Page 68 of Bastard

“What’s going on Jace?” Georgia was suddenly at my side.

“Jasmine and Adriana kept nodding toward this office. When they walked by I realized the computer monitor was pointed toward the window. This is what’s on it.”

Georgia frowned. “What is it?”

I could be completely wrong, but it felt too right. “The other day Sam was talking about cypher. A simple cypher? No…Caesar cypher? Could that be it?”

Georgia snapped her fingers. “I need paper and pen!”

“You know it?”

She glared at me. “Of course I know it. It’s the easiest one there is. Look, I’m older than you. I come from the early days of coding and one of the dorky things we played around with for fun is cypher.” She began scribbling.

The first word had three letters. The second six.

Georgia wrote a lot of nonsense and the whooped. “Got it!” It took her another twenty seconds to write it out. “Get Clancy? Why the fuck does she want him?”

Did it matter? “Is he in town?”

Dombrowski scrolled through names on the tablet. “No. But I’ll get him on the phone.”

Meanwhile the hostage takers shoved Sam and Adriana into the lab after they forced them to use their badges to gain entrance, leaving the door propped open with a stool. I really didn’t like the way they manhandled them. Each time Sam stumbled I got a little tenser, a little twitchier.

Dombrowski’s phone made a screech and then a connection. Clancy’s face was too close to the screen and we got a good look up his nose. “Oh yes. Hi. How can I help? Oh hello, Georgia. Nice day.” Clancy babbled on the video call.

Georgia scowled. “It is not a nice fucking day. Hostages took the 7th floor and have Samantha.”

“Oh. Oh my!” Clancy fumbled for his glasses. A set of hands reached into the frame and pulled them out of his pocket. I imagined it was his assistant. “And you’re calling me why?”

“Sam left a message that said to get you. Do you know something we don’t?”

Clancy frowned and scratched his cheek. “Hold on. Wait. Catch me up quickly. Who are these people and what do we know?”

This whole process of explaining the same things over and over as new people were brought in was particularly annoying, but necessary. We gave Clancy the shortest possible version. “We assume they’re conspiracy theorists. They want to prove Samantha is a fake. They just drew her blood.”

Clancy frowned. “Where are they?”

“In the 7th floor lab with Adriana Morales.”

To my relief, Clancy’s eyebrows shot up. “Oh. She’s asking for the fail-safe.”

“What the fuck is the fail-safe?” Georgia barked at the same time I did.

“Well, um…” he readjusted his glasses, accidentally dropped a pen in dramatic fashion, and started typing furiously on a computer. “Well you see, I had this idea last year. You know, when Roark got the shuttle operational and started work on the lunar labs? Well I wondered what they’d really do on the moon and if we ever discovered it was something quite terrible, how could we stop it. We used the 7th floor lab as a prototype for neutralizing both scientists and their work.”

“You fucking did what?” Georgia almost threw the phone she was so mad.

I grabbed it from her. “What happened to the fail-safe?”

“Oh it’s still in place. Once I proved it was possible, we were going to dismantle it, but instead…I sort of forgot about it…until Samantha wanted to know why Project Fail-Safe was never formally ended.” He grimaced, glancing away from the phone. “You know how I can be.”

Georgia started yelling at him again, so I turned away from her. “Can you activate it now?”

“Well of course.” He began tapping away at his computer. “But it will only neutralize the people in the lab.”

“The lab door is propped open. Will that affect the people down the hallway at all?”

Clancy nodded. “More than likely it will make them a little sleepy. Woozy even. But it won’t be strong enough to make them unconscious.”

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