The Enclave (7 page)

Inexplicably, as he neared the director’s office, Cam’s heartbeat began to accelerate. His hands went cold and damp, and the underarms of his flannel shirt grew clammy—and he had no idea why. He’ d done nothing wrong and had nothing to fear. Besides, Swain liked him and he knew it. He’ d all but begged Cam to join his team.

“Good morning, Dr. Reinhardt,” said Deena Flynn, Director Swain’s senior secretary, as Cam drew up to her desk. “And congratulations.” Curly black hair framed her pretty porcelain-pale face, wide blue eyes, and fetching dimples.

Cameron blinked at her. “Congratulations?”

“On the Black Box Citation.” She regarded him with amusement. “Forgotten already?”

“Oh.” He smiled sheepishly. “Thank you. And good morning to you, too.”

She gestured toward the dark-paneled door in the dark-paneled wall behind her. “Go on in. He’s waiting for you.”

Cam rounded her desk and started toward the door. Suddenly a searing light exploded in his face and a thundering boom slammed him backward as it drove the breath from his chest. White heat flashed around him in the narrow, rough-walled tunnel and was gone. He stood reeling in the smoke that drifted before him, shifting ethereally in the beam of his head lamp. Sulfurous fumes stung his throat and nostrils, and he tried desperately not to breathe it in, but finally could not help himself.

As he gasped in the air his lungs demanded, the tunnel vanished and he was back in Swain’s reception area, heart pounding. Sweat drenched him, and his knees trembled so violently he feared they might give way at any moment.

“Are you all right, Doctor?” asked Deena from behind him.

He swallowed hard, drew another breath, and felt the trembling subside. “Yes,” he said as her chair squeaked and rolled back. He turned to give her a reassuring smile. “Must have been the elevator ride or something.”

A slim brow arched. “Or perhaps you are working yourself too hard again?”

He ducked his head in a combination nod and shrug, then turned to close the gap still between himself and Swain’s door. But as he grasped the pewter latch, he saw his hand still trembling and hesitated. Lifting his gaze to the dark, gleaming panels, he stood breathing softly, letting his pulse settle as he came to grips with the fact he’ d just had another flashback. His second in less than twenty-four hours.

What is going on?!
He’ d suffered post-traumatic stress disorder during and after his deployment twelve years ago, and for a time it had ruined his life. But God had found him in the mess he’ d made and pulled him out of it.
Oh, Father in heaven, please don’t let me go
back to that!

He heard Deena’s chair squeak behind him. She must have turned to look at him in renewed concern. Before she could speak, he drew himself together and pressed the latch.

Director Swain’s huge corner office, with its sweeping, high-–ceilinged expanse and odd dimensions, always gave him a sense of disorientation upon entry. Tinted floor-to-ceiling windows formed the two outer walls, providing a spectacular view of the Catalina Mountains looming to the south. Freestanding sculptures, replicas of ancient tomb decorations, and Canopic jars stood about the room, and the curving interior walls were lined with glass cases holding more artifacts than the state museum down in Tucson.

At first Cam thought Swain had stepped out, for the padded captain’s chair at his massive mahogany desk in the midst of the archeological assemblage stood empty.

Then a voice called, “I’m over here,” and Cam shifted position enough to see the director around the tomb panel that had obscured him. Swain stood at the south window peering through a telescope aimed at the grounds.

Wending his way through the artifacts and replicas, Cam felt his trembling increase and his chest grow tight. Thankfully he drew up beside the director without falling into another flashback, and his tension subsided. It helped to have the openness of the mountain view now spread before him.

Immediately below, the ziggurat’s two lower sections stairstepped down and away from them, their flat rooftops glaring in the midmorning sun. Beyond them sprawled the Institute’s desert campus, its inner mesquite park cradled between the long, curving berms formed of the earth that had been removed from what was now the ziggurat’s multilevel basement. Paved and graveled paths wandered throughout the park, past several ramadas, a central bricked plaza, and a small lake as they linked the various outbuildings and maintenance buildings with each other and the zig.

