Broken Mirror (21 page)

The entrance was covered up by aluminum sheeting affixed to the facade by metal pins the size of large fingers. He couldn’t go in there.

Images from his time in the building haunted him. The echoing hallways, the small square rooms where he gave blood and submitted to countless psychological tests, the waiting areas with glass windows looking out toward the bay
—
wherever he was, his memories of the place were never far away.

Victor looked for another way to get inside. He walked next to the southern wall. The windows, more than a meter beyond his reach, were too high to be of use unless he could find something to stack underneath them.

Around the corner, he found a narrow concrete stairwell leading down. Maybe he should have asked for Circe to find someone to accompany him. It wasn’t that he was afraid, but he might have to carry away boxes of records. Unless she was right, and there was really nothing left.

He didn’t have time to hesitate, not with Dr. Santos’s deadline hanging over him. He climbed down the stairs.

At the bottom, he tugged at a metal-banded door, but it wouldn’t budge. From his pocket he took his contraband Japanese army knife. The door’s mechanism was a simple latch. One swipe with the knife’s blade cleared the curved spring-tongue from the catch. The door opened halfway with a painful metal-on-cement shriek, then seized and wouldn’t open further. He squeezed through.

Glittering dust cascaded through the narrow shaft of light at the threshold, illuminating a thin slice of the interior gloom. A low-ceilinged corridor stretched ahead between ductwork, pipes, and machinery: hot water heaters, chillers, and electrical cabinets. The basement looked as if it hadn’t been touched since the hospital was closed.

Victor took a few steps and allowed his eyes to adjust to the dim light. If he could find the stairs leading into the main building, he could search for files and data cores in the research unit’s laboratory.

A lump formed in Victor’s throat. His career, his life’s ambition, his destiny
—
to help people through science and medicine, to continue the Eastmore legacy of healing and progress
—
it should all be playing out in the rooms above him. Instead he was searching around the dark basement like a blind man. He explored the perimeter of the room by touch. A lightstrip activation panel did nothing when he pressed it.

A pair of double doors in one corner seemed promising. Each had a small window at eye level and blackness on the other side. The doors wouldn’t budge. Maybe he could repeat his knife trick to open the door.

A high-pitched scream shot through the dark.

Victor jumped and fell against the wall, breathing heavily. That sound
—
what was it? A dying wail, a murder? He might be next.

Another scream came from maybe ten meters away, back toward the entrance. Victor strained to see in the blackness. His heartbeat reverberated in his limbs.

A third scream ripped through the room, painfully loud.

The tide of adrenaline receded, and Victor realized the sound wasn’t a scream. It was metal screeching on the concrete floor. The outer door was being pushed open.

He straightened and listened. He heard grunting and breathing. He wasn’t alone. He edged backward along the wall.

A beam of light flashed on, sweeping the room. Victor ducked to a crouch behind a large storage cabinet on wheels. The beam moved toward him.

He was trapped.

A male voice called out, “Who’s there?”

Victor’s pulse raced.

“I know someone’s here,” the man said. “The perimeter sensor tripped.” The voice waited a few breaths in silence. The man sighed. “I know you’re still in here. Show yourself!”

Who was he? Probably not a police officer, Victor reasoned. Maybe private security, assigned to watch the shuttered hospital, but who would bother with that? And wouldn’t Circe have known and warned him about it? Whoever the man was, he must have been monitoring the property from nearby to get here so quickly.

Clip. Clop. Clip. The man walked further into the room. “I don’t like hide-and-seek, so why don’t you come out? What are you doing down here anyway? There’s nothing left.”

Victor weighed his chances of survival and escape if the man became hostile. He might be able to knock him out with a pipe or a wrench, if he could find one.

But not if the man was armed. Victor wasn’t trained for knife fighting, and in the dark there was too much to bump into and trip over.

Or the man might have a sonic grenade, deafening in such close quarters, or a stunstick, a sleep jabber, fire grenades, or any number of other exotic weapons. Victor’s skin burned, remembering the people who died when their houses exploded.

The man took a few steps closer. “Come out where I can see you,” he said. He kicked away some bits of metal with his shoes.

