Seize the Night

possible clue.
    As we descended the stairs side by side, a flat metallic echo of my voice bounced immediately back to me at some points, while at other places the walls absorbed my words as effectively as the acoustical material that lines the broadcasting booth from which Sasha spins night music at KBAY.
    I said, “They scoured away virtually every trace of what they were doing here—every trace but one—and I don't think they were just concerned about protecting national security. I think … it's just a feeling, but judging by the way they totally gutted these three floors, I sense they were afraid of what happened here … but not just afraid. Ashamed of it, too.”
    “Were these some of the genetic labs?”
    “Can't have been. That requires absolute biological isolation.”
    “So?”
    “There would be decontamination chambers everywhere—between suites of labs, at every elevator entrance, at every exit from the stairwell. Those spaces would still be identifiable for what they were, even after everything was torn out of them.”
    “You have a knack for this detective crap,” Bobby said as we reached the bottom of the second flight of steps and kept going.
    “Awesomely smooth deductive reasoning,” I admitted.
    “Maybe I could be your Watson.”
    “Nancy Drew didn't work with Watson. That was Holmes.”
    “Who was Nancy's right-hand dude?” Bobby wondered.
    “Don't think she had one. Nancy was a lone wolfette.”
    “One tough bitch, huh?”
    “That's me,” I said. “There's only one room down here that might have been a decon chamber … and it's full-on weird. You'll see.”
    We didn't speak further as we proceeded to the deepest of the three subterranean levels. The only sounds were the soft scrape of our rubber shoe soles on the concrete and the crunch of dead pill bugs.
    In spite of the pistol-grip shotgun he carried, Bobby's relaxed demeanor and the easy grace with which he descended the stairs would have convinced anyone else that he was carefree. To some degree, he was enjoying himself. Bobby pretty much always enjoys himself, in all but the most extreme situations. But I'd known him so long that I—and perhaps only I—could tell that he was not, at this moment, free of care.
    If he was humming a song in his mind, it was moodier than a Jimmy Buffett tune.
    Until a month ago, I hadn't been aware that Bobby Halloway—Huck Finn without the angst—could be either rattled or spooked. Recent events had revealed that even this natural-born Zen master's heart rate could occasionally exceed fifty-eight beats per minute.
    I wasn't surprised by his edginess, because the stairwell was sufficiently cheerless and oppressive to give the heebiejeebies to a Prozac-popping nun with an attitude as sweet as marzipan. Concrete ceiling, concrete walls, concrete steps. An iron pipe, painted black and fixed to one wall, served as a handrail. The dense air itself seemed to be turning to concrete, for it was cold, thick, and dry with the scent of lime that leached from the walls. Every surface absorbed more light than it reflected, and so in spite of our two flashlights, we wound downward in gloom, like medieval monks on our way to say prayers for the souls of dead brethren in the catacombs under a monastery.
    The atmosphere would have been improved even by a single sign featuring a skull and crossbones above huge red letters warning of deadly levels of radioactivity. Or at least some gaily arranged rat bones.
    The final basement in this facility—where no dust has yet settled and no pill bugs have ventured—has a peculiar floor plan, beginning with a wide corridor, in the form of an elongated oval, that extends around the entire perimeter, rather like a racetrack. A series of rooms, of different widths but identical depths, open off one side of this corridor—occupying the infield of the track—and through some of them you can reach a second oval corridor, which is concentric with the first, not as wide or as long as the first, it is nonetheless enormous. This smaller racetrack rings a single central chamber: the egg room.
    The smaller corridor dead-ends at a connecting module through which you can enter the innermost sanctum. This transitional space is a ten-foot-square chamber accessed through a circular portal five feet in diameter. Inside this cubicle, to the left, another circular portal of the same size leads into the egg room. I believe these two openings were once fitted with formidable steel