To the right, about halfway down the bowl’s slope, stood the white-walled clinic Cam had left some fifteen minutes ago. Beyond it, scattered across the northwestern berm and continuing up the surrounding hillsides beyond were the guest casitas, meeting rooms, and office buildings of the Fountains of Eternal Life Health Resort—adobe walls a warm contrast with the oak and cottonwood trees surrounding them. Between it and the ziggurat, the red-granite slabs of Swain’s avant-garde Black Box Theater lifted from the side of the berm like a hatching pterodactyl.

The director, a wireless headset clipped to his right ear, had focused his telescope toward the southeastern boundary of the Institute’s property, where a dissipating dust cloud rose off the distant draw that Cam knew lay just inside of the perimeter fence. He glimpsed a bit of the eight-foot-tall chain link, in fact, but only because he knew where to look.

Face still pressed to the eyepiece of his scope, Swain said, “Where is it exactly that you run on these morning jaunts of yours?”

Cam blinked. “Where do I run?”

Swain straightened from the scope to regard him blandly. “I was up early this morning—well, I’m up early every morning—and I saw you coming out of the desert down there by that ramada.” He gestured toward the freestanding porchlike structure southeast of the park. “About half an hour after dawn. So where exactly do you go?”

Cam eyed the telescope, unnerved to think that Swain had been watching him at 5:30 in the morning. He turned his gaze to the wooded hillsides, taking comfort in the fact he’ d done most of his run in the dark.

“I just go over the east berm, up the draw, and loop back on the trail there,” he said, forcing himself to meet Swain’s gaze. “Why?”

“Did you see anyone or anything unusual?”

“Just one of our vans. It was parked near one of those abandoned mine shafts. I assumed it had something to do with the search for last night’s intruder.” He paused. “I take it you haven’t found him?”

“No.” Swain returned to his scope. “Do you run every day, then?”

“Except Sunday.” Cam was certain Swain knew the answers to these questions.

“Of course, not Sunday,” Swain said, giving him a sidelong smirk. “Well, I suppose given the level of dedication you devote to other areas of your life, that’s hardly surprising. Still, I must warn you—it’s dangerous out there, especially in the dark. You could stumble into a mine shaft or step on a snake. . . . How long does it take you?”

Shrugging, Cam turned his gaze toward the view. “About an hour.” He traced his route with his eyes. “I have a head lamp. And I like to be outside. Like to see the sunrise and be alone to think.” Though Swain’s questions were superficially innocuous, Cam always had the sense that the man was playing with him, leading him to places he didn’t realize he was going until it was too late. The director’s personal magnetism was undeniable, and every time Cam was with him he felt its power— an assurance of affection, an invitation to relax and let down his guard with a kindred spirit, a benevolent authority. Yet the eyes, the mind, missed nothing.

“I thought you used the time to listen to those Bible lessons you download from the Internet every night,” said Swain as he straightened and picked up the beige polishing cloth hanging from the telescope’s tripod.

“Well. Yes. I do.”
So he knows about those, does he?

“I’ll bet you use the time to pray, as well.”

“Sometimes.”

“My father used to pray at dawn,” Swain said, carefully wiping down the telescope’s eyepiece and knobs where he’ d touched them.

Okay. So
that’s
where this is going. . . .

Swain had declared months ago that his parents, both deceased, had been devout Christians, a failure for which he’ d never forgiven them. Despite their increasingly desperate methods of evangelization, he’d refused to believe in Jesus. The whole idea of God demanding a blood sacrifice for the sins of the world, he said, was simply bizarre and barbaric. What kind of God would find red corpuscles and plasma a satisfactory payment for man’s supposed transgressions? Swain’s father, a pastor, had never been able to answer the question to his satisfaction. In fact, he’ d apparently never tried, furious at his son’s audacity for asking it at all.

“He was a fool,” Swain said now, hanging the cloth on its hook. “Did not read—except the Bible, of course. Did not think! Heaven forbid he should ever seriously and thoughtfully entertain a concept that challenged his belief system! My mother was even worse. Anything they didn’t understand—which was almost everything—they ascribed to the devil.”

And the devil, in Swain’s view, was nothing but an invention of religion, a nonexistent bogeyman used by one group of men to control another.

He sighed at Cam’s side. “Faith is for fools, boy.”

“So you’ve said.” In the distance something flashed, and shortly a new dust cloud arose. There must have been another vehicle out there, hidden behind the foliage.

