The Bari Bones Read online

  As they were ushered back onto the pale red concrete path, the guard’s sweaty palms tightened around Sam’s wrists and it promptly occurred to him that the guards had never searched them for weapons. Behind him the guard still puffed heavily in the wake of the adrenaline-charged event that had disturbed their routine night patrol and, as the sudden surge of stress slowly disappeared from his body, he finally found the courage to speak to his colleague again—no doubt comparing notes or possibly to check if they had followed the correct protocol. They brought their trespassers to a halt in front of the seamless glass door at the front of the tall building. The short one barked a sudden command at his partner before he pushed Alex closer to Sam handing her into his partner’s custody. Alex and Sam patiently watched as the guard moved his body one glass panel to the left and stared directly at his own image where it reflected back at him through the mirrored pane. An instant later, a thin green horizontal line moved over his body before he was prompted to press his left palm against the glass. The green outline of his hand flashed back before the glass door in front of Alex and Sam receded and silently slid sideways.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Behind them the glass door promptly moved back into place as if there had never been a door there at all. It was as if they had stepped into a brightly illuminated alien ship of some kind. Beneath their feet the shiny, white floor squeaked under the guards’ shoes as they nudged their prisoners forward into the expansive entrance. From the inside, the glass windows had now transformed into stark white walls which surrounded them entirely. There was no ceiling above their heads. Instead, an open shaft escaped high up into space between floor upon floor that surrounded the atrium’s outer edges. As they were ushered toward a pair of matching stark white capsules positioned on the furthest end of the massive space, a three-dimensional image of a friendly Chinese hostess erupted from the floor in front of them. Startled by the hologram, Sam unintentionally broke free from the guard’s grip as he sidestepped the coherent light source, sending the guard into a sudden flare of panic.

  “It’s all good, mate. Just got a fright,” Sam said calmly and allowed the frazzled guard to wrap his sweaty palms around his arms again. Along the walls several glass panes had been replaced by digital screens upon which silent images of a red and white helix, happy children playing on a playground, and a contrasting funeral scene rotated in random sequence before it ended with the bright red Infinitech logo.

  When they reached the enormous twin pods the shorter guard placed his palm on the capsule wall after which the bottom three-quarters of the pod receded into the floor while the top remained hovering in the air.

  “Get!” the guard barked at Alex and Sam, prompting them to move forward under the pod umbrella before they stepped in with them. As suddenly as the pod’s wall receded it advanced back into position, closing them inside the pod. A short command left the guard’s mouth and Alex and Sam felt what they had now determined was in fact an elevator, descend below the building. When the elevator pod opened after just a few seconds, they stepped out into a shiny stainless-steel corridor that appeared as sterile as the area they had just left, except it was far less inviting. Instead of the shiny white floor their feet now moved over a gridded metal floor and, to Sam, it felt as if the steel walls and ceiling were closing in on him. It was as if they were walking upright through a ventilation duct. Sam nervously looked sideways at Alex who seemed as on edge as he did. When they reached the end of the long ‘duct’ Alex and Sam were somewhat pleasantly surprised to be stopped by a far more ordinary looking metal door. Again, as with the last two doorways they had passed through, the guard’s hand unlocked the door and they felt themselves being shoved inside a small windowless steel room before the guards disappeared and the door locked behind them.

  “What is this place?” Alex finally spoke.

  “Quite something, isn’t it? I’ve heard China had mind-blowing technology, but this is on an entirely different level.”

  “Their computer technology might be mind-blowing but their security needs work,” Alex announced as she pulled a hairpin from her back pocket and promptly set about unlocking her handcuffs before freeing Sam from his. Alone in the steel box they each traced their eyes along the solid steel walls in search of a camera or microphone before, having found none, settling on the floor against one of the walls.

  “How many floors below ground do you think we are?” Alex asked Sam.

  “Who knows how fast that weird capsule elevator goes. Your guess is as good as mine.”

  Alex glanced at her watch. “Well, we have a few hours until sunrise. My guess is they’ll wait until morning before they report us.”

  “The way I see it, we have two choices,” Sam said with a twinkle in his eyes.

  “Oh, I know that look Sam Quinn. Handcuffs I can get out of. An electronic door, not so much.”

  “We should at least try, right?” Sam was already on his feet inspecting the door. His hands glided along the narrow outlines of the door. There was no door handle, digital pad or anything similar. He placed his ear against the steel panel but heard nothing and then tried pushing his body against it.

  “Told you,” Alex mocked as she let her head drop back against the wall behind her and continued to watch Sam’s hands move over every inch of the door. Yet, it yielded nothing. He stood back from the door and placed his hands on his hips staring at the door.

  “There has to be a way to open this door,” he expressed in frustration.

  “There isn’t, Sam. At least not without the guy’s hand. We should get some sleep. If nothing else this place is clean enough to eat off the floors.”

  Sam had just about turned to follow her advice when he blurted out, “That’s it! The guy’s hand!”

  He crossed to the opposite pane. “It was his left hand, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, why?”

