“That’ll keep you toasty.”

“Sure will.” He gave her the credentials back. “I’ll see you on the flip side.”

“I’ll just be an hour or so. Checking on things.”

“Good deal.”

He closed his door. She put up her window. And then the twenty-foot-high chain-link gate trundled off to the side and the arm bar rose.

The lab compound was located a distance back from the guardhouse, and as she proceeded forward on the plowed two-lane drive, everything seemed both totally familiar and completely out of place. There was still this brilliantly lit road in with speed bumps every twenty yards or so and concrete barriers on either side. Still a vast, single-story complex connected by pediways. Still two parking lots to choose from, with spaces for a hundred or so vehicles.

As she headed to the right to leave off her car, one of BioMed’s roving security cops went by her in his marked sedan. She waved to him. He waved back.

And meanwhile, her mouth went so dry she couldn’t swallow.

There were a dozen or so cars, many of which she recognized, all of which were parked as close to the entrance as possible. She chose a spot she could drive through and face out.

God, she’d never had to think about making a getaway before. Then again, given the security here, if things went badly, like they were going to let her get back out here to the parking lot?

Disembarking with her backpack, she shut her car door and almost walked off without locking things. Her heart was still doing a sprint and a half behind her sternum, and the puffing of her breath into the cold air was so pronounced she looked around to see if she were being followed by anyone who would become suspicious. Could the FBI even get onto the property?

Probably not without a warrant.

A path had been shoveled and salted up the wide marble steps leading to the entrance, and as she got to the top landing, there was a familiar clunking sound as the lock was released upon her approach. Inside, she stopped in a vestibule that was heated and offered her card to the officer who was sitting behind a desk.

“You watching the Heat?” she asked as she heard a squawking under the counter.

“Sure am.” There was another beep as the guard scanned her ID. “They makin’ you work late again, Dr. Watkins?”

“Sure are.” She forced herself to smile casually. “What can you do.”

“Big boss man’s here tonight, too.”

Sarah hesitated as she put the lanyard around her neck. “Dr. Kraiten?”

“Yup. He came in with a couple of guys in suits.”

The FBI? she wondered.

“Well, it’ll be a party then.” She forced a smile. “I’ll see you on the flip side.”

She had no clue what she was saying or what he replied. And it took everything in her to wait calmly for the unlocking before she could enter the lobby of the facility.

Marble floors, white walls, long corridors in three directions. Security cameras everywhere.

As she walked off straight ahead, she was aware of the photographic portrait of Dr. Robert Kraiten that hung between an American flag and the New York State flag. He had famously started his first company with his roommate while still at MIT forty years before, and there had been many incarnations since, the mergers and acquisitions morphing the biotech firm into a global leader in pharmaceutical and medical device research. Kraiten, now in his early sixties, was probably worth a billion dollars, and he was showing no signs of slowing down. His original partner, on the other hand, hadn’t made it out of his forties.

She could remember Gerry telling her that the guy had come to a gruesome end when one of the labs had been burned down twenty years ago.

And didn’t that make her wonder now.

Kraiten, on the other hand, was most certainly thriving, even if she personally found his public persona cold and aloof. But maybe that was the secret to his success. Remaining detached from everything no doubt spared emotions when you had to make hard corporate decisions.

Without meaning to, she rerouted and stopped in front of the picture in its large silver frame. The black-and-white image did little to improve the severity and calculation of the man’s stare.

All she could think about was Gerry. And what secrets he had taken to his grave.

No, there was one other piece. She wondered who had put him up to it.

It required every kind of discipline for her to turn away and keep her pace slow and steady as she followed the corridors to her lab. As she went along, she was aware of every security pod in the ceiling, and she passed by a number of different research divisions. The office/lab setups were all the same, walls of frosted glass glowing with diffused light and preventing wayward eyes from divining anything of the work being performed behind coded doors.

There was no transparency anywhere. Even within the company, security clearances and access were parsed out like the place was the Pentagon and everyone was a spy. Hell, even the labs themselves were not titled by division names at their entrances, but rather a code of numbers that she still, four years later, didn’t completely understand.

Her own division was in the eastern corner of the complex, and she swiped her ID at the card reader by the steel door. As her clearance was accepted, there was the sound of an air lock releasing and then she was inside the front office portion of the layout.

This section looked like your bog-standard office space, cubicles with gray partitions lined up in a row, a conference table and a little break area off to one side. Her desk was over on the right and she went across and put her backpack on it. She had spent so many hours here in her chair, at her corporate computer, on her corporate phone, talking about her research, her discoveries, her clinical trials on how cancer cells could be killed by the immune system under the right conditions. Her contacts included colleagues, researchers and oncologists around the world.

She had done good work, she realized. In spite of everything that had happened with Gerry.

But she had already left, hadn’t she. As she looked around at her fellow BioMed employees’ cubicles, she saw pictures of husbands, wives, children, dogs. Knickknacks. Mementos. Dilbert science jokes. Internet memes.

There were a lot of Einstein riffs.

Her cubicle? Nothing. After Gerry’s death, she hadn’t been able to concentrate with pictures of him around, so she’d stashed them in the bottom drawer of her desk.

Taking a deep breath, she turned away and walked across the gray carpet to another set of frosted doors. Using her pass card again, she gained access to the laboratory itself, the temperature-controlled, largely sterile, stainless steel and white-tiled area full of microscopes, refrigerators, testing equipment, centrifuges.

One thing that had always been true of BioMed was that they spared little expense when it came to equipment.

For a moment, she forgot why she’d entered. Then she looked at one of the storage units of pathology slides. It was full of tumor and blood samples from patients who were the true heroes of the effort, the real ones that mattered, the pioneers braver than Sarah would ever be.

Although considering what she was up to tonight?

Well, she was certainly woman-ing up in a way she never could have foreseen.

As darkness finally fell, Murhder woke up in an unfamiliar room, although it took no time at all to recognize the modest contours of Xhex’s hunting cabin. He had slept upright in a chair in the little central room that he imagined would, were he to pull back the blackout drapes that covered every window, provide a view of the mostly frozen Hudson River, the wintered-up shores of the waterway, and Caldwell’s twinkling downtown buildings and highways on the far side.