Innocent Blood
Innocent Blood
James Rollins
1
December 18, 9:58 A.M. PST
Palo Alto, California
An edge of panic kept her tense.
As Dr. Erin Granger entered the lecture hall on the Stanford campus, she glanced across its breadth to make sure she was alone. She even crouched and searched under the empty seats, making certain no one was hiding there. She kept one hand on the Glock 19 in her ankle holster.
It was a beautiful winter morning, the sun hanging in a crisp, cloud-studded blue sky. With bright light streaming through the tall windows, she had little to fear from the dark creatures that haunted her nightmares.
Still, after all that had befallen her, she knew that her fellow man was just as capable of evil.
Straightening again, she reached the lectern in front of the classroom and let out a quiet sigh of relief. She knew her fears were illogical, but that didn’t stop her from checking that the hall was safe before her students trooped in. As annoying as college kids could be, she would fight to the death to keep each one of them from harm.
She wouldn’t fail a student again.
Erin’s fingers tightened on the scuffed leather satchel in her hand. She had to force her fingers to open and place her bag next to the lectern. With her gaze still roaming the room, she unbuckled the satchel and pulled out her notes for the lecture. Usually she memorized her presentations, but she had taken over this class for a professor on maternity leave. It was an interesting topic, and it kept her from dwelling on the events that had upended her life, starting with the loss of her two graduate students in Israel a couple of months before.
Heinrich and Amy.
The German student had died from injuries sustained following an earthquake. Amy’s death had come later, murdered because Erin had unwittingly sent forbidden information to her student, knowledge that had gotten the young woman killed.
She rubbed her palms, as if trying to wipe away that blood, that responsibility. The room seemed suddenly colder. It couldn’t have been more than fifty degrees outside and not much warmer in the classroom. Still, the shivers that swept through her as she prepared her papers had nothing to do with the room’s poor heating system.
Returned again to Stanford, she should have felt good to be home, wrapped in the familiar, in the daily routines of a semester winding toward Christmas break.
But she didn’t.
Because nothing was the same.
As she straightened and prepared this morning’s lecture notes, her students arrived in ones and twos, a few climbing down the stairs to the seats in front, but most hanging back and folding down the seats in the uppermost rows.
“Professor Granger?”
Erin glanced to her left and discovered a young man with five silver hoops along one eyebrow approaching her. The student wore a determined expression on his face as he stepped in front of her. He carried a camera with a long lens over one shoulder.
“Yes?” She didn’t bother to mask the irritation in her voice.
He placed a folded slip of paper atop the wooden lectern and slid it toward her.
Behind him, the other students in the room looked on, nonchalant, but they were unconvincing actors. She could tell they watched her, wondering what she would do. She didn’t need to open that slip of paper to know that it contained the young man’s phone number.
“I’m from the Stanford Daily.” He played with a hoop in his eyebrow. “I was hoping for one quick interview for the school newspaper?”
She pushed the slip of paper back toward him. “No, thank you.”
She had refused all interview requests since returning from Rome. She wouldn’t break her silence now, especially as everything she was allowed to say was a lie.
To hide the truth of the tragic events that had left her two students dead, a story had been put out that she had been trapped three days in the Israeli desert, entombed amid the rubble following an earthquake at Masada. According to that false account, she was discovered alive, along with an army sergeant named Jordan Stone and her sole surviving graduate student, Nate Highsmith.
She understood the necessity of a cover story to explain the time she had spent working for the Vatican, a subterfuge that was further supported by an elite few in the government who also knew the truth. The public wasn’t ready for stories of monsters in the night, of the dark underpinnings that supported the world at large.
Still, necessity or not, she had no intention of elaborating on those lies.
The student with the line of eyebrow rings persisted. “I’d let you review the story before I post it. If you don’t like every single bit, we can work with it until you do.”
“I respect your persistence and diligence, but it does not change my answer.” She gestured to the half-full auditorium. “Please, take your seat.”