She felt like weeping. Her mind raced, yet she couldn’t think of anything to do. She expected to hear pounding on the door at any moment. She lifted the rags and saw that the wound on Pig’s head wasn’t as bad as it first looked. He wouldn’t die. She returned to the window.
Three young boys stood watching the flashing lights of the police vehicle, but none of the three men were in view. Zoya grabbed for the window latch. It wouldn’t budge. She pulled harder but it still wouldn’t give. She cried out and whirled around, searching the room. Her gaze landed on the wooden stool. She grabbed it and ran back to the window, knowing the men would be there again. No, just the three boys. She hefted the stool and smashed it through the window. Ignoring the shouts of the boys, she raked the stool along the bottom edge of the window to remove the remaining shards of glass, then climbed up on the window ledge and peered down at the yellowed grass below. The drop looked awfully long, but Zoya told herself this might be her only chance. She closed her eyes and let herself drop.
Moscow
Sunday, June 8, 2138
11:28 a.m. MSK
For security purposes, the autopilot of Tyoma’s Sun Lada 6 had been programmed to fly different routes for each trip to the dacha that housed the secret military R&D teams. This time the air car skimmed above the birch forest in a long semicircle to approach the base from the rear. The car slowed and began to descend just as Tyoma saw a string of lights marking the perimeter of the compound. He counted twelve cars in the lot.
He wondered again what could possibly cause everybody to come in like this on a Sunday. Did the general figure out we are holding back on him? The thought chilled him. This research had become their whole lives. They had spent more than four decades on it. What could he do if their funding was cut off? He supposed it wouldn’t matter if they all ended up in a gulag somewhere in Siberia.
“Door!” he cried, before the car had even settled into its spot. It slid up and Tyoma leapt out, tripped, and fell into the dirt. He cursed and muttered, “Slow down; you’re not sixty anymore.”
A scrape on his palm reminded him of his disrupted game, and he scowled and brushed dirt from the seat of his pants. At least the guards weren’t here to see you fall, he thought, as he approached the entrance door. He put his unwounded hand onto the plate and held his eye to the iris scanner. The door hissed open.
Tyoma hung his jacket on a peg and brushed more dirt from his clothes before heading for the labs. Arguing voices cut off instantly as he opened the door.
“The great sorcerer Xax graces us with his presence!” There was a good-natured grin on Konstantin Sakaev’s face.
Volodya’s sour look told Tyoma that not everyone shared his best friend’s joke. “You might try programming your apartment to allow calls from work through. Everyone else—”
“He’s here now, Volodya. Settle down.” Dmitri Aseev was nominally the leader of the group since he outranked the others, but he rarely asserted his authority. He was a stooped man of nearly eighty. Everyone called him Big Dima, not because he was big, which he wasn’t, but because the other Dmitri was so little.
Kostya patted the empty seat next to him, and Tyoma joined his colleagues at the conference table. He scanned the faces, searching for a clue to what this was all about. Other than Volodya’s scowl, mainly what he saw was curiosity.
“What’s going on?” he said in English, since three of their members didn’t speak good Russian.
Kostya nudged him with an elbow. “That’s what we’ve been asking Volodya ever since we got here, but he insisted on keeping us in suspense until everyone arrived.”
Volodya stood and held up his hands. “All right, let’s get this over with. We’ve been robbed.”
The room erupted as everyone began speaking over each other. Volodya flapped his arms until there was silence.
“I came in a couple of hours ago because I had an idea and wanted to work on it. The light was on in the storage room. I couldn’t see anything wrong, so I called up the security records.” Volodya raised his eyes to the ceiling. “Computer, show us what I looked at earlier.”
The blank wall on one side of the conference table flickered and a video feed appeared, showing the inside of the storage room. The door slid open and a security guard entered. He walked around the small room tugging on drawers and cabinets, but they were all locked. He halted near one cabinet and picked up something lying on top. The man had his back to the camera at this point.
“That’s enough, computer,” Volodya said. He held up a hand to forestall any questions. “I checked the storage room. Someone left a stack of chips out on Friday. The computer says the last one in the room was Sasha. How many times have we told you to put the chips away, Sasha?”
Everyone looked at the big engineer sitting at the far end of the table. Sasha Panov was a huge man with a bushy silver mustache. He shrugged and grinned. “I knew we’d just be getting them out again Monday morning.”
“Do you know what your laziness might have cost us?” Volodya said.
Sasha shrugged and looked away.
“What was taken?” asked Anders Thomsen, the Danish molecular engineer, who at fifty-two was the baby of the group. They had added him to the team when he was seventeen due to his prodigious talent.
“The guard didn’t take them all. There were four chips left,” Volodya said. “Three combat and one recording. How many chips did you leave there, Sasha?”
Sasha shrugged again. “I dunno. Maybe a half dozen. I’m not sure.”
“Great,” Volodya said. “You didn’t log them, so we don’t even know what we lost.”
Tyoma hated how Volodya always tried to boss everyone around. “Calm down. Everyone must remember what we were working on Friday evening. We should be able to figure it out. What about the other security cameras?”
Volodya glared at Tyoma for a few moments before responding. “The guard clearly planned to rob us. He knew enough to disable security, but he didn’t know that we had the storage room on its own system. That feed was all we had, and about the only thing more it tells us is that he did it Friday night, just after eleven.”
Big Dima stood. “Okay. We’ll figure out what’s missing soon enough. If it’s just recordings then we should be fine. The only worry is if it’s military chips he took.”
“No kidding,” said Dagur Stefansson, the Icelandic geneticist. “If those fall into the wrong hands, we’re done.”
“What about the guard?” asked Little Dima, the tissue engineer.
“Can’t find him,” said Volodya. “He’s not responding. I called his supervisor and told him to track the man down.”
Arguments broke out around the table. Tyoma turned to his friend Kostya. “He may not be worried about recordings, but I am. You did an update recording of me on Friday. I don’t like the idea of someone having a copy of me out there.”
Kostya was fiddling with a lighter, clearly craving a cigarette; he’d had to give them up ages ago when real tobacco became rarer than gold. “What could they do with it? If they slot it, they’ll most likely kill themselves. The worst that can happen is they go insane, right?”
“We don’t know for sure,” Tyoma said. “That’s the problem. We can’t test it on a human yet, so we have only our theories and the chimp tests to go on. There was only that one successful test, and there was something wrong with that chimp…mental problems. Don’t tell me you’d be comfortable having one of your recordings out there.”
Kostya shook his head. “I don’t believe it can hurt us. It’s the military chips that worry me. It doesn’t matter who took them. Once someone tries one of those, the general will learn about it eventually. We’ve got to get those cards back.”