Each skittering clinking sound made Victor’s chest shudder. He crawled on his elbows, trying his best to remain quiet, like a mouse hiding from an owl.

The light beam moved toward other parts of the room. Victor got up and took a few crouched steps. The beam of light flashed back. A bright glare in his face blinded him, and he jerked back into hiding.
Tricky
. Time to try something different.

“Just checking things out,” Victor said in a deep voice, trying to sound authoritative. Then he slunk to the ground and used his elbows to pull himself forward. His only way out was deeper into the basement.

“I could just gas you to sleep,” the man called out. “My guess is you don’t have a mask, do you?”

Adrenaline flooded through Victor. He sprinted to the double doors and worked on the latch with his knife. It clicked just as the man’s light found him. Victor yanked a door open with a grunt and stumbled forward into a hallway that was empty and lined with closed doors on either side. The man’s lightstick beam followed Victor as he ran. He found a stairwell door unlocked and flew up the stairs.

He climbed three floors, hoping to exhaust his pursuer, and whirled down a hallway on the floor designated for long-term patients. He had been here many times to visit Alik.

Victor sprinted toward the end of the corridor. He could take the other stairwell down and escape from a first-floor window. Something caught his foot. He almost fell. Arms spinning wildly, he regained his balance.

Hissing surrounded him, and a fog cloud arose. Fatigue sapped his muscles. Victor slumped to the floor and drifted to unconsciousness.

***

Victor woke, confused by the sensation of his body hanging by his armpits. He opened his eyes. A man was holding him up without seeming to strain. In his late thirties or early forties, the man had grizzled, dark-honey-colored skin, a jutting jaw, and wide-spaced eyes on a narrow face. A black knit cap sat snugly on his head.

The man said, “Tell me who you are and what you’re doing here, or this is going to get messy.”

Victor struggled. The man lowered Victor to his feet and moved a hand to his throat.

“Let me go,” Victor said, hating how pathetic his squeezed voice sounded.

“No. Tell me now.”

“Victor Eastmore.”

“What?” The hand around his throat relaxed.

“Victor Eastmore,” he said. “My grandfather built this place.”

The man squinted at Victor, examining his face. “I don’t care who you are. If you try anything, you’re in for more pain than you can handle.”

Free from the man’s control, Victor shuddered and balled his fists. Who was this guy to threaten him? “You’re not police. Who are you?”

The man blinked. He peered at Victor more closely, his brows converging. “Can’t believe I didn’t recognize you.”

“Why would you?”

“Me and Jeff go way back. Guess you didn’t see me at the funeral.”

Victor was sure he hadn’t seen the man before.

“Name’s Tosh, short for Táshah.”

“Tasha? That’s a girl’s name.”

Tosh smiled and showed his teeth. Victor backed away a step.

“
Táshah
is the Caddo word for wolf. I worked for Jeff.”

Victor took another good look. Black hair poked from under Tosh’s knit cap like greasy porcupine quills. He looked weather-beaten, like an old chair left on the porch, but there was a hardness to him, a way his eyes glared that gave Victor the creeps.

“Worked for him where? Here?” Victor waved at the line of closed doors stretching toward an abandoned nurse’s station. “You don’t look like a doctor.”

“Not here. I worked for him
personally
. Wherever he needed me to be.”

Victor tried Dr. Tammet’s color technique. Tosh’s face was a jumble of hues, too many to make sense of. But his musculature, the way he’d handled Victor like a straw doll, marked him as a thug.

“Jeff saved me from the Caddo flats a long time ago. I owe him everything. Death doesn’t cancel that kind of debt.”

“Why are you spying on me?”

Tosh chuckled. “Don’t flatter yourself. Jeff asked me to keep an eye on things here after it closed, among other things. I’ve got cameras and sensors all over the place.”

Tosh’s manner changed. A predatory look settled on his face. “Has the data egg opened?”

Victor took a step back. “You know about that?”

Tosh raised his hands, palms forward, in a gesture of peace.

Victor didn’t believe it for a second.

“Has it opened?” Tosh asked.

“No, it hasn’t.”

“Tell me what you’re really doing here.”

