Carrie Vaughn - After the Golden Age

She wondered, if the West Corp people transferring all this paper to the computer had come across the Leyden file, would they have noticed if it mentioned a connection to Sito? Would it have tripped the recognition in their minds that it had in hers? If so, would they have said anything?

She was meant to be here, digging up this data. No one else knew the connections. No one else could find it.

It took her three hours of looking in banker’s boxes, scanning the neatly typed labels on hundreds of legal-size manila folders. Real estate deals, stock acquisitions, mergers, sales—every deal possible to make in business was represented. Jacob West had had his fingers in a lot of pies. Oil, telecommunications, entertainment, government contracts. He’d started out importing diamonds, but quickly diversified. Economic downturns had never affected him.

Finally, she found a surprisingly thin folder labeled Leyden Industrial Park.

She filled out the appropriate form needed to take information out of the archives and slipped a card into the folder’s place in the box. If she followed procedure, her father wouldn’t have any reason to reprimand her. Really, though, she wasn’t a West Corp employee. She wasn’t entitled to remove files from storage.

She really might break down and ask her father for a job, if no one else hired her.

Feeling a bit like Pandora, she sat at an austere desk in the archives room and opened the folder.

A cover memo addressed to Jacob West outlined experiments in bioengineering. Celia couldn’t find a more detailed description than that. These were accounting records, not lab reports. The file included a list of assets, which she hoped might give her some clue as to what the experiments involved. Most of the entries were for machines with complicated names that Celia couldn’t guess the purposes of. The ones she recognized—oscillators and autoclaves—were generic, used for all sorts of purposes in every kind of lab. They could be found in dentists’ offices.

She set aside that list and turned to the payroll data. Here, she made some progress. West Corp not only owned the building, it had signed the paychecks for the dozen or so people who worked there during that time. She looked for one particular name first, and found it: Dr. Simon Sito was on the West Corp payroll. She was going to have to show this to her father.

The name right above Sito’s was Anna Riley. Her position was listed as stenographer. Suzanne’s mother’s name was Anna Riley. It might have been a different Anna Riley, except her age at the time, twenty-five, was about right.

Celia called her mother’s cell. Suzanne didn’t answer, which didn’t surprise Celia, but she left a message so she wouldn’t forget to ask the question later. “Hi, Mom. I have a weird question for you. What did Grandma Riley do for a living? Thanks.”

The prickling on the back of her neck grew even stronger when she came across the last name Baker. Analise’s last name was Baker. George Baker was listed as a lab technician. But Baker was a common last name, surely no relation.

Celia didn’t know if Analise was talking to her or not, so she didn’t call.

The last entry in the expenses portion of the trial balance was for a benefits payoff to employees. This cleaned out the account for the Leyden Industrial Park lab project. West Corp abandoned the property to the city, washing its hands of the place utterly.

What had happened there that one of the city’s most powerful investment companies didn’t try to salvage anything from the aftermath?

This was like trying to identify astronomical bodies by their distant gravitational effects. Celia was circling around the real mystery with no way of seeing it directly. That was usually how her job went. She never caught the bad guys red-handed, and only ever knew they were bad at all by the unlikely amounts of money they shuffled around.

If she’d wanted it any other way, if she’d wanted to be at the center of things, she’d have become a cop.

Somebody somewhere had to have a real lab report, something detailing the actual experiment. Most of the employees on the list had been in their twenties and thirties. A few of them should still be alive. The older ones, maybe not. She copied out the list of employees and found a phone book.

She put a check mark by Sito’s name; she knew where he was, and knew the likelihood that he’d tell her anything of use. Anna Riley—if it was the same Anna Riley—had passed away twelve years ago. Celia put a question mark by her name. Then she started at the top of the list and made calls.

“Hi, I’m with the DA’s office—” This fib would get her in serious trouble if it got back to Bronson, but what did she have to lose? “This isn’t anything serious, but I’m trying to track down some information. I’m looking for a Harold Kleinbrenner who might have worked as a lab technician about fifty years ago? Is that you?”

No, that was Harold Kleinbrenner Jr.’s father. Harold Senior had died of prostate cancer twenty years ago.

Sorry, wrong Gerald Stowe.

Aaron Masters was dead. So was Lawrence Donaldson.

After an hour of calling wrong numbers and dead ends, Celia had written “dead” by half the names. Four had question marks. They either had unlisted numbers, or no relatives who could vouch for them.

Finally she came to the end of the list. A woman answered the number listed in the phone book.

Celia said, “Is this Janet Travers?”

“Yes?”

“Are you the Janet Travers who worked as a lab tech at a place called the Leyden Industrial Park about fifty years ago?”

The phone line hissed and whispered during a pause. Then the woman said, “Yes.”

Celia whispered a prayer of thanks to the data gods. “I’m working with the DA’s office tracking down some information. Do you think I could ask you a few questions?”

Her voice was steady, but soft, whispering almost. “About what?”

“What kind of research was being conducted there? What experiments were going on? I haven’t been able to find any formal lab reports.”

“That was a very long time ago. I don’t really remember.”

“Nothing at all?”

“I was a bench tech. I processed samples, that’s all. I wasn’t privy to the overall results, Miss … What did you say your name was?”

Celia wanted very much to skip over that part. “Ms. Travers, Simon Sito worked at that lab. Can you tell me anything about—”

Janet Travers hung up.

Well. There was a thread that needed following.

At the end of the day, she collected her notes, and headed to the penthouse to find out if the museum had been robbed yet.

In the elevator, she ran the key card through the reader authorizing penthouse access. The ride up would take a good long time. Plenty of time to consider her chances on the job market. Maybe there was still time for the trial to produce another scandal that would boot her out of the headlines.

The only thing she had to look at was her reflection in the brushed steel wall across from her: red hair pushed back with a headband, baggy sweatshirt and sweats, sneakers, file folder hugged to her chest, the whole image blurred and warped. She might have been sixteen again, coming home from school. She was grown up now; she just didn’t feel like it.

The lights flashed to abrupt darkness and the elevator lurched to a stop. She braced against the wall; an emergency light came on, making the steel walls glow red. Her face looked sunburned in the reflection.

She stood still, frozen, waiting to hear something—a groan of gears restarting, someone forcing a door. Her blood pounded in her ears; all else was sickeningly silent.

The Stradivarius Brothers couldn’t possibly infiltrate West Plaza. Impossible. Not with West Corp security, not with the Olympiad’s sensors in place. Seconds ticked by, and every one of them dragged.