hell, the only way they found this place is by tailing Childs.”
“And everything’s in the name of the Institute. He’s registered as the President of the Board of Directors on all the paperwork. It just might work.” D.C. rocked back in the chair, running it through his mind in case there was something he might be missing. You had to be careful with something like this. Overlook one small detail and you could find the whole thing blowing up in your face. “It does have a sweet sense of irony about it, doesn’t it?”
[129]
The room was completely dark except for the gray cast of the four video monitors mounted across the back of the console. Just at the periphery of the man’s vision, the nearest monitor reflected the slow, sweeping movement of the camera over the receptionist’s area on the main floor. The screen flickered and the picture changed. This camera was mounted near the ceiling above the basement landing, just outside the elevator. It did a slow, deliberate sweep across the open space.
Jake, who was working alone tonight, briefly glanced up from his checkbook then returned to the task of trying to find the one-hundred and forty-seven dollars and thirty-six cents that was missing from his account according to his current bank statement. He’d had this problem with the bank before, though it had always been a couple of dollars here, a couple of dollars there. That kind of difference wasn’t worth the time or effort to track down. But a hundred-and-something dollars, that was real money. You could make a down payment on a fine stereo system with that kind of money. He wasn’t going to let it slide. The bank had some explaining to do.
The nearest monitor flickered and changed pictures to the room with the two boys. The youngest boy was asleep. The other kid, the Knight kid, had settled back and was trying to read a Christopher Pike book with his cast across the top of the page to keep it from turning.
The far monitor flickered and the camera swept across the lab where Dr. Childs was hunched over a console, his glasses sitting on top of his head. He sat back, ran his hands down his face, then sat forward again, apparently refreshed enough to continue.
The right middle monitor flickered and the picture from the loading dock changed to the room in the basement where the sleepers were housed. Jake glanced up again, and started back to his checkbook when he thought he caught a movement at the corner of the screen. He sat forward, pressed a button, and froze the monitor at that location.
“What’s this?”
At the lower right-hand corner, two adults emerged from out of camera range. They moved only a step or two into the room and stopped, side-by-side, their backs turned away from him. He wasn’t sure who they were, but he thought one of them might be Elizabeth Tilley, who tended to make her rounds at odd hours, whenever it seemed to convenience her.
“Come on, turn around now. Let’s see your faces.”
The woman, who was standing on the left, suddenly sank into the man’s arms. That was something Jake had never seen between the doctor and his assistant. Not that he would know if anything were going on. He only came in for a couple of hours a night. It wasn’t as if he were privy to anything.
Finally, the man turned toward the camera, where his face could clearly be seen. He was not Dr. Childs. And he was not one of the other two who were always hanging around, either. This guy… he was a man Jake had never seen before.
“Oh, Christ,” he said, reaching for the phone. “Oh, Jesus Christ Almighty, we’ve got one.”
[130]
“My God,” Teri whispered. She could barely believe her eyes. They were standing just inside the door of a room that was maybe thirty by sixty, looking out across two rows of hospital beds. Half of those beds were occupied, and all of the occupants were children. “What has he done?”