Робин Кук - Pandemic

He got no response from anyone. The man who had done the talking was sitting in the front passenger seat. Besides the two men next to Jack, there was a fifth man in the third-row seat. It seemed unnatural that all these men were so silent. It was just the same as when Jack had been driven from the hospital to Wei Zhao’s house with the GeneRx security people. Jack found it extraordinary. Verbal communication was as natural to Jack as breathing.

“You people seem preternaturally quiet,” Jack said. “Is it me or are you always so silent?” There was no response.

Eventually even Jack gave up, and he, too, rode in silence until they turned into the entrance of Dr. Wei Zhao’s commercial complex. As they were passing the turnoff to the hospital, Jack said, “I’d much rather go to Dover Valley, if you don’t mind.” As he expected, they ignored him.

A few minutes later they stopped at the gatehouse leading within the compound to GeneRx and the Farm Institute. As soon as the driver lowered the window, Jack shouted out that he was not a willing visitor and was being brought in against his will. “Help! Please call the local police,” he yelled.

The people in the gatehouse ignored him, as did the other occupants of the vehicle. It was apparent everyone knew one another by sight. After the driver was given several keys, the van pulled ahead and the driver raised his window. Jack looked longingly at the GeneRx building as they passed. He felt he wanted to go anywhere but the Farm Institute. He was absolutely certain he didn’t want to be put into an animal pen.

To Jack’s surprise, the van did not stop at the Farm Institute’s administration entrance, where Jack had entered on his brief tour the day before. Instead, they drove all the way along the front of the building and then rounded its end. Then they drove the length of one of the wings that stuck off the back and couldn’t be seen from the front. Jack could now appreciate that there were three wings in total, such that the Farm Institute’s footprint was a letter E .

The SUV came to a halt at the end of the wing where several semi-trailers were parked off to the side. As the guards climbed out of the front of the van, Jack tried to figure out what part of the institute they had stopped at, but there was no signage whatsoever. There was a normal entrance door, as well as a receiving dock with a large overhead door. The only windows in that portion of the two-story wing were up high under the eaves.

The sliding door of the van opened, and Jack was helped out. “How about removing my handcuffs?” he suggested, once he was standing on the macadam of the driveway.

“When we have you in the pen, we will remove them,” the guard said. The entire group walked to the door, where the driver used the key given to him at the gatehouse. Inside was a dark, windowless office. Everyone filed in after the light was turned on.

“Keep going,” the guard said, as he pointed toward another door in the back of the room behind the desks.

The second room was cavernous and had a mildly disagreeable smell. It was filled with a significant amount of assembly-line-like machinery, with an overhead conveyor system whose function Jack did not immediately recognize. Although some natural light spilled in from the windows high on the walls, it wasn’t enough to provide much ambient light down on the floor, and the machinery cast weird and grotesque shadows.

“This way,” the guard said, pointing off toward the left in the direction of the main part of the institute. Jack followed several of the other guards who had gone ahead. After walking several hundred feet, they came upon a huge, heavy wire-mesh enclosure that extended off into the distance. A moment later they approached an embedded door made of the same material. Inside the cage, the floor was covered with what appeared to be sawdust.

“What is this building for?” Jack asked, unsure if he’d get an answer.

“It’s the slaughterhouse,” the guard said.

“Oh, wonderful,” Jack said sarcastically. He’d been told about the slaughterhouse by Ted Markham and Stephen Friedlander back when they were acting as if they were trying to impress him. Now he was getting to see it much more intimately than he would have liked. It occurred to him that the hulking machinery they’d been passing was for processing and butchering animals.

The van driver used another key to open the mesh door. The hinges made an agonized creaking sound, as if they hadn’t been opened in years.

“Turn around,” the guard said.

As Jack turned around he noticed the man with the Taser had unsheathed his weapon, just in case. Jack had no intention of getting Tased a second time.

“Okay, inside!” the guard said after removing the cuffs and pointing into the interior of the huge coop.

Jack glanced through the door. The cage was about ten feet wide and ten feet high. To the right, it terminated after thirty feet or so, while to the left, it disappeared off into hazy darkness. It was hardly inviting, and as the understatement of the year, he was not inclined to go inside. “What is this cage for?” he asked, in an attempt to stall, even though he had a pretty good idea it was to hold animals before the slaughter.

“Inside,” the guard said, giving him a shove to the small of the back.

Jack had to step up and duck down at the same time to enter. Behind him, he heard the hinges complain again prior to a loud mechanical click as the door shut and locked. Jack turned around. The guards were already leaving.

“Hey!” Jack called. “How long am I going to be here?” But the men didn’t answer. They didn’t even turn around. Eventually he heard the door to the office close. Then there was a heavy stillness.

Turning back around, Jack looked first to the right. Only ten to fifteen feet away he could see that the cage narrowed such that animals being herded in that direction would be forced into single file to facilitate them being killed and then hoisted up onto the conveyor system to be hacked into various cuts of meat. Turning again, he looked in the opposite direction. That way, the cage progressively widened before vanishing into a murky nothingness.

THURSDAY, 3:15 P.M.

“You utter fool!” Jack was vaguely aware of voicing the words aloud as he berated himself for his lunatic behavior. He questioned how he could have been so stupid as to allow himself to be isolated in a fortified home and get into an actual physical brawl with its paranoid billionaire bodybuilder proprietor when he clearly knew there were shenanigans afoot. At the same time, he understood that his emotions had been stretched to the breaking point over the last few days, culminating in his having been put on administrative leave that morning. It had been his job and only his job that had been keeping him psychologically grounded.

The first thing that Jack did was look closely at the embedded door. He was able to immediately appreciate that the locking mechanism required a key on the inside as well as on the outside. There was no handle or latch of any sort. He hit the lock a few times with the base of his fist to sense how loose the latch bolt was within the strike plate. It wasn’t loose at all. Next, he used a fingernail to feel how tightly the separation was between the lock’s face plate and the strike plate. It was well engineered and tight, so there was no chance of using the old credit-card trick. Next, by embedding his fingers in the wire mesh, he tried to shake the door. It didn’t budge. He imagined it had been built to withstand mistreatment by a two-thousand-pound bull, and he gave up on trying to get it open.

Turning around, he again glanced up and down the expansive animal cage and struggled with a sense of impotence. The chances of him being able to free himself from his current predicament were dimming rapidly from possible to probably not. Wei had said that Jack wasn’t going to be heading back to the city at the moment, but what did that actually mean? How long might he have to wait? And why was he waiting at all?