After a moment, Swain sighed again and chided, “Are you just going to let me say that, when we both know you disagree?”

“If we both know I disagree, why do I need to express it?”

“Because I want to hear your refutation. Give me a good reason to change my mind.”

“There’ll never be a good enough reason for you, sir. You don’t want to change your mind.”

“Are you saying I’m close-minded?”

“Your words, sir, not mine.”

“Humor me, then. I want to hear your reasoning.”

Cameron sighed. “Faith is for everyone, sir. You have faith yourself every time you get in your helicopter and take off—faith that it’s been properly maintained and that the pilot is not going to make any mistakes.”

“That’s not faith, boy. That’s certainty. I make it my business to know what the maintenance schedules are, and I see that they are followed. As for my pilot, he is a personal friend who has served me for years and proven his capability over and over.”

“So it is with my God.”

“A personal friend?” Swain turned to him with cocked brow, skepticism raising the pitch of his voice. “Proven His competence over and over, has He? Which is why you were all but fired from Stanford? Accused of doing something you did not do and never would?”

Cam met his employer’s gaze with an arched brow of his own. “But that all led to my coming here, did it not? And in the end, my position was vastly improved.”

Swain met his gaze silently, and Cam could sense his irritation warring with his pleasure at the compliment. Finally he smiled and stepped back with a nod. “Very well, I’ll give you that one. For now.”

He headed back to his desk. “It
is
dangerous out there, though,” he said over his shoulder as Cam followed. “You never know what you’re going to meet on the trail.”

Swain sat in his captain’s chair and gestured Cam into one of the two facing chairs across the sea of wood. On its flat surface, a five-inch cube of black glass balanced on end atop a stand of three curved silver prongs—the Institute’s iconic Black Box. Beside it sat a silver tray bearing a matching pitcher, two empty glasses, and a folded cloth napkin.

As Cam settled into the thickly upholstered chair, the director touched a spot on the desk’s flat, until now invisible control panel, and the window-wall behind him darkened. Then, folding his hands on the desk, Swain fixed his gaze on Cam and said, “Frederick is convinced you’re a spy, you know.”

“A
spy
?!”

Swain’s eyes stayed upon him. “You didn’t exchange your coat for McHenry’s on purpose?”

“Why would I do that?”

“So someone else could pick it up?”

Cam regarded him dubiously. “Frederick thinks I’m in league with the night janitor, then? Who is
also
a spy?”

“He’s not sure.”

“He’s paranoid, is what he is. And he’s never liked me.”

“True. He’s jealous of you. But his concerns are valid. We’re pretty sure the last hack job was done by someone inside. And our security has been picking up encrypted transmissions lately from somewhere on-site. . . .”

The director turned his attention to the Black Box on his desk, reaching out to stroke it gently, his fingertips leaving ripples of fading color in their wake. Watching him do so filled Cam with an inexplicable restless discomfort, and he worried another flashback might be about to seize him.

“Why
did
you throw the coat away?” Swain asked quietly.

An image of the bloodied handprint flashed before Cam’s eyes as the light flickered at the edges of his world and dizziness swooped upon him. He swallowed and focused on the silhouette of the Egyptian frieze looming at Swain’s right shoulder. “I . . . guess I thought it was unsalvageable.” He explained about the handprint but did not mention the flashback, nor his sudden irrational fear of the coat.

When he finished, Swain looked genuinely puzzled. “But to leave a bloody handprint on her lab coat would mean his hand was bloody
before
he shoved her. And wasn’t it the shove that was supposed to have caused Ms. McHenry’s cut?”

Cam frowned at him. “Perhaps he had a preexisting injury.”

“You’re sure it was a handprint you saw, and not just random blood spatters?”

The question immediately recalled the bloody image to Cam’s mind and, lurking behind it, others he was certain he did not want to recall. He was trembling again, his chest tightening, prickles of adrenaline washing over him. Swain’s blue eyes bored into his own. He swallowed, tore them from the other man, and focused on the mountains outside the smoky windows. “It’s what I thought at the time. . . .”

“And at the time you were somewhat rattled, I understand. Frederick said you were white as a sheet and unusually distracted, even for you. He thought you might pass out.” Swain paused. “You’re not one of those who faints at the sight of blood, are you?”