The Gender Experiment: (A Thriller) (9 page)

He didn’t have a beard, so she assumed he carried shaving stuff in his pack, among other things. She couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be homeless and have to worry about where to brush her teeth twice a day. She wanted to ask him, but didn’t know him well enough to get that personal.
They’d just slept in the same bed!
The thought made her smile.

“What? Is it my hair?”

“No. I’m just wondering what it’s like to be homeless.”

“In one word? Challenging. I hope you never find out.” He gulped down the rest of his coffee. “The hardest part was selling my laptop and not being able to sit down and write whenever I wanted.” He shook his head. “But I’m making a comeback.” He squinted at her. “I’m worried about having enough time to access the files today. Are you game for breaking into the clinic now before it opens?”

Was he serious?
“It’s a medical facility, run by the military. I’m sure it has an alarm.”

Jake laughed. “Right.” He started brewing another cup of coffee. “Hand me the flash drive, then give me five minutes to get ready. I say we do this right after it opens at eight. The administrative staff probably doesn’t arrive until nine.”

Fewer employees was a good thing. “We’ll park a few blocks away. If they call the police, we can run and meet at my car. That way, they won’t get the description or license plate.” She handed him the thumb drive.

“I like your thinking. Shows a criminal nature.” He grinned and sauntered into the bathroom.

Thirty minutes later, they stood in front of the doors, with a soft morning sun struggling to illuminate the cold concrete building. Taylor fought the urge to shiver, keeping one hand under her fake belly bulge the way she’d seen pregnant women do. She caught her reflection in the glass and winced. Having children wasn’t in her future. She had a uterus but no ovaries. Another reason she didn’t feel like a real woman.

“Ready?” Jake sounded nervous for the first time.

“Not really.” They had discussed at least five scenarios for how this might play out, but most of them ended with her leaving in a hurry. Jake was prepared to exit out the back or push through an alarm door if confronted. He’d pulled on a baseball cap to hide his face from security cameras, and she wore a scarf that covered her chin. Plus the cheap reader glasses they’d picked up at the pharmacy across the street.

“As the saying goes, just do it.” Jake gave her a little push, and Taylor stumbled toward the door. His plan was to slide in, unobserved, once she had the receptionist’s attention.

Inside, the heat helped her body relax. Only one patient waited in the wide, blue-and-gray themed lobby. The woman looked about six months pregnant, and a toddler slept in her lap. Taylor moved slowly to a seat on the other side, far from the door, and held her mouth in a grimace. The worry was real, but she wanted to convey pain too. The receptionist looked up. The same young woman with the tight bun. Not good. She spotted Taylor and scowled.

Oh no.
Taylor’s heart started to hammer. Had Tight Bun recognized her even with the glasses and scarf? Maybe the clerk was just annoyed that she hadn’t come to the counter to check in. Taylor winced and leaned forward, hoping to keep the receptionist focused on her. She made small moaning noises and glanced sideways at the door. Jake was walking toward a drinking faucet near the front. Taylor sat up. Tight Bun rounded the front counter and came out into the lobby. Perfect. Tight Bun’s back had been toward Jake when he crossed the carpeted room, and now Taylor couldn’t see him at all. He was good at this.

She leaned over again, not wanting the receptionist to get a good look at her face, and let out a louder moan.
Oh god.
She couldn’t believe she was doing this.

“Miss, do you have an appointment?”

Taylor ignored her and moaned louder.

“What’s your name? I need to get you checked in so a doctor can see you.” Annoyance overrode the receptionist’s concern.

“I don’t have an appointment.” Taylor spoke slowly through her fake pain. “I think I’m in labor.” She drew in a sharp breath and winced. Time to get on the floor. Taylor pushed up with one hand on the arm of the chair, the other gripping her padded belly. As soon as she was standing, she let herself collapse. Her knees hit first with a painful twinge, then she flopped over on her side. The scarf fell off the bottom of her face, but it didn’t matter. The receptionist wasn’t looking at her any more. Tight Bun had turned away and started yelling for assistance.

