CHAPTER FOUR
As they barreled down the dark, winding road, Yamada dialed a number on the burner phone and handed it back to Waterman, who continued steering with one hand. The call was answered immediately.
"How'd it go?"
"Good and bad," answered Waterman.
"Did you get a location?"
"Yeah, we know where the Machine is. But we have a very short window."
"How short?"
Waterman put his other hand on the wheel while braking through a tight turn. When the road straightened again, he brought the phone back toward his mouth. "Two days, maybe three. Until they realize Lagner is missing."
On the other end, Wayne Coleman calmly placed his own burner phone on the table in front of him and enabled the speakerphone, allowing Rachel Souza to listen in.
"Where's it at?"
"Prescott."
Coleman mulled for a moment. "Four hours away. Five max."
"Ask her if we can be ready that quickly."
Rachel spoke up. "I'm right here. I'm thinking."
Studying the road in front of him, Waterman slowed for another turn before straightening the Explorer and punching the gas. "Well?"
Rachel bit her lip, still thinking. "We don't have a lot of choices."
"No, we don't. The kid and I should be back by oh seven hundred."
In the small, darkened room, Rachel hovered over an old Formica table as she replied, glancing at her watch and then at Coleman, "We'll be ready."
Minutes later, Rachel burst through the door of her makeshift lab. The term "lab" was a stretch. It was an old bedroom converted into a stopgap workshop, with nearly every square foot packed with medical and diagnostic equipment. Several computers with their adjoining monitors and keyboards occupied one corner, and two small, glass-doored refrigerators with petri dishes and test tubes were in the other. And to the right, dozens of cages stacked one on top of another, creating a veritable wall of wire and mesh filled with hundreds of mice.
She methodically scanned cage after cage, examining over a hundred tiny "house" mice, also known by scientists as C57BL/6. The most common strain used in biomedical research. And to her relief, all were still moving.
Rachel exhaled, followed by a deep inhalation as if trying to prepare herself for what came next.
It was the moment of truth. They had finally located Lagner and, more importantly, the Machine. The one thing that was absolutely integral to their plan. What she did not expect, however, was how little time they would have.
It meant everything she had done had better be right. The testing, the experiments, all of the trials. The slow, painstaking process of gene editing was unforgiving, and the chance for error heightened under such a compressed timeline. Meticulously recording every test, every result, every detail, regardless of the outcome. All carefully documented, then tested again and again to ensure her end results were not just accurate, but predictable. She had gone through thousands of tiny subjects whose DNA was as close to human as she could get under the circumstances. And given their limited resources while working in complete secrecy. Everything she had done...had better be right.
It was the medical equivalent of working in someone's garage for nine months with nothing but duct tape and an ice box. Okay, that was an exaggeration. But it sometimes didn't feel far off. Toiling away in a room with no windows, minimal ventilation, and illuminated by the sterile overhead glow of fluorescent lighting.
Trying to reason her apprehension away, she turned and glanced behind her right shoulder at their strange contraption, centered upon a medium-sized table and shaped like a giant porcelain egg. Slightly marred and nicked from constant use, with thin wires emerging from every direction of the device. Thin silvery strands resembling a mass of wild, unkempt electronic hair. Snaking together less than two feet away into organized and braided bundles, running down the nearby wall where they disappeared into a much larger computer casing.
It was extremely crude, but it worked. A miniature version of the same Machine they had been hunting down. This one small and compact and just large enough to house her tiny C57BL/6 subjects.