Victor started to take another step back, but Tosh gripped his arm. Suddenly he was behind Victor, who found himself kneeling with his arms pinned painfully behind him and Tosh pulling on them every time he moved.

“Tell me what you’re doing here, and maybe I’ll let you go without popping your arms out of their sockets.”

Victor tried to throw his head back to connect with Tosh’s face. He missed. Tosh’s grip tightened and pulled Victor backward, sending shearing pain through his shoulders. Victor screamed.

“If you scream like that again, you’ll wish you hadn’t.” Tosh tugged on Victor’s arms to prove his point.

Victor sagged onto his heels, breathing hard. “I’m looking for something,” he said.

“Looking for what?”

Victor hated telling him, but he had no choice. “The research for a cure. He might have been close before he was . . .”

“Before what?”

A week to go and nothing to lose, Victor thought. Might as well say it.

“Before he was murdered.”

“
Murdered
?” Tosh released him. Victor almost fell forward, but Tosh caught his shirt and helped lift him to his feet.

Victor sighed and leaned against a bulletin board. “I found something on the data egg. Traces of polonium, a rare, human-made radioactive element. It could explain his health problems. But I don’t know what to believe. My condition . . .”

Tosh said, “I know about your disease. The Broken Mirror thing. You think he was poisoned?” Tosh whistled, a high keening sound that hurt Victor’s ears. “Let me show you something.” He walked to the stairwell.

Victor followed Tosh up six flights. His legs ached, and he couldn’t stop yawning, which he blamed on the residual effects of the sleeping gas.

“Come on,” Tosh called out from half a floor above. “You’re going to want to see this.”

The top floor was sunnier than the rest, thanks to long skylights that repeated along the ceiling like the dashed dividing lines of a highway. Tosh paused in front of an open door. Inside, wire-mesh racks held cleaning supplies, jugs of bleach, and other cleaning products. A mop, buckets, and plastic cones that said, “Wet Floor!” stood to one side.

There was nothing there to see.

Then Tosh stepped forward, reached behind the rack of supplies, and pressed a control pad on the back wall that looked like a normal lightstrip panel. The wall and rack both swung backward, revealing another room.

Victor breathed shallowly and followed Tosh inside. Now he’d get some answers.

A few books were piled on otherwise empty bookshelves. The windows were covered with sections of black plastic. Chem lab equipment sat on a work table, still plugged in, as if the experimenter had just stepped out for lunch. Victor picked up a silver lightstick from the table and turned it over. An inscription on the butt read, “J. E.”

“What is this place?” Victor looked around the room, which connected to others on either side that were completely empty. There were no doors back to the hallway, except for the secret one he’d come through.

Tosh took off his cap and ran his fingers through his black hair. “It’s mostly junk. Some equipment. The valuable stuff is gone.”

“Explain.”

“After he closed the hospital, Jeff had me set this up, using solar power from the roof. Anybody wandering through the building wouldn’t even know this was here, and I made sure no one got in. You found one of my gas traps downstairs. Jeff knew where they were and came and went as he pleased. Until . . . He wasn’t able to move around so well toward the end.”

“But why?”

“Don’t know. He told me that after he passed, I should destroy everything in here. It’s taken a while. I sneak around. Don’t wanna be seen, never know who’s watching. Almost done. These books and this equipment are the last to go.”

Victor paced the small room. What had his granfa been doing here? There were no logbooks, nothing like a journal or research notes, only a bunch of textbooks and manuals. He felt an ache in his chest, picturing Granfa Jeff, alone, spending his last days here. The man deserved better than that.

Tosh was watching him as if Victor’s expression would reveal a clue as to the purpose of the secret room.

Victor waved a hand at an empty desk. “Was there paperwork? Files? Computers?”

“He wiped the computers and destroyed the files.” Tosh made a motion with his fingers like a flower blossom opening. “Poof. It was trash by the time I looked.”

Victor massaged his arms and shoulders where Tosh’s hands had dug in. The books on the shelves covered a hodgepodge of topics. Renal function. Cell cycles.
The Mineralogical Handbook
. Victor thought briefly about the herbalism book he’d found in his granfa’s home office. He might have been referencing that too, looking for something.