“What’s going on?” Goldfarb appeared behind him, his dark hair mussed. Then, realizing Skraling was gone, “Oh, shit.”
“Mr. Skraling, I can’t allow you to—” Craig said, but the heavy oak door slammed in his face. He heard Skraling push himself against the other side of the study door and the metal-on-metal scrape of a deadbolt lock clicking into place.
“Hey!” Goldfarb shouted. Craig pounded on the door. Inside, he heard desk drawers rattling, papers tossed about.
“Mr. Skraling, destroying evidence will only make things worse for you. It can increase your sentence by as much as ten years, if convicted.”
“Make it worse?” Skraling hooted through the door then he just laughed and said nothing else.
Feeling stupid for letting himself get into this situation, Craig pounded on the door and rattled the knob, but it was shut tight. He looked at Goldfarb; the other man spread his hands helplessly.
Craig pulled air through his teeth. “Okay, let’s break it down.”
Together, they stepped back and took turns kicking at the deadbolt. Craig slammed the heel of his black street shoe with all the force he could muster, then stepped back, feeling the jarring pain through his shin.
Goldfarb cracked with his own shoe at the door. Craig tried again with his other foot. Goldfarb tried a second time, and the jamb finally began to splinter. The noises inside the study ceased.
“Come on out of there, Mr. Skraling,” Craig said. “We can talk this out.”
He listened for an answer as Goldfarb poised himself for another kick at the door. The only response he got from Miles Skraling, though, was a loud, high pop then a loose thump.
“Oh, my God!” Craig said. Goldfarb let loose with all his strength, slamming his heel into the deadbolt. Wood splintered. The brass deadbolt protruded a from the jamb. Craig threw his shoulder against the door, and finally the lock broke away. The door popped open, letting him stumble into the too-silent study.
Craig caught his balance. Goldfarb pushed in beside him.
Skraling lay slouched backward in the stuffed leather desk chair studded with a decorative rim of brass buttons. His hand dangled beside the desk. A small pistol lay on the hardwood floor, where the recoil had knocked it out of his hand.
The bullet had entered the back of his mouth, throwing him backward. Red spatters were sprayed across the fine leatherbound volumes neatly arranged in his study library.
Jackson came running up. The three agents spent a long time staring before they said a word to each other.
CHAPTER 10
Sitting alone at a table in the break room of the Plutonium Facility, Duane Hopkins opened his black metal lunchbox and withdrew a thermos of coffee. After carefully unscrewing the cap he poured himself a cupful. He rummaged in his lunchbox, taking out a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich and a Twinkie. He always ate half his lunch during the 10:30 break and ate the rest of it at noon. He never spent money in the soda or snack vending machines.
He poked around to doublecheck what he had packed for himself, as if somehow hoping he would find a surprise there. When he had first gotten married, Rhonda had always packed his lunches, but she had stopped putting in surprises after six months. After Stevie was born a year later, she had gone away altogether, packing only a suitcase, taking the contents of their savings account, and leaving him a simple but eloquent note: “I have my own life to live.” She hadn’t signed it “Love Rhonda,” or anything. Just left it on the gold-flecked Formica dinette table. He had never heard from her again, not in ten years.
Sitting in his bright orange lab coat, Duane sipped some of his milk and carefully unfolded the waxed paper surrounding his sandwich. He took one bite of the sandwich, feeling the sweet stickiness goosh on the roof of his mouth.
Then Ronald and his caveman buddies came in, talking too loudly, laughing like gorillas at each other’s stupid jokes. Duane looked away and tried to become invisible, but Ronald headed directly over to him.
“Hey, Beavis, glad you could come to work today. No special missions for the CIA? No extra credit work for T Program?”
“Stop calling me that,” Duane said.
“Calling you what, Beavis?”
“That,” Duane said. “It’s not my name.”
“Well, why not?” Ronald answered with a gap-toothed grin. “You’re a butthead, aren’t you?” The three other guys with him laughed at that.
“I was just at T Program for a tour. I took my son to the Virtual Reality chamber.”
Ronald raised his eyebrows. “Well, excuuuuse me,” he said, lolling his head from side to side and raising his eyebrows in a sickening parody of Stevie’s cerebral palsy.
Ronald had bristly dark hair and a blurred blue tattoo of an eagle on his left forearm, visible because Ronald always rolled up the sleeves of his orange lab coat. He flaunted his former Marine image, knowing full well Duane’s service in the Army. Ronald occasionally made up stories about his days in ‘Nam, though Duane and most of the others knew that Ronald was too young ever to have been in the Viet Nam war — but no one would challenge him on it.
Ronald leaned forward, his breath stank of sour tobacco smoke; he was probably lighting up again in the bathrooms, even though the building was a no smoking facility.
“You sure they didn’t want to just run some secret experiments on you, Beavis? Maybe run a special analysis to see why you’re such a wuss?”
“It was just a tour of the simulator chamber,” Duane said, putting his sandwich down. In fact, that nice man Gary Lesserec had called him this morning, and Duane had been delighted to hear from him, remembering how much Stevie had enjoyed the VR demonstration. He hadn’t understood Mr. Lesserec’s request, but Duane felt he owed the T Program man a big favor, so he was happy to promise the material Lesserec wanted.
Ronald picked up the Twinkie from Duane’s lunch box, tore open the cellophane and stuffed the sponge cake into his own mouth, dropping the wrapper to the floor. Duane sat silently fuming.
“The Virtual Reality Simulator,” Ronald mocked with his mouth full and his voice high pitched and woman-like. “Next thing you know our friend Beavis here is going to be talking with the President on another news conference.”
“Yeah,” one of Ronald’s cohorts said. “NIB — the National Initiative for Buttheads.” They all guffawed.
Duane hated every single one of them, jeering in their blue jeans and orange lab coats. “Cut it out and just leave me alone,” he said. He put his sandwich back in his lunchbox and closed it up.
“Hey, Beavis, where’s your badge?” Ronald said. The others looked around in mock horror. “Oh my goodness, he doesn’t have a badge!”
Duane checked and saw that he had left his green badge clipped to his flannel shirt draped over the chair at his workstation in the metallurgy facility. He was supposed to have it with him at all times though occasionally everyone grew lax once they had passed through the rigorous security checks to get into the plutonium building in the first place.
“What are you, some kind of a Commie spy?” Ronald said. “You’d better get your badge, or I’m going to call Security right now. Get you fired!”
Seeing an excuse to get away from the taunting, Duane left the break room and pushed through the swinging double-doors that served as an airlock. He hurried across the linoleum floors in the brightly fluorescent-lit open areas of the Plutonium Facility. Metal lockers stood against parts of the walls, with equipment carts or large rolls of thin sheet plastic to be taped down on the floor in the event of a spill.