Cliff Ryder - Out of Time

The distractions made her feel guilty, because she knew they were counting on her—had in fact handpicked her from a great number of good, qualified candidates—to analyze this data, validate it and to shift it into the next stage of testing and research required to bring it to the world. It was an incredible trust that had been granted her, and she felt the weight of it keenly.

She shut down the laptop with a last glance at the page she was working on. It was a study involving a viral agent that had been introduced into control hosts. The host cells were mutated in two control sets by the viral agent, and then the nanoagents, programmed to reverse the mutation, were introduced into one set. This gave three sets of data—control, mutated and those mutated and then treated with the nanoagents. The results looked more as if there were two control sets and one mutated set. The nanoagents had literally achieved a one hundred percent rate of repair. No anomal-ies. It was incredible. In other studies, data like that would have caused Brin to pause and consider whether the numbers might have been skewed, but she’d been through enough of the data from the Chinese branch of MRIS to know that if it had been skewed, then the entire study was a fiction.

The perfect score she’d just analyzed was the rule, not the exception. In all her years of research she’d never seen anything so absolutely conclusive.

She closed down the equipment and checked the cultures contained in the climate-controlled chamber. The cultures would become the last portion of her work on the project, as it stood. She would actually get to perform a series of experi-ments that paralleled what had been done. She would provide the final validation—repeating the results of her colleagues, and developing new tests on the specimens. She wondered if she could justify choosing MS degeneration on cells in those tests and, assuming Alex made it back safely from wherever the hell he’d gone, if she could find a way to get those nanoagents into his system. She shook her head to clear the unethical thoughts and turned off the lights. She still had to pick up Savannah, and she wanted to get home and check that e-mail site, even though she doubted she’d find anything waiting when she did.

AFTER DINNER, Savannah determined that she was going to draw pictures for Daddy. She had her art case and a pile of washable markers and was scribbling furiously on the floor in front of the television. Brin had dug out a DVD of Scooby Doo episodes for the girl to distract herself with, and was relieved at the momentary break. She took the opportunity to sit down at the computer and check for replies to her e-mails. The messages remained unread, and Brin slapped a hand violently on the desktop in frustration.

“What’s wrong, Mommy?” Savannah asked.

The girl looked up with wide eyes. Brin doubted Savannah had ever seen such an outburst from her mother, and she wasn’t sure how to explain herself.

She decided on honesty.

“I just miss Daddy,” she said.

Savannah nodded. “Me, too. I don’t hit the table, though—I draw.”

Savannah went back to her drawing, and Brin watched her, lost in thought, until the villain said,

“You meddling kids,” a final time. It was time for her daughter to close the art shop and head to bed.

Brin’s heart ached. She wondered how long it would be before she was raising the girl on her own. No matter the amount of time, it would be far too soon.

It was a long time before her tears cleared enough for another fruitless check of her e-mail. By the time she was back at the computer’s main desktop, the tears had dried and she was growing angry again.

She didn’t exactly know how to bring up the Room 59 chat room, and she’d been warned not to do it. She knew they might be watching her—

might have been clued in to her presence the second she logged on to Alex’s computer. The last time she’d been reading an e-mail addressed to them when the man who supposedly worked with her husband had appeared and the window had opened on its own. If that didn’t happen pretty quickly, she intended to go searching until she found some trigger.

She’d gotten a clue from the method they used to hide the secure chat entrance. She took the mouse and very slowly began panning it over the screen.

Alex’s wallpaper was a picture of the family, taken on the beach a year earlier, Savannah holding up her plastic pail of sand tools and grinning widely, Alex tanned and strong with his arm around Brin’s shoulders. Brin tried to ignore the memories flooding her mind and concentrated on the motion of the cursor across the screen. She started at the bottom right, where the first Easter-egg entrance had been hidden, and she slid her pointer slowly across the bottom of the monitor screen, then back, moving it only a fraction of an inch higher. It would take a while, but she had the feeling she was on the right track. When the cursor reached the point on the screen directly over her own heart, a small circle appeared around the arrow point. It took her by surprise, and she didn’t stop moving her hand in time to catch it on the first pass, but when she brought it back, the circle returned. Brin clicked the mouse button, and the initial chat room window she’d seen during her first visit to Room 59 appeared.

She waited a moment to see if anyone would make first contact, but the cursor blinked in the room, unanswered. Brin moved the cursor to the input window and typed.

“Is there anyone there? This is Brin Tempest.”

There was no answer. She thought about repeating her question, and then decided against it. She was wasting time. She dragged the cursor down to the point at the bottom of the screen where she knew the hidden entrance link was located, and when it appeared, she clicked it. She entered Alex’s en-crypted password and waited. She had been afraid it might be changed or locked out after they allowed her access the first time, but apparently they didn’t really want to keep her out. The password was accepted, and the secure window opened. Again, she was alone in a chat room, but she was in.

She repeated her message.

“Is there anyone there? This is Brin Tempest.”

She clicked on the send button, watched her message appear in the empty screen of the chat room and sat back to wait. It didn’t matter how long it took, she decided; she was going to remain logged in to the site until someone noticed. Every few moments she repeated her message to make sure the system didn’t lock her out for inactivity.

The blinking cursor continued to mock her, but her mind was set. This was her husband and her life and she wasn’t giving any of it up without a fight.

Denny stepped into the doorway of Kate’s virtual office and waited patiently for her to join him.

Finally she appeared and said, “Denny, you wanted to see me?”

“We’ve got a problem,” he said.

“You have no idea how tired I am of that statement,” she replied. There was no trace of a smile on her face. She had a folder open on her desk, and Denny knew it was the MRIS operation report.

“It’s part of the same problem, I think. Mrs.

Tempest has found her way back into the Room 59

chat. So far we’ve ignored her, but we’re going to have to figure out how to deal with this. She may have information we don’t have—Alex may have found a way to contact her. We need to make contact.”

“You warned her not to contact us,” Kate said.

“You ordered me not to change the access,”

Denny shot back.

Kate almost smiled. “I did, didn’t I? Get in there and see what she knows. If she’s heard he’s been captured, all hell could break loose, and we’ll need a plan for damage control. This one is already running way outside safety parameters.”