That she slipped into the pocket of her hooded sweatshirt.
One-strapping her backpack, she left her lab, striding quickly down the corridor. Gerry’s division had two levels of clearance, the only lab at the firm that did. When it had come time for his level to be increased, she could remember him commenting on how he’d had to go down to Personnel and sign a bunch of documents. He’d also been fingerprinted, drug tested, and, as he’d said, all but microchipped like a dog at the vet’s.
The cafeteria was halfway between Sarah’s lab and the Infectious Disease division, and she steamed right by it. Security changed shifts at ten, something she’d learned from previous late nights, and she wanted to do her figural breaking and entering during the handoff.
When she came up to the IDD lab, her palms were sweating and she was breathing heavily. Taking the credentials out, she felt time slow to a crawl, and a part of her was all No! Don’t do this!
Because there was going to be no going back. Her face, her infiltration, was going to be recorded, and if she were wrong, if what she’d seen on Gerry’s USB drive was incorrect or if the program had been discontinued in the past two years, she was going to be fired and prosecuted for trespassing. And she was never going to work in her chosen field again because no research program in the country wanted to volunteer for a whistle-blower who’d cried wolf.
Plus she was going to be busy pulling an Orange Is the New Black for a while.
But then she thought of those scans. Those reports. All that cancer being pumped into a human being—
Her hand moved with a decisive swipe, and the nanosecond that followed took forever.
The light turned green. The air lock hissed.
She wasted no time going through the office part of the space and the layout was exactly the same as it was for her division, which was helpful. In the rear, over on the left, was another sealed door, and she swiped again, figuring it had to be for the lab.
That lock released as well for her, and as she pushed the heavy steel wide, she stopped.
Now, things were different, the orientation of clinical workstations and equipment not what she was used to. Didn’t matter, she told herself as she entered. Walking in between the stainless steel counters and shelving, she looked into every nook and cranny, the whirring sound of the nitrogen cooling units a familiar white noise in the background.
Everything was sparkling clean, from the microscopes to the stacks of supplies to the workstations. Nothing was out of order. Nothing was unusual.
She started to think she was nuts.
But come on, what had she expected? Secret panels sliding back to reveal a clandestine lab?
God, she might well accomplish nothing except career suicide tonight.
After she went through the space three times, she focused on the isolation unit. Behind panels of heavy clear glass, she could see the suit-up anteroom as well as a decontamination area, and beyond, an airlocked chamber with hazmat markings all over it.
The pass card got her into the suit room and she put on the protective gear quickly, pulling a baggy blue isolation suit over her backpack, covering her head and neck with a hood, and latching gloves on that went up nearly to her elbows. After making sure everything was attached correctly, she entered the work area with its negative airflow, its InterVac hood stations, and … nothing else.
The sound of her breathing in the echo chamber of the head protection only increased her anxiety and the clear plastic panel she had to look through made her feel like she were underwater.
To hook herself up to the oxygen feed, she pulled one of the tethers away from its ceiling mount and clicked the hose to an aperture on the back of the suit. Instantly, plastic-smelling air flooded the hood, and the artificial smell of it made her gasp for breath.
Telling herself to get over it, she went around the twenty-by-twenty room.
Sarah found the keypad on the far side of the workstations, and at first, she almost overlooked it, as the thing didn’t seem tied to any portal. But then she saw the ever-so-faint seam in the wall.
It was a door.
John was used to the seizures. He’d been getting them on and off ever since he’d entered the vampire world. His first one, that he had a concrete memory of at any