Page 60 of Hunter

“I’m all right.”

“No. You need to get some sleep.”

He considered the advice, then nodded. “First, I must turn on the recorder.”

“Yes.” She followed him down the hall and watched him open the access panel that hid the listening device.

After he reactivated it, they returned to the back of the house.

He hesitated outside his door, his gaze dark and intense. That look was enough to make her blood turn molten.

Before temptation overwhelmed her, she gave his hand a quick squeeze and went back to work. But she found she was still thinking about Hunter. She had never met a man like him—such a potent combination of competence and naiveté. Strength and wonderment. A man with no memories because they had been taken away from him.

At least that was what William Emerson had told her when he described Dr. Swinton’s research. At the time, it had sounded illegal and immoral. But what if it was actually worse than she imagined?

A terrible thought had been rattling around in her head since she had read the information on Ben Lancaster and seen his picture. Hunter was like a younger version of Lancaster. A younger identical twin.

Eyes narrowed, she went back to Swinton’s file. He had earned a medical degree from George Washington University. After a residency in neurology at Johns Hopkins, he had gone back to school at Hopkins to get a PhD in physiology. Then he had won a prestigious appointment to the National Institutes of Health where he had specialized in cutting edge research in genetics. Next, he had taken a research post at Berkeley, but he had been dismissed for illegal work on human fetuses.

After that, he had switched to animal research at a remote, privately funded laboratory in the Colorado desert. Not so far from Los Alamos, where Ben Lancaster had been working, she realized with a sudden start.

The lab had produced some notable successes in the cloning of animals.

Cloning!

She felt a wave of cold sweep over her as the force of the word hit her. Swinton had cloned animals. Would he dare to try it with human beings?

God, was she really thinking such things, Kathryn asked herself, her mind boggling as she tried to come to grips with the implications. It couldn’t be true! She didn’t want it to be true. Yet, she’d always been a logical person. Against her will, logic forced her mind to move on to the next step.

Cloning was the only way she knew to produce identical twins of different ages. And to clone Lancaster, Swinton wouldn’t have needed the whole body, simply a few cells. That she had progressed so far in her thinking in so short a time shocked her to the core. Her assumptions would make Swinton a lawless monster.

Silently, she got up and pulled on black sweatpants, tee shirt, and running shoes. Before the sun came up in a few hours, she was going to check out Building 22. Maybe it would turn out to be like Area 51 in Roswell, New Mexico, she told herself, the place where the Air Force was supposed to be hiding a UFO. But she wanted to see for herself.

She took out the thumb drive and held it in her hand. Hunter had told her to erase it. But the information she’d just read on Swinton was electrifying, and she hated to give up the chance to find out more about the other key players—particularly since Hunter had almost gotten himself killed bringing her the files.

The thought made her struggle for composure.

God, she must be the only person on this whole damn place who understood his basic humanity, his basic goodness.

Her vision clouded. Emerson must have been struggling not to laugh in her face when she told him she wanted to give Hunter the experience of a normal life. Emerson didn’t give a hoot about his welfare. Neither did any of the rest of them.

Her lips pressed into a grim line, she took another few minutes to carefully open a small hole in the seam of her pillow, stuff the thumb drive into the middle of the foam rubber layers, and sew up the seam with the mending kit from her suitcase. Then, for good measure, she turned the pillow around in its case.

Satisfied with the hiding place, she took a small flashlight from her emergency kit and exited through the bedroom window much as she and Hunter had climbed outside the night before.

The night was cool, and she shivered as she stood orienting herself to the map Hunter had drawn. Though she’d been to the research center before, she knew that things would look different in the dark. At least there was a gibbous moon, making it easier to pick her way through the woods behind the house. She came out onto a field about a block from the house and began to jog toward the research center. If anyone spotted her, she’d say she couldn’t sleep and had decided to see if exercise would help. Still, when she saw the lights of a car coming down the road, she faded into the shadows under the trees.

It was a patrol car, she noted, with a little shiver, as it passed. Apparently, the security force patrolled the grounds at night.

Staying away from the road as much as she could, she wound through the complex, stopping once more when she saw another vehicle approaching. With the two interruptions, it took her ten minutes to make it to the research building.

Building 22 was in back. The night patrol had made her careful, and she stood in the shadows of some oak trees, watching for activity, before cautiously moving forward and making a partial circle of the building. It was only one story, with a flat roof and metal doors on two sides. The moonlight did nothing to soften its stark lines, or the general impression that the exterior was in even worse repair then the rest of the facilities.

Now that she was here, she wished she had worked out a brilliant plan of assault. Probably it would be better to scope out the place tonight and come back tomorrow, she told herself. The approach was sound, though she suspected that it had as much to do with a failure of nerve as anything else. She didn’t want to prove her shocking theory. Yet she had to know one way or the other. So, after a nervous fifteen minutes during which she saw no sign of activity, she glided cautiously forward.

She half expected the nearest door to be locked. But the knob turned easily. As she pushed the door open, she started worrying about a silent alarm. Then she told herself that this place probably didn’t need one, since she was the only spy at Stratford Creek.

And not a very cool spy, she acknowledged, feeling her pulse race as she tiptoed down a tile corridor with painted cinder block walls illuminated by dim lights. Deep inside the building, she could hear air conditioning or other similar equipment running. After listening to the background noise for several moments, she crept ahead, feeling more and more vulnerable the farther she progressed into the interior.

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