When the Wind Blows - James Patterson [78]
He took down the first, labeled “AGE1,” and held it up to the light.
Floating in dark fluid were a dozen embryos no larger than marbles.
Kit thought he might lose it. Right there in somebody’s fancy office. He turned away and blew out hard. He finally calmed down a little. He looked back at the embryos.
Human, he thought. Little dead babies kept in a closet? God damn them!
He forced himself to study the embryonic heads, minuscule fingers and toes sloshing in the liquid. Silent and dead. His stomach was sloshing around pretty good, too.
Kit reached into the cabinet again and took out another large jar. He held it carefully in both hands. This one was marked “AGE2.” It contained another embryo collection much the same as the first. AGE3 and AGE4 were identical to the first jars.
The entire cabinet was filled to capacity with jars of embryos so similar that he couldn’t really differentiate between them.
He took up the third key and slipped it into the lock of a file cabinet standing to the left of the desk. The lock clicked. Kit slid open the top drawer.
Inside was an alphabetical arrangement of files: mundane interoffice memorandums, drafts of an untitled manuscript of some sort.
The middle drawer contained medical magazines dating back to the eighties and clippings from Der Spiegel, a German magazine, a clipping from the Times of London.
In the back of the bottom drawer, he found notebooks filled with formulas and data in scientific techese. It was frustratingly incomprehensible, but looked important. He decided to take a few of the smaller notebooks with him.
As he leafed through the papers, Kit felt a cold prickling at his back. It was too quiet in here, too quiet in general. Why had the lab suddenly been deserted? Abandoned? Why had the bird-children been left behind?
The embryos in the bottles looked long dead. Some of the drawings were flyspecked. Each manuscript was annotated, so marked up and crossed off, it looked as if the author had started, stopped, started again, then finally given up.
And how did all of this link up with Max and the four other children? The ones they’d found lying in their own waste, starving in the cages down the hall? The ones who were probably being put to sleep.
Kit heard a noise behind him and turned. It was only Frannie. He wanted to tell her everything, all at once.
“Come look at this amazing stuff. Tell me what you think.”
Chapter 82
THEIR ARROGANCE is absolutely astonishing. Like nothing I could begin to imagine,” I said angrily. My eyes were greedily taking in the elaborate line drawings on the walls.
Kit was emptying out a carton of documents onto the floor. He lifted up sheaves of paper to show me what he’d found.
“This box is filled with pictures and diagrams of wings. All kinds of wings. They were designing in here. Do you believe this?”
“More like redesigning,” I said, as I leafed through a fistful of the well-wrought line drawings. “Whoever made these drawings is definitely playing God, Kit.”
“It’s the group from Boston and Cambridge, the outlaws from MIT. They make their own rules. They always have. Anthony Peyser believes he’s above the rest of us and above the law as well. Look at these.”
He showed Frannie a half dozen memos to staff. At the bottom of each page was a handwritten A.P.…. Anthony Peyser.
I had been racking my brain trying to think if anyone I knew in the area might be Dr. Peyser. No one came to mind, and I had met most of the medical doctors and scientists in the area. David knew them all. Where could Peyser be hiding himself? Could this have been his office? Was he the mystery designer?
Kit sat in a desk chair in front of a computer. He was punching letters on the keyboard and a directory of contents had scrolled up.
“I’ve been calling up a few files at random. I haven’t been asked for a password once. The front door is wide open. Why? The keys to the files are hanging on the bulletin board and… Why?”
“Don’t ask me. I don’t get it either. Not yet.”
My eyes fell on a pile of the notebooks he’d spilled onto the floor. Whoever had