Robin Cook - Shock

Dodging the crowd, Deborah paced off the distance from the stairwell to where she guessed the dumbwaiter shaft was, behind the corridor wall. Leaving the corridor, she found herself in a patient-treatment area. Where the dumbwaiter shaft's doors should have been located, she was confronted by a shallow linen closet. It was immediately obvious to her that there was no opening for the dumbwaiter on the first floor.

A simple process of elimination left only the basement as the eggs' origin. Deborah headed back to the stairwell. To get down there she had to descend three flights instead of the two that had separated each of the upper floors. This suggested to her that the basement would have a higher ceiling, but it turned out not to be the case. There was a mezzanine floor of sorts between the basement and the first floor, composed of a myriad of piping and ductwork.

The basement had the appearance of a dungeon with infrequent bare-bulb lighting. The walls were exposed brick with arched ceilings, and the floor, granite slabs. The unease Deborah had felt up on the third and forth floors was magnified in the gloomy basement. It, too, contained a multitude of mementos of its mental-institution, TB-sanitarium past, but here they were more decrepit as if abandoned in dank, shadowed recesses. Deborah's immediate feeling was that if there were any of the old infectious agents lingering in the building, this was where they'd live.

Girding herself against the power of her own imagination, Deborah proceeded to pace off the distance from the stairwell as best she could. The floor plan did not have the simple central corridor like all the floors above. It was considerably more mazelike, requiring her to be more creative in judging the distance while proceeding in a zigzag course around massive supporting piers.

As she passed through an archway and skirted a large kitchen with spacious metal countertops, huge ovens, and soapstone sinks, Deborah confronted something she'd not expected: a blank, modern, metallic door with no handle, hinges, or even lock.

Tentatively Deborah reached out in the semidarkness and lightly touched the shiny surface. She guessed it was stainless steel. Curiously, however, it was not cold but rather felt comfortably warm to her touch. She glanced around in the half-light at all the old kitchen equipment, then back to the shiny door. The incongruity was startling. Placing her ear against the door, she could hear the hum of machinery within. She listened for several minutes, hoping to hear voices, but she didn't. Moving back from the door, she caught sight of a card swipe just like the one outside the server-room door. At that moment she wished she had Wingate's card.

After a moment of indecision and a brief argument with herself, Deborah reached out and knocked on the door with her knuckle. It resonated solidly as if thick. She wasn't entirely sure she wanted anyone to answer, and no one did. Gaining in confidence, she pushed against the door, but it was immovable. Using the heel of her fist, she hit around the periphery of the door just to see if she could determine where the latch was. She couldn't.

Shrugging her shoulders in the face of such an impenetrable barrier, Deborah turned and retraced her steps back to the stairwell. It was almost noon, and time to return upstairs to wait for Joanna's call. Deborah had learned little on her foray, but at least she'd tried. She thought that maybe, if all went well, she could come back in the afternoon with Wingate's card. The stainless-steel door and what might be behind it had definitely piqued her curiosity.

EARLIER IN THE DAY, JOANNA had developed more respect for data-entry-level office workers. Now she had significantly more respect for thieves. She couldn't imagine doing anything like what she was currently doing for a living. Deborah had talked her into returning to the server room with a compelling argument and plan that seemed to have worked. Joanna had been in the server room now for almost twenty-two minutes and no one had bothered her. Her biggest enemy had been herself.

The immobilizing panic she'd felt on the first visit had come back with a vengeance the moment she'd come through the outer server-room door and had let up only enough to allow her to function, although not all that efficiently. The worst part of the whole episode had been the agonizing wait for the brute-force cracking software to come up with a password to unlock the server keyboard. While it ran, Joanna had been reduced to a pathetic, quivering mass of anxiety beset with intermittent jolts of fear from constantly hearing noises that were either innocuous or completely fabricated by her overwrought brain. She was actually surprised at herself. It had been her misconception that she would been a cool person under the kind of stress she was experiencing.

Once she'd gotten into the system, her terror had been ameliorated a degree just from the mere fact of doing something rather than just watching. The main trouble had then become her tremor. It had made operating the mouse and the keyboard difficult.

As she had progressed, Joanna had silently thanked Randy Porter. The man had made her job significantly easier by not hiding what she was searching for too deeply within subfolders. From the very first window Joanna had brought up, she found a server drive named Data D that sounded promising. Opening that drive presented her with an array of folders conveniently named. One of them was called Donor. Right-clicking on the folder and selecting Properties, she saw that access was extremely limited. In fact, besides Randy as the network administrator, only Paul Saunders and Sheila Donaldson were authorized entry.

Confident she'd found the correct file, Joanna went through the process of adding herself as a user. That required merely typing in her user account designation plus her office domain. Just as she was about to click the Add button she heard a door open somewhere in the distance that caused her heart to leap in her chest and a new batch of perspiration pop out on her forehead.

For several seconds Joanna was unable to move or even breath as she strained to hear the telltale sounds of footsteps in the server-room corridor. But she didn't. Still she expected someone was behind her. Slowly she turned. A modicum of relief coursed through her veins when she saw an empty server-room doorway. Standing up and taking a few steps back, she looked down the server-room corridor to the outer door. It was closed.

"I've got to get out of here," Joanna moaned. Quickly she returned to the keyboard and, with a trembling hand, clicked to add herself to the donor file access list.

As rapidly as she was able Joanna went back through the windows she'd progressively opened to return the server monitor to its desk top and ultimately to its password demand. She snatched up her purse and was about to flee when she remembered the cracking software still in the CD drive. Shaking worse than ever now that she was within seconds of success, she managed to get the CD out and in her bag. Finally she was able to leave.

She closed the server-room door and then ran the few steps to the outer door. Unfortunately there was no way to anticipate if it was a good time to emerge into the main corridor or not. It all depended on who happened to be out there. She just had to take a chance and hope for the best. In one motion she opened the door and stepped out, pulling the door closed behind her. Trying not to panic, she avoided looking up and down the corridor but rather went immediately to the water fountain. It wasn't that she was thirsty although her mouth was certainly dry. She just wanted something to do rather than look like a thief making her escape.

Joanna straightened up. It had been encouraging while drinking not to have heard any voices, and now that she looked it seemed she'd selected a particularly opportune moment to emerge. It was one of the few times Joanna had seen the corridor completely deserted.