  But Sam didn’t answer. Instead his knuckles eagerly rapped the approximate area on the steel panel where the guard had placed his hand to unlock the door while he pressed his left ear flush against the panel.

  “What are you…?”

  “Shh!” he flung back at Alex and continued to knock against the panel.

  When the hollow echoes subsided and instead a solid dull thump reverberated from behind where his knuckles hit the steel, he stopped.

  “Got it!”

  “Got what?” Alex asked, rising to join him at the door.

  “The digital box. It’s here.” Sam had placed his palm flat against the panel, his fingers fanned.

  “It won’t open without the security guy’s palmprint, Sam.”

  “How soundproof do you think it is in here?” Sam asked an arbitrary question ignoring her skepticism.

  “No idea. Why does that even matter right now?” Alex said confused as she carefully surveyed Sam’s face. It was very evident his mind had gone off on its own mission.

  “Stand back,” Sam ordered and pulled his gun from under his jacket before aiming it directly at the invisible digital box hidden behind the metal wall.

  He fired a single shot into the wall long before Alex had made sense of his plan. A few sparks burst from the bullet hole in the wall as Sam waited for the door to open. But it didn’t. He instantly fired off another bullet which caused a much bigger set of flashing lights produced by the sudden disruptive electrical charge. The door clicked and sprang away from the surrounding walls.

  “Are you staying or coming with?” Sam mocked as Alex stood mesmerized by his successful breakout; she simply smiled with admiration.

  The duct-like corridor was undisturbed when they popped their heads around the doorway before they stealthily moved along the gridded steel floor. When they reached the very spot where the capsuled elevator had spat them out, there was nothing but a clear steel shaft in its place. A low railing surrounded the inside of the shaft behind which there was nothing but darkness. Peering up into the dark shaft the underbelly of the capsuled pod was barely visible roughly fifty
feet above them. They stepped back scouring for another way out then Alex, staring down the long passage that continued beyond their holding cell suggested, “Let’s go that way.”

  Their feet thumped on the lattice steel squares as they hurried down the corridor, passing the room they had just escaped from before the passage suddenly turned ninety degrees to the right. They had just turned the corner when the short hallway suddenly stopped at the bottom of a spiral steel staircase. Taking caution Sam looked up but, unable to see beyond the darkness, quickly started ascending the stairs with Alex closely behind him.

  With their guns held in position, they quietly made their way up the multitude of steel steps, estimating that they had long since passed the fifty-foot mark. When it finally stopped at a small landing that opened up into a stark white corridor, it had become apparent that they must have reached one of the floors that extended above the capsule elevator in the main entrance.

  “Wait!” Alex called out to Sam as he moved to exit the landing.

  “There’s a camera,” she whispered, pointing to its position directly above the small doorway. The flashing red light indicated it was on. With their backs against the inside walls on either side of the entrance into the passage they each surveyed along the length of the white corridor.

  “Clear,” Alex whispered to which Sam echoed the same. They fixed their eyes on the small camera above their heads as it slowly swiveled away from the end of the passage.

  “Now,” Sam signaled before they stepped out and swiftly moved down the sterile corridor away from the camera’s view.

  Alex paused when the wall suddenly gave way to the large window to a laboratory. Inside several cages of white mice lined the surface of a long stainless-steel table. Her eyes settled on one particular cage that bore the mutilated bodies of three dead mice. It repulsed her, realizing they had been the unfortunate subjects of a bad experiment.

  “This way.” Sam urged her towards a cloakroom when he caught sight of the camera that was slowly making tracking its way back to them. And not a moment too soon.

  Safely out of sight from the camera’s eye, they slipped into a changing room. Rows of red lockers stretched down the center of the room, mirrored by several more that lined the walls on both sides. The striking sound of a locker door closing came from somewhere in the back of the locker room before they heard footsteps moving towards them. Unable to retreat back into the range of the camera’s lens in the passage they froze. Staring down the two aisles on either side of the row of lockers along the center of the room, ears strained in an effort to distinguish the imminent approaching footsteps, they waited in silence. Allowing her instincts to direct her, Alex pulled Sam toward the left aisle where they each turned and paused in front of a locker. Now, only separated by the back to back row of lockers between them, they anxiously listened as the footsteps moved along the floor and disappeared into the hallway. Relieved she had trusted her intuition, Alex continued further into the room in search of any more unexpected employees, and soon discovered they were alone. At the end of the rows of lockers Sam spotted a container and lifted its lid to reveal a pile of worn lab coats. He reached in and pulled out two coats which they promptly slipped on. Alex found herself staring at the embroidered red logo on Sam’s chest, pulled out the patch of fabric from her pocket and flattened it against the image. There was no mistaking it. Infinitech was indeed behind their attacks.