Jake steered away from the exam rooms and hurried down a short, dead-end hall with three closed doors. In the lobby behind him, he heard the receptionist shout for help. A moment later, Taylor let out a sharp cry. The girl was giving it her all.
Sweet.
He’d half expected her to bail out. The door directly in front of him started to open. He grabbed the knob on his left and turned hard. Locked.
Damn.
A woman in a dark suit stepped out. With heels, she was taller than he was and either a rough thirty-five or a well-preserved fifty.

“My wife needs help,” Jake said. “I think she’s in labor.” He reached for the woman’s arm, expecting her to pull away.

She did, moving rapidly toward the lobby, her pumps clicking on the laminate floor. “Who’s her doctor?”

“I can’t remember.” Jake lagged behind. “Give me a minute and I’ll find his name.” He pulled out his cell phone, as Taylor cried out in another room.

“Call for an ambulance,” the director shouted over her shoulder. “We don’t do deliveries here.”

Jake waited for her to exit the end of the hall, then spun back and charged into her office. He had six to ten minutes at most. He closed the door and sat down in front of her computer, which she’d left on. After a few false starts, he found the shared server. He conducted a broad search, using the word
archive
, then tried again with the date
1995
, the year the drug had likely been administered. A list of files displayed on the monitor.
Yes!
The military had probably been the first major organization to create digital medical records. They likely still had paper copies too, but those could be in a storage unit on the base.

Jake pulled the flash drive from his jeans pocket and searched for an empty USB port. He found one on a hub behind the laptop. After inserting the drive, he scanned the file names.
Patients A-F,
Patients G-M
,
Patients N-Z
were the top three listings. The intersex babies could be mixed in among all the other patients, and the files were huge. He didn’t have time to download even one. He skimmed farther on the list and spotted two folders near the bottom of the monitor. An entry called
Gender Exp. Protocol,
followed by another file,
Subjects 1995/96
.

Score!
An experiment, just as Taylor had guessed. He left-clicked on the file and chose the download option. A dialogue box opened and asked for his password.
Shit!
He clicked on the email app and typed
password
into the search bar. A message opened that contained a list of pass codes the director had sent herself, and the second one was labeled
work
. If he were a real criminal, he could have wiped out her bank account in the next few hours. But all he cared about was the medical experiment conducted at this clinic twenty-one years ago.

After he pasted the passcode into the security box, the files began to download. Jake glanced at the clock on the computer monitor, but the numbers meant nothing. He hadn’t looked at the time before he started. How many minutes left? He listened for footsteps in the hall and bounced on his well-worn shoes.

Without warning, the door opened and someone said, “Karen.” As the younger woman’s mouth dropped open to process the scene, Jake gave her a charming smile. “I’m with IT. The hospital sent me over to correct a glitch in the data-sharing software.” He nodded toward the front of the building. “Karen’s dealing with an emergency out front. Someone’s in labor.”

“I heard.” The woman turned toward the hall to listen.

Jake pulled out the flash drive and slipped it into a secret pocket inside his jeans. He’d bought the pants at the Goodwill, and they’d probably belonged to a druggie. Now he had to get out of the building and call Taylor when he was clear. Her ringing phone would signal her to shut down the show and get moving. “I think I fixed it. I’ll test it from the other end.” Jake moved toward the door.

The woman eyed him suspiciously. “I don’t recognize you. Let me see your ID.”

Jake kept smiling and walked into the hall. He patted his shirt pocket. “I think I left it in the car. But don’t worry, I have it.” He let out a stressed laugh. “I can’t get back on base without it.”

The emergency exit was around the corner and ten feet away. The front exit was more like fifty yards—and with a crowd watching. He strode toward the hallway intersection.

The woman followed him, talking excitedly. “I don’t know how you got back here without your identification. Karen wouldn’t allow that.”

When he spotted the side exit, Jake bolted for it. “I parked out here,” he called over his shoulder.

Behind him the woman yelled, “Security!”

Two hours earlier

Devin pulled into the parking lot across from the obstetrics clinic. In the dark quiet of the early morning, she had her pick of spaces. Another hour of sleep—even in the crappy motel bed—would have been nice, but she couldn’t lose her targets again. She’d watched Lopez’s apartment for a while the night before, but she and Wilson hadn’t shown up. Devin had driven south, guessing the pair would head for Colorado Springs and the obstetrics clinic in search of more information. She expected them to turn up sometime this morning. They would be in for a surprise.

