A Knife Edge

THIRTEEN

I had to watch it several times but even then I didn't understand it — not the bigger picture, anyway. The starring role was played by Sean Boyle before his conversion to carbon. I'd recognize that haircut in my sleep. The cinematographer was a security camera — actually several of them. A display indicated the time and date: nine-thirty p.m. on the second of August — nearly five months ago. I guessed that the location was most likely Moreton Genetics. I played with the sound, but there wasn't any.

In that sketchy way security cameras operate, I saw a white room full of electronic apparatus I didn't recognize, plus a few scrolling computer screens. Boyle was leaning over something. He walked to a different bench to check on something else, then headed to yet another white box closer to the camera that featured a bunch of dials as well as a little screen. He could have been baking a cake for all I knew. Then one of the computer screens went blank, followed by two more. A desk light went out, and I noticed the streamers on the air-conditioning duct beside the camera grow less excited and then hang limp.

Boyle stood up straight. He was smiling a private, self-satisfied smile. Then a line went through the screen, freezing the picture for an instant, before the screen went blank. Nothing happened for a few moments and I was wondering whether the show had finished, and then the picture returned. I was looking down on two people standing in a stainless-steel box. I assumed the location was an elevator. The time-and-date display had returned. One of the people, a male Caucasian in a uniform with a hand truck carrying bottles for the water cooler, was in a panic and pounding the doors, while a woman, also Caucasian, just stood there like a store dummy. I couldn't see her face — her head was tilted down away from the camera until the very last split second. Was she calm, or frozen in panic like the guy in there with her? It was impossible to tell. And then she turned and, as she did so, the picture again went blank — no signal again. I fast-forwarded but there was nothing else on the disk.

The time display told me only a couple of seconds had passed from the footage of Boyle fiddling with equipment to the pair in the lift. The familiar double-helix logo in the elevator confirmed I was seeing something that had happened at Moreton Genetics, some kind of power surge or power failure. But wouldn't a high-tech place like that, with all its delicate and important ongoing research, have some kind of emergency backup power source — generators — that would kick in? I was intrigued by what was on the disk because someone thought it important enough to slip under my door and because whoever did so wanted their identity kept secret.

I went to my laptop and called up the home page for the San Francisco Chronicle. I became a member and surfed around the site's archive, but I couldn't find any reference to power failures in any part of San Francisco in or around last August. If the power was cut, wouldn't everything at MG go out at the same time, rather than in a staggered fashion? I set up the news service to forward any articles containing the keywords “Moreton Genetics” to my Hotmail address.

I took the disk from the player and put it into my laptop's CD drive. I made an MPEG copy and e-mailed it on to Arlen at OSI with a note explaining what I wanted him to do about it. Then I called Moreton Genetics and received a recorded message letting me know that MG would be closed until the fourth of January. Ten days. I turned to the online phone directories next. If I could get hold of Freddie Spears, perhaps she'd be able to tell me what I was seeing on the disk. But there was no Dr. Freddie Spears listed, nor was there any Frederique Spears in the data base, although there were twenty-three “F. Spears” in the San Francisco area. For a moment, I thought about cold-calling complete strangers on Christmas Day. I decided against it.

I carefully removed the disk from the slot in the laptop and returned it to its envelope. Then I placed the envelope in the laundry bag and put it with the rest of my stuff. What to do next? A rumble in my stomach told me it was getting impatient for those low-fat yuletide bacon-and-pancake stacks. Problem solved.