  Chapter Twenty

  Camouflaged in their stolen white lab coats they quietly set off through the facility in search of answers. They passed several research rooms that were thankfully unoccupied as a result of it being outside normal working hours. Alex took note of the surveillance cameras that were strategically placed along the corridors, as they made every effort to play the part of Infinitech employees. When the nearest camera’s angle changed it afforded Alex the brief opportunity to tug on a laboratory’s door in the hope that it would open, but it didn’t. So they continued on and, after trying several more doors with no success Alex started getting anxious. Walking aimlessly up and down the corridors was not helping their disguise or getting them any nearer to finding the answers they sought.

  “We need to find a way off this floor, Sam. We’ve been walking up and down these white halls for some time now and sooner or later an overzealous guard monitoring these cameras will catch on and come for us. There has to be an elevator or stairs to another floor here somewhere.”

  “I agree, but all I see are unoccupied research labs and by my reckoning it won’t be long before real employees start arriving for work or someone discovers that we escaped from our underground prison. The best we can do right now is to keep moving.”

  Passing yet another locked research room, Sam snatched a clipboard from where it hung on a hook attached to the door. Using it as a prop in order to pass one more CCTV camera they turned down the next empty corridor. Relief washed over them when they stumbled upon an elevator.

  “Bingo!” Sam exclaimed; although his excitement was possibly more due to the fact that the elevator had ordinary buttons to press and didn’t require any complicated handprint identification.

  “Up or down?” he asked, knowing Alex’s intuition was worth more than a haphazard guess at this point.

  “Up,” she answered quickly.

  When the white elevator doors closed them inside, the silence soon broke into a high-pitched nasal vocalist whose traditional Chinese song accompanied them all the way to the forty-second floor. The elevator took less than sixty seconds before the doors opened and they found themselves staring into a sizable office that stretched out in front of them.

  “So this must be the boss’s office,” Sam commented when the pair stepped out onto the luxurious bamboo crafted floor and they gazed out across the entire Bio Island through the three-hundred-and=sixty-degree floor to ceiling windows that wrapped around the elevator situated in the middle of the room.

  “This is what I call a corner office,” Sam added, still mesmerized by the grandeur of it all.

  “We don’t have a lot of time, Sam. We need to find the manna and whatever proof we can lay our hands on that points to the priest’s murder.”

  Alex had already yanked open the narrow drawer that stretched the length of the pristine desk that was magnificently crafted in shades of red, green and burnt umber which transmuted into black towards the flared legs that looked much like swords. When she found nothing but a letter opener and a newspaper written entirely in Chinese, she slammed the drawer shut and stared at the writhing dragon painted on the bare tabletop.

  “There’s nothing here. Not one single piece of paper or file that tells us who this company is and why they killed to get the manna.”

  Frustrated and at a loss what to do next they circled around the elevator through the large office that contained nothing but the single desk and a few chairs.

  “We’re missing something, Sam. Why have this enormous office with no furniture except an empty desk in one corner? There’s not even a computer or a television screen. Nothing,” Alex muttered.

  “Maybe it’s just that, an empty office. With a billion-dollar view, of course,” Sam said.

  But Alex wasn’t convinced and she continued to pace across the bamboo floor. In a moment of frustration she threw her head back to stretch out a knot in her neck and caught a glimpse of an oddly shaped circular panel in the ceiling above her head. She paused and stared at the inconsistency between the otherwise square roof panels that surrounded it.

  “That’s odd.”

  “What?” Sam asked, then stood gazing up at the spot she had pointed out.

  They were standing in the middle of the large empty space on the other side of the elevator.

  “If I didn’t know better I’d expect water to rain down from it. It almost looks like one of those ostentatious showers,” Alex said as she tried to solve the puzzling anomaly above their heads.

  Sam waved his hands above his head as if he was flagging down a taxi.
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br />   “What are you doing?” Alex giggled.

  “Trying to activate the sensors, but nothing’s happening. If it were a shower we’d both be drenched by now.”

  “I don’t think it’s a shower. It’s something else. We need to look for a button or a remote,” Alex ventured.

  Alex found herself back at the desk, gliding her hands across the surface and underneath the scrolling apron that ran around the desk’s top. When she found nothing she smoothed her hands down all four of the sword-like legs.

  “Nothing here,” she reported, while Sam’s hands searched the paneling around the elevator.

  Alex stood back and inspected the desk from every angle before she found herself once again staring down at the ornately painted dragon, her eyes peering deep into the dragon’s black eyes. Her hands rested, much like Father Guido’s had back at the Basilica di Nichola, as she remained fixed on its eyes. Something about it seemed strange and she traced her fingers over the two black circles. Instantly they turned a glowing red beneath her fingers, prompting her to snatch her hand to her chest fearing she might have triggered an alarm. Sam’s voice bellowed from behind the elevator, summoning Alex to join him. She found him staring at a digital laser display that had appeared from the odd shaped panel in the ceiling and projected through almost the entire space. The hologram ran from the ceiling to the floor and was visible from any direction. They stood in awe, watching the screen share several images of lab technicians at work while a honey-toned female voice shared an introduction to Infinitech in perfect English. Enthralled by the sophisticated private audio-visual tour on display in front of them they took it all in, hypnotized by its high-tech delivery.