For an hour, she sat, waited, and watched, as she had the night before in front of Lopez’s apartment. Her training as a sniper had taught her to quiet her mind while remaining hyper alert. To get into that state, she tapped into her animal instinct, the part of the brain that didn’t think or process but simply survived.

A car engine slowed, and she snapped to attention. A white sedan pulled into the clinic parking lot, and a tall blond woman climbed out. Devin glanced at the time on her phone. The director was early. The clinic wouldn’t open for another hour. But Lopez and Wilson could be here already, sitting and waiting like she was. The challenge was the split mission: terminating Wilson and kidnapping the girl. She hoped to accomplish both in a single orchestrated move, but it might not be possible. Lopez had to be her priority.

Devin took inventory of the tool kit under the back seat. Chloroform, plastic handcuffs, duct tape, and rope. Yes, she was ready. But she couldn’t conduct the grab here at the clinic. Too much risk of a witness, which meant it could make the news. Any media coverage that connected the subjects’ deaths or disappearances could jeopardize the whole Peace Project, which was only weeks—or possibly days—away from its final phase. The second generation of subjects all seemed normal, with no deviant tendencies. The major and his research partner were confident the hormone-targeting drug was ready. They just needed a green light from the last operative to get into position.

A few minutes after eight, Devin spotted a young couple approaching the clinic on foot. They had come from the side, and the woman looked pregnant. Her dark hair was pulled back, and a scarf covered the bottom half of her face. The man wore a hooded sweatshirt and walked stiffly. A worried husband. They paused in front of the door and exchanged words. Why hesitate? Because they weren’t patients! Wilson and Lopez had done well to disguise themselves, and the fake pregnancy was clever. But not clever enough.

What were they up to? Devin had expected a more direct approach. Their deviousness meant they might plan to steal files, probably from the year of the first experiment. Should she try to stop them? The pregnancy and birth records by themselves weren’t incriminating, except for the anomaly of so many intersex babies born in the same geographic area at the same time. But that didn’t prove anything.

In her head, the major’s voice scoffed at her simplistic thinking. They couldn’t afford to draw attention to the project, especially now that it was so close to fruition. The first seeds had been planted twenty-one years ago, and the operatives had been sent into the field a decade after. She admired her father’s ability to think long-term and his patience in conducting a twenty-year mission. She was proud to be part of it. But her orders were to terminate and kidnap, and she couldn’t do that inside the clinic. She would wait for the couple to exit and walk away. If they’d taken files, she would confiscate them when she completed her task.

She silently cursed the reporter. His interference had really mucked things up, and now she had to pull off a kidnapping. It would have been better to not let them access the data in the first place, but she couldn’t stop them here without drawing attention to herself. To function successfully as the cleanup person, she had to keep a low profile. But she was good at that. After completing boot camp, she’d been assigned to her father’s command and had lived in the shadows, keeping her face out of the public and out of the watchful eye of security cameras. For months, she’d trained in a secret research complex, an underground facility that few people knew about. She still had a sleeping unit there but preferred to live in her own apartment on the base. The major spent all his time inside the underground lab now, and she sometimes worried about his mental health. His recent decisions seemed almost reactionary.

She climbed from her vehicle, wanting to be ready for anything. Where was Lopez’s car? She and Wilson had seemed to come out of nowhere, and it was troubling. Devin briefly considered creating a diversion, but anything big enough to get everyone out of the building would also bring the police. Her best choice was to wait, follow them to the car, then carry out the assault when the opportunity presented itself. As she visualized how that would play out, she reconsidered her plan. It might be better to find Lopez’s car, break into it, and wait in the backseat. She could slit Wilson’s throat without him ever sensing her presence, then chloroform the girl before she could scream. She would bind and muffle Taylor with duct tape, then retrieve her own vehicle to pick up the sedated target. How much time did she have to search for the Jetta? What if she didn’t find the car and missed them when they exited the clinic?