Bloodshot - Cherie Priest [132]
Room 451 didn’t have Bruner’s name affixed to it anyplace that I could see—even in the reverse letters on the other side of the glass—so I felt somewhat better about having missed it the first time around. Instead, upon the pane had been painted the legend OFFICE OF EXPERIMENTAL BIOENGINEERING RESEARCH, which I thought was tacky, if more or less correct. It took me a few precious seconds to parse it because hey, I don’t read backward very well, okay?
But I knew I was in the right place.
The office was nothing to write home about. In the center squatted a desk covered with two large phones, a beige desktop computer, and one of those big paper calendars that you treat like a place mat, and behind the desk was a wall of dull gray filing cabinets, two of which had their handles either broken off or rusted off. On the floor beside the desk was a wastepaper basket that had, alas, been freshly emptied. And stuck between the far right filing cabinet and the wall was a duffel bag that turned out to be full of clothes … the kind of clothes a man keeps around when he occasionally spends the night at the office—socks, underwear, a clean shirt, and a shoe-polishing kit. The polishing kit struck me as a little anal-retentive, but who am I to judge?
Something kept me rooted to the spot, staring at the certificates of commendation that were framed on the walls and wondering what kind of man could do the kinds of things he’d done. Did he not understand that the undead were people, too? Or did he disagree? Had a vampire bitten someone he cared about? Was he just a psychotic fucker who would destroy anyone he fancied?
Nothing gave me an answer. Not the cup full of mismatched pens and pencils, or the brown coffee mug without so much as a logo on it.
I went to the wall of cabinets and started with the one farthest from the door. With one ear on the commotion in the hallway (certain that at any second someone would hear me and come busting in), I began to pull them open—locked, all of them, but they all came loose with a twist of my pick, which was quieter than the yank-and-break method—and I started to dig.
Most of what I found, I didn’t understand. Code names, project names, and numbers … all of it swam together. I forced my eyes open and concentrated hard. In the fifth drawer I found a file labeled PBS. And as I knew, it probably didn’t stand for Public Broadcast Service.
But it didn’t stand for Project Bloodshot, either. “Project Bandersnatch,” I whispered to myself. I poked through it anyway, and swiftly realized that even ex-military asshats are positively stupid for continuity. One fast glance down the first few sheets told me that I’d found the right project—or one frighteningly similar to it. And a second fast glance told me these weren’t all old records. Some of this paperwork was dated within the last year.
“Officers.” I swallowed. “Subjects. Contacts …” All with Bruner on top of the letterhead. “Wait a second,” I said, momentarily forgetting that Adrian was several offices over, and not in immediate hearing range. I remembered flashing past a cabinet drawer labeled FUNDING, so I went back to my side of the cabinetry and located the folder corresponding to Bandersnatch.
I pulled it out and opened it. “Millions,” I said, again wishing I had someone handy to exclaim to. And all of it was going to the same set of numbers, same set of contacts, as Bloodshot. I didn’t have time to get too hung up on the tiny details; I could steal all this stuff and read it later at my leisure. But I couldn’t take my eyes off it.
Same officers, same numbers, same contacts. Same program, just lacking government oversight this time.
“Wait. Same contacts,” I mumbled, because once you’ve started talking to yourself, it’s hard to stop. I felt like an invisible pop-up ad had leaped off the page and was trying to flag me down.
Harvey Feist, James Ellison, David Keene, Richard Wing.
I singled out the name “David Keene.” I shook my head, feeling a flush creep up from the pit of my stomach. They